Benghazi & the FBI wiretaps – the connection

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Posted on May 14, 2013 by Matteo X

This morning, the Washington Post reported that the FBI wiretap investigation of the Associated Press was initiated because of leaks of classified information from the government. In the words of the Post:

“The aggressive investigation into the possible disclosure of classified information to the AP is part of a pattern in which the Obama administration has pursued current and former government officials suspected of releasing secret material. Six officials have been prosecuted, more than under all previous administrations combined.”

The Post also reported:

“The two leak inquiries were started after Republicans in Congress accused the Obama administration of orchestrating news stories intended to demonstrate the president’s toughness on terrorism and improve his chance for reelection. The Republicans sought a special prosecutor, but Holder instead named two veteran prosecutors to handle the inquiries.”

If you recall, in June of last year, in the heat of the election, Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain, and others accused the White House of leaking information on the highly classified Stuxnet cybervirus program to the New York Times. Of course the Democrats called it politics but it was serious enough to force meetings with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director Robert Mueller. Clapper then suggested wider polygraph testing of intelligence officials.

In fact, the suspected source for this leak was at the very top at the White House.

In May of 2012, world headlines reported the arrest of a second underpants bomber in Yemen. It was later reported that the United States government blew the cover of an allied agent in place who tipped off the British intelligence services. Even Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condemned the leak. A full investigation was supposed to have been launched, but then it sank mysteriously into obscurity. Again, the White House was the prime suspect.

For an Administration that has been more aggressive in policing the intelligence community than any of its predecessors, there is a gaping hole in its narrative.

And so now the important facts are coming out about the Benghazi attack. It was a coverup and it was political.

And the FBI has been caught in delicto flagrante wiretapping one of the Administrations favorite news organizations for vague, unspecified reasons. Again quoting from the Washington Post article.

“This investigation is broader and less focused on an individual source or reporter than any of the others we’ve seen,” said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “They have swept up an entire collection of press communications. It’s an astonishing assault on core values of our society.”

Translated into English, it was a fishing expedition.

So as the Administration has been using intimidation and threats to our intelligence apparatus at every step it has itself been engaging in a Byzantine level of political corruption to forward its narrative.

CIA Director David Petraeus was humiliated on a national stage 2 days after the election. This wasn’t an accident. It was an act of political destruction. The Benghazi coverup wasn’t an accident. The FBI investigation was a political fig leaf meant to both show Congress that something was being done on the larger scandals while being used as a tool to quash the Administration’s enemies.

Machiavelli and Boss Tweed and the Borgias have got nothing on this bunch of treasonous crooks.

The Smoking Gun in Benghazi

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Posted on May 10, 2013 by Matteo X

We are still being fed a narrative by the media on Benghazi. The problem runs much deeper than they are willing to admit.

First we were told it was a protest against a video. Then, after weeks of lies, we were told the Administration was looking into it. Then there were Congressional hearings where State Department officials were pilloried. Then Hillary Clinton faced Congress and said:

” The fact is; we had four dead Americans! Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

Then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said:

“The United States military is not and should not be a global 911 service capable of arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world,”

General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff denied that there was time to send a response team or for that matter any support until hours after the attack was over. The attack went on for at least 5 hours.

Panetta then went on to say:

“You can’t willy-nilly send F-16s there and blow the hell out of place. … You have to have good intelligence.”

And yet in later testimony it was acknowledged that there were drones broadcasting real time data back to Washington and to other sites almost all through the entire attack. The defenders of the Consulate were lasing targets in the expectation of strike aircraft support. We had good intelligence and we had specific targets.

The resignations at the State Department after the hearings were another smoke screen. State has been underfunding security around the world partially because their embassy construction budget is insanely high.

Our new embassies look like and are fortresses, which projects a terrible image across the world. But that is the policy of the our government these days.

The crisis on 9-11-12 was a multi-jurisdictional crisis. DoD, CIA, NSA, and all the other alphabet agencies were involved and the manager was supposed to be the DNI, James Clapper, who has very little actual authority.

Every agency involved fell flat on its face either through incompetence or the orders of the political masters running the show. Obama checked out at 5:00pm, and Hillary and Panetta and even Petraeus shortly thereafer. No one with authority was on-line to hear the screams or watch the tracers and RPG’s that finally ended this debacle. There was clear dereliction of duty.

Someone at the very top pulled the plug and let these people die and in all likelihood it was Obama and his minions. The 5:00PM checkout is a smoking gun.

It’s like one of those bad movie devices when they turn off the computers and the phones and the lights and the last person out of the room closes the door and the screen goes black.

And the next morning the lies and the coverup began. And even now the media are doing their best to cover up the truth.

Walking the Camino – Six Ways to Santiago – Newport Beach Film Festival – Review

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Posted on May 4, 2013 by Matteo X

The Camino de Santiago has been one of the sacred pilgrimages of Christianity since the latter part of the first Millennium. Pilgrims travel the path, which starts wherever they embark on the journey, as a symbol of faith or of repentance.

Munich, Paris; Cluny, Carcassonne, Madrid and Lisbon are the overland start points of some of the many paths that all lead to the same incredible Galician city that sits not far from Cape Finisterre, which the Romans believed was the end of the world. Some journeys are a few miles. Some are a couple of hundred. These are the real thing.

In the Middle Ages traveling the Camino and receiving the Compostela (certificate) means also receiving a plenary indulgence, which remits full temporal punishment, which was quite harsh in the Middle Ages. Today, spiritually, it is a sign of submission and reverence.

In the 1980′s the Camino became a European Cultural Route which really opened the doors to all as a part of the common heritage. It is an incredible journey that can be started on foot or by bicycle or on horseback from all over Europe depending upon the faith and available time and the stamina of the pilgrim.

Walking the Camino is the work of Lydia Smith; her first as a director I believe. A documentary, it is a labor of love from start to finish. Funding the work was hand to mouth from friends, donors, and a wide range of “angels” along the way.

The production values are simple but profound. The light of Spain turns out to be a pretty good way to find a warmth and spiritual glow that reflects beautifully the images captured.

The pilgrims in their common humanity and in their differences tell the story. The Camino is not easy. Most of them started from 500 to 600 miles away in Spain. The weather can be harsh. Rain and hail and 20-25 miles/day of hiking for 45 days can challenge the endurance and health of anyone.

One pilgrim is a French single mother with her young child and a rather free-spirited, unbelieving brother. She is committed to the Camino as an act of faith. Another is a Portuguese college graduate who took up the Camino as an adventure. Another is a Brazilian/English woman whose life has left her wondering how she will go forward. Another pair are two Canadians; one a priest, the other his friend, adrift after having lost his wife. The choice of stories and individuals who made the final edit is inspired but I am sure everyone who traveled on this particular journey had their part in the film’s success.

Each of the pilgrims has a different reason. Each has their own interpretation of the Camino. Each has their own challenges. It is a hard journey not meant to be undertaken lightly. An American woman walks the Camino but has to struggle with both her own competitiveness and her physical frailty. Along the way she encounters incredible kindness that has a deep impact on her understanding of the Camino, of herself, and of others.

Cutaways of priests discussing the religious meanings of the Camino and its ways; of Hospitaleros along the way give a varied and very enjoyable view into the care and feeding of pilgrims, and various religious and temporal highlights add depth and meaning beyond a conventional narrative.

The pilgrims tells us their stories along the way and the camera is a willing listener and diarist. They tell us without art or artifice what they are feeling and how they are reacting and interacting with the Camino and their fellow travelers.

The film is beautifully framed and edited. You are in the modern but can sense the timelessness of the journey. The scenery is often incredible and takes the pilgrims through mountain passes; dirt trails one pilgrim wide; and major cities.

The pilgrims discuss faith and their varying beliefs matter of factly. Some are devout Christians. Others are not. But all of them are changed and Ms. Smith captures these metamorphoses beautifully. The act of completion is liberating both spiritually and physically. It is a passage and it is something that no one can ever take away from the those who have completed a Camino.

There is no preaching; only the story. Tough to do when picking an inherently spiritual subject. Films tell stories. They educate us and they entertain and once in a great while they enlighten us. Walking the Camino does all of these.

Obama’s Middle Finger to America

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Posted on April 25, 2013 by Matteo X

Since when has an Administration given the finger to virtually the entire American People? And since when has there been an almost complete silence on the issue by the media?

The President badly misjudged the effects of Sequestration on the American political landscape. The first few weeks had been a non-event despite the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth by everyone from the President himself to the Cabinet to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So now the President has ratcheted the game up, Chicago-style.

The Sequester represents a 2% cost reduction from the increased budget for this year and the next 10 years. This year’s portion is approximately $85 Billion (2%) from a budget of $3.8 trillion, 40% of which is being borrowed. In most families and companies, this would mean a few less nights out for pizza or movies. To the Federal government under President Obama, it means war.

Consider the following:

White House tours cancelled. White House parties continue.

Aircraft carrier deployment cancelled. Military exercise with Morocco cancelled. Air shows cancelled. Worthless programs continue.

Government threatens the most vulnerable; education, HIV patients, Meals on Wheels; HeadStart

. Government threatens closure of national parks.

Government orchestrates air traffic control slowdown.

In other words, the leadership in government wants you to feel the pain while they continue to spend beyond all reason.

When he was selling Obamacare to the American people, the President said that he had identified $65 Billion in waste and fraud in the Medicare program that would offset higher costs for wider coverage. Not a thing has been done about that fraud since. Even some reform would have mitigated the cuts.

The Federal government has added hundreds of thousands of additional jobs, year after year until it has become a bureaucracy more bloated that any in the world. Federal unions have some of the most generous pension plans and benefits in the country as well. Taking care of your special interests is vital to crony capitalists. Think of the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on green energy projects.In a time of lean, one must consider anything that is peripheral to the common good, but not this government. Not now.

And when one tries to discuss greater efficiency or common sense solutions, the reply is crickets. They don’t want the problems solved.

Our government has never set out to oppress its own people until now. Now, we are all pawns in the President’s battle to assert his will. Never before has a President been so arrogant as to do so. He is directly confronting us with his power and daring us to respond.

And to date no one has directly responded.

This is clearly the president’s crisis. He was the one who recommended and campaigned for sequestration in the first place and now he is reaping what he has sown. And in his vindictiveness he is giving the finger to all of us.

Failure Analysis – Asking the hard questions on the Boston bombings

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Posted on April 22, 2013 by Matteo X

It has been one week since the Boston Marathon bombing. We now know that the perpetrators were two brothers acting in jihad. A primary and a secondary device were planted to maximize casualties.

The perpetrators went to ground for 3 days before they surfaced. One of them, Dzhokhar Tsaraev, went back to his dormitory room and acted as if nothing had happened. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to those who knew him. None of those who knew him seem to have any recollection of anything out of the ordinary leading up to the bombings.

The trail of the other brother, Tamerlan, is much more clear. At a certain point he turned towards a very conservative Sunni interpretation of Islam. His family was concerned. From what little we know of his wife, a convert, she adopted the hijab and lived as an observant Muslim in a small town in Rhode Island. Not the most normal state of affairs in small town New England.

Tamerlan began to follow ultra conservative imams and posted their sermons on his web page. He also posted jihadi videos taken in Syria and elsewhere.

According to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, the FBI visited him at some point. According to Tamerlan’s father the visit was a warning. “We know where you live. We know what web sites you are frequenting. We know who you are talking to” was the message.

And yet this week the FBI reported that the U.S. government was asked by Russia to investigate Tamerlan, did so, found nothing amiss, and were legally required to close the file.

The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building a security apparatus that includes the most sophisticated surveillance systems; that allows for an unprecedented invasion of the privacy of its citizens, and that has access to virtually every database on-line.

When speaking with a FBI Agent based in the Santa Ana, CA office recently, I was told that the office had become one of the largest in the country because of the ongoing programs monitoring the Muslim community. Mosques have been bugged, imams are regularly interviewed, and close attention is paid to anything out of the ordinary.

And yet we find this week that Tamerlan Tsaraev was thrown out of his mosque in Massachusetts because of his radical and aggressive actions.

We also found that he spent six months in Dagestan, a known region for Islamist unrest, and may never have been questioned about his stay.

The UK’s Channel 4 reported that Tamerlan was under surveillance for 5 years. So said his mother. The Dail Mail reported:

The FBI said in a statement released Friday that it had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaeva in 2011 at the request of a foreign government. The FBI did not reveal which country’s government that was.

‘The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups,’ the FBI statement said.

The FBI said that in response to the request the bureau culled through its databases and interviewed both Tamerlan Tsarnaeva and members of his family, but were unable to find any evidence that he was connected to a terrorist organization.

It would seem that the Wall Street Journal’s account and that of the FBI differ, or perhaps there was more than one meeting. Tamerlan’s father mentioned no questioning by the FBI.

Regardless, it now seems obvious that Tamerlan Tsaraev should have been on the terror watch list at least 2 years ago. The question is why was he overlooked? The press does not seem to want to ask that question yet.

The press has also been remarkably forgiving of an administration that stonewalled on both Fast & Furious and on Benghazi. Will they ask the hard questions now?

1 – What are the full and complete circumstances of Tamerlan Tsaraev’s interactions with our government?

2 – How and where was he radicalized?

3 – How, where, and why did he take the steps to become a terrorist?

4 – Why did his family know and his mosque know he had become radicalized and the FBI not know?

5 – How and why did the FBI and other agencies, especially Homeland Security drop the ball?

6 – Could this have been prevented by better tactics and strategy?

The carnage was minimized through the heroic actions of many and a lot of luck. The apprehension of the perpetrators is still murky, but after the largest lockdown in American history, it was a citizen who made the final link. It was ordinary Americans who finally solved the case; a dead cop in Cambridge led to the chase to Watertown and a bloody exchange with the terrorists. Some guy who noticed a tear in his boat cover.

Did we need every SWAT cop within 100 miles out there marching around and searching without warrants? Did we handle the lockdown properly? Was it an intrusion too far on civil rights?

We need answers to all of these questions and we cannot afford to have bureaucratic or political agendas keep us from the truth.

Islamist Terrorists Bomb Boston

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Posted on April 19, 2013 by Matteo X

10 days ago,, the Associated Press removed the term “Islamist” from its style book as a perjorative term for Muslim extremists. This morning we woke up to find that Islamist terrorists bombed the Boston Marathon on Monday.

The two terrorists, for they admitted that they did commit the act; in fact they bragged about it, were from Chechnya, one of the most violent places on earth 15 – 20 years ago. Chechnya experienced one of the most devastating civil wars of the past 100 years between the Russian state and Muslim separatists. As the war which began in 1994 expanded, brutality begat brutality. The First Chechen War ended in 1996, while the Second Chechen War ended in only 2009 after a 10 year insurgency.

The Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002 where 170 died and the Beslan School massacre, where 380 people lost their lives in 2004 were perpetrated by Islamist terrorists. Grozny, the capital of Chechnya looked like Stalingrad 1943 after the first Chechen War. This is the reality of being Chechen.

Chechen fighters today are considered the shock troops of Islamist armed struggle from Bosnia to Afghanistan to Syria. mention Chechens to a jihadi and it is like mentioning the Navy SEAL’s or the pro’s from Dover to an American.

The Tsarnaev brothers were escaping that part of the world, it is clear. They were brought to this country and given refugee status. The elder brother, Tamerlan, came here when he was approximately 16. The younger brother was probably 9 when he arrived. At those ages, young men are very impressionable. And instead of dreaming of becoming firemen or cops or other American dreams they were isolated and insulated.

Somewhere along the way they became radicalized. One does not simply think to assemble and place improvised explosive devices one day. It is a process.

The press tells us that jihadi web sites such as Al Q’aeda’s have the manuals and instructions for the pressure cooker bombs used at the Boston Marathon posted.

Djohar Tsarnaev had Jihadi and Islamic devotional videos on his VK profile and linked it to a Chechen web site.

When confronted by a MIT campus policeman, Sean Collier, they shot and killed him. They then robbed a 7-11 and carjacked a man who stated that they had admitted to the Marathon bombing. Tamerlan died in a hail of bullets and may have detonated a suicide vest.

The cops are calling it terrorism, but not Islamist terrorism. At least not yet. Our government is deathly afraid of labeling it for what it is, just as at Ft. Hood.

But when it walks like an Islamist and quacks like an Islamist and smells like an Islamist, I think AP might want to reconsider the changes in its style guide and our president and his government their disconnect from reality.

There is a faction of Islam at war with us. On 9/11. In London. In Madrid. In Yemen. On a Christmas Day flight to Detroit from Amsterdam. At Fort Hood, and now in Boston.

Al Q’aeda was never an organization with clear lines and uniforms and unit patches. And Al Q’aeda is just one part of Salafism. You can go out and say you’re an AQ without having a membership card or you can go out and blow up innocent civilians and not affiliate yourself. But the motives and results are the same. Death to infidels. That’s why the term Islamist was used in the first place.

All Muslims are not Islamists, but all Islamists are Muslim. The president “vanished” the Global War on Terror. It disappeared from the lexicon. But it never disappeared. Not in Benghazi nor in Boston.

The Tsarnaev brothers are simply the latest link in a chain of Islamist terrorism that will continue until the Muslims themselves extinguish this fanaticism.

One sentence that captures the Left’s position on Abortion

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Posted on April 15, 2013 by Matteo X

In an article in this morning’s Washington Post entitled

“Will Kermit Gosnell change the abortion debate?”

, author Juliet Eilperin captures the Left’s position with pellucid clarity. She writes:

“Can the allegedly egregious acts of one provider shift the broader abortion debate?”

That Dr. Gosnell is an abortionist has been established by his license from the State of Pennsylvania. That he performed late-term abortions was advertised by the doctor. The results of those abortions have been entered into evidence and are unquestionable.

That Ms. Eilperin uses the terms “alleged” and “egregious” is clearly indicative of her perspective regardless of the Post’s style manual. They are a semantic smoking gun.

This is the position of the Left and of this Administration specifically. Late term abortion is perfectly legal to this faction. 10 days ago in Florida, a representative of Planned Parenthood endorsed post delivery abortion or as most of us call it, murder.

This is the logical extension of the eugenics policies advocated by Margaret Sanger when she founded Planned Parenthood in 1916. Eugenics, the policy of selective breeding and culling of human beings to establish a superior genetic stock was the policy of Adolph Hitler as well, if you recall.

Sanger and her allies, who included Theodore Roosevelt, wanted to eliminate defective traits and populations and specially targeted African-Americans. Abortion rights are part and parcel of the Progressive agenda, and that includes Ms. Eilperin, the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services.

You see, the President’s has been very clear on his support for late-term abortion. He was interviewed in 2003. And in 2007

“Obama sharply criticized the Supreme Court for its 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart decision upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. He said, “I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling…I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman’s right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.”

Kathleen Sebelius, a nominal Catholic, invested her tenure as the Governor of Kansas into the support of late-term abortion. Jack Cashill in The American Thinker connects the dots in the web of corruption and Leftist maneuvering in Kansas in the abortion debate centered around Dr. George Tiller, another late-term abortionist. The story was never reported in the national media. Sebelius led a coordinated campaign for six years to fight for Tiller’s right to abort late term fetuses.

In November of 2012 Human Events magazine reported that the wife of Attorney General Eric Holder, OB/GYN Dr. Sharon Malone Holder and her sister own, through a family trust the building in Georgia housing the offices of controversial abortionist Dr. Tyrone Cecil Malloy. AG Holder’s Department of Justice has been aggressive in targeting anti-abortion groups, not so much the potential violations of abortion laws on the books. There is a clear conflict of interest.

So we have the President, his HHS Secretary, and the Attorney General all far to the left of the American People on reproductive rights. We have spokespeople for Planned Parenthood acknowledging their support for post natal abortion.

And then we have Ms. Eilperin concerned that the abortion debate is turning against late-term abortion definitively, arguing that abortion clinics are overburdened with rules and regulations as it stands. She points out that the National Abortion Rights League (NARAL) has given an “F” to Pennsylvania for the states restrictive abortion policies. She argues that emotion is overcoming reason. But is it?

Is it reasonable to take the life of a viable human being simply for the fact of its existence? Go down to any hospital with a maternity ward and look at the section for premature infants. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent per case to keep these infants alive. How does this dichotomy reconcile itself in any humane society? When does a fetus or in the case of late-term or post delivery cases have its own human rights? Our policies are schizophrenic.

And the Strangelovian rhetoric of the Left must be recognized for what it is. In the newspeak of the Left calls it reproductive rights. Except the product has no rights. Even until the final stages of pregnancy and beyond, if they had their way.

I cannot and would not post the photographs of the souls lost to Dr. Gosnell’s snips, but they are little different from those of healthy, living infants.

Scientifically, life begins at conception. Our society has decided that a life may be terminated prior to birth. Those limits have been legally established and yet the abortion rights movement wants no restrictions whatsoever. How is this just? And how do we reconcile having some of the strongest advocates for those extreme positions writing the rules and regulations and then enforcing, or not enforcing them?

Dear Mr. President, please stop BS’ing us on AGW

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Posted on March 29, 2013 by Matteo X

Yahoo today ran photos from across Europe this morning of the effects of early Spring snow. Britain, France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe have been faced with some of the most snow and cold since the 1960′s. I was a miserable winter and at Easter, still a miserable early Spring.

Today’s Telegraph estimates that 30,000 people will have died this winter season from weather related conditions. Earlier this year, a group of Norwegian students made a video mocking both the celebrity driven cause industry and global warming. Radi – Aid, sending radiators to Norway, can be seen here.

This week’s Economist gives another data point. Apparently, the models predicted by AGW advocates such as James Hanson, the NASA propagandist, for global warming are not working out the way they thought they would. Surface temperatures across the planet are at the low-end of the predictions and there hasn’t been any actual, you know, global warming in 10 years according to the numbers. What is emerging is that the climate change advocates really don’t know. Climatology is hard, you see. The weather in most places changes every day.

And those anthropomorphic polar bears the AGW crowd are using as poster bears for climate change? Well, there are a hell of a lot more of them on the planet than there were 25 years ago according to every single study written. It seems that our government has been trying to cover this up as well. ‘When the facts don’t fit the narrative change the facts” is government policy.

We have gone from Global Warming to Climate Change to WTF.

Yes, climates on the planet are changing. Why and how? We do not know. Climatology is a new science. It used to be called meteorology and we didn’t have a lot of faith in the TV weathermen in predicting tomorrow’s weather back in the ancient times oh 20 years ago or so.

Now we have experts with a kernel of data extrapolating some amazing consequences 50 or 100 years down the line. The data does not meet the bullshit test.

But this is what Al Gore and our President believe as gospel, and therein lies the rub. The president has authorized hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in green energy projects that have failed or for which there is no real financial expectation of a reasonable return on investment, either ecologically or financially.

At the same time, the Administration has done its best to exterminate the coal industry, interfere with oil and gasoline prices, stymie nuclear power, and oppose natural gas. This is all part of their strategy. It is no accident. It is the stated goal of the green energy industry to work with government to raise the price of conventional energy to a point where green energy is competitive. Cheap energy is the enemy.

Bjorn Lomborg, the original skeptical environmentalist, wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently that the actual cost of green energy is much higher. The models used by corporations and government do not accurately reflect the energy, materials, and labor input in manufacturing green energy technology, which already relies far too much on government subsidies. I keep on thinking of all of those poor Germans in their worst winter in ages and their commitment to solar power. I wonder what the output of a solar array is in a snowstorm or the fog?

Solar power survives on voodoo economics. They don’t discuss the failure rates of modules or inverters or other components or the fact that dirt will drop the efficiency of a module array by 30-50%. All of the models reflect and unicorn and rainbow logic.

Just this morning, the EPA announced a new set of rules reducing sulphur and its emissions that would raise the price of a gallon of gasoline by a minimum of $0.09/gallon at a time of already record energy prices.The United States consumes 368 million gallons of gasoline per day, so this new tax will cost us $33 Million/day or $12 Billion/year. And who pays? Everybody. Who does it hurt the most? The middle class and poor.

The heavy thumb of government is already being felt in CAFE standards driving the standards for MPG up to a level that will kill the current automobile industry. And by the way, you and I have no voice in the discussion. It is a diktat by bureaucratic fiat. Stroke of the pen, law of the land government.

And the guy at the top of the pyramid is driving this bus. It is one of his core beliefs. The President is willing to use all of these tools because he feels that the United States uses too many of the world’s resources. How he came to that conclusion I am not sure, but it probably has to do with his elitist leftist education and the echo chamber he lives in. Facts, to them, are an inconvenient truth. It is about control.

So as the central tenets of anthropogenic global warming become shakier and the economics of green energy are seen to be a lie what happens? The record of this president indicates that he will double down. It is crucial to his political agenda to be right in all things.He is still in campaign mode. And if one of his core beliefs is challenged he is inflexible. This much we do know after four years.

But facts are pernicious. He has created an edifice based upon inaccurate information, and his policies must be challenged. BS should not be government policy.

The President’s New Policy – A Fable of the Modern Age

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Posted on February 15, 2013 by Matteo X

Gather round, children, and I will tell you the story of the President’s New Policy.

Once upon a time, there was a vain president in far off Washington whose only worry in life was to make grand pronouncements and dress in elegant clothes and have parties. He began by making grab bag policy speeches and then holding weekly soiree’s, and then twice per week, and then three times per week. And at each event he loved to show off his new clothes and played with the presidential Teleprompter telling ever more outrageous stories.

His consort, Princess Shopping Cart, would also dress up in the most expensive and outrageous outfits, which disturbed the common folk to no end while the sycophants and hangers-on all cried with joy at her inventiveness. The plebes, however, began to call her Princess Gaga.

The President and his Princess had the most wonderful times eating cake and spending the plebe’s money with their rich liberal friends, who all professed their solidarity with the plebes as they ate cake.

One day, two clever economists from far off Italy named Dolci and Gabbano heard of the vain president and decided to take advantage of him.

They went to the President’s gate dressed in the finest clothes and said to the guards “We are two very fine economists who also happen to moonlight as tailors, and can not only fix your economy, but also weave a policy of whole cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. We’ll even throw in an extra pair of pants for free.”

The head guard heard the strange story, but did not know what to make of the two outrageously dressed strangers. He summoned the Chamberlain of the Economic Policy Council. The Chamberlain notified the Chief of Staff, who ran to the President and disclosed the incredible news.

The President’s curiosity got the better of him, and he immediately summoned the two economists to his throne room.

“We have done many years of research, and can not only fix your economy, but we have also invented an extraordinary method to weave a policy so light and fine that it looks invisible. As a matter of fact, the policy is so fine and incredible that it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality.” And we will throw in the pants for free.”

The President gave the two scoundrels a large sack of TARP funds, and said “Just tell me what you need and I shall give it to you”.

They asked for a loom, silk, an Apple MacBook Pro and 100 kilograms of the finest gold thread, and began to pretend to work. They promptly converted the TARP funds into RMB Yuan and transferred them to an untraceable bank account in Austria, which everyone knows is much more secure than Switzerland these days. The gold thread was melted down into bar and hidden in a safe place in case of hyperinflation.

The President thought he had spent his money quite well. He would fix his economy, get a new policy, and find out which of his plebes were ignorant and incompetent, along with an extra pair of pants.

He promptly held another soirée, where the clothing was the most outrageous yet and the cake was made of the finest ingredients. He invited Princess Oprah and Lord Harry and Nancy of Marin and Princess Shopping Cart outdid herself in a dress made of environmentally sustainable materials including dixie cups and duct tape and lawn clippings and tinfoil.

Once the door closed behind them, the two economists chortled with glee. “Whadda Maroon” said Dolci. “whattan embezzle!” said Gabanno. For days they pretended to work deep into the night at the loom, but in fact were listening to iTunes on their Bluetooth headsets.

Several days later when he had heard nothing from the economists, the President said “I would really like to know how they are coming along with my policy and my extra pair of pants.” But he was a bit uneasy when he recalled that anyone who was unfit for his position would not be able to see the policy or the material. Of course he himself had nothing to fear, but still he decided to send someone else in order to follow White House protocol.

“I’ll send my honest old Treasury Secretary to the economists” thought the President. He’s the best one to see how the policy is coming along and knows good clothing. He is very sensible and no one is more worthy of his position than he. So the honest old Treasury Secretary went into the hall where the two economists sat busily working their empty looms and typing on the computer. They had printed out 1,000 pages of incomprehensible gobbledegook, but the loom seemed empty.

“Goodness, thought the Treasury Secretary, I cannot understand a single phase of this policy and I cannot see a thing.” But he did not say so.

The two swindlers invited him to step closer, asking him if wasn’t the most beautifully elegant policy and if the colors of the pants were not the most magnificent he had seen. They pointed to the empty loom and the thousand pages of gobbledygook and the poor old Treasury Secretary opened his eyes wider and wider. He still could see nothing for nothing was tthere. “Gracious, he thought. Is it possible that I am stupid? I have never thought so. Am I unfit for my position? No one must know this. No, it would never do for me to say that I am unable to understand the policy or see the extra pair of pants. “

“You aren’t saying anything!” said one of the economists.

“Oh! The policy is magnificent! It will solve all of our problems and will only penalize those with incomes over $250,000 dollars, depending upon how we define it. Peering through his glasses, the Treasury Secretary said ” The patterns and colors of the extra pair of pants are magnificent! Yes, I will tell the president that it is beyond our greatest expectations!”

“That makes us very happy!” said the two economists, and they called the policy and the colors and the pattern by name. The old Treasury Secretary listened very closely so that he would know exactly which words to say when he reported back to the President, and that is exactly what he did.

The swindlers now asked for more money and silk and gold and shares in Exchange Traded Funds, all of which were immediately granted and all of which were immediately laundered. They then continued to weave on empty looms as before and download Latvian folk poetry translated through babelfish and parsed through Lexis/Nexis.

The President then sent other officials as well to observe the economists progress. They too were startled when they saw nothing and they too reported back to the president how wonderful the policy was and how beautiful the extra pair of pants were, advising him to carry the policy and wear the pants in a grand procession. The entire city was alive with praise of the policy and of the pants. “Magnifique!!, Prima!!!, Nysseligt!!, Incredible!!” they said in all languages. The President awarded the economists with medals of Nobel, bestowing on each of them the title of Senior Policy Advisor and Master Weaver.

The swindlers stayed up the entire night before the procession was to take place, burning more than 16 compact fluorescent lamps. Everyone could see they were in a great rush to finish the policy and the extra pair of pants. They pretended to take the material from the looms and ordered 3 extra printers and a collating machine in order to print the new policy. They cut the air with large scissors, and bound the policy with the most exquisite bindings of fine Corinthian leather. They sewed the air with needles without any thread. Finally, they said “Behold!

The President’s policy is completed! And while we ran 3,000% over budget, behold the extra pair of pants, along with a frock coat and vest, are finished!”

The President came to them with his most trusted advisors, Congressmen, Senators, and Princess Shopping Cart. The two economists handed the President the exquisitely bound new policy, which he promptly passed to a page as he strode forward to see the new clothes. The two swindlers raised their arms as if they were holding something and said ” Just look at this extra set of pants! Here is the jacket! This is the vest!!” and so forth. “They are light as spider webs! You might think you didn’t have a thing on, but that is the good thing about them!”

“Yes!” said the advisers and Congressmen and Senators and Princess Shopping Cart, but they couldn’t see a thing because nothing was there.

“Would your Presidentness, if it pleases, kindly remove your clothes so that we may dress you?” asked the swindlers. “We will then fit you perfectly with the new ones, in front of this mirror.”

The president took off all of his clothes, and the economists pretended to dress him, piece by piece with the new ones that were to be fitted. They took hold of his waist and pretended to tie something around it. They pretended to tie his tie in an exquisitely formed knot just so. Then the president turned and faced the mirror.

“Goodness! Don’t the clothes fit you well! What a wonderful fit!” everyone said. “What a pattern! What colors! Such luxurious clothes!”

“The canopy to be carried above Your Presidentness awaits outside” said the Director of Protocol.

“Yes! I am ready!” said the President. “Don’t they fit well?” Princess Shopping Cart could only smoulder at all of the attention he was getting.

The chamberlains who were to carry the train held their hands just above the floor as if they were picking up the train. As they walked, they pretended to carry the train high. For they could not let anyone notice they could see nothing.

The President walked beneath the beautiful canopy in the procession, the new policy symbolically carried by two carefully chosen members of special interest groups, and all of the people on the street and in their windows said ” Goodness!! The new policy will save us all (except those with incomes over $250,000), and the President’s new clothes are incomparable. What a beautiful jacket! What an exquisite pair of spare pants!” Scribes Krugman and Sullivan and Friedman and Robinson all praised the policy as they were told to do by Journo List. No one wanted to admit that they had not read the policy nor that they could see the President’s new clothes, for then it would be said they were unfit for their position or that they were stupid. None of the President’s clothes or policies had ever received such praise.

“But he doesn’t have anything on,” said a small child in a wondering voice.

“Good Lord! Let us hear the voice of an innocent child!” said the father, and whispered to a reporter what the child had said.

” A small child has said the President doesn’t have anything on!” said the reporter. “And having seen a copy of the policy it seems to be nothing but Latvian folk poetry!” he continued.

Finally, everyone was saying “He doesn’t have anything on! The policy is gobbledygook!”

The President shuddered, for he knew that they were right, but he thought “The procession must go on!” He carried himself even more proudly as the pages of the policy began to come loose from their bindings and dance in the breeze, and the chamberlains carried the train that wasn’t there.

The two Italian economists, Dolci and Gabbano, crept softly into the night onto a G5 bound for the Cayman Islands, where they could not be extradited, and were warmly greeted by Angelo Mozillo, Lloyd Blankfein, Jack Lew, Jon Corzine and George Soros.

The End

All due respect to Hans Christian Andersen.

Dereliction of Duty on Benghazi

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Posted on February 12, 2013 by Matteo X

Look at last week’s New York Times or Washington Post or Los Angeles Times or even the Wall Street Journal, and it is hard to find any mention of the Congressional hearings that took place on the assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi last September 11. In less than 24 hours and it had already disappeared down the mainstream media’s memory hole. It is a non-story just like they used to do in bad old Russia.

But what did we learn? Secretary of Defense Panetta testified that in a 30 minute teleconference with the President he informed Mr. Obama of the situation in Benghazi.

“By our best estimate, the incident at the Temporary Mission Facility in Benghazi began at 3:42 p.m. eastern daylight time on September 11^th”. The conversation took place at approximately 5:00pm, one and a half hours after the attack had begun.

“AFRICOM directed that an unarmed, unmanned, surveillance aircraft that was nearby to reposition overhead the Benghazi facility.” We watched the attack unfold in real time.

“Soon after the initial reports about the attack on Benghazi, General Dempsey and I met with President Obama and he ordered all available DoD assets to respond to the attack in Libya and to protect U.S. personnel and interests in the region.” The President asked to remain informed, and then disappeared from the scene.

Panetta then describes the assets tasked to support the Americans under assault in Benghazi. FAST Teams and Special Operations Forces are mentioned, but then no air assets could be tasked because they were “9 – 12 hours away”. Within hours, a response team from the Embassy in Tripoli was dispatched. And only 12 hours after the attack began, all American personnel were evacuated.

The battle at the Consulate lasted at least 5 hours. In that time the personnel on the ground brought down a world of hurt on the terrorists.

General Carter Ham, the head of Africom, had the same real time drone feeds and radio communications from the Benghazi team that the DoD had, the White House had, the Department of State had, and the NSC had. Apparently, General Ham had a response team ready to lift off almost immediately after the data came streaming in. Apparently, General Ham was ordered not to proceed. Who gave that order?

The Administration knew immediately that this was not a protest of an obscure video on the internet, but an honest to goodness terrorist attack.

Prior to this, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified that the State Department had not interviewed the surviving employees at the consulate afterwards. It took the FBI weeks to get agents on the ground, and the press had a field day photographing secret documents in the days immediately following the attack. Since the attack, no one has been brought to justice.

On November 16, outgoing CIA Director David Petraeus admitted that “the CIA knew within minutes that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist act planned in advance.” Mr. Petraeus also stated that the CIA report was later altered by another Federal agency.

On September 12, the day after the attack, First, the New York Times offered a remarkably accurate report of the attack on September 12. A report that surely came from inside sources.

We had the President and Secretary of State implying on September 12 that it was the video and not a terrorist attack. The State Department could not move fast enough to produce and air advertisements on Pakistani Television apologizing for the video.

On September 14, the Libyan government had four men in custody according to Al Jazeera. On the 19th, the president of Libya laid out the details to that same network.

On September 24, the President appeared on “The View” and said the investigation was continuing, and did the same on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on the 25th, the President stated “If we are serious about these ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of the crisis”. And yet he knew the deeper causes and did not say a word. He continued with the lie.

The Daily Beast had the president dead to rights on September 26.

In her testimony before Congress on January 24^th, Secretary Clinton was unapologetic. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk last night who decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

In his testimony on the 7^th, Secretary Panetta said “The United States military is not and should not be a global 911 service capable of arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world.” And yet with all of the military units scattered around Europe, he claimed that no one was available over a 5 hour firefight and that no one was sent until after the fighting had ended.

In the reportage surrounding the firefight, the calls by the personnel defending the embassy were clear, including one that indicated that the mortar teams bombarding the compound were being “lased” , or targeted for any airborne assistance that could remove the threat. But there was none of that either. With U.S. fighter squadrons based in southern Italy and allies close by, no one was available.

The defenders of the consulate fought to the last bullet and then died and the response by our leaders was “what difference does it make?” and “the United States military is not and should not be a global 911 service.”

All of this of course in the aftermath of Ambassador Stevens repeated warnings and requests for more security support. On December 19, four senior State Department employees resigned after the publication of a report by a committee headed by former JCS Chairman Mullen , who stated

“We did conclude that certain State Department bureau level senior officials in critical levels of authority and responsibility in Washington demonstrated a lack of leadership and management ability appropriate for senior ranks in their responses to security concerns posed by the special mission.”

The President was AWOL. No one can seem to remember who was responsible for what, and the response by two Cabinet level officials was basically “What, me worry?”

In the meantime on Feb 10, the Mail in the UK reported a claim by two authors, both of them former special operations experts that “John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, had been authorizing ‘unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,”

With Special Operations Command; the CIA, and a plethora of other secret organization all linked together in the black operations world, it seems that the Deputy National Security Advisor may have been directly tasking his own private army. This in itself is a bombshell. It clearly violates the chain of command and also the scrutiny of Congress if true.

What we know to be true is that the Ambassador to the United Nations lied. The President lied. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied. The question is whether it is gross incompetence or something darker.Regardless, it was clearly a dereliction of duty by our highest officials.

Stephen King does comedy

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Posted on January 27, 2013 by Matteo X

We were blessed by a by a new novel from Stephen King this week; one you can purchase for only $0.99 on Amazon.

He calls semi automatic firearms “weapons of mass destruction” echoing the language of the Left during the Iraq War. For man who has plumbed the depths of the human soul for profit on the scale of Croesus, this is pretty friggin’ funny.

He has animated automobiles, anthropomorphized wolves, and turned hotels into malevolent protagonists, herding his characters wholesale into madness and mayhem.

He has led his readers through the labyrinth of madness like no other modern writer and yet he gets it all wrong on the issue of gun control. Guns are inanimate except in King’s novels and novellas. They just sit there in a closet or a drawer or in a safe.

His book “Rage” spoke of the alienation of young men and was a template for at least three murderous assaults. He is unapologetic.

He does nothing to address the real issue; mental health. Many murders are extemporaneous. Some are premeditated. But those such as Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown were the product of the darkness of the human soul, which Mr. King knows better than anyone.

He mocks the fears of the citizens who buy “assault” rifles characterizing them as “self-serving lies promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America’s propaganda-savvy gun-pimps”. He sort of epitomizes the Blue State ethos where everyone is crammed together into dense communities. Communities with fears he has in many cases created.

Going back to the math; John M. Browning had some interesting concepts. During the Moro Insurgency in the Philippines, he designed a “knock down” pistol in the M 1911 .45 caliber. A target hit with a .45 stays down. However, just a few years later he designed the Browning Hi Power, a 9mm (.354 caliber) with a 14 round magazine, which also became a global standard. Why? In one word, marksmanship. Many militaries, police agencies and other users around the world felt the .45 caliber was too inaccurate in the hands of non-experts. Mr. King didn’t come across that gem in his research, I guess.

He mocked semi-automatic pistols as only good for killing. I guess he forgot revolvers do the same thing.

I appreciate Mr. King’s concern but bans are not the answer. It is the individual we must examine. State of mind, motive, and then means. If we do not address issues such as mental health we will never be rid of the curse. In England, China, Germany, and elsewhere, a knife has been proven just as efficient, and no one should know this better than Mr. King.

It’s funny in a very dark way when someone as talented as Mr. King misapplies logic and the facts. It’s black comedy, almost. But then again, it really isn’t.

Hillary dances around Benghazi

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Posted on January 23, 2013 by Matteo X

Today we have the spectacle of the Secretary of State emoting on cue while saying nothing of substance regarding the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 of last by Islamic terrorists. She is waltzing effortlessly around the greatest deliberative body in the world and making them look like fools.

In addition to the usual fawning by Democrats, she has largely been tossed softballs by the Republicans. Consider these potential questions:

1 – Where was Ms. Clinton during the attack? Was she a part of the decision making team? Who participated in the decision making team during and after the attack?

2 – Why was this declared as a mob attack when State and the government knew in real-time that it was a terrorist attack? Why did the government continue to propagate this trope for months afterwards?

3 – Why was no effort made to intervene during the 5 hours the attack took place?

4 – Why was every warning regarding the dangers waiting in Benghazi, including pleas by Ambassador Stevens on the very day of the attack, ignored?

5 – Who was responsible for the White House and Department of State descriptions of the attack, and for coordinating the misleading response of the UN Ambassador, the Secretary of State, and the President?

6 – Who was responsible for the decision to tape an apology for the video that purportedly caused the attack that was recorded by Ms. Clinton and broadcast on Pakistani television? who participated in this process? Was this discussed with the President? What was the thought process behind this? Why was the decision made? Why was the decision made when the facts were known to be otherwise?

7 – Why was the Department of State caught completely off guard not only in Benghazi, but in Cairo as well?

8 – Why did the Secretary of State continue to insist weeks and even months later that the attack was caused by a protest when she had the facts at hand that stated otherwise?

9 – Why have senior officials of the State Department repeatedly contradicted each other regarding the responsibilities and cost of improving security at State Department run facilities around the world?

After four months, there are no answers. The White House, the Intelligence establishment, and the State Department have been playing a game of keepaway with witnesses; have stalled and prevaricated, and danced with their enablers in the media to quash the investigation and its mention in the news.

I am sure Ms. Clinton will have thought this is the last chapter, but it is incumbent upon those responsible to provide a full accounting. Ms. Clinton is far too well known for dancing instead of doing the hard work of representing the American people’s interests.Hillary in South Africa

Hillary in Cartagena

The Problem with Mali isn’t just Mali

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Posted on January 18, 2013 by Matteo X

The papers and the Internet and the foreign policy magazines are all now talking about Mali. Once again, there is a war in a country most people couldn’t find on a map.

Islamist insurgents, primarily from the Tuareg, a nomadic people, have been declaring jihad against what government exists in one of the harshest terrains in the world. The Sahara and Sahel make Afghanistan look like a summer camp. This is the land of 1,000′ sand dunes and tiny oases, and dusty, remote towns like Timbuktu, the legendary end of the line in 19th Century literature. Beyond Timbuktu there was nothing but endless desert for thousands of miles.

The Land of the Tuareg is called Tinariwen and extends from the inner deserts of Libya to those of Niger, Mali, Chad, Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria.Other tribes are allied with or subject to the Tuareg in these regions. The Tuareg have been in an almost constant state of war and rebellion against first the Western colonial powers, and the national governments in each of the aforementioned countries.

Starting in 2006/2008 radical Islamists, including some influenced by Al Qaeda, began to proselytize in Tinariwen. The Tuareg have always been extremely conservative. They are sometimes still involved in the slave trade even now. This is a pre-colonial African society, with some parallels to Afghanistan, I might add.

Tinariwen’s is among the driest climates in the world. The oases are life, and control of the oases is political power. While Saudi Arabia has its oil wealth and modern cities Tinariwen has no riches and is largely barren. It is even more tribal and more remote. A united Tinariwen would be larger than any country in Africa, including the formerly united Sudan.

The distances are vast and the ability to govern such a large area almost impossible. However, the attack on the gas processing plant in Algeria and rapid collapse of resistance in Mali point to a much larger problem. It isn’t a failed state. It’s a never had a state state.

In most countries the effort to relocate and anchor nomadic peoples has been a primary objective. Smuggling, banditry and rebellion are much more prevalent where there are no police or state controls. Virtually every one of the states where the Tuareg live have waged harsh wars of suppression with only limited success ever since their Independence in the 1960′s.

Now, with failed and dysfunctional states all around and the power of the word of the Prophet as interpreted by Al Qaeda, along with an infusion of modern weapons from Libya the Tuareg in the West see the opportunity to break away from governments to revert to purely tribal governance.

The West sees Al Qaeda training camps in the deep desert but at the same time the desert is the greatest enemy. Water is survival. Control of the oases is power. This is real live French Foreign Legion 1,000′ sand dune desert and hard Sahel scrubland where the nearest water could be 100 miles. the caravans have been plying the same routes for 1,000 years because of the same need for water.

While the first reaction of the military may be to bomb and strafe the jihadis it might be better to negotiate with the leaders. The Tuareg councils of elders are ancient and formalized to a far greater degree than in Afghanistan or Iraq with much less corruption. When you have nothing, there is nothing to steal.

This is not Lawrence of Arabia or one of Delacroix’s paintings or Afghanistan or any other desert war. It is probably a uniquely unnecessary war if properly handled. Much of the problem is in the actions of corrupt central governments. Even the crisis with Boko Haram in Nigeria is different. The Tuareg are in Nigeria, but they are not of Nigeria.

One of the critical mistakes make in Iraq and Afghanistan was simple hubris. We did not and do not have the T.E. Lawrences and Richard Warburtons who know the inhabitants intimately and are accepted by both sides. We seek to impose top down solutions and spend billions of dollars on a constantly revolving and changing set of priorities because it is our way.

The conflict in Mali is in its early stages. Let us hope after 11 years of constant warfare that somehow, someone comes to their senses. Expansion of this war will spread from country to country if we do not.

Government – The Firearm’s Industry’s Best Friend

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Posted on January 14, 2013 by Matteo X

There is a perverse truth that has been overlooked in the latest effort by liberal activists and politicians to enact more gun control legislation. Gun sales are through the roof. Dealers are jacking up prices and shelves are emptying. Back orders at gun manufacturers are at all time highs. The threat to ban “assault weapons” has backfired. Instead of finding real solutions, the politicians are the single largest driver of gun and ammunition sales.

In the 1980′s when the Brady Bill was passed, millions of firearms were sold in the panic that ensued prior to the ban taking effect.The assault weapons ban in 1994 triggered another round of panic buying.

This ban, which was the downfall of the Clinton presidency, lasted 10 years and was largely ineffectual, as the manufacturers simply redesigned their product and continued doing business.

The FBI only began releasing the data on background checks in 1998 , but in that time has not explained how the database is managed in order to ensure that unauthorized purchasers are kept from obtaining firearms. When Fast & Furious is considered there is reason to doubt the system works very well. Over 2,700 firearms were allowed to fall into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels, presumably having undergone FBI background checks. One of the official reports on Fast & Furious stated that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who were running the operation, weren’t even keeping track of the firearms purchases. There are some very strong reasons to believe the FBI system doesn’t work well.

In California in 2008, the Leftist state legislature, which has its own long-term romantic involvement with gun control, was at it again. The state enacted a ban on .50 cal rifles, ensuring that any inventory remaining would sell out immediately. Again manufacturers adapted and the same firearms became available in other calibers, getting around the law.

In the aftermath of the Tucson shooting in 2011 the state enacted AB 962 to end mail orders of ammunition; require fingerprinting of ammunition purchases; and restrict purchases significantly. None of these measures addressed the issue of keeping guns from the mentally ill, but the shooting was an excellent excuse for more gun control.

Before the law was overturned by a state judge, there was a massive increase in sales of ammunition in the state, and with it of firearms. Once again demand was driven by fear of the government’s actions.

The statistics are there for all to see. It is clear that the it is gun control legislation and government that has been the greatest single driver of gun sales since the 1980′s. Perhaps one day the Left will be willing to discuss the real issues, but it is doubtful.

Merts! The new men’s fashion fad!

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Posted on January 11, 2013 by Matteo X

The men’s skirt, or Mert, is all the rage in fashion whether in a highland tartan or metallic minis with high heeled fringed jackboots. It recognizes men in touch with their feminine side; perhaps too much so. After the stunning reception on the London runways this week Merts will be seen in heavy evidence on the reviewing stand for the Inauguration. The President has issued an Executive Order for a full dress military version for senior officers, and all male Supreme Court Justices will also be re-equipped with a version 2″ below the knee to protect their dignity. Whether it is the runways of London or the streets of LA, Merts are where it’s at for fashion forward men. kanye west - mert Up on stage, Kanye West has men and women wondering whassup under his kilt as he tops it off with a funky Versace waistcoat. In Los Angeles those wicked spanking patrols at the Burning Man decom were spotted looking for a few good tushes. Fringed or traditional Tartan or leather, the Mert is where it’s at in 2013. Fashion is definitely Forward.

The short and sweet ballad of Al Gore

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Posted on January 9, 2013 by Matteo X

There was an Emir from Oman
Who had a nefarious plan
He’d buy up a station
in a very large nation
and make Gore a very rich man.

That Al sold the turd to a Sheikh
Was considered completely unique
After carbon tax credits and fraudulent edits
Even Begly thought Gore was a freak.

So Al flew on to the Great Green Northwest
Where in his hotel he undressed
But the masseuse wasn’t buying and ended up crying that Al was just there to molest.

So the gist of the story is clear
Mr. Gore is just not sincere.
When he tells us one thing and he does something else we know that his actions are queer.

Firewall – thoughts on how to reduce gun violence

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Posted on December 23, 2012 by Matteo X

The nation is still reeling from the Newtown, CT school massacre. Many of the funerals were held last week, and the national dialogue has become “he said – she said”. There is intransigence and wishful thinking and a tremendous lack on knowledge of the facts.

But there are some ideas that might help reduce some of the gun violence, and I would like to propose one.

The demographic of the majority of not only mass school shooters but many other murderers is well-known. It is similar to the demographic of terrorists, which we also ignore. In this case it is young men aged 17 – 26. That is an arbitrary range, but let the lawmakers come up with better.

This is the age range when mental illness often sets in and when the hormones are most active. It is the age of the man-child, especially in a culture that functionally delays the age of majority.

We recruit much of our military from the high schools and these recruits are then rigorously tested by a battery of psychological and other tests to determine aptitudes, skills, and suitability for various positions. The military is able to weed out those who cannot perform or are otherwise unsuitable.

But we do almost no psychological testing on the civilian side unless certain limits are exceeded, whether at home or in society. Our culture is drenched in an imaginary culture of blood that sometimes becomes all too real. The mythology of firearms is a powerful subliminal aphrodisiac. Power = manhood.

From video games to movies to street culture, violence is glorified and there are fewer and fewer social filters. Doing the dozens escalates on the streets of the inner cities and gang violence is a scourge. Making ones bones or proving ones manhood or sometimes a twisted spasmodic urge to get even with the world results in death time and again. The narcotics trade is a prime contributor. And much of this revolves around young men 17- 26.

This is the time when gun usage should be controlled. This is where we need a Firewall. If we can limit access between these ages, crime will drop, and we will be able to limit the damage done by all shootings. The statistics support this argument unequivocally. There are outliers such as the Ft. Hood shooter and the Oslo shooter, but the worst of these murders have been committed by people sometimes not old enough to buy a beer legally.

There are exceptions to every rule and the vast majority of firearms users under the age of 26 are responsible, law-abiding citizens. But here too a sensible policy can help keep firearms out of the hands of madmen and criminals. Exemptions for serving military, shooters in supervised programs, and other classes of gun users can help sustain our Second Amendment rights.

And with this most of all must come an improved mental health system which can help identify and perhaps treat those most at risk. Thomas Szasz challenged the moral and scientific bases of psychiatry, but replaced this structure with nothing. The mentally ill are all around us and yet there seem to be no answers under modern treatment guidelines. Forced confinement and medication are applied only to the most severe cases and yet we are faced with Columbine and Newtown.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression) and other mood disorders are treatable, but the patient must comply with the treatment protocol. How can this be done within our human rights? Again, I will leave that to the experts.

Pure evil does exist, but it is often shrouded in misinformation, ignorance, and politics. The massacre of 20 children and their teachers certainly falls within the definition.

But as human beings we are given the tools and intelligence to resist. The humanists deride faith and yet compassion, empathy, and sacrifice are all essential to a solution.These are found in much greater degrees within faith-based solutions and there is a verifiable record of success.

For we have seen an acceleration in mindless violence with the loss of faith. Science and the law will not solve this terrible issue alone. We cannot wish the problem away with gun free zones and firearms restrictions. These are humble suggestions humbly offered, but perhaps they can help inform the discussion.

We now know where the buck doesn’t stop

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Posted on December 20, 2012 by Matteo X

We found out yesterday that “systemic failures” were responsible for the death of United States Ambassador Christopher Stevens on September 11 of this year. Somehow “systemic failures” pulled the trigger. Somehow “systemic failures” were responsible for complete inaction to save the lives of the ambassador and three security team members in a battle that lasted for over 5 hours.

It seems that “systemic failures” were responsible for Ambassador Rice lying about the incident 5 days after it occurred and Hillary Clinton going on Pakistani television to apologize for an obscure video and for the president prevaricating all the way into October on the true causes the terrorist attack. For this is all the report really tells us.

Hillary Clinton is said to have fainted and suffered a concussion while she has avoided being in Washington for the past 3 months, all to avoid testifying before Congress on the Benghazi incident.

The one thing we do now know is where the buck doesn’t stop. The buck that used to stop on Harry Truman’s desk seems to dart hither and thither in today’s Washington.

Despite direct ties to the office of the Attorney General, Fast & Furious was swept under the rug by both the Administration and the media. Despite direct communication between the Attorney General’s office and senior White House staff, executive privilege was invoked and no follow-up was done. Two federal agents dead; over 200 Mexican citizens dead, and a coverup of the murder last month of a Mexican beauty queen by a weapon implicated in Fast & Furious and no one in the Administration bears responsibility.

Vague reports of “senior staffers” miscommunicating and plausible deniability are all we see today from the “most transparent and open administration ever”. Top secret information leaks like a sieve from the White House itself with condemnation by both parties and no one bears responsibility.

Cabinet level officials such as Kathleen Sebelius line the pockets of friends and cronies and no one bears responsibility.

This is not bureaucratic ineptitude but rather a conscious effort to hide the facts and truth. It is still anyone’s guess why the Administration lied about Benghazi. But time and again, it seems that the Administration is doing its best to best the Nixon Administration in coverups.

Even in the negotiations on the fiscal cliff, the President has done his best to obscure the facts and refuses to consider spending cuts, promising that sometime in the future they might be considered. All the while he blames his opposition for intransigence.

The President cannot be pinned with any of the policy disasters of his administration. He slips like mercury through the fingers of responsibility.

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II were all held accountable for their actions. But today, with a sycophantic press and docile Congress, Barack Obama has shirked responsibility time and again. It is very clear that the buck never, ever stops on his desk.

Gun Control Discussion Talking Points

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Posted on December 17, 2012 by Matteo X

An interesting set of questions in the gun control debate from Glenn Reynolds:

Why do people who favor gun-control call people who disagree with them murderers or accomplices to murder? Is that constructive?

Would any of the various proposals have actually prevented the tragedy that is the supposed reason for them?

When you say you hope that this event will finally change the debate, do you really mean that you hope you can use emotionalism and blood-libel-bullying to get your way on political issues that were losers in the past?

If you’re a media member or politician, do you have armed security? Do you have a permit for a gun yourself? (I’m asking you Dianne Feinstein!) If so, what makes your life more valuable than other people’s?

Do you know the difference between an automatic weapon and a semi-automatic weapon? Do your public statements reflect that difference?

If guns cause murder, why have murder rates fallen as gun sales have skyrocketed?

Have you talked about “Fast and Furious?” Do you even know what it is? Do you care less when brown people die?

When you say that “we” need to change, how are you planning to change? Does your change involve any actual sacrifice on your part?

Is That All There Is? Our existential crisis

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Posted on December 16, 2012 by Matteo X

Several hundred feet above me I can hear the clatter of the news helicopters flying mindlessly above the scene of an incident that was over 2 hours ago where some guy who lost his job shot a pistol into the air in the local Macy’s parking lot. The mall was locked down and the people evacuated. The helicopters are mindless recorders of nothing.

And on Facebook and Twitter the flame wars on firearms are in full engagement after the horrors in Newton, CT yesterday. Leftists from across the Blue Spectrum are calling for gun control, and yet the response from the Right is muted for the most part. They are still mourning the dead, for that is right and proper.

Accusations against the NRA and gun owners are flying fast & furious, and yet no one really has the facts, and the elephant in the living room has been ignored.

Pure evil does exist. We see it around us all the time ,it seems lately. We are seing more pure evil every day. We are horrified by the murder of 20 children and their teachers, and yet there is no horror at the daily death toll in “gun free” Chicago. It is acceptable according to the rules of the game the way it is played today.

Back in the early 1970′s, Peggy Lee recorded a hit song titled “Is that all there is?”. It was the ultimate existential ballad. “If that’s all there is my friend, let’s keep on dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.”

Existentialism has poisoned our society. From Nietzsche to Sartre to Camus the belief systems that have sustained humanity for thousands of years have been eroded to nothing. “Science” has been raised to the new godhead and yet the more we know, the more we realize that we don’t know.

The old belief systems have been undermined as well as a program of destruction of the moral system we live in. The philosophies of Derrida and Foucault deal in relativism and equivalency with nothing behind the curtain except the destruction of belief. The deep cynicism of humor today no longer reflects the conflicts within our relationships with the world but rather the desire to tear it all down.

The churches lose their parishioners and yet there is nothing with which to replace the belief system of 5,000 years.

And yet, as Dooley Wilson sang 70 years ago, the fundamental truths apply. Those are immutable. Nietzsche has attempted to replace Plato and Aristotle and the Tao with…..nothing. The superman? The Nazi and Soviet ideal which has been utterly disproven?

The bodies and souls of hundreds of millions of human beings and almost 100 years of experience point towards the failure of the existential model and of socialism. Maoism and communism and socialism have been disproven in technicolor and replaced with statism and crony capitalism where there is no morality. The statists today are offering nothing but more of the same damn fool nostrums that were disproven in 1989 and repudiated even by the most hard-core communists.

And yet we wonder why these horrible massacres occur. What the hell did you expect when you threw out morality and systems of morality built upon the critical thinking of 4,000 years? Anything goes and “I’m OK, You’re OK” are not valid moral philosophies.

And when one throws out morality, one throws out the entire basis for not only faith, but the law itself. How can one make judgements in a non-judgmental society? It all then becomes relative and subjective.there is no universally defined “good”.

So back to the gun debate. A gun is an inanimate object like a lawn chair or a pair of pliers or a trombone. It is only when it is picked up that it finds a use. It seems that we do not want to question the person who picks up the gun, but rather want to simply ban its presence.

And yet the essential question to all of this is “why?”. If one doesn’t ask that question, there will never be an answer. The Constitution itself is pellucid on the reasons and purpose of the 2nd Amendment, and when one considers the police state that America is becoming, the justification has also never been more clear. The violations of the Constitution that have been perpetrated by our government are the most serious in our history.

But yet we have tolerated the evil use of those firearms. The debate is a necessary one, but we must examine first principles first.

In China the other day, a man ran amok with a knife injuring 22 people. Do we consider banning knives?

But without a strong moral compass it all means nothing. Nothing at all. And we shall descend even further into darkness.

The Presence of Evil

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Posted on December 14, 2012 by Matteo X

I am sitting here at my computer, stunned to my core with the horror that has taken place in Connecticut. I know Newton and Danbury, having hitchhiked there as a teenager running away from home and to a friend’s house. A good friend lived there for many years as did my father. It is an archetypal place. The best of New England in many ways.

Danbury used to be a typical New England town and Newton a suburb. Danbury was the hat town but now that hats are out of fashion it faced the same crises single industry towns across the country have faced. It adapted. Today, there is a much more Latin flavor. Newtown is one of those small Connecticut towns packed with vague history.

Evil visited Newtown today. A classroom full of kindergartners was massacred. We don’t know why, but really, there is no answer for this. It simply is. There can be no justification or rationalization. There can be no politicization. Satan descended upon Newton. One can call it madness or resentment or getting even, but these excuses fall far short.

Dualism, the belief in good and evil goes far back into prehistory with the Egyptians and Chinese. It is found in the order and life of Osiris and the death and chaos of Seth and in Plato and Zoroastrianism and in Christianity. In Buddhist philosophy, one rises through states of grace to nirvana or is cast down for evil conduct. In Plato and Aristotle and Confucian philosophy it is right conduct. It’s funny how the modern interpreters have lost this fundamental truth.

Evil lives in Freud’s id and in Christian sin and the central Hindu concept of Dharma. it is universal.

27 people were gunned down today, most of them kindergartners. Our most vulnerable and most hopeful The best of us in so many ways. Those children were thinking of Hannukah and Christmas and probably a pageant and Christmas trees and baby Jesus. And toys.

And now they are gone in the most violent manner imaginable. With screams and sudden impact and blood strewn everywhere.

Evil is afoot in our world. This morning a man in China stabbed 22 children. I looked up the Seven Deadly Sins today and had to reflect. Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride are everywhere it seems. The moral compass is badly askew.

There is a war on Faith. And yet faith is the only solace. Just as Evil exists so does Good. And yet Man in his pride and his hubris learns a little and assumes he knows all.

The universe before expands at the speed of light or faster and the complexity of existence is witnessed at the submolecular level and keeps on throwing curve balls, and as C.S. Lewis put it “Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will of some lucky few people in one lucky generation who learned how to do it.”

As we see an ever more complex and incredible universe emerge around us, we have forgotton that Isaiah wrote in 750 BC “for My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways. As high as the havens are

Walk on By

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Posted on December 12, 2012 by Matteo X

A meditation on narcotics in Orange County

There is world here in Southern California that exists under the radar of most people. In a land of wealth and privilege and hope there is a dark underside that we choose to ignore.

It starts in grade schools that fail to meet the needs of their students. Sometimes it is the school’s failing, or the student’s or their families. It can be the latch-key kid or the rich kid with too much time on their hands or the one with troubles fitting in or even some darker, more evil demons. For these demons are very real.

A weak moment. A desire to make the hurt go away. A desire to just get high and not deal with it.

Back when I was running the streets of New York, it was, as Grandmaster Flash said, “fun, baby”. But we learned damned fast that that wasn’t true. If you climb onto the dragon’s back, the dragon always wins. That was thirty years ago and kids are still making the same mistakes and nothing has changed.

When you talk to some of these kids, the story slowly comes out. The reasons for using come out. And what they are using today is far more dangerous than even a generation ago. The drugs are purer and more addictive and more damaging than ever. It seems that every week a kid in Orange County ends up in the morgue from an overdose.

In a time when alcohol is readily available and pot is virtually legal and incredibly powerful, the slide down into madness and death is easy with just a little bit of grease. This is not figurative. It is real as a heart attack.

The price of heroin is at an all-time low and it is easy to find. Just ask any of these kids if you need a hookup. Afghanistan, which supplies 95%+ of the world’s heroin, sees production grow every year. The poppy fields stop at the edges of our firebases. There are rumors that some of the heroin arrives at Camp Pendleton or transits Pendleton because there is less scrutiny. Sort of like the bad old days of the Vietnam War. 100 miles south of here the cartels are bringing it over in truck and boatloads. A Coast Guardsman died last week in a drug bust off of Santa Cruz Island, 100 miles north of here. The War on Drugs has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and is an utter failure.

The shrapnel from the drug trade is all over Orange County and no one pays attention. From the grave of the millionaire kid who “had a car accident” and whose family could have the records altered to a family at Holy Sepulcher grieving a 20 year old kid who OD’d “popping” something way too powerful for them to the kid with the melted synapses at the sheriff’s Theo Lacey facility, it pervades our culture.

Orange County has the highest density of sober living homes in the country. These are the ones who are trying to kick it. With AA meetings and NA meetings and help from their friends they’re doing the best they can. But the temptation can be right there sometimes. A quick hit that no one may notice that may or may not be the hot shot that kills them.

And they fall down and try to get back up again.

And most of us walk on by.

Enabling does no one any favors. Legalizing pot simply indulges stoners for the most part. One of the few growth industries in California in the past several years has been pot clinics. The drug companies legally produce enough oxycontin pills annually to overdose every man, woman, and child in China or more. “Pill Mills” and doctors writing sometimes hundreds of prescriptions for drug dealers and abusers are page 3 or page 4 news.

The fact is that our leaders don’t care or are profiting from our collective addiction. The entire trend of our society has been away from “right conduct”. And yet the people who are trying the hardest to help these souls are faced with indifferent families and indifferent leaders and a moral compass that has been purposely ripped from its moorings.

Funding is nonexistent and rehabilitation has at times been a for-profit industry.

Evil exists, and nowhere more so than in the world of narcotics. In our nonjudgmental world today some might say it is a matter of personal choices. But once that monkey is on their backs, it is no longer a choice. It is a cold hand slowly strangling the life out of them.

And most of us will walk on by.

Bob Costas and the cult of the Athlete

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Posted on December 4, 2012 by Matteo X

The other day, an athlete well beyond the bounds of reason shot his companion 9 times in front of her mother and then drove to the facility where he practiced and took his own life with a gunshot to the head in front of his coach, the team’s general manager, and police.

Immediately, the shock and horror trended towards the athlete and not his victim. Somehow, the horror and depravity of this act required a response. Jason Whitlock reflected on this deeply yesterday. He deplored a culture of violent sport and the violence that permeates much of our society. He wrote

“Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.”

Last night Bob Costas took to his soapbox and reiterated much of Mr. Whitlock wrote, ‘recoiling from cliché’s” as he said. And yet both Mr. Costas and Mr. Whitlock reverted to their own cliché’s on gun control. They blame the gun culture for deaths of the athlete, Jovan Belcher and his fiance’. What he does not discuss is the myth and the cult of the athlete that he himself has helped create.

Many years ago former NBA star and now commentator Charles Barkley stated “I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court.” In response, Karl Malone, another star wrote “Charles…I don’t think it’s your decision to make. We don’t choose to be role models, we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one.”

Athletes, whether they like or not are role models. But at the same time they are placed upon pedestals by the media, their fans, their families, and their hangers-on. There is a huge myth making industry and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars are at stake every year across the sports universe whether it is basketball, football, soccer, track & field or any of 100 sports. Myths sell heroes. The truth is sadly different most of the time.

After year upon year of denial and miraculously passing hundreds of drug tests, Lance Armstrong was confronted with the incontrovertible facts of his cheating and finally stood silent. Never an apology, mind you. McGwire, Clemens, Bonds and Sosa all denied drug use until they could not anymore.

But more to the central mentality of high level sports; high performance athletes are separated from the herd at an early age. They are groomed and treated like thoroughbreds. Gymnasts are in special programs at the age of six or seven. Their hormones are suppressed and they are trained like circus performers to vault ever higher, twist ever more exquisitely. Their egos are crushed and stroked so that winning is the only thing. Prime baseball prospects are identified as young as eight or ten and then prepared for the big leagues.

The wining ethos is driven in again and again and the focus becomes ever more narrow, sometimes to the loss of all other perspectives.The development of character and perspective and humility often takes a back seat to the glory and the riches that can come from a skill or good genetics.

The culture of greed also has its part. Easy money brings easy times and bad decisions. It’s not an accident that many professionals are broke a few years after leaving the spotlight. In many cases it is a life of excess; easy come – easy go. Until the merry-go-round stops, that is.

And Mr. Costas and his colleagues are a large part of the star making machinery. Without their fawning approval heroes are not crowned. Laurels are not bestowed. The media are the kingmakers and the gatekeepers of fame and fortune.

It is not the gun culture that is at issue. It is the culture of sport itself. It is the billions of dollars and fame and riches beyond dreams and the loss of perspective and humility that occurs. It is a far deeper problem than Mr. Costas and Mr. Whitlock are willing to recognize. It is a moral crisis and this resides at the very core of each of us as an individual.

On Benghazi – Of Course Obama Knew

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Posted on November 16, 2012 by Matteo X

This morning, former CIA Director David Petraeus testified to something that has been an open secret for months. The CIA knew within minutes that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist act planned in advance. Mr. Petraeus also stated that the CIA report was later altered by another Federal agency.

The Democratic Party’s left-wing held a photo-op yesterday decrying the attacks on U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her espousal of the Administration line that the Benghazi attacks were the result of an obscure video on YouTube in the immediate aftermath of the event.

There is just a small problem with this line of defense. It is completely false. The Administration has been doing its best to obfuscate and obscure a truthful response on the Benghazi attack. For two weeks afterwards the Secretary of State, the President, and Ms. Rice knowingly lied to the American people. After these lies were exposed, the White House has been playing keepaway with the facts and the witnesses.

How do we know this? First, the New York Times offered a remarkably accurate report of the attack on September 12. A report that surely came from inside sources.

In addition, we have the President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implying on September 12 that it was the video and not a terrorist attack. The State Department could not move fast enough to produce and air advertisements on Pakistani Television apologizing for the video.

On September 14, the Libyan government had four men in custody according to Al Jazeera. On the 19th, the president of Libya laid out the details to that same network.

On September 24, the President appeared on “The View” and said the investigation was continuing, and did the same on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. The commemorative photo, run by the Washington Post, is especially offensive in light of the lies.

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on the 25th, the President stated “If we are serious about these ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of the crisis” while ignoring the crisis of trust at home as he ignored the real cause for the violence.

The Daily Beast had the administration dead to rights on September 26.

The election came and went and the Administration has continued to do its best to cover up the cover up. But on October 26th, Director Petraeus dropped a curiously worded statement saying that “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ” This called into question whether a rescue force was prevented from rushing to Benghazi and absolved the CIA of decision-making authority. This after the Administration did its best to pin blame on the CIA and intelligence community.

Director Petraeus statement this morning is at complete odds with the Administration’s narrative. The CIA did its job on September 11 and reported the facts as they saw them.

Someone else was responsible for editing the report. But Ambassador Rice has a very difficult position. When she was trooped out to mouth the party line to the talk shows a few days after the assault, there was only one person who was authorized to approve her talking points; the President himself.

State reports to the President. The U.N. Ambassador reports to the President. The Director of National Intelligence reports to the President. The Director of the CIA reports to the President. The buck stops there.

The President has been caught in a web of his own lies. It is now up to us to hold him accountable.

Massachusetts Dairy Co-Op Places Pictures of Mitt Romney on milk cartons

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Posted on November 9, 2012 by Matteo X

Boston, MA
The Bay State Dairy Cooperative today announced a program by its members to try and help locate former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts has not been seen since election night and there are concerns about his mental state.

“Governor Romney always treated us well” said Neil Furby of Attleboro based Organic Bliss Dairy. “While we didn’t vote for him, we also don’t want his fate on our consciences.”

The program will be implemented immediately and will run until the former governor is found. Anyone having knowledge of Mr. Romney’s whereabouts should contact the Cooperative at 617-939-0800.

The Cabinet Merry Go Round begins

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Posted on November 9, 2012 by Matteo X

The headline on Drudge is that Attorney General Eric Holder will be stepping down. The odds on favorite according to the Washington Post is Janet Napolitano, the former Governor and Attorney General of Arizona, who would be leaving a tainted Department of Homeland Security.

At State, it seems Hillary Clinton will be leaving post-haste, with either John Kerry (D-MA) or U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice as the favorites. One way or the other, we’re screwed. Kerry has been central to the mess in Afghanistan, which we can expect to blow up in our faces next year while Rice was the President’s prime interlocutor in the Benghazi fiasco.

The rumor is that Timothy Geithner will be replaced by Goldman Sachs (there’s that name again) Suzanne Nora Johnson or Erskine Bowles. Either way, once again we’re in trouble.

Leon Panetta is out of Defense as soon as possible, with juniors Ashton Carter or Michelle Flournoy named as the possible replacements. The knife is out, so the President seems to want a henchman (or woman) more than anything else as he winds up Afghanistan. Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel is also in the mix. This would signal an even stronger shift against Israel as Hagel has repeatedly shown his antipathy. Unfortunately the world has become a much more dangerous place, and we will, I think, be sorely tested.

Steven Chu and Lisa Jackson at Energy and the EPA respectively are looking to leave as well. I must assume that their commitment to Green Energy, carbon taxes and the important work of saving the planet has waned mightily.

The stable door is open and the horses are bolting. The names of the replacements do little to assuage the concerns of a very concerned electorate.

One of the problems one has as a poor leader is in attracting the top talent. The Woodward book is damning. Being an outsider in the Obama administration is a form of gelding, and unfortunately the country is the loser. It is going to be a very long four years.

More on the Liverpool Care Pathway Controversy

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Posted on November 7, 2012 by Matteo X

Lost in the news about the election yesterday was an article in the Daily Telegraph on the uproar surrounding the Liverpool Care Pathway, or as it is known to some, Crematorium Lane. Over 1,300 doctors, nurses, and caregivers wrote to defend the policy, which is used in almost all UK hospitals today.

Since the inception of the concept in the 1990′s, doctors have been struggling with end of life care. The LCP is a multidisciplinary process of assessing and treating seriously ill patients with little hope of recovery. Solutions include cessation of treatment, withholding of food and water, and even of IV drips.

It is not an evil process in itself, but rather in its application. death comes to us all and death with dignity is a right.

But it has been revealed that many hospitals stand to reap performance bonuses for “Commissioning for Quality and Innovation” (CQUIN), or setting targets for the number of patients who are treated using this regimen.

In 6% of all cases, the families were never informed that their loved one had been placed on the Liverpool Pathway, and in 25% of the hospitals participating doctors and nurses had failed to inform the families in half of all cases. Strange statistics indeed. Consultation with the family is a centerpiece of the Pathway as written. There have been several calls for a parliamentary inquiry.

Statism is a way of life where bureaucracy takes over the simplest and most complex of decision making processes. In an article only the day before, the Telegraph reported on the case before the High Court of accident victims being placed on “do not resuscitate” orders without their families consent. There has been a litany of similar cases in the UK press of late.

In an article only a few weeks ago, family physicians are being asked to identify patients likely to di, which really, is all of us, in order to make the process more efficient. from those guidelines:

“Doctors are told to pick out such patients during routine consultations that show ‘indicators of frailty and deterioration’ and are told that ‘older people are a priority to consider”.

They are also told to use feedback from district nurses or hospital consultants, while patients in care homes should be “actively considered for your register”, the advice states.

So it is up to you. The brother of Rahm Emmanuel, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, has argued eloquently for patient rights and against euthanasia. The Liverpool Care Pathway recognizes that same human dignity, but is failing in its application. When the sorts of abuses and potential abuses reported in the UK press are considered, we must once again reconsider state sponsored medicine.

Bush vs. Obama – Disaster Edition

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Posted on November 4, 2012 by Matteo X

There is another strange disconnect just before this election. As some New Yorkers dumpster dive and many Jerseyites spend another cold night without basic services, the president has been bouncing across the map like a pinball trying to shore up his election chances. What is more strange is how the press have given him a hall pass for doing so.

In 2005 in the aftermath of Katrina, the media made it its mission to blame Bush for every hiccup in the relief efforts. Whether it was the response of the National Guard or the New Orleans Police or FEMA, it was “Bush’s Fault”. On the other side of the Mississippi though, Governor Haley Barbour and his team quietly went about rebuilding his equally damaged state and never was the breakdown in leadership in Louisiana mentioned.

In New Jersey this week non-union power crews were shunned and went to Pennsylvania instead. 1,000,000 homes and businesses are without power in New Jersey. Rescuers are still finding new victims as of this morning.

400,000 homes and businesses on Long Island are without power with temperatures in the 30′s and 30,000+ are homeless in New York City. There are few if any television cameras. The election is sucking up all the air time.

The President on the other hand left the White House this morning for stops today in New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio and Colorado. He will not be back in Washington until Tuesday night. How can he have time to deal with the crisis if he is spending all of his time campaigning?

And the response from the media? crickets……

A new storm is moving in on New York and New Jersey and temperatures are in the icebox. Hundreds of thousands of people need shelter now. Would that the media might hold the President’s actions up to scrutiny, but we can be certain that isn’t going to happen. They have proven themselves completely partisan.

What will it take to force the media to do their job? How many people will have to die before they shine the spotlight on the limited efforts and engagement of our government?

The Newsweek Lesson

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Posted on October 19, 2012 by Matteo X

Newsweek is ceasing their print edition at the end of the year.I would imagine, like LIFE, they will then occasionally publish special editions on potentates and celebrities but functionally it will soon be just another blog.

As I sit here in my pajamas, I have to wonder at the sheer bloody mindedness of management. In recent months I have to say that the magazine has been marginally more interesting with some excellent comment from authors who have largely been sidelined like Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Ali Hirsi. Surprise, it was their alternative perspectives that made those articles must reads.

But when the media establishment becomes so politicized, they will always risk losing 50% of their potential audience. Fox has found a gold mine in the 50% neglected by the mass media because their demographic spans the entire conservative spectrum. there are few alternatives.

On the other side of the dial are CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS and a plethora of their offspring and offshoots.

The same holds true in the national media. The New York Times is a shadow of its former self while the Washington Post struggles. The clear winner has been the Wall Street Journal, who have maintained both credibility and relevance while expanding its reach well beyond the financial pages.

Go to a newstand these days. Not nearly as many people do anymore. Magazines have become expensive and it seems that self-help, sports and lifestyle publishing dominates. There is less and less space given serious writing. The cost of printing and editing and perhaps even paying writers has forced much of what was the serious press deeper and deeper into the shadows. What is left is very unappealing to many. It represents one more phase in the dumbing down of America.

At a time when the internet has challenged traditional media for the volume of content, some rookie mistakes have multiplied the chances of failure. The creep of politics, and specifically liberal politics from the editorial page and into content; the constant shuffling with form and ‘packaging” and typefaces and gimmicks all have contributed to the slow death spiral of print media.

And yet I have to believe from all that I read on the internet and how badly packaged much of it is that there are still opportunities for serious content. There is a herd mentality that spreads from the editorial desks to the newsrooms to the bureaus that has lost the sense of good reporting. The media fiasco in reporting the Benghazi fiasco is one notable case; the lack of reporting outside the wire in Afghanistan and much of the Middle East is another. These days the herd is firmly inside the corral.

Lesson #1 from the Newsweek failure – Don’t piss off 50% of the audience. Provoke them; Intrigue them; Inform them. This is what has always sold newspapers and magazines

Lesson #2 – Quality Sells. Be the best at what you do.

Lesson #3 – Cost Performance. Add real value.
Lesson #4 – Always remember Lesson #1

Senator Coburn’s Government Waste List – The new phone book’s here!

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Posted on October 18, 2012 by Matteo X

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has come up with his latest Waste Book listing many of the wonderful, bizarre spending projects our federal government funds. The preface points out that since the last budget was passed on April 29, 2009, our government has spent $11.2 trillion and added more than $4.8 trillion to the national debt which is now over $16 Trillion.

One of the first takeaways is that the NFL, and many other sports leagues are classified as non-profits, costing the economy approximately $91 Million/year in tax revenue. Roger Goodell and Jerry Jones have the best of all possible worlds; rapacious ticket prices; stadiums financed by local government; and no taxes on the partnerships that are the major sports leagues. I guess we should have pity on the poor NHL owners, but the PGA is right in there as well. There’s nothing quite like subsidizing professional golfers.

Burger King, KFC, Godfather’s Pizza, and McDonald’s all accept food stamps and while cities and school districts are waging war on soft drinks, over $2 billion in Food Stamp money was spent on these products last year. In Seattle, Starbuck’s is a popular food stamp item.

Parque Alegria, a series of 10 minute telenovelas being broadcast on Spanish language stations at a cost of $3-8 Million, including time buys, instructs viewers on how much healthier the Food Stamp program is, weaning them from El Pollo Loco to Burger King, I guess.

An unused airport in the Senator’s home state comes in for over $750,000 in subsidies over tha past few years. Morroccan pottery classes for $27 Million, Alex! Yep, we funded a series of useless classes in Morocco, where they have a ceramics tradition dating back over 1,000 years. There is also funding for NASA to develop pizza on Mars.

In another project called “Look! Squirrel!” San Diego State University and UC Davis have developed a robotic squirrel that “will help perform public outreach, mentor students, and develop the next generation of robot animals.”

For the 1%, the government is also funding marketing programs for American caviar producers.In Alaska, $3.3 Million was spent subsidizing a ferry to nowhere in Alaska. This is not the ferry the bridge to nowhere was supposed to replace.

Senator Coburn also points out that it now costs us $0.02 to produce a penny. And we’re supposed to believe that the Health Care Bill will bring costs down? And yes, there is a program funded by the NSF to test gaydar.

Pepsi got $1.6 million to build a yogurt factory in New York. USC in Los Angeles got $40K to develop a Henry David Thoreau video game. Apparently the user simply contemplates the screen for months at a time. The Army spent $1.5 million last year to develop combat ready beef jerky.

The GSA, that hard partying junketeering fun-loving crowd, spent $24 Million on trophies and awards. Everyone gets a trophy at the GSA!

The list goes on, but during this hard-fought election season, some light reading helps break the tension.

Obama’s war on conventional energy and problem with the facts

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Posted on October 18, 2012 by Matteo X

The President spoke at length last night about his energy policy. He implied that under his administration the United States was producing more energy than ever before and took credit for the current shale oil and gas boom. And yet he has a terrible record on energy.

His War on Coal began long before the 2008 election. On January 17, 2008 in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, the candidate said:

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s Thousands of jobs at both coal mines and power plants have already been lost.

Immediately, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior began to work hand in glove to re-write existing regulations on emissions; on new technology implementation; and even on the remediation of mining sites. Energy Secretary Chu re-stated this in early 2011. Credit Suisse estimated that by 2020 the targets would take over 35 Gigawatts of power off-line. Already numerous power plants and mines have been forced to close.

In the meantime, Secretary Chu, long before he took the job stated while at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” in order to reduce dependence upon foreign oil. he seems to have gotten his wish.

A few weeks into the new administration in March 2009, the President proposed his Cap & Trade Bill in the depths of the worst economic recession in 75 years. This would have done absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gases but would have created a market for hundreds of billions of dollars in credits to be traded. The power companies would have passed the bill onto the customer, and people like Al Gore, who has already made over $100 Million on the practice, would have made even more. The bill passed in the House but died in the Senate. Both houses were controlled by the Democrats at the time, but the bill was so egregious enough Democrats voted against it to kill it. But it was very close.

The president was proud to point out “Over the last three years my administration has approved dozens of new pipelines, including from Canada. And we’ve opened millions of acres for oil and gas exploration. All told we plan to make available more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.” A small part is true, but the rest is clearly pure smoke, as will be demonstrated.

It is true that the president approved the southern part of the Keystone XL pipeline but he dramatically cancelled the much more important northern portion, which would make Alberta’s massive oil sands an integral part of the North American oil infrastructure. He wildly misstated his pipeline approvals.

He also said: “In 2010, our dependence on foreign oil was under 50 percent for the first time in over a decade. We were less reliant on foreign oil than we had been. In 2011, the United States relied less on foreign oil than in any of the last 16 years. ” Perhaps the worst financial downturn since the great depression may have had something to do with this.

But the Energy Information Administration reported in January that production of oil and gas on federal and Indian lands is down 40% from 10 years ago. In January, the Bureau of Land Management reported that 2010 was the worst year since 1984 for new lease sales, and there was only one lease auction in all of 2011. Once again, the president’s statement is at odds with the facts.

Between 20 April, 2010 to mid 2011, all offshore and much inshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of the Deepwater Horizon moratorium. It was only in early – 2011 that permits for offshore drilling began to be issued. Only recently have those levels returned to normal in the face of $4.00/gallon gasoline.. Deepwater Well approvals

The war on conventional energy in Alaska alone is worth noting. In Alaska, The Department of Interior just banned drilling in 50% (11.5 million acres) of Alaska’s National petroleum reserve.The state of Alaska sued the federal government in 2010 for violating federal regulations in banning offshore drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Shell Oil has been trying to drill for several years and has been blocked by various federal agencies at every step by any means possible. Exploratory drilling in the Cook Inlet has also been blocked by methods including the Jones Act, which requires U.S. hulled ships to be used. But in this case, there are no U.S. hulled ships that can be used. Catch 22 again.

The President also touted his approval of new nuclear power plants. There have been four reactors approved; all of them additional reactors at existing plants. No new plants have been approved. New plants are caught up in a Catch 22 because the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was supposed to offer a form of credit insurance that would allow the operators to go to the markets for capital, but has yet to do so. Vague, yet effective Senator Harry Reid was also been very effective in quashing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site in cooperation with Obama’s NRC Chairman Gregory Jackzo. Jackzo was forced to resign in May for intimidation, harassment and a harsh working environment. Jackzo was adamantly against new nuclear power plants.

Last night the President bragged about the new natural gas rush. the only problem is that the federal government has once again done its best to stop this bonanza. If you recall, in 2010 EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz, responsible for the Texas/Louisiana oil patch, recommended (video) that the EPA crucify companies engaging in fracking. he was involved in a number of controversial cases in his region where he was apparently using these tactics and was forced to resign earlier this year. This seems to be official policy as there have still been no leases granted on federal land and the EPA has repeatedly been challenged successfully on their data.

Oil, Coal, Nuclear, and Natural Gas. The facts contradict the president and yet he remains unchallenged. The war on Hydro in the Northwest is also well-known, but is not at the same level yet.

Green Energy is problematic and a niche resource at best. I am not sure what the President’s game is, but he has done his best and has lied about it. Watch what he does; not what he says.

The elephant in the living room in Benghazi

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Posted on October 16, 2012 by Matteo X

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton fell on her sword according to the national media, but without actually taking responsibility for the lies regarding who and why and how the Benghazi assassinations occurred. She took blame for the security failure, but not for the mischaracterization of the attack as from a spontaneous reaction to an obscure movie rather than its true source, Al Qaeda.

From the outset, Ms. Clinton, the President, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice hewed to the party line that it was the rioters and not the radicals; at the U.N.; on “The View”, and on the talk shows a lie was propagated.

In the meantime, after the president spiking the ball on Osama Bin Laden and after hundreds of Hellfire strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, Al Qaeda was supposed to have rolled over and died. Instead, not only were Ambassador Stevens and his team killed, but also a senior security officer at our embassy in Yemen a few days later. They know who we are and where we live. Al Qaeda is alive and well.

And this is the President’s problem. The facts don’t fit the narrative.

The Administration has a problem with the truth. But they have an even bigger problem.

11 years after 9/11, Al Qaeda and our enemies still have the ability to penetrate our intelligence and security and carry out complex attacks based upon that information.

Just like they did on December 30, 2009 when a Jordanian double agent went through 5 layers of security and penetrated a top security CIA facility at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan and detonated himself, killing 7 top analysts trailing Al Qaeda.

Just as the Taliban did in penetrating Camp Bastion in a complex attack on September 14.

There is a message being sent with these attacks that the Administration is desperate to cover up. The enemy have penetrated our security and can strike when they feel the time is right.

Our government and those of our allies have erected an Orwellian security apparatus costing hundreds of billions of dollars. This apparatus violates our civil liberties as it taps pretty much anything it pleases; traces financial transactions all over the globe, and stares at us through the cameras on the street or drones 60,000′ in the air.

And now we find that there are basic security leaks. The watchers have been penetrated. The all-powerful Oz, in this case our President, is a man behind a curtain peddling lies. And we are less safe than we were 11 years ago.

Krugman’s harmonic dissonance on UK economic policy

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Posted on October 16, 2012 by Matteo X

Paul Krugman today ripped into the British Government’s efforts to get the country’s economy back on track, calling austerity fundamentally mad. As one of the world’s most prominent Keynsians I am not surprised, but as a rational thinker I am deeply disturbed.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde has also expressed her reservations regarding deep government cuts. And yet profligate spending policies without corresponding balance have drained government coffers around the world and we are standing on the edge of a deeper crisis than in 2007 based upon exactly the economic policies so strongly advocated by Mr. Krugman. The fundamental rule that at some point governments run out of other peoples money has still not sunk in.

John Maynard Keynes was reacting to the Great Depression when he formulated his policies and they began to be implemented. His work on government stimulus assumed that structural deficits were acceptable in the short-term but did not address a long-term in some cases running for decades with interest compounding along the way.

The postwar economic boom funded the extension of the social welfare state. Huge and incredibly expensive promises were made that Mr. Keynes would not have comprehended. Keynes argued that nations avoid deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate in order to keep internal prices stable.

But now we are faced with core commodity inflation. There simply are not enough resources to go around. There are deep structural changes occurring in the global economy.

Both the ECB and Federal Reserve have been running the printing presses at an accelerating rate which has set off the first salvos of currency wars. Mr. Krugman and respectfully, Ms. Lagarde have also failed to note the results of expansive monetary policy and public spending in their host country. The Yen continued to rise in value from the ¥180/$ level of the early 90′s to ¥78/$ today, making their economy uncompetitive. The massive shift of manufacturing in China partially driven by the currency shift not only in Japan but elsewher has also had a deep impact on the pillars of the global economy.

Since the early 1990′s after the Japanese banking collapse, that government has engaged in a Keynsian stimulus program aimed at reviving the economy. The Great Tohoku Earthquake was in many ways another Keynsian economic event, but the result has still been deeply damaging economically. Imports are cheap, but there are no jobs and the debt burden of the Japanese government is growing, not shrinking.

Japanese national debt as a percentage of GDP is the highest in the world with the United States and the UK right behind. This is financed primarily by Japanese savings, which mitigates the damage somewhat, but the reality is that the government is still teetering on the edge of its own abyss, but simply owed to its rapidly aging citizens, who are now putting an even greater strain on retirement funds.

The horrific debt of the United States was one of the other primary topics of the IMF meeting.

While Keynes argued for government spending to even out the depths of financial crises, the constant reliance by modern governments on public debt not only creates the environment in which we find ourselves, but sucks the oxygen from private capital markets where the real engines of growth reside.

Krugman has been hectoring world leaders for more stimulus for the past year just as he has ignored the economic realities staring him right in the face. The bill must eventually be settled and government does not create value; it simply redistributes and regulates economic activity.

He has gotten the stimulus he sought in the world’s two largest economies; Europe and America. But he seems to have forgotten the study of history. Massive stimulus is a very limited weapon with unintended consequences.

The news out of this weekend’s Tokyo meeting is not good. There are many brushfires in the global economy and the tinder for a major economic event is very dry. Every night I pray for some answer, for if we do not find new answers, we are doomed to repeat the past.

Twitiots threaten riots if Obama loses

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Posted on October 15, 2012 by Matteo X

The media has begun to pick up stories of thousands of Twitter tweets threatening riots and mayhem should Barack Obama lose the upcoming election. Among them are:

“If obama dont get re-elected & romney wins .. on life every white persons getting pistol whipped and im startin a riot.” (SOURCE)

“If Obama don’t win lets start a riot so Romney know what he’s getting himself into.” (SOURCE)

“You know you ain’t shit if you gotta “MAKE” Mafukas vote for ROMNEY ! …. Mannnn OBAMA better get back in office . Or BLACK FOLKS will riot.” (SOURCE)

“If Romney wins im goin on a rampage.” (SOURCE)

“If Mitt Romney wins the election I think its our duties as Black folks to riot and fuck shit up.” (SOURCE)

“If every action IS met with an equal and opposite reaction ..what should workers do to employers if Romney’s elected? #Riot in the streets!!” (SOURCE)

“If Romney becomes president let’s all start a riot.” (SOURCE)

“I Heard Mitt Romney , Tryna Take Away Food Stamps , If He Do .”IMA START A RIOT , IMA START A RIOT.” (SOURCE)

“If romney wins, imma start a mf’n riot! Rns.” (SOURCE)

If Romney wins I’m Starting a Riot….Who’s WIT ME???”

“I Hope The USA Is Well Aware That If In The Event This Character Romney Wins The Election, The People Will Start A Country Wide Riot! #Power”

“If Romney is elected president, its gon be a riot its gon be a riot.”

“If ROMNEY GETS IN THE WHITE HOUSE …U MIGHT AS WELL KILL ME NOW …..CAUSE ITS GONNA BE A ************ RIOT !!!”

“If Romney became President and took away welfare Downtown Cincinnati would become a riot”

“If Romney takes away food stamps 2 Chainzz in this bit IMMA START A RIOT”

“If Romney wins. (which i highly doubt) THERE WILL BE A RIOT—”

In this age of instant communication there is no mute button for the most inane comment, much less insane. In this age of Homeland Security where a huge surveillance network is now in place and hundreds of millions of rounds of small arms ammunition have been purchased recently by government agencies ranging from Homeland Security to the Weather Service and police departments around the country are better armed than the Belgian Army, it is foolish to say the least to make such comments.

Having experienced Watts first hand and the Rodney King riots from nearby, mob violence is a terrible thing and hurts those communities most which can least afford it.

The only solution is for leaders in the communities affected take to the internet and the media to condemn such action forcefully now. Such idiocy needs to be nipped in the bud. We are all Americans. We are all Americans together and want the best for our country.

We face difficult times and tough choices, but we can only succeed if we work together in our mutual self interests. The language of division and demagoguery have already taken a toll on civil society. It is time to grow up and get back on track.

Indicting Obama on Intelligence

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Posted on October 13, 2012 by Matteo X

Today’s London Dail Mail has an article written by Toby Harnden, their America watcher, in which he notes that former Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff and former CIA Director Michael Hayden have damned Vice President Joe Biden and his boss for blaming CIA employees for the confusion caused by the Administration’s insistence on blaming an obscure video for the terrible attack in Benghazi.

This is the second time in recent months that former intelligence officials have blasted the Administration for its cavalier way with the facts. The last time was a chortling insider account of a secret mission in Yemen where high level White House insiders described in detail the capture of another underwear bomber. But it was actually an allied secret agent.

The UK was forced to exfiltrate a deep cover agent within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) because he was compromised. This was virtually the first human intelligence asset we had been able to place within this incredibly paranoid organization. The Administration came in for widespread criticism both here and abroad once more.

In June, Senator Feinstein called for an investigation to leaks from high places revealing details of the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran. These leaks were once again attributed to the White House.”In recent weeks, we have become increasingly concerned at the continued leaks regarding sensitive intelligence programs and activities, including specific details of sources and methods,” said Chambliss; Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-California; Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan; and Ranking Member C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, D-Maryland, in the statement.

We were informed in incredible detail by the New York Times in June of a secret “kill list” as well. Senator John McCain called for an investigation.The FBI was ordered in June to investigate these leaks. Since then there has been a complete blackout. I might remind you, dear reader, who the FBI reports to.

Last year our government abandoned Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped locate Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. Dr Afridi is now serving a 33 year term for treason. In an interview with the UK Independent he said that Pakistan’s ISI considers the United States its prime enemy, even before India. Dr. Afridi was outed by news leaks made to American newspapers by Administration officials. The White House was the source of a number of leaks in the immediate aftermath of the Bin Laden raid and again there were calls for an investigation.

If you recall, early in the Administration seven former CIA Directors dating back to the Reagan Administration issued a joint condemnation of the Administrations reckless conduct in pursuing a politically motivated vendetta against CIA interrogators.

The history of the politicization of intelligence matters in the Administration dates to its opening months.

The problem is that everyone knows where these leaks and distortions have come from. The information released is of such a highly secret nature that there can only be a few people on the list, and believe me, there is a list and those who knew had the highest of security clearances with corresponding penalties up to and including life imprisonment without parole.

The black farce that the Benghazi blame game has become; the leaks; the vendettas all point to the very top. The buck clearly stops on the President’s desk on this 3 1/2 year fiasco.

Anyone else would have had their security clearance revoked and be facing criminal charges. That’s the way the system works.

It is time to take away the President’s secret decoder ring. It is time to change the codes. To change the locks. To change the policy. It is time to do a kiss ass tour of every major intel agency we have pissed off around the world with our cavalier and smirking conduct.

He is the president, but he is also a danger to himself and the country.

Following the breadcrumbs on the Libyan cover up

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Posted on October 13, 2012 by Matteo X

Last night, Vice President Joe Biden was adamant that the responsibility for the Libyan fiasco and subsequent deception lays everywhere but the White House.

First the Director of National Intelligence’s office misinformed them, and then the State Department didn’t have the answers and then the FBI was sent in 2 weeks after the incident to try to apply some sort of Jedi forensics on a “crime scene” that had been completely compromised.

Let’s look at the facts:

On late Tuesday night, September 11 (mid afternoon Washington time) the Ambassador was kidnapped and found dead at a Benghazi hospital early Wednesday morning, September 12.

The New York Times in their article on the event on September 12, a few hours after the attack raised the specter of Islamic militants armed with RPG’s and anti-aircraft missiles. According to the article:

“American and European officials said that while many details about the attack remained unclear, the assailants seemed organized, well-trained and heavily armed, and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning.”

On September 12 our president and Secretary of State stated unequivocally that it was a spontaneous riot triggered by an obscure film no one had heard of until September 11. Our UN Ambassador Susan Rice, not the Secretary of State, went on a number of talk shows that weekend and was quoted in all of the mainstream media delivering the Administrations version of events.

On September 14, the Libyan government had 4 men in custody. On September 19, the president of Libya in an interview with Al Jazeera, Libyan president President Mohamed al-Magarief stated that the attacked was planned well in advance and that Al Qaeda was responsible.

On September 24, the President appeared on “The View” instead of attending the U.N. General Assembly or perhaps even working to find the facts of the case, and once again stated that our government was still investigating the case.

The Daily Beast released the story which truly upset the apple cart first on September 26, which was when the coverup started morphing.

On October 3, Reuters reported that the Administration knew within hours that the attack was tied to militants, and that the CIA had this information.

“Officials familiar with them said they contained evidence that members of a militant faction, Ansar al-Sharia, as well as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, were involved in the assaults.

So our president expects us to believe that 2 days before the facts went public and a week after the president of Libya identified the attackers he still knew nothing about the true nature of the assassination. There is such a thing as plausible deniability. This is implausibly deniable.

U.N. Ambassador Rice has an interesting position. She is a direct report to both the Secretary of State and the President. This month’s Foreign Policy Magazine has a fascinating article on Ms. Rice and informs us that she has placed her relationship with the president well ahead of that with Secretary Clinton. So whose version was she reporting? Has anyone asked her? Who wrote the version reported? Who was the author of the deception?

The House Committee investigating the attack established yesterday that the Department of State failed to protect Ambassador Stevens adequately. So what next?

As they said back in 1973; “What did the President know and when did he know it?” I would add to that, “why did he lie to us, and what did he hope to gain?”

Resurgent Jihad

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Posted on October 11, 2012 by Matteo X

Today’s Congressional hearings on the 9/11 Benghazi attack shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in a raid now attributed to Al Quaeda. For one month, the Administration portrayed this raid as a response to an offensive videotape by local residents when the truth was that a heavily armed band of Islamic radicals intent upon one specific mission; the assassination of Ambassador Stevens.

The military and State Department security officials testifying to the Congressional committee were unanimous in recognizing the highly fluid and dangerous state on the ground in Libya and repeatedly requested additional assistance and to extend the mission of a security team already on the ground. These requests were denied by Foggy Bottom.

There were specific and credible warnings of an impending attack. These were ignored. The president of Libya just a few days after the attack spoke the truth which the Administration is only now admitting regarding the source of the attack.

In Afghanistan, the suicide mission at Camp Bastion was the most successful act of jihad in the war to date. Green on Blue violence is now an integral part of Taliban tactical planning and has taken over 55 ISAF lives this year. This does not include an accelerated rate of civilian massacres.

The Taliban is sending a clear message that they are back and that they are ruthless.

In a controversial speech in Chicago last week, CBS senior foreign correspondent Lara Logan ripped the narrative that we are winning the war against terrorism apart.

Having covered the Afghanistan War since 2001, her perspective is unique as she has seen the war the war has changed over the past 11 years. Her most recent project was to investigate the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

She interviewed many of the key players including several of the commanding generals, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Taliban emissaries, and Afghan government officials. The Taliban and their Al Qaeda and Pakistani allies do not see themselves as insurgents. They were the legal government of Afghanistan and are completely committed to retaking power once the international forces leave next year. Both the Taliban and Al Quaeda have set up training camps in the remote provinces of Nuristan and Kunar. That has not made the morning news.

Our own leadership has been minimizing this threat in the interest of internal American politics. Ms. Logan pointed out that unlike the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in that war, the Salafists see the struggle as a clash of cultures and faith. The caliphate is a real and attainable goal. But like the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, they have remained unchanged in their ideology. There is no kinder, gentler Taliban. It is a fiction being sold to us.

Salafism has now spread to Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Mauritania, Somalia, Mali, and Nigeria and has become much more virulent.While many of the governments and even the people wish for peace, the Salafists are infiltrating much as they have done in Pakistan. It is never the mass of the populace but rather small cliques who have asymetrically been able to commit terror whether the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, or the Salafists.

Most of these countries without strong, pro-Western dictators would be considered failed states. The primary missions of AFRICOM now are to combat Islamic terrorism and help prevent the failure of existing national governments. We may not agree with the political systems in some of these countries, but we must help prevent chaos as best we can with limited resources and involvement.

The Obama administrations support for the Arab Spring would be sorely tested in the political arena regardless of the Salafists. Nascent governments are almost impossible to predict. But the the role of the Salafists and the resurgence of Al Quaeda should be a strobe light for the next administration.

The Afghan people were never completely with us. Night letters, assassinations, and attacks have always created a barrier to international aid and the modernization of the country.There is a fatalistic expectation that they will once again be deserted and must make their accommodations with the Taliban.

On the other side of the border, Pakistan has multiple personality disorder coupled with extreme paranoia. It has a toxic political environment pitting sect and ethnicity against each other while the ISI and Army use the both Taliban and Haqqani Network to both fund the insurgency through the narcotics trade and and counter Western and Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has gone from a shaky ally to a frenemy to an undeclared enemy. That Pakistani agents have been behind some of the worst terrorists incidents in Afghanistan is another data point in both the destabilization of Afghanistan and the growing sophistication of asymmetrical warfare.

Despite the narrative, the world is a much more dangerous place than it was in 1998, or 2001, or 2006, or even last year. We are perceived as weak and weak-willed. The retreat from Afghanistan will be the cause for rejoicing throughout the Islamic world. Not by all, but by the powerful minority willing to proclaim jihad.

There will be many unintended consequences caused by our fickle policies. A nuclear Iran is only one of our worries. As Ms. Logan concluded in her remarks,

” When I look at what is happening in Libya, it’s a big song and dance about whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest. And you just want to scream “For God’s sake, are you kidding me?”. The last time we were attacked like this was the U.S.S. Cole, which was a prelude to the 1998 embassy bombings, which were the prelude to 9/11. And you are sending in FBI agents. I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors who are going to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered. And the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

General John Allen was suddenly promoted out of his job as commander of ISAF last week because he spoke the truth. This is the third commander who has been relieved in theater in the Afghan War.

Instead of the truth that needs to be told and heard there is a narrative at large that must be countered, or we shall pay a much higher price sooner rather than later.

Obama’s magical ATM

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Posted on October 8, 2012 by Matteo X

Back in 2007, early on in his campaign, Barack Obama said:

“I have been a long-time advocate for public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests…. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election….If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” – Washington Post

Obama even wrote an editorial in USA Today.

On June 19, 2008, shortly after cinching the Democratic party nomination, Obama’s campaign reneged on that promise. The campaign went on to rake in over $750 million by November of that year while his opponent John McCain abided by FEC regulations limiting private funding and encountered full public scrutiny.

The Obama campaign engaged in a massive credit card fraud scheme in raising that money. Federal law is clear. An individual can give $2,500 to each candidate and $30,800 to the national campaign committees. There are other limits as well, and the new Super PAC’s fall outside of this discussion.

We are talking specifically about “individual” campaign contributions. In 2008, Obama received campaign contributions from Osama Bin Laden, Bill Ayers, Saddam Hussein, A. Hitler, J. Stalin, hundreds of M. Mouses, and one Mary T. Biskup of Manchester, MO who seems to have given $175,000 using multiple credit cards on multiple dates.

Except when contacted Ms. Biskup stated that she had never made such donations, nor did they show up on her credit card bills. Hmmmm.

The media reported the fraud widely. NCV codes, the 3 and 4 digit credit card verification codes necessary to prevent fraudulent use of credit cards, were missing from the Obama campaign’s donation web pages. Address verifications were also missing. In other words anyone could donate as much as they wanted without verification or traceability, breaking the law doing so. In 2008, the amount involved exceeded $200 million.

It’s funny, because if you want to buy a Obama T Shirt or commemorative coffee mug on the same web site, the NCV code must be entered.

The FEC was asked to investigate the scandal, but stated that because the Obama campaign was privately financed it could not do so under the law.

A further twist was added when the Administration put the FEC on life support. Last year, Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center, Public Citizen, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and U.S. PIRG held a press conference at which they stated:

“The FEC is itself a national campaign finance scandal,” and “The FEC is a dysfunctional agency that refuses to enforce the campaign finance laws.”

All summer long we have been reading about the President’s jetting around the country for high-profile fundraisers in New York, San Francisco, Detroit, and Los Angeles for high profile fund raisers. The numbers reported for these fundraisers have been in the $4 – $5 Million/event range. Not a bad payday, but in the middle of a down economy and with the middle class which is hurting there is a huge gap to be filled. There have been a number of reports of the Obama campaign struggling for financing this year, burning through cash much faster than they could raise it as of late August.

But a miracle seems to have occurred. Suddenly in September the campaign was able to raise $150 Million. But this has been tainted by another scandal. It seems the Obama campaign has used another subterfuge.

An independently owned web site called Obama.com run by a prominent Obama supporter in Shanghai, China has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars with no scrutiny whatsoever. By locating the site outside of the United States, it is largely shielded from U.S. laws. In addition, 68% of the traffic to the site has come from overseas, which is generally illegal. Almost all of the donations have been under the $200 reporting limit, and many have been made with non-traceable prepaid credit cards.

In a world in which the Treasury Department has become the most intrusive and relentless financial agency in the world in its search for money laundering operations, the Obama campaign has itself become a money laundering organization with virtually no scrutiny.

The president stood at the podium at the Democratic Convention railing against special interests but is seems that he has created his own special interest very successfully.

As in 2008, the reports say that the Obama campaign will spend close to $750 million on the campaign. This is an obscene sum, especially in the middle of an economic downturn. More to the point the president promised transparency and accountability and yet his has been one of the most opaque administrations and campaigns in history. Watch what he does, not what he says.

“Would you like a E 85 Super frappe, sir?” “Or perhaps you would prefer the pumpkin spice regular?” – explaining California’s insane energy system

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Posted on October 6, 2012 by Matteo X

Driving by the local gas station this morning I saw that regular was at $4.65/gallon. Anyone who has been reading the dead tree media or watching television now has California’s gas crisis on the radar.

Refinery fires and the winter gas switchover and Jerry Brown’s haircut have combined to send prices skyrocketing. California finds itself once again leading the nation in foolishness.

Here in California, where we still actually have a substantial oil industry, we have had higher prices than anyone in the country with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska for the past 40 years. California was the first state in the union to manage air quality. I remember as a boy having recess and sports cancelled because the smog in the San Gabriel Valley was so bad.

The state created agencies and a set of regulations 3′ thick on gasoline formulations and exhaust scrubbers for factories and solvent usage, and today 30% of our air pollution comes in courtesy of coal-burning power plants in China. Even with this the air is still much cleaner, but our regulatory system has gone insane.

You cannot build a refinery in California anymore. You would have to be certifiable to go through the regulatory process. Just the mention of such a project would have the Sierra Club and Earth First and the Environmental Defense Fund lawyered up and descending upon Sacramento like a Mongol Horde taking no prisoners. There is no compromise in their vocabulary.

Then comes the Methyl Tert Butyl Ether (MTBE) scam. MTBE was used in gasoline as an oxygenator to raise fuel octane and help it burn more efficiently, but it was outlawed in the early ’00′s because it was a groundwater pollutant. The problem with that logic is that gasoline itself is highly dispersant and one gallon can pollute up to 750,000 gallons of water. A minimal additive can do little to affect the basic science. But California and New York and then the EPA decided that we needed our own special blends.

Then came ethanol. It too is an oxygenator. Most of the ethanol in this country comes from corn. We could buy sugar ethanol from Brazil, which is cheaper and has a much higher energy potential, but the American sugar lobby and the corn ethanol lobby will have none of that.

The price of corn has been at record levels for the past year not only because of the drought, but because the law mandates up to 10% ethanol in conventional fuels, with E 85 (15% ethanol) growing rapidly. It doesn’t matter that corn ethanol has 66% of the energy efficiency of gasoline, or that processing corn ethanol is highly inefficient and costly. The subsidies are massive. When villagers in Egypt are rioting over the rising cost of flour, Pharoah in Washington has said “so let it be written. So let it be done” on corn prices. The United States could do more good in the Middle East today by re-purposing our corn crop than our fumbling diplomatic efforts to date.

Then came our Starbucks Winter and Summer blends courtesy of the EPA. So we have our own special California blends on top of it the EPA mandated blends. Mocha frappucino E-85? Half & half latte Super? It’s no wonder the refineries have had fires recently. They’re so damned confused they probably threw the wrong switch.

California’s gasoline industry is a mess. Our power generation industry is a mess. We now experience regular power outages. All because of the regulatory environment. Electronics manufacturers in the Los Angeles area are no longer allowed to use simple rubbing alcohol to clean circuit assembles any more, no matter if it’s one or 1,000. So there goes that industry. And all kinds of manufacturing has been exiting the state at an accelerating rate.

California is one of the wealthiest political entities in the world, but an insane regulatory environment has the state in free fall economically. It might even be mitigated by have a cleaner environment, but regular sewage dumps along the coast because of overstretched water treatment plants have one checking the water quality every time you go to the beach. We’d rather build high-speed rail lines to nowhere.

Happy Man Day!!

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Posted on October 6, 2012 by Matteo X

The news speaks of politics and gas prices and conflict halfway across the world but today is something much more important. Today is Man Day.

What, you may ask, is Man Day?

Man Day is better than Thanksgiving. Man Day is more important than the Autumn Equinox. It pushes Columbus Day aside like a little baby.

Man Day is the day when the planets align in their proper sequence and in a yearly miracle we are treated to Baseball, Football (H.S., College & Professional), and now Basketball for a brief moment before the planets spin out of alignment once again.

Multiple televisions are placed around the house tuned to different games and even sports. Women and children below the age of 18 are urged to go to the mall or even check into a hotel for the night. A few brave Women do brave the Man Day festivities, but it is a rare occurrence.

The traditional Man Day apparel usually involves a rotating wardrobe of jerseys of one’s favorite players and teams to be switched meticulously as one changes stations. Men dig deep into closets to pull out their basketball gear while football and baseball gear is usually well in place.

The ritual beer can pyramid is also a Man Day tradition.These can reach great heights depending upon how many men come together to celebrate. In some states, Men go from home to home, indicated by team banners hung with care from balconies and flagpoles beer- or – treating. Woe to those who do not come through, or come through with swill.

Barbecues around the country are lit and kept burning into the early evening, forming a galaxy of orange – blue light if seen from the air.

Sometime early in the evening, Man Day begins to fade away, usually during the first quarter of basketball pre-season games. While signifying the changing of the season, they are more symbolic than meaningful.

Snores and belches and farts and other noises are heard throughout the land, and for a brief, shining moment, we can revel in our Manhood.
Here’s to Man Day!!!

Purple Fox YK-13

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Posted on October 5, 2012 by Matteo X

As you may know, my original blog was taken down by hackers recently. I am trying to retrieve some of the blog posts that I thought were worth something.

Originally Posted on October 2, 2010

Driving north from Fredericksburg, Virginia is driving through history. From the scene of one of the worst battles of the Civil War in that town, one drives past other battlefields and in many ways the heart of our Republic in Central Virginia. Not far off is Monticello, Jefferson’s home, and further north is Manassas and then Mt. Vernon.

Driving above the speed limit on I-95 a few days ago on the way from one meeting to another for which I was already late, I saw a sign and was forced to veer off of the highway suddenly. It wasn’t an emergency, but it was something I had to do. For you see on February 4, 1968 my friend Jim earned a Silver Star, and the helicopter he had been flying that day was enshrined at the Marine Corps Museum, which is visible from I-95.

Airframe 153986 is a CH-46, the same medium lift helicopter the Marines are using today. It was built near Philadelphia and delivered to the Marine Corps in August 1967. The CH-46 was introduced in 1962 and is still the backbone of Marine transport. The last one was built in 1971. If it needs moving in the vertical plane, it’s usually a CH-46 doing it even after 48 years. It’s absurd, really,when you think about it.

When you step into the Khe Sanh exhibit at the Marine Corps Museum, you enter through the fuselage of 153986. I could smell the oil and solvents and gak that had built up during its service life. Probably some smoke and burned insulation as well. You walk off just like the troops and supplies would drop in, with sandbags and mortars around you and a narrative of the battle by survivors on the sound system.

On February 4, 1968 my friend Jim was the maintenance officer for HMM – 364, the Purple Foxes, a typical Marine can-do unit. Their motto is “Give a Shit” and they surely did. In Vietnam, especially at Khe Sanh at the height of the Tet Offensive when the whole country was on fire, the odds didn’t count for very much. You did your job and maybe you prayed you would survive the day.

Khe Sanh was bait right in the middle of Planet NVA. It was Custer and the Indians all over again. Every ration and every bullet had to come in by air, and the enemy had the runways and flight paths registered and zeroed in. As a pilot you had under 30 seconds to get a load down on the ground, load back up with wounded or dead, and back out again. That’s how long it took for the mortar rounds to hit from the time you heard the thunk from the barrel. Usually, they could anticipate you as you flew up the valley, so you were screwed anyway. There was a junkyard on the side of the runway of aircraft that didn’t make it out. It was the most dangerous place on earth.

On February 4, at the height of the battle, Airframe 153986 (YK-13) had been damaged while landing. Jim and a crew chief and couple of mechanics had been flown in to try to repair it and fly it off. Mortars and artillery and accurate automatic weapons fire did their best to kill the crew as they tried to fix the beast.

Late in the day, they were ready for a check flight. Jim took up a co-pilot and pick up crew with him, expecting to check the airworthiness and maybe get back to Phu Bai for the night. A call came in. Another helicopter had gone down near Hue with 17 Marines aboard and they needed help immediately. He responded that 153986 would take the call despite the fact that the navigation system was broken.

The weather was virtually unflyable except there they were. Fog and mist and rain and every sort of ground fire imaginable. Jim and his crew went in the first time. No joy. Heavy small arms fire mixed with .50 cal machine gun fire. He cleared the fog and went in again. No luck. At that point the helicopter had taken heavy fire. A gunner was dead and another crewman wounded.

They chanced it one more time, and this time they were able to land. They were able to pick up the wounded Marines and evacuate them back to base. They were on the ground for close to 10 minutes, more than a lifetime.

The next day, another crew was flying 153986. They weren’t as lucky. They went out on a medevac call not far from HMM-364′s base at Phu Bai to pick up three wounded Marines. On the way, the corpsman, Jack Ehrhardt, was badly wounded through the thigh as the helicopter took very heavy ground fire. They continued to fly towards the landing zone until the ground fire hit cables and wires and fuel lines and hydraulics. The aircraft was screwed at that point. With no hydraulics or control, the helicopter pitched up, somersaulted, crashed and burned. Everyone on board was killed except Ehrhardt and the crew chief, Corporal Conner. Ehrhardt was thrown from the helicopter into a rice paddy covered in the flames from burning fuel. One of the dead was Sgt. Jim Shelton, who had crewed on the rescue mission the night before. The wounded were evacuated by 153986′s wingman, but Cpl. Conner died 2 weeks later of his burns in the Air Force hospital at Cam Ranh Bay. The wounded Marine survived.

Later on 153986 was retrieved. The casualty report said that it was a bunch of pieces held together by pipes and cables that bore no resemblance to a helicopter. Whether the fuselage in the museum is in fact 153986 or how it ended up at Quantico is a story I don’t know.

Yesterday, we went down to MCAS Miramar for the Air Show. I met a young Marine pilot down there from the Purple Foxes and asked him if he knew the story of 153986 and my friend Jim. He did, and had been to the museum and seen it and knew what it was all about. He didn’t know of the final act in Vietnam, and I told him what had happened. We paused for a just a moment. I asked him where HMM-364 was based and he told me and gave me his phone number and said they would love to have Jim come down sometime. Hopefully that will eventually happen.

Most of the time heroism is just doing your job or taking care of your friends. You don’t think about it. You just do it and maybe you tell the story to a friend who remembers it driving 75 on the interstate when a light bulb goes on over his head.

And remember, there are young men and women out there right now from HMM-365 and 1,000 other units continuing in the same traditions and putting their lives on the line for their brothers and sisters every day. I hope someone remembers this story 40 years from now.

The Haqqani/Pakistani Attack on Camp Bastion

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Posted on October 4, 2012 by Matteo X

The BBC seem to be the only ones who followed up on the attack on Camp Bastion on September 14. It seems that the base is not as remote as it has been said to be. Several key points were made in the article.

. The attackers did extensive reconnaissance before the attack – The attackers accesses the weakest point on the base on the night of a new moon. The access point was the shortest distance between the wire the target. The night vision goggles of patrolling sentries would not pick up a signature.

. The attackers knew exactly what their target was – The attackers immediately upon getting through the wire headed directly to the hangars and tarmac where Marine Squadron VMA -211 was based. They broke into two teams

. The attackers knew exactly how to cause maximum destruction – immediately upon arriving, the attackers fired RPG rounds at 8 of the harrier jump jets. RPG’s are one of the best tools available to destroy an aircraft and all 8 were taken out in a matter of moments. They brought the right tools with them.

. The attackers held out for four hours – Only four members of the Quick Reaction Force were left unwounded after the attack. Two of their vehicles were destroyed. many of the attackers were downed in the first 30 minutes, but the survivors had to be dug out using Apache helicopters. The attackers knew where to hide.

A Taliban cameraman waited in place just outside the wire for hours to catch the chaos caused by the attack.The video shows pillars of smoke and helicopters from a short distance. This would indicate the cameraman knew where to hide and how to evade capture. The video was a priceless trophy for the insurgents and had to be preserved at all costs.

ISAF Intelligence sources briefed the BBC and stated that the attack carried all of the hallmarks of the Haqqani Network. The Haqqanis are linked directly to Pakistan’s ISI. In the past, Pakistani military officers carrying military identification have been found dead at the sites of some of the most violent attacks in Afghanistan, including school and hospital bombings. It is widely believed that the ISI does much of the operational planning for the highest profile missions.

In the past year, President Obama has authorized over 200 drone strikes in the Northwest Territories, many of these specifically directed at the Haqqani bases in the Miram Shah area. The video released by the Taliban after the attack stated that it was in revenge for the video which caused protests by Muslims around the world, but with such planning it is obvious that this is not the case. One might speculate that the Haqqanis waited for the darkest night of the month instead of September 11 when there was still moonlight. This is another red flag indicating a very professional plan.

It seems the BBC has done a very competent job in reporting on this attack and yet nothing like it has appeared in the American press. After the fiasco surrounding the purposeful misattribution of the Libyan consulate attack by the White House and Department of State and the suggestions that the Administration is purposely trying to cover up Islamic terrorism, the BBC narrative is at odds with our own government and media’s narrative.

The Best Post Debate Quotes

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Posted on October 4, 2012 by Matteo X

“Did the president send out his body double tonight?” – Time Magazine

“Mitt Romney came in with a chainsaw. ” – James Carville

“If Romney keeps this up…Obama is going to vote for him!” – Michael Moore re-tweet

“This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” – Michael Moore

“Romney was able to ‘out-Obama’ Obama. On the connection piece, on the authenticity piece, on the being able to tell the story.” – Van Jones

“This is a rolling calamity for Obama. He’s boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney!” – Andrew Sullivan

“He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight.” – Andrew Sullivan

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.” – Bill Maher

“When I got onto the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” – Barack Obama

“When you go to 5,000 feet and you only have a few hours to adjust — I don’t know, maybe”… – Al Gore

“But here’s the great news for Republicans: We have a candidate who is going to do extraordinarily well on Wednesday night, the first time he has the opportunity to stand on the same stage as the President of the United States.” – Chris Christie – September 30

“The debate was a wipeout.” – Chris Christie – October 3

“Where did the favourite go?” – Le Figaro

“I don’t think anyone has spoken to him like that in four years. He lost, It was a surprise to us all.”
- David Gergen

“Obama could barely look at Mitt Romney” – Gloria Berger

“Last night, I watched Barack Obama morph into Adlai Stevenson, I had the particular advantage of seeing the debate in a bar in my fair state of Ohio, at a “watch party” organized by the local Democratic Party. I heard two to three faint cheers during the debate and then silence and private conversations as the hour and half proceeded. Obama lost most of that local audience that he should have energized.” – Kevin Mattson

“We have our knives out! We go after the people and the facts! What was [Obama] doing tonight — he went in there disarmed!” – Chris Matthews

“I personally do not know who won this debate.” This means . . . yeah, Mitt won. He beat the hell out of Obama.” – Rachel Maddow

“OK, so Obama did a terrible job in the debate, and Romney did well” – Paul Krugman

Obama “created a problem for himself on Social Security tonight. He agrees with Mitt Romney.” “I was absolutely stunned tonight.” – Ed Schultz

“Obama came across like a man who would rather have been watching basketball on TV at the White House or even authorizing new drone attacks.” – Der Spiegel

Propaganda 101 – The Tight Focus Media

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Posted on September 29, 2012 by Matteo X

A few years ago I attended a function for a controversial political figure who was being targeted by Latino rights groups for his hard-line stance on immigration rights. I wanted to hear what this boogeyman said and make up my own mind about him.

When I got there in addition to the crowd attending the event, the driveway of the hotel was jammed with television trucks from all of the major Los Angeles television stations as well as a large number of national Spanish language stations.

Few of them were covering the event inside. Rather they were focused on a small crowd of perhaps 20 protesters outside. It was a symbiotic relationship. The media were there for the protesters. The protesters were there for the media. 20 news crews were broadcasting this protest into the living rooms of millions of Spanish-speaking families along with the 11:00 o’clock news on every major English language channel in Los Angeles.

By the look on the screen when I got home that night, one would have thought there were hundreds of outraged protesters. In fact, it was only when the klieg lights came on that it was anything but a very casual affair. The protesters joked and smoked with the news crews and reporters, and then went home before the event ended. They had made their point and sent their message to the masses.

Yesterday morning, it was reported that MSNBC had altered another video of a Romney/Ryan rally showing the Republican candidates in an unfavorable light.This is the second time the network has been caught.

On September 22, the major media including the networks, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets reported a crowd on 18,000, Obama’s largest yet, in Milwaukee. Unfortunately, the BMO Harris Pavilion where it took place seats only 5,000, and video images taken by attendees showed large swathes of empty seats. The video from the major media naturally was tight focus.

It’s an old trick from the 60′s. Visual media feeds off of motion and noise. It’s the shiny object theory. It is also a pack of lies.

This morning, the ombudsman for the Washington Post challenged the paper to recognize its left-wing bias and a recent Pew poll found that only 46 percent of the population feels that the news coverage of the candidates by the media is fair.

When the Obama administration tried to enlist the National Endowment for the Arts to develop a media campaign to promote the President’s health care bill, it was not the mainstream media but alternative media that blew the whistle on a clear violation of the law.

Camera phones and iPads are challenging the received narrative. Breitbart, the bete noir of the Left repeatedly caught the farce on video, shutting down ACORN and “exposing” the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal. It wasn’t that the major media had no interest in these stories. They didn’t fit the political narrative, so they said nothing. Same thing with the John Edwards scandal. It was the National Enquirer that broke the story. A major presidential candidate was cheating on his dying wife and engineered a criminal coverup, and the media knew and said nothing.

The decisions on what to report, and what not to report, and how it is framed are made by a handful of editors and executives, almost all of whom have cast aside any measure of objectivity.

But when there is a clear pattern of propagandizing for one side or the other, a Rubicon of our freedoms has been crossed. A fair and impartial press is vital to our democracy. The media themselves claimed that people sitting at home in their pajamas were creating a false narrative but today, it is those same citizen journalists who have been catching the media in their lies.

There is a growing cry against this propaganda machine but sometimes it is hard to find since the machine is intent on self-preservation. But when 46% of the audience no longer believes what it reads in the paper or sees on TV, the death knell has rung.

Punch Sulzburger died yesterday. He was an iconic figure to many in the East Coast media posse. But he and his successors failed to realize that by catering to a left-wing audience they lost 50% of their subscribers in a nation that is relatively moderate.

The propaganda machine is self imploding while it blames free content and 100 other causes other than its own alienation of its audience. Propaganda works when it is government subsidized but not in a capitalist economy.

We may differ on our ideas, but we cannot afford to differ on the facts.

Obama’s Imperial Presidency

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Posted on September 27, 2012 by Matteo X

Much was made back in the days of Richard Nixon of his aggregation of power to the White House. His was the first “Imperial Presidency” according to the intelligentsia at the time and Arthur Schlesinger made it official.Nixon was said to be assuming the powers of a dictator or king: the power to declare war; the power of the purse; and the power of immunity from legislative oversight.

Much has been made of the assumption of power by the executive branch since. Most recently George Bush was accused of this after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was passed by Congress. Opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq used the term repeatedly despite Congressional approval and U.N. Resolutions. Helen Thomas was relentless in her criticism equating the imprisonment of Jose Padilla, a Taliwannaban, to the gulags of Soviet Russia and the internment camps of World War II. Ms. Thomas implicated the Supreme Court as well, who approved Bush’s measures when challenged by an activist Leftist bar.

And today, we have a president who has arrogated more power to his agencies and the White House than any in history, and the media and the Leftist bar are utterly silent.

Consider the use of Executive Orders:

Theodore Roosevelt 3

Others to FDR None

FDR 11 through the Great Depression & World War II

Truman 5

Eisenhower 2

Kennedy 4

Johnson 4

Nixon 1

Ford 3

Carter 3

Reagan 5

G.H.W. Bush 3

Clinton 15

G.W. Bush 62

Obama 135

Consider that Obama created an unprecedented separate bureaucracy from his Cabinet level agencies and departments run by “czars” for banking, the auto crisis, Afghanistan, AIDS, the Border, Climate, Domestic Violence, Drugs, Green Jobs, Guantanamo and on and on. These czars are nominally accountable to the various departments but decision-making power rests with them and in the White House. Obama has emasculated the structure of our government, and yet no one has said a word.

A number of the agencies and departments, including and especially the EPA, the FDA, The Department of Agriculture, and the department of Homeland Security have arrogated powers never legislated to themselves such as climate change, industry regulation, and even transportation safety.

When the White House began to use the National Endowment for the Arts as a propaganda tool for his health care bill, enough scorn and criticism was rained down to quickly snuff what was an almost Orwellian use of governmental power.

Much more serious was the president’s decision to go to war in Libya. Executive Order 13566 declared Libya an extraordinary threat to the United States despite no act of war and in coordination with the United Nations Resolution 1973 which called for the protection of the Libyan people. Congress was informed, not consulted.

The law is, ever more, what the President says it is. As as expressed by Lewis Carroll so well, “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

And this is the root of the issue. At a time when there are bitter divides and when the policy battles are fought in the courts there has been no middle path. The aggregation of power in the Presidency has become fundamentally un-Constitutional no matter which party is in power.

The aftermath of 9/11 saw an accelerated use of executive power during an asymmetrical war with no rules. To institutionalize those powers permanently will be a final blow to the division of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

America’s Epic Fail in the Middle East

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Posted on September 25, 2012 by Matteo X

Today the president addressed the United Nations General Assembly, apologizing for a film no one saw and condemning the wave of violence across the Middle East without somehow addressing the anger and tribalism that is the root cause.

He spoke forcefully for human rights and against the tyranny of censorship. The response was positive, but we are still left with a policy in tatters. Instability reigns and the clouds of war ebb and flow with every day’s news. First Syria. Then Iran. Then Libya. And in the background always Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Mohammed Morsi has accumulated even more power than his predecessor, Mubarak, in the name of democracy, but we know not what his intentions are. We have gone from being close allies with Egypt to some amorphous, ill-defined relationship not through actions of state but through poorly worded presidential news bites using ill-advised language.

In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, our country’s word has lost meaning because of a disengaged, unilateral policy towards the Arab Spring that ignored the advice and counsel of our allies. Today’s New York Times reports that the president has failed to build the relationships necessary to diplomacy, staying disengaged and aloof. His personal style has actually hurt our ability to influence events. This is not a good sign.

The Israeli – Palestinian situation has effectively become a sideshow. We ignore both sides even as the crisis with Iran escalates.

This afternoon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak to the General Assembly. At home he is deeply unpopular but still holds power because of his close alliance with the extremist faction. He is actively supporting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria not only with armaments but with troops as well. Iran has been fomenting unrest in Bahrain, the Gaza Strip and beyond.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban and their allies are simply counting the days until the departure of Western forces now while making life ever more difficult. They are reminding both our government and the Afghan people that they will be back once we are gone. In the background, the Pakistani government has all but declared war against western interests.

And yet this should never have happened. From 1979 onwards, the protector of the Ummah has been the United States. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, it was the Reagan government that organized support for the mujaheddin.

In 1983, 241 United States Marines were killed in a terrorist attack in Beiruit, Lebanon while trying to help establish peace during that civil war. 58 French paratroopers were killed that day as well. All of them peacekeepers.

In 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it was the 82nd Airborne who were first on the scene in Desert Shield, protecting the Holy Places from the aggressor. Saddam’s goal was the domination of the richest oil patch in the world. he would have used this as a tool not only against the West, but against any opponent of his Baathist regime, which was virtually every other nation in the region.

Over 700,000 U.S. troops were involved in the Gulf War and 394 were killed. We went home afterwards except for some forces tasked to ensure that there were no further incursions. After Desert Storm, the United States led the way in establishing the no-fly zones, which protected the Kurds in the Iraqi north.

It has conveniently been forgotten that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction three times. The first in massive attacks reminiscent of World War I in his war against the Iranians; secondly against Israeli targets in the Gulf War; and lastly, against the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Twice he used nerve gas against his coreligionists.

In 1992 when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, the United States once again supported a Muslim government in Bosnia. The Dayton Accords led to an independent Bosnia. American aircraft dropped food and supplies while “black” C-130′s dropped weapons.

At the same time, U.S. forces arrived in Somalia on a humanitarian mission (Operation Restore Hope) to end a man-made famine caused by civil war between tribal militias. 43 Americans were killed and 143 wounded.

In Kosovo, U.S. troops once against guaranteed the peace. Just this week, Kosovo became the newest member of the international community of nations.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in cooperation with the Northern Alliance expelled the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The Taliban regime was among the most barbaric in history, brutalizing the Afghan people. We were greeted as liberators at the time.

In 2003, U.S. forces finally deposed Saddam Hussein with resistance collapsing within 30 days. We were once again greeted as liberators by most of the country. But then a vicious combination of jihad, civil war, and gangsterism was allowed to arise. There were no civil institutions, just as in Afghanistan. There was no reconstruction plan.

And as a result, 4,487 Americans have died to date in Iraq, the vast majority seeking simply to keep the peace. Close to $1 trillion has been spent. To achieve what?

The Maliki government is a corrupt alliance of Shiite interests, both secular and religious that is like its predecessor more concerned with looting the country’s resources than building civil society. The oppression of minorities continues and government leadership has aligned itself with Iran. In the north and other parts of the country a de facto sovereigntism has taken the place of a national government. The Kurdish regions are by most metrics independent in all but name.

In Iraq, the United States was recognized by almost all parties as the honest broker holding the divergent special interests both accountable and together. Behind the scenes and despite public pronouncements to the contrary, Iraqi politicians from all sides begged that the US remain as that balancing force. But our own politics, our leadership’s disengagement, and the desire simply to exit as soon as possible overruled the common sense answer.

One thing we have learned beyond doubt is the personal disengagement of the President. When General McKiernan begged for additional troops in Afghanistan he was fired. When General McChrystal requested the same, the administration waited for over 90 days to respond. Today’s New York Times describes the president’s disengagement with leaders in the region.

To a dangerous extent the president has isolated himself from events. To then misrepresent facts on the ground for political purposes such as the root cause of the assassination of Ambassador Stevens and blame an obscure video for the past two weeks of violence avoids and abets the complete failure of our government, not only in this administration, to deliver an effective message in the light of the facts.

We have fought more time for the basic rights of Muslims than for any other religion or people. We have gone to the aid of Muslims more times than for any other people. Even when supporting regimes that have been oppressive, we have acted in the interests of peace and the personal safety of the individual. The problem does not lie with the United States. It lies with the extremists. It lies with those who stay silent in response to the extremists.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. There is an unsteady awakening in the Middle East. The old leaders have been overthrown. But now what? Can the institutions of justice and human rights survive conservative Islam? What of the Copts in Egypt and the Jews of Baghdad and the Christians of Syria? What of the rights of women?

The United States has done its best to come to the aid of Muslim peoples. Trillions of dollars and cemeteries full of American and other foreign bodies have been filled trying to protect and preserve Muslims. There is nothing to apologize for.

But in the balance, 30 years of policy has been a failure. The Wahabbists were allowed to propagate their philosophy just as the Deobandists have done so. The result was Al Q’uaeda and fanatic violence in Pakistan.

The president’s lecture of the extremists this morning is symptomatic of our epic misunderstanding of the politics and psychology of the Ummah. The Koran was frozen in context in the 1200′s. Any reformation or reinterpretation is punishable by death.

This is a massive barrier to progress. But to deny that the rage is against the “other” is to deny what has been proven time and again.The state of conflict between Shiite and Sunni should be a clue to the underlying issues.

But all of the Arabists and all of the experts seek to define the issues through a Western prism and this is perhaps our greatest failure. Western understanding of the Middle East can go only so far and no further. The facts are pretty clear.

We tried to change the game in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed. We tried to stay ahead of the curve in Egypt and Libya, and we have failed.

We tried to simply keep coreligionists from killing each other and we failed. We protected Muslims from oppression and we failed.

We are destined to fail because we are not considered a source for the positive in any light. We are simply infidels to the majority, who have no say in their affairs. Our blood and our treasure and our good intentions have bought us little politically because we are both outsiders and have been disengaged.

Our presidents have hit the reset button so many times in the Middle East that it is broken. Politically and militarily we have spent the last four years disengaging ourselves. This will have had deeply negative consequences in the long term, but with few options now there is little we can do. We have backed ourselves into a corner.

The real meaning of the Camp Bastion attack

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Posted on September 22, 2012 by Matteo X

On 9/11, the Taliban, in an operation most likely planned and supported by the Pakistani military, executed their own version of a SEAL Team assault of Camp Bastion in the middle of the Afghan desert.

Camp Bastion was placed in a Godforsaken place so that no one could easily assault it. It is a huge, sprawling base with British, American and other ISAF compounds. From a few flights per day 18 months ago, the base now handles 600 missions per day ranging from helicopter assaults to resupplying COP’s to close air support to C-17′s flying in troops and logistics directly in from the UK or States. As Joe Biden would say, it’s a big f’ing deal.

So somehow a Taliban assault team of approximately 17 troops managed to blow a hole in the 30′ high double fencing, drive across the base to the U.S. Marine Harrier squadron’s area of operations, and then blow up most of that same squadron while killing its commanding officer and several others.

It was a one way mission regardless with 17 virgins at the end of the line, but it was textbook planning and execution that set it apart. Our military would have known this 30 minutes after the last shot was fired and people at Eighth & I and Quantico would be encountering severe gastroenterological problems passing large clay objects through their systems.

And yet our president and our media skipped over it like it never happened. No one from the White House met the coffins as they arrived at Dover. They would just as soon forget it ever happened.

But the fact is that our enemy launched one of their most successful assaults on our forces on the anniversary of 9/11 and it’s like it never happened. Funny how that works with this administration. Orwellian, even.

There is no cry for retribution or even investigation. There has hardly been an acknowledgment from either the White House or the Pentagon. We knew where, generally, the mission was planned within 48 hours and perhaps even who planned it. This kind of operation has fingerprints all over it and the after action reports on our side would have been thorough.

This, combined with the assassination of our ambassador in Libya, was a coordinated effort by the Salafists to regain the initiative and instead we are entertained by commercials on Pakistani networks paid for by our embassy with the President and Secretary of State calling for reason with the crazies.

The enemy has the measure of our leadership and finds it perfectly suited to their agenda.We can expect more, and more daring assaults as the date for withdrawal draws near. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli are bywords for strategy and tactics, and instead we have the My Little Pony School of Leadership at the highest levels.

The criticism of our nation’s policy in the Middle East is now coming from experts on all sides and yet the President and his sycophants have rather successfully covered up probably the worst week of the Global War on Terror in 10 years.Instead, it seems from his actions in the aftermath that he is pursuing his own global war on our own objectives.

The indecisiveness when General McChrystal begged for more troops for the Surge; the refusal to confront Pakistani complicity and support for the Taliban and their allies; even the almost complete refusal to pursue the narcotics traffic responsible for 95% of the heroin that scourges the West; how much more pathetic can it get?

The Camp Bastion attack is a symptom of what has been wrong with our strategy in Afghanistan for a very long time. From the withdrawal from engagement with the Afghan people to the sprawl and waste to the Pollyanna power point presentations and restrictions on engagement to the refusal to pursue the enemy to their safe havens, this is no way to run a war.

Wars are on or they’re off. There is little or no middle ground. This war has been on autopilot for a very long time and as troops die or come home missing limbs, our leadership has failed both their trust with them and with ourselves completely.

What is really going on in Egypt?

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Posted on September 19, 2012 by Matteo X

The demonstrations have died down for the moment, but Friday, demonstration day, is only a few days away. If you follow the Middle East, the demonstrations usually follow Friday’s prayers at the mosques, when the more outspoken mullahs perform like Elmer Gantry in stirring religious and political fervor at times.

Unlike in the West, religion and politics are deeply intertwined, whether it is the opposition in Syria or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the nascent Salafist movement in Egypt. The crowds stream from the mosque and into the streets and things start burning and people get hurt.

The anger began in earnest when Khaled Abdullah, known for his incendiary television sermons against Christians and secularists, demanded justice and retribution. Al Nas, the satellite television station from which Abdullah broadcasts, was originally founded by businessman Mansour bin Kadesh broadcasting music and entertainment, but became first a Sunni outlet, and then later a Salafist station broadcasting across the Middle East. The pot began stirring on September 8 with Abdullah’s first rants. On September 11, he was joined by Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the brother of Ayman, leader of al Q’aeda. Ayman had issued a call for revenge for the death of Abu Yahya al-Libi, AQ’s operational commander, at the wrong end of an American Hellfire missile.

Last weeks riots began on 9/11, if you didn’t notice and were in my opinion nothing to do with an obscure Youtube video. The timing is self-explanatory much as Jay Carney and Susan Rice would like you to believe otherwise.

Our Embassy in Cairo has been under daily assault by protesters. Now it turns out that many of them; the professional thugs and even the young and unemployed have been being paid £50/day ($8.50) in a country where that is a lot of money. Hundreds if not thousands of the protesters are being paid, and no one knows where the money is coming from. Saudi interests? The Gulf? Pro Mubarak factions?

The majority in Egypt are angry with the government and Muslim Brotherhood. Not for what you might think, but for not having done enough to stop the violence. But as elsewhere in the Middle East, it is dangerous to speak out, especially against the thugs.

The worst riots have occurred in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. The focal point for American interest in Benghazi seems to have been a planned mission using a small protest as cover according to the latest reports. The timing has become obvious, but the links are still unclear.

What has become clear, though, is that this was not an accident. The majority of people in Egypt are just as concerned as we are. Invisible hands are moving the chess pieces and building upon the violence.

As the Pope visits Lebanon to pray for peace, itself a bold move, denial is not just a river in Egypt; it is our government’s policy.

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