Gen45

The Republican Party can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes, so rather than just waiting around for them to get this idea, I decided I might as well make it a reality myself.

Behold — Gen45:

Anti-Obama protest in SF far outdraws any Occupy event this year; still ignored by MSM

There was a large political protest in San Francisco a couple days ago. In fact, it was one of the largest ones this year and far out-drew any OccupySF protests since the earliest days of that movement.

And yet, the protest was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media.

Why?

^{Photo courtesy of Larry in SF}

Because it was organized by Catholic groups strongly opposing President Obama and his contraception mandate for religious organizations. Any event that opposes Obama is deemed by the media to be irrelevant and trivial, and can safely be swept under the rug.

But thankfully the mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on the narrative, and in this case Larry in SF from the Fund47 blog was once again on the scene to bring us exclusive coverage of the protest, along with photographic proof that it numbered over a thousand people — far in excess of the few dozens that comprise the typical media-saturated Occupy protests these days.

Click to see the full photo-essay:

San Francisco Catholics Defend American Exceptionalism

Here’s what Larry had to say about the numbers:

The crowd of 1000 was about half men, half women, with significant numbers of Hispanic, Asian and African Americans.

Attendance in San Francisco was double that reported by Catholic San Francisco Online, the National Catholic Register or the San Jose Mercury News. High resolution photographs captured by Fund47 reveal at least a 30×30 grid of protesters, with an additional hundred around the periphery. Also, the crowd turned over at a decent clip during the 90–120 minute event, scheduled on a workday, meaning even higher numbers.
…

The silence by San Francisco mainstream media on the Catholic protest is deafening. I could not find a report in the San Francisco Chronicle online, which recently gave full page coverage to a “bum rush” by 25 protestors (and 30 photographers) on the residence of Wells Fargo’s CEO by an OccupySF splinter group, revealed as utter farce by Fund47. Two weeks ago, a war protest with 15 professional protestors received frothy local TV news coverage.

The event was not unique to San Francisco; it was part of a nationwide protest by groups opposed to Obama’s anti-religious mandates in recent months.

^{Photo courtesy of Larry in SF}

Joining those who oppose Obama on religious principles were several Tea Partiers who oppose Obama’s fiscal policies. Many analysts now see this as a “two-front war” against Obama’s program, putting him on the defensive wherever he turns.

Check out Fund47 for the full story.

Gen44: Obama names entire generation after himself, whether they like it or not

Redefining the parameters of narcissism and megalomania, some dude named Barack Obama has renamed an entire generation of Americans as “Gen44″ — that’s “44″ as in the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Gen44er Tina Korbe over at Hot Air takes exception to this inclusion of all young voters in Gen44, whether they voted for Obama or not.

The Twittersphere is already turning the hashtag #Gen44 into an hilarious Obama-bashing fiesta, something I heartily recommend you join if you’re familiar with this newfangled “Twitter” thingamajig.

Michelle Malkin’s new Twitter-trend-folling site “Twitchy” has already compiled some of the more memorable Tweets, such as “I’m not #gen44, I work for a living. I’m #gen1040″ and “#gen44: Because this time I want Obama to win all 57 States.”

Here’s the official diktat from our Eternal Namesake, Il Quaranta-Quatro:

UPDATE:

I was thinking various organizations could take this idea and run with it, as a marketing concept.

Abercrombie & Fitch:

The National Rifle Association:

The Republican Party:

Danish TV host humiliates Obama with clips showing identical compliments

Earlier this month, sarcastic Danish TV announcer Thomas Buch-Andersen utterly humiliated President Obama and undid months of his ham-fisted foreign policy attempts by proving that Obama says the same thing — literally, the exact same words — to every single foreign head of state that visits the White House.

A clip of his broadcast was uploaded to YouTube, and now that American viewers have discovered it, it’s starting to go viral.

I only wish this Dane had a job on American TV. Then I might actually turn mine on for the first time in ten years.

Watch and weep:

“A few shortcuts in my passion to be heard”: Public radio scandal sums up liberal “journalism”

This really ought to be more of a bombshell story than it has been so far. Public radio’s nails-on-a-chalkboard show “This American Life” in January broadcast a devastating hit piece which exposed Apple as a brutal taskmaster overseeing near-slavery conditions in its Chinese factories. The piece led to innumerable follow-up stories in major media outlets bashing Apple as the new Snidely Whiplash of Capitalism. Liberal Web sites and groups collected signatures for anti-Apple petitions, started Apple boycotts, picketed Apple outlets…

…and then…

…[dead air for about seven minutes]…

…This American Life just admitted that the whole story was basically faked.

Turns out the “journalist” was a performance artist named Mike Daisey who conceived of his report as a sort of one-man show in which he dreams of how evil Apple could be ought to be, to match his worldview in which successful companies are always inherently evil.

How did Mike Daisey explain his mendacity? With one of the best non-apologies in the history of lying:

“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey tells Schmitz and Glass. “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

Uh-huh.

Mr. Daisey’s explanation of his serial lying — “a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard” — and This American Life’s eager willingness to embrace his story, could actually be applied to almost all liberal journalism these days. In fact, that’s what they teach in Journalism School now — “Advocacy Journalism,” in which the narrative (generally a sob story with capitalism as the villain) is more important than hewing to the facts. If the narrative and the facts aren’t aligned — go with the narrative.

The fact that Mr. Daisey tried, and almost succeeded, in taking down a major corporation with a pack of lies, which were then parroted by nearly every leftist in the nation, should be the journalistic scandal of the year.

But who controls the media? The same people who ran with Daisey’s narrative. Expect the story to sink like a stone.

UPDATE:

Perhaps they should change the name of the show to “This American Lie.”

Thieves stealing US oil reserves

And by “oil,” I am of course referring to the leftover cooking oil and grease stored behind restaurants, which thanks to rising gas prices has suddenly become popular as a source for biodiesel:

Slick-fingered Bay Area thieves are stealing restaurants’ used kitchen grease, a product that six years ago was so worthless that some restaurant owners would illegally dump it down the drain instead of paying for proper disposal.

The leftover cooking oil, yellow grease, is the easiest material to turn into biodiesel. And as the alternative fuel’s popularity has increased, so has its selling price, making it a target for thieves willing to go through the trouble of pumping or siphoning the grease out of storage barrels.

“It’s liquid gold,” said Daniel Rugg, director of engineering at the Four Seasons hotel in East Palo Alto, where security guards frequently chase away would-be grease thieves.

…

In 2006, processed or “finished” yellow grease sold for 11.5 cents a pound, said Don DeSmet, vice president of the western region of Darling International, a large grease hauler and renderer. In 2011, the price was 42 cents a pound – a price jump that gave the waste product a new allure.

“People started stealing it like it was nobody’s business,” Levenson said.

Last month, the grease was selling for about 32 cents a pound.

Thieves with a truck, a pump and a handful of 50-gallon barrels can make a few thousand dollars a week.

While some grease thieves are amateurs pilfering barrels with ladles and hoses, others are professional haulers, officials said. Because they’re licensed, it’s hard to prove what has been stolen and hard to punish renderers for buying stolen goods.

Renderers can process the grease with an alcohol to make biodiesel or use it to make animal feed and other products.

The federal government should closely study this news as a picture-perfect example of how a market economy works. If you create an artificial shortage of one product — as the government has done with its refusal to increase or take advantage of North American oil fields — then alternative substitutes will see a price rise as well.

Shortsighted “green economists” were saying just a few years ago that biodiesel was a logical substitute for petroleum-based fuels, since the raw material for biodiesel — leftover kitchen grease — was free!

Well, in a very short period of time, leftover grease went from having negative value — i.e. you had to pay someone to dispose of it for you — to being free, to costing 11.5 cents a pound, to costing 42 cents a pound. Why? Because the price of traditional gas at the pump has gone up. If gas cost substantially less than biodiesel, then there’d be no profit in kitchen grease, and no one would steal it — which is the way things were until recently.

If we take a step back, we can see how this principle applies to all forms of “alternative” fuels. If the only way to make “green energy” economically viable is to intentionally inflate the cost of petroleum-based fuels, then even when we adopt some alternative energy source, its cost will remain inflated to the consumer, due to supply-and-demand pressures on the energy market as a whole. And then poor people, who can least afford the cascading effects of price-increases across the economic landscape due to higher energy costs, will suffer.

Look, I’m all in favor of alternative energy sources, if they can diminish our dependence on foreign oil. But they need to enter the market and become competitive on their own merits and cost. Our fantasies of subsidizing our way to energy independence run straight into the brick wall of market economics; as this story proves, the overall energy market — petroleum-based, alternative, what-have-you — is a unified economic entity, and when you inflate the cost of gas, you inflate the cost of everything, including “green fuels” like kitchen grease.

RutherfordGate part of a pattern for Obama

By now you’ve probably already heard about RutherfordGate — in which President Obama thoughtlessly repeated a bogus quote falsely attributed to President Rutherford B. Hayes in order to slander his opponents and (almost as an afterthought) Hayes himself:

“One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?’” Obama said. “That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore.”

A quick bit of fact-checking uncovered that the quote — as has been long known to anyone with a passing knowledge of history — is just an urban legend.

But this is not the first time Obama has done this. In recent months, he’s been citing all sorts of fabricated quotes attributed to his presidential predecessors, and then mocking their obvious inferiority to his visionary self. Here are just a few examples overlooked by the media:

January 13, Toledo, Ohio:

“When Bill Clinton first surfed the Internet, he said, ‘Golly, this’ll never be good for anything but porn and cyber-stalking,’” Obama announced. “That’s why he’s now nothing but a disgraced, impeached sex addict in a sham marriage to the worst Secretary of State in history.”

January 24, Panama City, Florida:

“When Harry Truman first learned about the atom bomb, he thought it was a ‘senseless waste of uranium’ and tried to ship a couple to the Emperor of Japan as novelty gifts,” Obama said. “If they hadn’t fallen out of the plane, Japan would still be our ally today.”

February 3, Burbank, California:

“When FDR was shown his first television, he deemed it ‘The Devil’s Toolbox’ and smashed it up with a sledgehammer, accidentally injuring his leg in the process,” Obama said. “He was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and is now known as an elitist 1%er who bankrupted America with a Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security.”

February 17, Baltimore, Maryland:

“When Abraham Lincoln was shown the Gatling Gun, he laughed and said ‘Why would anyone want to shoot more than one bullet at a time?’” Obama scoffed. “That’s why he isn’t on Mount Rushmore.” [Aide hurriedly whispers in Obama's ear.] “Oh, he is? Well, then, that’s why we’re going to replace his ugly face with my classic profile.”

February 28, San Antonio, Texas:

“When Thomas Jefferson first learned of the steam-powered locomotive, he insisted that ‘Nothing will ever replace the horse as mankind’s primary mode of transportation,’” Obama claimed. “That’s because he was a slave-owning rapist who declared an imperialist war on our Muslim brothers. More than any single person he is responsible for developing the supremacist philosophy underpinning this racist Amerikkka, and I have ordered all his portraits removed from the White House.”

Occu-turf as union stiffs get paid to join OWS protest against Romney

NY’s resident citizen photojournalist Urban Infidel is at it again, documenting the latest OWS outbreak in the Big Apple. This time around, the Occupiers attempted to crash a Mitt Romney fundraiser today, but were rebuffed by security and had to settle for an outdoor march:

Mitt Romney Fundraiser Crash Fail at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel

What makes this report particularly noteworthy are the photos Urban Infidel captured of bored-looking union members arriving at the protest where they were signed in by union reps – undoubtedly so they could pull a paycheck for their day’s astroturfing. Or should I say occu-turfing in this case.

The Left is apparently struggling to find an effective angle for criticizing the milquetoast stand-for-nothing Romney, because they had nothing better than “Romney Kills Jobs” as the theme of the protest. While the narrative lacks accuracy it makes up for it with good visuals:

Authentic OWS “Sub-Humans” in the foreground; astroturfing union members earning an easy day’s pay in the background.

And no protest is ever complete without a ludicrous and self-defeating misspelling.

Check out UI’s full report for plenty more photos and videos!

Expect the union/anarchist/socialist convergence to pick up steam as election day nears.

‘Occupy Jesus’: Evangelicals Give OWS a Taste of Its Own Medicine

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has transformed the word “occupy” into a catch-all term which they now apply to every conceivable noun: “Occupy education”; “Occupy foreclosures”; “Occupy the future”; and so on. Annoying and essentially meaningless, but catchy.

Yet you can’t copyright a word, so a group of Christians decided to co-opt OWS’s sloganeering yesterday and give Occupy San Francisco a taste of its own medicine.

Shortly after OccupySF re-established an encampment in front of the Federal Reserve Bank on Market Street, they were surrounded by Christians holding up signs that said “Occupy Jesus”:

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}
Zing! Take that, Occupiers!

The photo above was taken by “Larry in SF,” proprietor of the Fund47 blog. Larry was on hand to capture all the action of this first-ever Christian re-occupation of the Occupiers, and filed an excellent report:

Evangelicals Confront Occupy at San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank & International Women’s Day March

What I found especially interesting is that when the Occupy Women’s Day march met the Occupy Jesus march coming the other way, the two groups passed though each other like neutrinos through a shadow; instead of the clash turning into a confrontation, the two groups’ ideologies were so far apart from each other that neither side had any way to challenge the others’ narrative.

One point worth noting: The Christian Occupiers who came to SF provide tangible real-world results helping drug addicts kick the habit and get their lives back in order; whereas OccupySF does nothing for addicts except provide a place to congregate and shoot up without criticism; in other words, they facilitate destructive addictions. Regardless of ideology: Which side is benefitting society?

I was not at this particular event, nor was anyone else with a camera except Larry it seems, so Fund47′s report is an exclusive — check it out to see all the action.

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}

Andrew Breitbart facts

Andrew Breitbart doesn’t turn the light on; he turns the dark off.

Andrew Breitbart doesn’t fight; he just allows you to lose.

When the boogeyman goes to sleep at night, he checks his closet for Andrew Breitbart.

There are no mysteries in the universe — only things that Andrew Breitbart hasn’t shared with the rest of us.

Google automatically fills in “ndrew Breitbart” as soon as you think the letter “A”.

Each hurricane is now assigned a different name because it was just too repetitive to call every one “Andrew.”

There are actually four tenses: past, present, future, and Breitbart.

Sometimes you need to open a can of whoop-ass. Andrew Breitbart is already inside the can.

Andrew Breitbart has a stunt double. For the crying scenes.

Racehorses have to pee like Andrew Breitbart.

When Andrew Breitbart parted the Red Sea, it was hydrogen on one side, oxygen on the other.

Andrew Breitbart does not sleep. He waits.

When ghosts go camping, they sit around the fire and tell Andrew Breitbart stories.

Electricity uses Andrew Breitbart to light its house.

It’s no accident that the alphabet begins “A, B…”.

Andrew Breitbart doesn’t need Twitter; he’s already following you.

If at first you don’t succeed, you are not Andrew Breitbart.

The Bible uses the phrase “fire and brimstone” because “Andrew” and “Breitbart” were already taken.

Niagara Falls went over Andrew Breitbart in a barrel.

There is no such thing as evolution. Just a list of creatures Andrew Breitbart allowed to live.

When Andrew Breitbart is in Rome, they do as Andrew Breitbart does.

If God has a beard, it’s because he wants to look like Andrew Breitbart.

Andrew Breitbart makes Happy Meals cry.

Darth Vader dresses up as Andrew Breitbart for Halloween.

Andrew Breitbart doesn’t need to look at his watch; he decides what time it is.

The sky is not the limit. Andrew Breitbart is the limit.

The movie “Anaconda” was filmed entirely inside Andrew Breitbart’s pants.

The FDA has now declared Andrew Breitbart an essential amino acid.

God may not play dice with the universe, but Andrew Breitbart does.

Only Andrew Breitbart can turn lemonade into lemons.

Andrew Breitbart uses pepper spray as a condiment.

Stonehenge is merely Andrew Breitbart’s building blocks from when he was a kid.

Even when Andrew Breitbart snoozes, he still wins.

Andrew Breitbart tells his GPS where to go.

Andrew Breitbart grew a beard at the age of 16. Months.

Andrew Breitbart has a grizzly bear rug on his floor. The bear is still alive — it’s just too afraid to move.

Andrew Breitbart doesn’t have to face consequences; consequences have to face Andrew Breitbart.

The Earth does not rotate on its axis; that’s just Andrew Breitbart walking.

The Million Breitbart Project

I mourn the death of Andrew Breitbart. I didn’t know the guy personally, aside from the exchange of a few mutual admiration emails, so I have no further insights into the man or his personality beyond what his many friends and colleagues have already written.

But my mourning is mixed with a sense of frustration. Great men like Andrew Breitbart are not great simply because of their own personal actions and achievements; they’re great because they show us the way to be just like them.

A good father goes fishing and feeds his sons every night. A great father teaches his sons how to fish so they can feed themselves.

A good muckraking investigative journo-activist breaks shocking stories that change the political landscape. A great muckraking investigative journo-activist — like Andrew Breitbart — shows us that anybody can do what he does.

Because that’s the secret of Andrew Breitbart’s career: He rose to the top despite not possessing any unique skills.

He wasn’t a great writer. Not bad; just serviceable. He didn’t have a PhD. He personally wasn’t very handy with a camera. (Though he certainly knew what to do with newsworthy photos or footage once he got his hands on them.) He wasn’t an economic theorist. He wasn’t a beacon of moral purity. He wasn’t a deep philosopher. He wasn’t even a professional journalist.

But whatever he did, he did with gusto. And not just run-of-the-mill gusto: extreme gusto.

When he got the ball, he never fumbled. He sent would-be tacklers flying. And even if his team wasn’t on offense, he’d snatch the ball anyway and score a backfield touchdown before the other guys even knew what happened.

One thing we must learn from Andrew’s life: If Breitbart could do it, anyone could do it. We no longer have any excuse. America’s bloggers and citizen-journalists and new-media mavens need to get off our collective asses and make news happen.

Operation Equilibrium

Exactly four years ago, Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos,” encouraging Republican primary voters to cross party lines and vote instead for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in order to slow down Barack Obama’s march to the nomination.

Now, just a few days ago, inspired by Rush Limbaugh, Democratic activists have launched “Operation Hilarity,” a scheme in which Democratic primary voters cross over and vote for Rick Santorum, in order to throw a monkey wrench into the Republican race and slow Mitt Romney’s march to the nomination.

Some analysts (including the Operation Hilarity oganizers) believe that Operation Chaos backfired, since the drawn-out nomination race “helped President Barack Obama and the Democrats to build a national organization,” which paid off in the general election and helped him to win the presidency.

Similarly, Operation Hilarity may backfire, since in the few days since it was launched, Santorum has surged to the lead in national polls and now the Democrats are simply voting for the Republican current favorite, for no discernible reason.

It seems that neither Operation Chaos nor Operation Hilarity were planned with much foresight, other than the juvenile glee of playing in your rival’s sandbox. But to what end?

The time has come to do this right. I hereby announce OPERATION EQUILIBRIUM. Unlike the previous Operations, it has a clearly thought-out long-term goal, and does not involve crossing party lines. Here’s how it works:

Operation Equilibrium

How to take part:

When the Republican presidential primary is held in your state, vote for whichever candidate has the fewest number of delegates up to that point. If the guy in last place is particularly distasteful to you, then vote for the guy in second-to-last place, or third-to-last. But whatever you do, vote against the current leader.

Why? Here’s the rationale:

Just about everybody agrees that the surviving crop of Republican candidates is just plain awful. I myself expressed my opinion of these losers in a recent post entitled “Barack Obama Will Still Be President on January 19, 2017.” But the problem is: They’re all we’ve got. Either Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul will be the Republican nominee in 2012. Right? Right?

Wrong.

We have one final chance to get a different candidate in there and beat Obama in the general election. And that chance comes in the form of a brokered convention.

A “brokered convention” happens who no one candidate wins a majority of delegates by the end of the primary process. This doesn’t happen very often, because primaries almost always devolve into two-person races very early in the season, so that one or the other candidate is sure to top 50% eventually.

But the Republican race this time around still has four candidates in play, and all four still think they have a chance to win the nomination. My opinion (one shared by plenty of folks, especially on the Democrat side) is that none of these existing four candidates has a chance to beat Obama in November, so our only hope is to nominate someone else at a brokered convention — and the only way to get a brokered convention is to ensure an ongoing equilibrium between the current four candidates. Make sure that they all have an approximately equal number of delegates, so that none of them breaks the 50% barrier and wins the nomination outright.

I’m not naming names as to whom you should vote for, since the momentum keeps shifting back and forth. But to be specific about the scenarios:

• If Santorum has the delegate lead and/or the momentum when it comes time for your state to vote in the Republican primaries, then instead vote for Gingrich or Romney.

• If Gingrich has the lead, then vote for Romney or Santorum.

(You might notice that I’ve left Ron Paul out of my recommendations. That’s because I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone vote for him, due to my personal dislike for him; but if you already have a hankerin’ for Ron Paul, and he’s already not in the lead, then you can include him in your voting options.)

The goal of Operation Equilibrium is to ensure that we arrive at the end of the nomination process with all the candidates equally split, delegate-wise: Romney 33%, Santorum 33%, Gingrich 33%. That way, no one candidate going into the convention can claim to have a “mandate,” which opens the door for a completely new candidate (Marco Rubio, Allen West, Paul Ryan — I’m looking at you) to jump in and win the nomination on floor votes at the convention. Sure, it’s a longshot, but it’s the only shot we’ve got.

There is so much simmering dissatisfaction among Republican voters with our existing crop of candidates, that I think ushering in a surprise new candidate would be a popular move and would generate excitement unlike what we’ve seen thus far.

So everybody: vote against the current Republican leader in Operation Equilibrium. It’s our only hope!

Sierra snowpack study instantly attacked because it undermines AGW claims

If you want a prototypical example of how climate science has ceased being true science and instead become little more than an ideological battleground, look no further than a study released yesterday showing that, contrary to earlier claims, global warming has had zero effect on the depth of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Although the study received almost no media coverage (hmmmm, wonder why?), the San Francisco Chronicle did publish an article entitled Study: Sierra snowfall consistent over 130 years. But they covered the study not to give it wider publicity, but rather to give a platform to critics trying to discredit it.

The main thing we learn from this incident is not that snow levels in California have essentially remain unchanged since 1878, but rather that the weak, fallacious and ultimately politically-driven counter-arguments from the critics reveal just how far mainstream climate science has drifted from unbiased truth-seeking.

From the article:

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.

“The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified,” said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It looks like you’re going to have snow for the foreseeable future.”

So — what’s to criticize about the study? The Global Warming Alarmists instantly sprang into action and settled on three lines of attack.

First:

Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn’t come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.

Christy’s study used snow measurements from railroad officials, loggers, mining companies, hydroelectric utilities, water districts and government organizations going back to 1878. That’s when railroad workers began measuring the snowpack’s depth near the tracks at Echo Summit using a device similar to a yardstick.

“No one else had looked at this data in detail,” said Christy, a Fresno native who said some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society’s online Journal of Hydrometeorology.

Remember: in the 19th century, there were no satellites, no such thing as “climate science,” and no official list of who is or is not allowed to measure snowpack. So the data in the archives is the only data we have about snowpack back then, and thus also the best data on snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. And yet, the climate mafia dismisses a century’s worth of engineers and government officials as “a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.”

By this standard, Galileo was an amateur, Charles Darwin was an amateur, Isaac Newton was an amateur, as was basically every scientist who ever lived prior to the standardization of university professorships in the first half of the 20th century, which officially segregated the world into “amateurs” and “professionals” once and for all.

But this is not mere historical ignorance on the critics’ part. Because when you get to dictate who is and is not an “amateur,” and thus dictate whose data is or is not valid, then you get to control the outcome of any study. You can accept as “reliable” any data that confirms your pre-estabished thesis, and reject as “amateurish” any data that contradicts it.

Yet that’s not how science works. If these critics were true scientists, they would rethink their thesis, not attack the personal integrity of a century’s worth of engineers.

Also note that, until very recently, no one had any political agenda to fabricate data to support or undermine global warming, so left out of the critique is any explanation of why some railroad official would fudge his data. Are the critics seriously implying that the following thought went through someone’s mind back in 1878: “Gee, I’d better lie about how deep this snow is, because I want to trick researchers 130 years in the future into thinking that some theory about global warming that hasn’t even been developed yet isn’t really true. Bwahahahaha!”

Back to the article, where the second line of attack is to dismiss the data as meaningless because no one measured how wet the snow was:

Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey, said Christy is picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.

For one, he said, snow depth is not as good a measure of the winter weather conditions as water content and density.

The number of inches or feet of snow on the ground can mean a variety of things, he said, depending on if it is fluffy powder or compacted, wet snow.

Of course, he has no data at all about the water content and density of 19th-century California snow, and no evidence that snow a hundred years ago was drier or fluffier than it is today, but hey, they were all amateurs back then!

Finally, the critics poo-poo the study as irrelevant, since other studies of snowpack elsewhere in North America had different results:

What’s significant in terms of global warming, he said, is the fact that the snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States, an area that includes Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Scripps researchers, in coordination with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have concluded that 60 percent of that downward trend is due to greenhouse gases.

“There is a popular conception that the snowpack has declined everywhere, but that is not what the science says,” Dettinger said. “What we’re saying broadly is that across western North America there have been declines in spring snowpack.”

But those other results must have been based on very recent measurements that couldn’t reveal any long-term trends, since they’ve already determined that measurement taken by “amateurs” in the old days don’t count.

Or was 1878 Montana brimming with all sorts of “professional” snow measurers that California lacked?

This is more likely: When old data confirms your thesis of global warming, then it is accepted as valid; but when old data undermines your thesis of global warming, then it is rejected. Simple.

The take-away news here is not that snow levels in California have remained unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. That’s not surprising. What’s newsworthy is that people claiming to be scientists act like true “amateurs” with confirmation bias, who only accept the validity of data which matches their preconceived notions.

CA Dem Party, Occupy movement, Van Jones, and Pelosi in Lovefest

What do you get when you cross Van Jones, the Occupy movement, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom and the rest of the California Democratic Party? Why, a veritable orgy of mutual admiration and clueless self-congratulation.

It all came to a head this weekend at the California Democratic Convention in San Diego, where Van Jones was treated like a rock star even as he sang the praises of the Occupiers and engaged in blatant class warfare.

Two articles set the scene. First, a blog post eyewitness account from SFGate’s Carla Marinucci:

Democrats’ star speaker Van Jones fires up crowd — and emerges party “leader of the future”?

Van Jones, the former Obama Administration green czar who resigned in controversy, appears on the fast track to a political comeback — emerging as a star at this weekend’s California Democratic convention and lauded by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a “leader of the future.”

Jones, who as head of an activist group called “Rebuild the Dream” has become a leading voice of the Occupy movement, was given the star speaking slot to address hundreds at the kickoff Friday night reception here sponsored by state party chair John Burton.

To the cheers of the grassroots activists, Jones endorsed a “millionaires’ tax” as a means of firing up younger voters in the 2012 election, saying “that will get their attention.”

…

“I’m tired of being accused of being anti-American,” said Jones. “They call it class warfare…if anything, it’s warfare against people who have no class…they won’t even return our phone calls when our houses are underwater.”

The effusive reception given to Jones underscores that the former community activist appears in resurgence since the days after the Obama Administration green czar was forced to resign after controversial statements and ties with grassroots groups that Republicans claimed had radical roots.

Jones apologized for some of his actions, including signing a petition for 911Truth.org which appeared to suggest the Bush Administration “may indeed deliberately have allowed 9/11 to happen.”

…

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told the Chronicle this week that he was so impressed with Jones that, as the former mayor of San Francisco, “I tried to offer him a job too when they fired him…because I was so upset with Glenn Beck” and other Republicans who demanded his ouster.

Jones, Newsom said, is “passionate and he’s been a leader on the Occupy movement. A strong voice, a rational, reasonable voice on the issue of income and inequality…and he’s as eloquent and effective a speaker as there is is out there.”

If that wasn’t enough proof that the Democrats have thrown in their lot with the Occupiers and Van Jones, an Associated Press report from the same convention seals the deal — as a small band of narcissistic Occupiers protested the very people praising them and enacting their demands, the Democrats wore buttons saying “We Are the 99%”:

Occupy protesters target California Democrats

About 100 Occupy members protested outside the San Diego Convention Center, where the state party was holding the convention, sounding off on themes similar to those being discussed inside. But protesters said some Democrats had let them down by supporting the indefinite detention of terror suspects and spending millions on political campaigns.

“Don’t just watch us, come and join us,” and “Get up, get down, there’s revolution in this town,” they chanted.

Democratic delegates had to push through the crowd as they returned from lunch, but many stopped to talk to the protesters. Some of them also wore buttons saying “We are the 99 percent” and “Millionaire’s tax of 2012.”

The Occupy movement began as a protest against the widening gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.

Speaking to convention participants, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Democrats owe thanks to the Occupy protesters. The former San Francisco mayor said they drew attention to income inequality, which he called “the greatest threat to democracy.”

On behalf of his two young children, he said, “I want to thank the Occupy movement for stepping up and stepping into this space and doing more than we have in 30 years for putting the focus on the growing income inequality gap.”

Mike Oren of Los Angeles said he was among 34 people who traveled on a bus from Southern California to the convention Saturday morning.

“We’re here to protest the National Defense Authorization Act,” he said.

That law, signed by President Barack Obama in December, authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism. Many civil liberties activists believe the law is unconstitutional.

Activists held signs with vulgarities denouncing the law and criticizing Democratic leaders for supporting it. “The Democrats also serve the 1 percent,” said one sign.

It’s absolutely astonishing that the California Democrats are embracing the Occupy movement even long after it has crashed and burned, and even as those very same Occupiers are hurling abuse and vulgarities at the people praising them.

Everyone knows that politicians are a bit slow on the uptake, but I mean this is ridiculous. It’s almost as if the left believes its own propaganda: the media intentionally misrepresents the Occupiers and their behavior and message so as to dupe middle America, even though anyone with one eye half open could see that the Occupiers were nothing but a motley crew of scatterbrained Marxists and smelly bums (and that’s being kind, frankly).

But hey, Dems, go for it: Nominate “ex” (sic) communist Van Jones to the party leadership, muss the hair of your beloved Occupy rascals, and keep turning left, just keep turning left.

Gay couple that overturned CA’s marriage laws now getting…divorced. Ooops!

Feeling anemic? Maybe you need a megadose of irony:

Gay couple who were the leads plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led the state Supreme Court to overturn Prop. 8 are now getting divorced after only three years

Robin Tyler and Diane Olson saw their shared dream come true in June 2008 after years of fighting for marriage equality.

In January, they saw that dream dissolve when Tyler filed for divorce after more than three years of marriage and 18 years of living together.

“It wasn’t a light decision,” Tyler told NBCLA. “It’s very sad.”

The couple pushed for the reversal of Proposition 8 in 2009 by renewing their vows and were lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led the state Supreme Court to strike down the same-sex marriage ban that year.

“We have a right to civil rights, and we don’t have to say, ‘If you give it to us we’re going to be perfect … we’ll try harder than anybody,’ ” Tyler told NBCLA. “We’re just like anybody else.”

On the surface level, this is all very amusing and ironic.

But on a deeper level it speaks to what many “traditional marriage” advocates secretly (or not-so-secretly) believe about the whole gay marriage movement — that most homosexuals either aren’t really interested in getting married or don’t have the personalities for long-term committed relationships anyway. And that the real goal of the movement is to weaken or belittle the concept of traditional marriage, by changing the essential definition of it.

Now, I’m not saying that I myself necessarily think this critique is true, but I’m quite sure that many others think it is true. And even though I myself back in 2008 voted against Proposition 8 (i.e. I voted in favor of gay marriage), since that date I have often second-guessed my vote and now I’m conflicted on the issue. On one hand, my libertarian streak tells me to “live and let live” and “Why should I care who or what you marry? Knock yourself out.” But on the other hand, the more I read essays and manifestos from the early gay movement in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the more I become convinced that the modern “gay marriage” movement is a very clever attempt to bring an end to marriage altogether.

Back then, the activists were overtly anti-marriage. They felt that traditional family structure was the main pillar of “normative sexuality” and that true sexual liberation could only be achieved through destroying the institution of (straight) marriage itself.

But that didn’t go over too well with the mainstream. So after many behind-the-scenes strategy discussions, a shift took place: The goal of destroying marriage remained the same, but the method of achieving it changed from overt to covert. How to end the concept of marriage? By rendering it so unrecognizable that the former defenders of marriage will themselves call for its dissolution. That is to say, the new goal would be to get traditionalists to say, “We’d rather abolish the concept marriage altogether than allow it to become a stamp of approval for things we disapprove of.”

And indeed, I have already seen the beginnings of such an attitude among some social conservatives who are beginning to adjust to the reality that gay marriage is making serious inroads into American society. And this “destroy the camp rather than let the enemy capture it” attitude is exactly what the gay activists want to hear — in fact, eliciting that reaction is the whole goal.

My suspicions are confirmed not only by today’s news story about the rapid divorce of the very people who overturned Prop. 8 (i.e. did they only “get married” to prove a point?), but by other observations in recent years, most of which I unfortunately can’t write about openly.

An example I can discuss was a scene in a documentary I saw a few years ago praising the beginnings of the gay marriage movement (I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the film, unfortunately). The filmmakers were interviewing two elderly gay men who were considered among the leading pioneers of the gay rights and gay marriage movement. And they described how they got “married” in an unofficial ceremony back in the ’70s. And the film presented them as heroes. But then…as the interview continued they discussed how they “stayed married” even as they both had frequent and transitory sexual relationships with other guys. And that this proved “just how strong our marriage is.”

Without going into details, this exact same behavior pattern has been evident in people I know personally. I’m not noting this because of any personal outrage or disapproval on my part (really, it doesn’t matter to me what you do in your personal life), I’m just noting that it is true: some gay men who are friends and relatives of mine declare themselves to be in long-term relationships, but in every case they are “open” relationships which allow outside partners.

I have no statistics about how common this is, nor do I believe that any reliable statistics could ever be generated on the subject. But from my own personal observations throughout my life, I get the impression that it’s not uncommon. And from what I hear and read from other people (including other gay people), a lot of other folks also feel that it’s not uncommon. Yes, some straight married folks cheat on each other and/or have “open marriages,” but those are regarded as failures or exceptions, rather than the norm.

So this brings us to the real question of what defines marriage. The raging argument these days is over whether marriage is a formalized relationship between (according to the traditionalists) a man and a woman, or instead between two consenting adults of any gender (according to the gay marriage proponents).

But I think that’s the wrong argument.

The actual dispute we’re having is over whether marriage should be defined as either a legally recognized monogamous sexual relationship between two faithful adults or instead an essentially meaningless legal label linking two adults with no expectations of sexual fidelity.

I have the feeling that many “traditionalists” would not object to gay marriage if they truly believed that marriage would lessen the perceived promiscuity in the gay community. But they don’t believe that. They believe that gays (gay men, in particular) tend to have “open relationships,” and that the marriage label won’t change that. So that extending the label of “marriage” to gays will instead do little except to diminish the significance of the term.

In short: The argument is more about sexual fidelity, and not so much about sexual orientation.

I know this is a taboo subject, but in the interests of making implicit assumptions explicit, I think it’s a useful discussion to have, considering the brouhaha over yesterday’s court ruling overturning Prop. 8.

Videos of Obama condemning Super PACs…which he now embraces

As Bryan Preston noted, Obama has just committed The Mother of All Flip-Flops and now actively encourages people to donate to his re-election Super PAC, a practice he repeatedly condemned for years as unethical.

Compare his unabashed embrace of Super Pacs today with these videos of him:

First, Obama in 2007:

Next, Obama in 2010:

Ouch.

A little dollop of hypocrisy on top of your hypocrisy sundae, Mr. President?

Egyptians hate getting foreign aid from the US; Americans hate giving it. The solution is obvious: Stop!

A new Gallup poll in Egypt reveals that 71% of Egyptians disapprove of their country getting economic aid from the US. (Why? Because they hate America, that’s why.)

Meanwhile here on the home front, majorities of Americans of all political stripes disapprove of paying out foreign aid to Egypt, with a solid 58% of all Americans saying “No” to giving Egypt aid. (And that poll was from a year ago, before recent anti-American developments in Egypt; the percentages are likely much higher by now.)

The question then becomes:

If we don’t want to give it, and they don’t want to take it, then why in the heck are we still giving it to them?

The answer dates back to 1979, when we agreed to give them aid as a reward for signing the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. And we’ve been dutifully doling it every year since.

Now, countries unilaterally abrogate their treaties all the time, but that’s not something I advocate the U.S. should do cavalierly; we need to maintain our reputation as a nation that keeps its promises. However, I argue that recent developments in Egypt have released us from honoring any treaty with its previous governments.

When any nation undergoes a major revolution, its new government often makes a complete break with its previous government. All prior treaties then become unenforceable, because they were agreed upon by a governmental structure that no longer exists.

Consider any revolution (or era-defining abrupt change in government) you can think of, and in every case the pre-existing treaties and agreements were jettisoned unceremoniously.

Did the Bolsheviks honor the treaties and contracts signed by the Czar? No.

Did Ataturk’s new secular government in 1920s Turkey honor the treaties of the Ottoman Empire? No.

Did post-1975 communist unified Vietnam honor the agreements which South Vietnam had previously affirmed? No.

Did Ayatollah Khomeini continue the government of the Shah with unbroken continuity? No.

And in all these cases, as well as just about every other case throughout modern history, the other parties to treaties with these countries also abandoned them and treated them as null and void in relation to the new state. Did we continue to support the new Iranian regime, just as we had supported the Shah? No. Did we send military aid to the new leaders in Saigon after 1975? No. And so on.

The “Arab Spring” and the subsequent election of the Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme Islamists in Egypt represents a revolution equal in severity to any of the examples given above. Our agreement was with the Sadat government; Mubarak’s regime, however undemocratic it may have been, was essentially a continuation of the Sadat-era policies. The change from Sadat to Mubarak did not constitute a fundamental political revolution, and thus our agreement with Egypt was still in force.

However the ouster of Mubarak and the ascent of the Islamists this year means that Egypt has been reborn as essentially a new nation, for better or worse. The old rules are out; Mubarak’s bitterest opponents are now in charge, and they will reshape Egypt into an Islamic republic.

We did not enter into an agreement with an Islamic republic. We entered into an agreement with a secular government. One that no longer exists. Thus, all prior agreements are declared null and void, and we start with a fresh slate.

I suggest we now write “$0″ on that slate, and use that as the starting point for future negotiations.

Mug shots of the 99%

In preparation for tonight’s weekly Occupy riot in Oakland, the Oakland Police Department has issued mugshots of 11 protesters whom a judge has ordered to stay away from the protest sites due to their violent behavior at previous events:

Judge Issues Stay Away Orders to Violent Oakland Protesters

The criminal charges against 12 individuals stem from the arrests made during the Occupy Oakland protest on Saturday, January 28, 2012. Of the 12 charged, eight protesters were charged with misdemeanor offenses, and four were charged with violent felony offenses. The Oakland Police Department will continue to work with the District Attorneys office on the filing of criminal charges.

Protesters have publicly announced their intent to continue weekly marches in an effort to drain the City of Oakland of its financial resources. They have posted to their website a call to non-peaceful participants to take part in militant actions. They go on to say that these marches are not intended for people who are not fully comfortable with a diversity of tactics, and discourage the participation of anyone who is against action, assaults, or arrests.

Chief Howard Jordan said, “This type of destructive and aggressive behavior is not welcome in our City. Anyone who engages in criminal activity or assaults against officers or community members will be arrested.”

While the City of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department welcome peaceful forms of expression and support the right to free speech, acts of violence, property destruction, and vandalism will not be tolerated.

The attached photos represent the first 11 protesters who have been charged by the District Attorneys office on criminal charges and served with stay away orders by the judge:

WEATHERS, Adam, (Felony) BRIONES, Joseph, WATLINGTON, Chloe Heather, WARWICK, Joanne,
OVETZ, Robert, WEISS, Geoffry, LUBIN, Michael, (Felony) HOOVER, Joseph, OZOLINS, Jason, 7/12/83 WINTHUNDER, Ahimsa, CASILLAS, Mario, (Felony)

Curious as to what “the 99%” look like? Behold their mugshots:

Would Jesus — or Judas — support Obama’s tax policy?

Back when I was in college and still at an impressionable age, I heard one night while listening to an “alternative” radio station an old song called “Stand Up For Judas,” by British folk singer Leon Rosselson. I didn’t know at the time that Rosselson was a communist and an atheist, nor did I particularly follow politics back then; all I knew was that the song was “counter-intuitive” and anti-authoritarian, which meant that it was hip and daring, which was good enough for me. I hummed it on my way to class and imagined myself so very risqué.

I’ve since moved on from that embarrassing phase of life, but the song’s lyrics have stuck in my head ever since. Rosselson’s thesis, in “Stand Up For Judas,” is that Jesus was in fact a “class traitor” who encouraged the perpetuation of poverty, by focusing on metaphysical questions and the afterlife rather than trying to create a utopia on Earth here and now. Judas, on the other hand, was a firebrand revolutionary dedicated to overthrowing society’s status quo.

I was reminded of “Stand Up For Judas” once again when I read this morning that Obama said “Jesus would back my tax-the-rich policy:

“For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,” Obama said, quoting the Gospel of Luke.

(The masochists among you can watch his entire 20-minute-long self-aggrandizing speech here.)

Now, politicians of all stripes have been claiming that “Jesus would support my policies” as far back as anyone can remember, invariably without the slightest justification.

But on the specific issue of taxation to benefit the poor (leaving aside the inconvenient side issue of high taxes stalling economic growth which would in the long run hurt the poor), who has the better argument: President Obama, or Leon Rosselson? Who would be more likely use the existing worldly power structure to take money by force from the wealthy and give it to the poor: Jesus, or Judas?

To help you decide, here’s a video of Rosselson singing “Stand Up For Judas,” along with the lyrics underneath for you to follow along. Warning: If you’re a Christian, the lyrics might make you blow a gasket, but try to suppress the outrage for a moment and appreciate Rosselson’s line of reasoning, which when it comes to the issue of taxation and which of the two historical figures was more into “social justice,” is actually pretty convincing:

Stand Up For Judas
by Leon Rosselson

The Romans were the masters
When Jesus walked the land
In Judea and in Galilee
They ruled with an iron hand
The poor were sick with hunger
And the rich were clothed in splendour
And the rebels, whipped and crucified
Hung rotting as a warning
And Jesus knew the answer -
“Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”
Said, “Love your enemies”
But Judas was a Zealot and he
Wanted to be free
“Resist”, he said, “the Romans’ tyranny”

So stand up, stand up for Judas
And the cause that Judas served
It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word

Now Jesus was a conjuror,
Miracles were his game
He fed the hungry thousands
And they glorified his name
He cured the lame and leper
He calmed the wind and the weather
And the wretched flocked to touch him
So their troubles would be taken
And Jesus knew the answer -
“All you who labour, all you who suffer
Only believe in me”
But Judas sought a world where no-one
Starved or begged for bread
“The poor are always with us”, Jesus said

So stand up, stand up for Judas
And the cause that Judas served
It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word

Now Jesus sowed division
Where none had been before
Not the slave against the master
But the poor against the poor
Caused son to rise up against father
And brother to fight against brother
For “He that is not with me
Is against me” was his teaching
Said Jesus, “I am the answer
You unbelievers shall burn forever
Shall die in your sins”
“Not sheep or goats” said Judas but
“Together we may dare
Shake off the chains of tyranny we share”

So stand up, stand up for Judas
And the cause that Judas served
It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word

Jesus stood upon the mountain
With a distance in his eyes
“I am the Way, the Life” he cried
“The Light that never dies
So renounce all earthly treasures
And pray to your heavenly father”
And he pacified the hopeless
With the hope of life eternal
Said Jesus, “I am the answer
And you who hunger only remember
Your reward’s in heaven”
So Jesus preached the other world
But Judas wanted this
And he betrayed his master with a kiss

So stand up, stand up for Judas
And the cause that Judas served
It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word

By sword and gun and crucifix
Christ’s gospel has been spread
And two thousand cruel years have shown
The way that Jesus led
The heretics burned and tortured
And the butchering bloody Crusaders
The bombs and rockets sanctified
That rain down death from heaven
They followed Jesus, they knew the answer
All unbelievers must be believers
Or else be broken
“So place no trust in saviours”
Judas said, “for everyone
Must be to his or her own self a sun”

Now, atheistic communists like Rosselson generally reject religion entirely, and dismiss the Bible as fiction. But in “Stand Up For Judas” Rosselson does something interesting: He accepts the Biblical narrative as factually true, but sides with the Gospel’s villain, rather than its hero. Whether he did this in all sincerity or rather because he simply thought it would be a good ideological strategy to undermine Christianity’s appeal, I could not say.

Postmodern academics waste their careers trying to retroactively apply contemporary political mores to the literary classics — “Feminism in Shakespeare,” “Colonialist Oppression in The Canterbury Tales,” and so forth — and Rosselson’s injection of socialist concepts into a Biblical setting is just as pointless and ridiculous.

But if one were to sit down and — purely as an intellectual exercise — ponder whether Jesus or Judas would be more in favor of compulsory wealth transfer from the rich to the poor, I’d have to cast my vote, alongside Leon Rosselson, for Judas.

I imagine that Jesus and Judas were both against the kind of taxation the Romans imposed, in which money was extracted but not returned in benefits to the colonies. But what about taking wealth and instead of carting it back to Rome, distributing to the poor? it would seem that was Judas’ position, not Jesus’:

Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

(Interesting to note that even back then, those who advocated wealth redistribution [like Judas] were condemned for skimming some of the wealth for themselves.)

Is Christianity inherently socialistic, as Obama claims? Or was Judas, not Jesus, the champion of the poor, as Rosselson claims?

Or is it a completely absurd exercise to mix religion and politics, the ancient and the modern, the worldly and the spiritual, such that we should condemn both Obama and Rosselson as political mountebanks?

Occupy Pledge of Allegiance: “…and to the plutocracy for which it stands, the privately owned central bank, under the Jews…”

During yesterday’s hours-long rioting at the Occupy Oakland protest, the Occupiers burned a United States flag in front of Oakland City Hall (before later breaking in and smashing up irreplaceable antique museum exhibits in the foyer). Someone posted a video of the flag-burning to YouTube, and then added narration on top of it — his own rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance in an Occupy theme:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pzI-hmAag8

Here’s exactly what he says as the Oakland Occupiers burn the flag:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the imperialistic capitalistic dictatorship, and to the plutocracy for which it stands, the privately owned central bank, under the Jews, with inequality and injustice for the 99.“

It’s not clear who made the narration and the video — it could be one of the Occupiers themselves, or a local Occupy sympathizer, or perhaps just some random guy on the Internet getting all excited seeing the Occupiers in action.

(The YouTube channel for the narrator has this self-description: “Combination of Technical analysis, marxism, monetary history, and mainstream economic analysis,” alongside a litany of Bay Area Occupy and “evil Federal Reserve” videos.)

But even if it was just some random guy, you’ve got to ask yourself:

When rank anti-Semites are inspired by your actions to rant about evil Jews controlling the banks, isn’t it time to re-think your message?

Looks like the Occupiers have embraced their leaders’ call to spread hate.

[Hat tip to Ringo of Ringo's Pictures for digging up the video. Also reported at Moonbat Tracker and
Weasel Zippers.]

UPDATE: As of 11:45pm on Monday, Jan. 30, the video “has been removed by the user,” undoubtedly due to all the attention drawn to it.

Occupy Oakland: “Now is the time to spread hate”

The motley crew of communists, criminals and creeps who use the meaningless label “Occupy Oakland” to somehow justify their violence rioted again today for the umpteenth time. In the middle of the melée, self-styled Occupy Oakland spokesperson and former Weather Underground revolutionary Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz gave a speech enunciating the Occupy movement’s new ethos:

The first speaker, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, took perhaps the most pointed stance, urging the crowd to fight the rich.

“Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world,” said Ortiz, a retired professor from Cal State East Bay. “Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

Any further questions?

Again?

“Never Again” is the rallying cry of Jewish Holocaust survivors determined to prevent another genocide. How to ensure that the Holocaust happens “never again”? Education. History. Don’t let anyone forget — especially the descendants of those who enacted the Holocaust in the first place.

Survivors and fellow activists have had mixed success keeping the Holocaust in school curricula around the world, with the most difficulty being in countries that were far removed, geographically and culturally, from the scene of the crime.

But Germany — ah, well, that’s a different story. Of course there, of all places, the history of the Holocaust is drilled into every student’s head so that they never ever forget.

Right?

Wrong:

ONE-FIFTH of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz, survey reveals

A survey carried out two days before Holocaust Memorial Day shows more than a fifth of young Germans do not know the name of Auschwitz or what happened there.

Twenty one per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 quizzed about the most notorious Nazi extermination camp had not heard of it, the survey revealed.

And almost half of all those canvassed by the Forsa research institute said they had never visited a concentration camp despite the fact Germany has made all of those on its soil permanent memorials to the dead.

Oh how quickly “Never Again” has opened the door to “Again.”

(The original article, in German, can be found here in Stern magazine.)

Occupy protesters use Bibles as weapons — literally

You couldn’t ask for a more quintessentially emblematic moment to sum up the ethos behind the Occupy movement.

Friday night in San Francisco, Occupy protesters broke into an abandoned hotel, took the Bibles still remaining in the vacant rooms, climbed on the roof and attacked the police with the Bibles, along with bricks and other projectiles:

Occupy San Francisco’s “Day of Action” turned violent Friday night when protesters occupied an abandoned hotel and began throwing objects at police officers from the roof, police said.

“Once they gained access [to the hotel], some of them made it to the top of the roof and they then began to throw bibles down at the officers,” San Francisco Police Department spokesman Carlos Manfredi said.

“One of officers was struck with a brick to the chest and one of our lieutenants was struck in the hand with an object and may have damaged or even broken his hand,” he said.

More details here:

Police arrested four people in connection with the evening’s occupation of the empty Cathedral Hill Hotel at Van Ness Avenue and Geary Street. “Once they got inside, some of the protesters made it to the roof top and were throwing Bibles at the officers,” Manfredi said.

Also here:

Witnesses say some of the people inside the vacant hotel started throwing Bibles and other debris at pedestrians and police below. One KRON 4 employee narrowly escaped injury when one of the books landed just feet from him.

Bibles as weapons.

Really, there’s nothing more that needs to be said about the Occupy movement.

Internal rifts as Occupy tries to “shut down” San Francisco today

Today is the day: The end of capitalism as we know it.

At least that was the overly optimistic pronouncement from Occupy Wall Street West, the new regional protest conglomerate composed of former Occupy crews in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley and elsewhere in the Bay Area, all of whom were evicted last year and decided to merge into one large mega-Occupy.

They’ve been all over the media in recent weeks, predicting that today’s protest would rival in size the anti-war protests of early 2003, which drew hundreds of thousands of attendees.

Note to the foolish: Announcing that something will be true won’t make it come true. Your cringe-inducing flamboyant promises of mass revolution only make your movement seem more puny and ridiculous when only a comparatively tiny number show up.

But most interesting of all is the very public rift between the two main Occupy factions: The nonviolent anti-capitalists versus the violent anti-capitalists. Whereas the putative leaders of today’s event dub it a “Nonviolent Mass Occupation,” plenty of frustrated fellow protesters are basically calling for a riot, “Because we have nothing; because we want everything; because we hate the pigs; because fuck capitalism.”

The public can get a glimpse of the in-fighting on a fascinating thread at Indymedia, the online clearinghouse for far-far-left activism. Since Indymedia blocks incoming links from most non-radical sites, to see it you’ll have to paste this URL into a new browser window: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/01/16/18704831.php?show_comments=1

Some of the arguments are worth preserving for posterity, because they show in a microcosm what always happens to leftist movements: clashes between control-freaks and anarchists, between “work within the system” incrementalists and “smash the system” rabble-rousers, and amongst various revolutionary ideologies claiming the moral upper hand, always lead to internal disintegration. And both sides descend into a maelstrom of spiraling conspiracy theories about who is or is not an undercover agent.

I’ll paste some of the arguments below for those unwilling to risk a visit to Indymedia. On purely logical grounds the violent anarchists actually seem to win the argument over the neo-communists seeking to clamp down on dissent. But that’s just my take on the debate: What do you think?

Keep in mind when reading the following text that both sides of the dispute are so far off the left end of the political scale the average person couldn’t even tell them apart; the argument begins at the starting point of “Capitalism must be utterly destroyed forever”; the point of dispute is “How do we destroy it?”

The news these days is all about how the Republicans are tearing themselves to shreds; but the GOP in-fighting is nothing compared to this:

Rebels want to shut down San Francisco’s financial district on January 20th. Count us in!

WHAT: A ferocious, mobile, well-prepared, fearless and autonomous bloc within the J20 City Shutdown of San Francisco.
WHO: anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians, anarchists, rebels, antagonists, hooligans
WHEN: assemble at 5PM, January 20th, 2012
WHERE: corner of Market and Stuart, Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco, CA
WHY: because we have nothing; because we want everything; because we hate the pigs; because fuck capitalism
HOW: oh, you know…

TO WHAT EXTENT: as hard as we can!

INSTRUCTIONS: make plans, bring your crew, bring supplies, wear street clothes, disregard the peace-police, go for it!

Joke or Agent Provocateur?
by MindFulloStrategy

Funny or fishy? Those who think violence or heavy property damage is effective can try that on OTHER days, rather than cowardly piggy-backing on powerfully peaceful protests. Provocateurs often do that. Don’t get caught holding the bag. The pro agent leaves (w/ a fat paycheck) and misguided “activists” end up doing time. Many examples lately of entrapment–young people getting hit with 4 years or more in the slammer. Also, violence or heavy property damage destroys public empathy so the resistance movement doesn’t continue growing. That’s why they pay agents to instigate it. Also, the means are the ends.

Wingnut or conspiracy theorist?
by (a)

First off, there is no call for violence. Secondly, just because someone decides to take a risk and use property destruction as a tactic, it doesn’t make them a cop. If you dont like the tactic, that is fine (and perhaps even worth debating), but to blindly call anyone who uses these tactics ‘agent provacatuers’ is misguided and dangerous.

Respect Diversity of tactics.
by Fuck the police

You’ve got people involved in the resistance for all different sorts of reasons and they all come with different ideas of how to fight back.

Putting revolutionaries in the same category as the CIA is not only dangerous but asking to get punched in the face.

solidarity
by @SFOCCUPY

The call out from occupy and other folks self organizing the day is for mass direct action and occupation and all of our groups organizing have made a conscious strategy to not smash stuff or street fight in order to mobilize the diversity of participants needed-pretty much every neighborhood and community will be in the streets. Anti-capitalists bloc; cool–Please act and be in solidarity.

respect the Occupy movement
by Carlos

While I do respect a diversity of tactics, and do consider myself an anarchist/anti-authoritarian, I am worried that this action may not be in cooperation with the many organizers of the action (some of whom also may identify as anti-capitalists or anarchists), who have made a strategic choice to use nonviolent (but militant) tactics to shut down Wall St. West. The Occupy movement is founded on many of the values and tactics that anarchists have always promoted: direct democracy, consensus, direct action, occupying space, etc. If a small group plans an action outside of the General Assemblies and the democratic planning bodies that are making this action happen, then they are violating the anti-authoritarian principles which guide this movement. I really urge the folks planning the “anti-capitalist bloc” to act within the strategy and principles of the day and not violate the principles of the movement. I understand the hostility toward those who advocate “nonviolence” in our protests. Sometimes nonviolence is used as an excuse for organizing ineffective actions, put together by people who don’t want to risk their privilege by challenging the system. But I don’t think that the call for nonviolence in Friday’s action is a result of the privilege of the organizers, or the lack of revolutionary consciousness (take a look at some of the organizations putting it together. it’s not like it’s being organized by Moveon.org…). Let’s remember that anarchist movements have often used nonviolent tactics, such as the sit-down strike, the general strike, and blockades, to mobilize people for revolutionary action.

I don’t think that implying that this Bloc will engage in property destruction is in anyway objectionable. This is what has happened in other recent Occupy actions. Some shadowy group announces an “anti-capitalist bloc” i.e. shit gets broken. Thats what happened at the General Strike. And it’s what has happened at other actions labelled “Anti-capitalist.” I think it is obvious that this is an action which will be high-risk and will most likely result in a confrontation with police and broken shit. People need to be up front about that. Accountability and transparency should be hallmarks of revolutionary movements, not dirty words.

Lastly, I just want to say that, as a low-income worker, I am very much interested in smashing capitalism. I am very involved in Occupy Santa Rosa, about an hour north of SF. Many of our folks are coming on Friday to participate. Our people do not want to be exposed to violence. Many of us cannot risk a confrontation with police because we would lose our jobs, our houses, and our means of living. Many of us are anti-capitalists, but we think that we need a mass movement to destroy capitalism. We do not think that we can defeat capitalism by engaging in tiny acts of property destruction. Actions which the mass of people can participate in are most conducive to revolutionary change (such as the Port Shutdown and the General Strike).

Undoubtedly, the police have infiltrated various levels of the Occupy movement. Sticking to our principles of consensus, transparency, direct democracy and accountability, will ensure that their efforts at disrupting us will fail. Organizing actions without consensus of your comrades is only bound to breed mistrust. Please re-think your actions on Friday and get plugged in to the overall strategy

The black bloc doesn’t take off until the end anyway so no worries.
by a

Most people will have gone home by then.

Non-confrontational shit during the day.

Confrontation during the night.

LONG LIVE THE OAKLAND COMMUNE!

And besides, protests in America are disproportionately peaceful 99% of the time.
by Even Steven

If you can’t stick around for the militant actions, don’t stick around to risk getting arrested. There will be fun and games well into the night.

Are you cops fucking kidding me?
by Jackrabbit

This drivel came from one of two sources: 1) Cops 2) a 14yo boy who’s parents took away his porno mags.

If the idea of ‘fucking shit up!!!’ appeals to you – please stay the fuck away from our movement.

My response to Carlos
by pat

Carlos says, “If a small group plans an action outside of the General Assemblies and the democratic planning bodies that are making this action happen, then they are violating the anti-authoritarian principles which guide this movement.”

So let me get this straight: Acting independently and not bowing down to authority somehow violates anti-authoritarian principles?

Thanks for letting us know, you fascist.

This is how it begins: Self-appointed leaders and “assembly spokesmen” telling people what they can and cannot do, “for the good of the movement.” Can’t you see that you have already become the thing you are fighting against? The Occupy movement is already philosophically bankrupt if the “Carlos”s of this world get to dictate what is or what is not acceptable behavior within an anti-authoritarian context.

You are the next generation’s cadre, the next bolshevik, the next “new boss” bully-boy seeking to establish the rules system that everyone must follow. I will resist you as much as I resist the current power structure. “Occupy” is not longer a people-powered movement (not that it ever really was, but you know what I mean); it’s just a word, a label that power-hungry unconscious crypto-fascists use to justify their nascent totalitarianism.

revolutionary self-discipline
by carlos

every revolutionary movement, anarchist or otherwise, has understood the need for self-discipline and group discipline. We need this because the state is sophisticated and spends a good chunk of its time figuring out how to destroy us. If we do not have a plan and if we are not acting together, then the state will have a much easier time infiltrating and destroying our movements.

I don’t mind being called a fascist. I’ve heard it before. I recommend studying other anarchist or anti-authoritarian movements that cleared the way for today’s anarchists. They all had one form of group discipline or another. All anarchist institutions have agreements that the group is expected to abide by. In a future society, without states or bosses, there will always have to be agreements that people collectively adhere to. This is one of the fundamental aspects of anarchist philosophy.

If a liberal group or socialist group showed up to one of our actions, without planning with us before hand, and just had their own little event, we would accuse them of attempting a co-optation. That sort of behavior is not ok when liberals or state-socialists do it, and it’s not ok when anarchists do it. Many people show up to these actions having no idea that there is all this bullshit going on behind the scenes. All they see is a small group of people going off on their own and smashing shit and it gets associated with anarchism. If nothing else, this is a terrible strategy for bringing more people into the anarchist milieu. People will mistrust anarchists and generally be afraid to participate in anarchists actions in the future.

Once again, the General Assembly process is a tool developed largely by anti-authoritarian struggles around the world. Go through that process, make proposals, and try to convince people that we need to accept a diversity of tactics. If your comrades agree with you, then your action has a popular following behind it. If people generally feel like it’s not the best strategy, then you have to live with that. It’s called cooperation and it is one of the fundamental principles of anarchism. We have to respect our principles, or else we have nothing. Please re-think your actions tomorrow. Plug in to the strategy developed by the good people who planned this action and who are your comrades. Pick a target, set up a hard blockade, or occupy a building. Just do it within the context of the action so that we come out of tomorrow stronger, and not divided on the question of whether or not it was ok to smash some stupid window, which does nothing to threaten capitalists. it just makes them look like the victim.
There’s nothing anarchist about not having a strategy, not working with others, not cooperating with the democratic processes of the movement, and threatening to punch anyone who disagrees with you. In fact, it is ANTI-anarchist. It is bullying. It is divisive. Please stop, and use your rage intelligently and strategically. Please. If you fuck shit up tomorrow, virtually no one will have your back. You might feel righteous about it. But you will be alone, and that’s not a good place to be if you plan on one day overthrowing the state and capitalism.

“Oakland Commune” (sic)
by JB

Quit signing “Oakland Commune” to every half-baked, unintelligent stunt you pull. And quit cop-baiting and “fascist”-baiting everybody who objects to it!

Admittedly there is an age thing going on with this. When I was 22 to 32 I thought this bust-shit-up-on-each-and-every-and-all-occasions stuff was the bee’s knees. Unfortunately, and much to my own profound personal disappointment, the larger goal of doing what we can to help engender a mass social movement of working people to overthrow and abolish the capitalist mode of production may somewhat, ever so slightly, outweight the need to get a quick kick at each and every demo.

I am against pacifism. I hate the police. I hate Stalinism, and I hate liberalism. The struggle against this social order is not and will not be exclusively non-violent, and personally I was glad to see the windows of some appropriate targets get busted on the day of the attempted Oaktown General Strike. But I’d trade all the broken windows in the world for an increasing percentage of wage earners getting involved and combative — and not just at demos, but on the everday life terrain that matters most; where we work, where we live, where we shop, and how we get around. Sometimes a few broken windows help, sometimes not. And doing it all the time cheapens it, lessens its impact, and gives the larger world, especailly all those socially conservative and ever-more hard-presed mainstream proles who need to get involved with something authentically combative the impression that you are not out for anything more than a little extremely fleeting fun, and that you and anyone associated with cannot be taken seriously.

Some people want reform while others want revolution. Lets be a little more blunt shall we
by -A-

Because of the threat of losing ones job, home and social status i.e. middle class white privilege in general, you will not act and you will attack anyone who does because rioting and revolution is a direct threat to your capitalist interests. The only thing you are here to do is save the capitalist system from its own demise. You see us as the threat. You are not anti-capitalist. You are reformists who love the police and believe in government. You do not want to overthrow the system. There are major class contradictions here. You middle class non-violent type don’t want a revolution. You spend 365 days a year working to feed the capitalist system and the police and military and out of those days you spend maybe 2-3 days marching against Wall Street and expect the world to change but only change for your self and the people who are middle class. You don’t give a fuck about the poor who have been living in a depression their entire lives so fuck off!

You have patients only because you have more money and life is easier so you have hope in the system if we just march peacefully then they will change and be nice to us. FUCK YOOOOOU!!!!!!

Maybe you should lose your job and your house so you’ll see the light one glories day. You need to wake the fuck up. Not everybody is in this to protect the middle class from disappearing. Some are here to ruin the middle class because they view you as nothing but a thorn in their side and buffer between the poor and the enemy being this fucked up system you are protecting with your non-violence.

We have had nothing but peace at every fucking demonstration with no fucking guts or self-dignity. You should be a fucking shamed of your selves.

You don’t dislike the police because you never have to deal with them in your life. You do not get profiled because of your white face and white neighborhood you live in. We the jobless, underemployed, unemployable, poor, homeless, anarchists and people of a revolutionary bent don’t appreciate you for holding us down and forcing us to accept this system and forcing us to accept your domination of protest and how we are supposed to conduct our selves. We fucking hate you. Get the fuck out of our way and stop trying force the systems shit down our throats. We cannot take this shit any longer.

If you want militant groups to respect you and obey your shit, your’re going to have to make some changes.

1) stop sending in middle class “peace police” (BRATS) to militant actions in Oakland.

2) create some parameters i.e. fucking rules for your so called “non-violent” actions if that is truly what you want everybody to obey and start respecting the fucking parameters of “FUCK THE POLICE” actions in Oakland or get your ass kicked next time.

I don’t even understand why I have to explain this.

Also, isn’t anti-authoritarian bloc supposed to take place after all the peacenicks go home so how the fuck are militants getting in your way. Stop telling us what to fucking do.
Bunch of spoiled brats.

Get along with us or don’t interfere. Go home.

Meanwhile, the protests have already started, though (predictably) on a much smaller scale than the organizers had predicted.

The Occupy Wall Street West home page has a scrolling news feed of the latest “direct actions” if you want to keep abreast of the latest hijinx.

Michelle Obama angry that she’s perceived as ‘angry black woman’: Remember her Princeton thesis?

Today’s beltway gossip centers around more revelations from Jodi Kantor’s new book The Obamas, in particular behind-the-scenes fights between Michelle Obama and various other members of the administration. In an attempt to defuse the accusations, Michelle herself today gave an interview to CBS’s Gayle King in which she said she’s tired of people portraying her as “some kind of angry black woman.”

I can only imagine that she’s creating a kerfuffle about this new book so that everyone forgets about her senior thesis at Princeton University. Because to whatever extent the average American perceives Michelle Obama as “some kind of angry black woman,” it is entirely due to her own writings, and not a gossipy new bestseller.

For those of you who have forgotten: During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obamas originally tried to suppress the thesis until after the election, eventually relenting and allowing it to be leaked to Politico, which published it as four separate pdfs. Later, other sites published the whole thing as a single pdf, which for convenience’s sake I’ll link directly to here:

Michelle Obama’s 1985 senior thesis: “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community” (pdf, 12.4mb)

As soon as the thesis was released, it immediately became apparent why the Obamas were trying to keep it under wraps: The entire introduction revolves around the separateness Michelle Obama (then using her maiden name Michelle Robinson) felt from white people, white values and the white community. A few excerpts:

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”

“These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further intergration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.”

“Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”

“…It is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League university has instilled within me certain conservative values. For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates — acceptance to a prestigious graduate school or a high-paying position in a successful corporation.”

“Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.”

The rest of the thesis is a survey of other black students, asking them if they feel as alienated, offended, ungrateful and, well, as angry as she does. Along the way, she cites former Black Panther and racial separatist Stokely Carmichael as one of the writers whose thinking “guided” her.

Want to know why America sees you as “some kind of angry black woman”? Look in the mirror, Michelle.

UPDATE:

In the final pages of the thesis, Michelle bemoans the integration of successful African-Americans into “White culture,” and sympathizes with the separatist position — that blacks and whites should maintain separate group identities:

These excerpts are from the final 14 pages of Michelle Obama’s thesis:

“However, with the increasing integration of Blacks into the mainstream society, many ‘integrated Blacks’ have lost touch with the Black culture in their attempts to become adjusted and comfortable in their new culture–the White culture. Some of these Blacks are no longer able to enjoy the qualities which make Black culture so unique or are unable to openly share their culture with other Blacks because they have become so far removed from these experiences and, in some instances, ashamed of them as a result of their integration.”

“My speculation for this finding is based on the possibility that a separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.”

“I wondered whether or not my education at Princeton would affect my identification with the Black community. I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with Whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that Black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the Black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”

The only known photos from the White House’s 2009 “Alice in Wonderland” party

By now you’ve probably heard about the “Alice in Wonderland”-themed Halloween party that Obama threw back in 2009 and which the White House tried to cover up (a charge they’re already furiously denying). Here at PJM Belladonna Rogers and J. Christian Adams have already blogged about it, so there’s no need for me to go into the details any further.

But the question everyone’s asking is: Where are the photos?

Well, unfortunately, it seems that the Obamas successfully banned discouraged photographers from inside the party itself. But all is not lost: There were a few photos taken inside of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton in Alice in Wonderland costumes along with Alice herself and the Obamas. And some other photos were taken of festivities outside the event. I’ve done quite a bit of searching, and this is what I could find, so for all of you out there hungry for pictures, here you go (presented in the highest resolution I could track down for each image):

[Note: THESE ARE REAL PICTURES of Halloween at the White House in 2009.]

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, an actress playing Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton in costume along with the Obama family at the 2009 White House Halloween party. The original can be found here, and (as far as I can tell) was originally posted to a Johnny Depp fan site (with the wrong date, oddly).

Verum Serum has also dug up some more party pics from the same fan site:

Here’s a blurry one that no one seems to have noticed yet:

Flickr user “Jon Schnitzer” was inside the White House that day and snapped a series of photos — not of the party itself, but of some Halloween preparations. For the completists, here’s one of his snapshots of a decoration for the Alice in Wonderland party:

Pretty amusing – a portrait of Bill Clinton next to what looks like a Tim Burton-designed “Pumpkin King.”

You can see the rest of Jon Schnitzer’s White House Halloween 2009 photos here.

Following a trail that Morgen of Verum Serum got me started on, I’ve uncovered a cache of additional (mostly blurry) snapshots taken inside the party by (apparently) Jonathan Benya, an actor who starred with Johnny Depp in an earlier film and who was at the Halloween event. The full cache can be found at “Imagebam,” a photo storage site, and further insider details are posted at the Russian-language Tim Burton fansite “Burton Land” — English translation here.

Below are a few of the photos — click the Imagebam link above for the full set:

This one is the most interesting, because it shows some of the party-goers and chefs in the background and some of the treats and party favors on the table.

Here’s a commentary from a “Burton Land” contributor who was at the Halloween event, and who explains many details heretofore unknown. Because the account has been auto-translated into Russian and then back out, the verbiage is a bit stilted, but you can get the gist of it:

Hatter tea party held at the White House dining room. Most of the cast of Alice were there. Johnny sat at the head word in a suit Hatter. The program also had a magic show, 3D paintings, Orchestra, tasting drinks, biscuits and a lot of other things. Johnny walked into the room and talked to people. Resident spoke with nearly all members of the cast. Guests are not allowed to take pictures, then, according to Kefir, there was “a ton of press photographers.” On the Zone has brought the girl just because she is “scanned” the Internet in search of photos from the event. At the end of the evening Johnny went out without makeup. The girl said a few words in his “pirate style”. Show sponsored by Johnny Depp and Disney. The guests were mainly represented by the White House staff and their children.

The celebration consisted of three parts. The first part took place in the fresh air. The second one was inside and included Johnny Hatter costume, greeting children and everything else. And the third part – it was restricted party for the elite, where Johnny was already without a suit. A highlight of the party was fun, “dragon breath” (marshmallow dipped in dry ice and then it all fizzles out through a straw) – Johnny was very good at it. Yogurt says that Johnny is very nice and an absolute gentleman. He held the hand of each guest without the slightest strain. I was touched a thing. In the suit Hatter Johnny said his voice. But when he took off his suit, noted Kefir, the emphasis Hatter sometimes still slip…

Here’s another forbidden photo, showing Abraham Lincoln overseeing the party set-up:

One of the Obamas makes an appearance in this photo — yes, that’s “Bo,” Obama’s Portuguese Water Dog being hugged by a cast member on the left:

As the description from the Burton Land commenter above reveals, there were three phases to the event: First, an outdoor party with kids and trick-or-treating (at which all the press photos were taken); then a private party inside the White House with Jonny Depp and all the “Alice in Wonderland” cast members in costume (at which the photos above were all taken); and finally an even more exclusive ultra-private adults-only affair at the end of the evening at which Depp (and the rest of the cast) had changed back into normal clothes. The question then arises: Where are the photos of this super-secret Phase Three?

Fear not! For I have those as well. Yet a different gallery at Imagebam has two photos from the final part of the evening, showing Depp out of costume (and Burton still sporting his eye-patch), posing with a White House staffer (whom I don’t recognize at the moment). Here are photos from the last phase of the Halloween event:

Depp and staffer.

Burton and staffer.

Want more? View the full sets at Imagebam here and here.

That’s it for inside the party (if you know of any other photos from the event, please post links in the comments section below), but pool photographers were allowed to snap pictures of the festivities outside. Some media outlets have reprinted pictures of the Obamas handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, but the “out-takes” are pretty amusing. a2zclutter’s photostream on Flickr features several pictures from the evening’s entertainment, including:

A band of musicians dressed as skeletons performing outside the White House on Halloween, 2009. What were they playing – “The Politically Tone Deaf Funeral March”? Or perhaps “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Here’s a close-up of the band:

The official caption reads “A skeleton band performs at the North Portico of the White House in Washington on October 31, 2009.”

As the kids arrived, left-wing anti-war protesters awaited them outside the White House gates:

The New York Times included this image in a slideshow about Halloween at the White House in 2009.

Another image from the slide show reveals butterfly dancers inside bubbles on the White House lawn.

Getty Images has more of that skeleton band, for those of you who can’t get enough of the ironic imagery. Some of the same photos (without watermarks) can be found on the band’s Web site:

“A skeleton band performs at the North Portico of the White House in Washington on October 31, 2009,” reads the official caption.

This one is my favorite:

There are plenty of photos on other sites of the trick-or-treating part of the evening (which seems to be not connected to the later Alice in Wonderland party), but if you’re curious nonetheless, the This Week With Barack Obama blog has a pretty extensive photo collection of the Obamas and various White House staffers handing out treats to kids on Halloween 2009.

PJM online poll: 94% not satisfied with current Republican field; Palin, Ryan, West and Rubio should enter race

Yesterday, as part of my depressed rant about the disappointing array of declared Republican presidential candidates, I included an online poll asking PJM readers their opinions about the campaign. There were a surprisingly large number of votes (well over 2,000), and the results — though entirely “unscientific” in the manner of all online polls — were shocking even to me:

87% of voters specifically said they were dissatisfied with the current crop of Republican candidates, with an additional 7% who were “too depressed to even vote in this poll,” for a grand total of a 94% dissatisfaction rate.

Only 5% said they were satisfied with the current field, while 1% liked it because they preferred Obama anyway, for a total of 6% who were happy with the selection of declared candidates.

The second half of the poll asked voters which alternate Republican candidates they’d prefer instead of the ones already in the race. Sarah Palin (45%), Paul Ryan (40%), Allen West (39%) and Marco Rubio (35%) were neck and neck in what was essentially a statistical tie for first place (considering that it’s an online poll), while Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal failed to generate as much excitement. Voters were also allowed to suggest their own candidates, but the “Other” write-in option only garnered 3% of the vote.

(The polls are still open, so these percentages may change as more votes roll in; they are current as of the time of this writing.)

Interestingly, the commenters on the post were much more favorable toward existing candidates (Romney, Paul, Gingrich) and more critical of my suggestion that new candidates join the race; but it seems (as is usually the case) that the active commenters are a small percentage of the most engaged readers; while the “silent majority” of non-commenting readers overwhelmingly expressed their disappointment with the current field.

As polls go, this one is hardly likely to make national headlines, and only reflects the views of the PJMedia readership, but the incontrovertible percentages should make some people (especially with first names like Sarah, Paul, Allen and Marco) sit up and take notice.

(Technical note: The polling software prevents multiple voting by checking IP addresses and cookies; while it is of course possible for determined hackers to bypass these safeguards, there is no evidence that this was done extensively [or at all], so I’m pretty confident that the 2,163 votes represent the opinions of 2,163 different people.)

If you want to see the latest totals, and/or have not yet voted and would like to do so, click here and scroll to the bottom of the post to view and/or vote in the (still-open) polls.

Sarah Shourd gets half a clue

Sarah Shourd, one of the three hikers who found herself in an Iranian prison after an idiotic adventure gone awry back in 2009, has finally written a full-length exposition trying to set the record straight about some disturbing statements she made after her release last year. Writing in The Daily Beast, Shourd explains that she praised and thanked the Iranian government only so as to protect the lives of the fellow Americans she left behind, fearing that any anti-Iranian statements would endanger them. But now that they’re all free and safe on American soil once more, she can say what she really feels about the Iranian government — and she pulls no punches:

Iranians understand what we went through better than anyone else. Their government is rapidly devolving into a neo-totalitarian regime that uses random arrests, assassinations, show trials, and executions to manipulate, silence dissent, and set an example….

Perhaps it wasn’t dishonest of me to thank the Iranian government 16 months ago, but now I can be more specific. Thank you for using us to further deepen your own crisis of legitimacy around the world and with your own people. Thank you for laying bare your total disregard for justice, fairness, and human liberty. Thank you for taking my voice away so that it could be that much stronger when, thanks to my family and friends, I got it back. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to highlight that what you did to me and my friends, you continue to do to thousands.

While it’s a relief to learn that Shourd was not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, or perhaps was a willing participant in some kind of bizarre double-reverse Iranian psy-ops, the news is not all good. While her essay nicely trashes the evil Iranian regime, she still manages to retain her original nauseating anti-American and anti-Israeli politics, spending well over half the essay bashing U.S. policy and making ignorant meddlesome suggestions about how we should conduct our foreign affairs.

Note to Sarah Shourd: Just because you blundered your way into prison doesn’t make you a foreign policy expert. It just makes you a fool — a very very lucky fool.

I take this news as a mixed bag. People like Sarah Shourd and I have fundamental disagreements on most political topics, and those differences will probably never be resolved. But there’s one area that Sarah and I, and that all leftists and “conservatives” should agree on, and that is the fascistic and dangerous nature of political Islam. But even so, far too many of Sarah’s leftist colleagues are finding ways to legitimize and support Islamic extremists, assuming that any enemy of America must be a friend of theirs. Perhaps this half-awakening by Sarah will open the door to other liberals and radicals to come clean over their real feelings about Islam.

Sarah Shourd may not be the next Christopher Hitchens, but perhaps her half a clue will help to create an atmosphere on the Left in which a million little Hitches can emerge.

Et tu, Berkeley? Occupy evictions reach final mop-up operation as even Berkeley boots crime-plagued camp

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain.

Failed revolutions don’t end with a bang; they end with a whimper.

That whimper happened today when, unnoticed by the national media, the city of Berkeley evicted just about the last remaining “Occupy” camp of any size in the nation.

Occupy Berkeley? That’s a redundancy if there ever was one. The whole city has basically been one big “Occupy” camp since it took a sharp left turn in the 1960s. (One popular former mayor, Gus Newport, was a proud communist.)

People have often emailed me over the last few months asking if there even was an Occupy camp in Berkeley; since I’ve covered the nearby Occupation movements in Oakland, San Francisco, and at the University of California, but never the city of Berkeley itself, does that mean that America’s most liberal city never even had its own camp? Well, actually, it has had an Occupy camp in Civic Center Park for two months, but I never wrote about it because there was nothing to say. The camp was originally quite small, never organized any protest marches, and was entirely uncontroversial considering the political climate in the city. The cluster of 25 or so activists at the camp were no more radical than any accidental group of strangers waiting to cross the street at any random Berkeley intersection, so Occupy Berkeley barely merited a shrug.

But that started to change recently when refugees from the evicted Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco encampments began wandering over to the Berkeley camp, where there was plenty of room for expansion and no hassles from the city government. Occupy Berkeley rapidly degenerated into crime-ridden squalor as the number of tents increased to 90, most of which were inhabited by the homeless, drug abusers and dealers, and various other unsavory characters.

It got so bad that the Berkeley Police Department issued this press release:

City of Berkeley Police Officers (BPD) officers have continued to conduct daily checks and monitor Occupy Berkeley/encampment site for community, public safety and participant safety. BPD officers have been addressing any criminal behavior that they see. There have been 33 reported calls for BPD services related to Occupy Berkeley since October 23, 2011, 24 of which are classified as crimes. During some of the investigations at the scene, victims did not wish to cooperate with BPD officers. There are crimes and other incidents that may be unreported, thus are not documented by BPD. There has been an increase in calls for police services over time. There have been cases involving violence in the Occupy Berkeley encampment such as batteries, assault with deadly weapons, possession of dangerous weapons and an attempted rape.”

“There has continued to be an increase in serious crimes and violence after the Dec. 15th flyers were passed out including an attempted rape last evening. The latest flyers are now providing warning that the law will be enforced. It speaks for itself. BPD would like the individuals in the park to follow the law voluntarily and the facts as to the encampment’s impact on community and participant safety is clear when reading the lists of crimes that have been occurring.” In addition to those crimes, BPD officers have issued 46 citations since December 15, 2011 for violations such as drinking in public, open containers of alcohol, smoking and other miscellaneous within the park.

The attempted rape was the final straw. Yesterday, the city instructed the police to evict the Occupiers and clear out the camp by today:

More than half of the campers at the Occupy Berkeley camp packed up and moved out last night after the city told them they had to go somewhere else.

Police officers handed out a notice Wednesday evening telling the group of campers that if they stayed another night they would be arrested.

“There has continued to be an increase in serious crimes and violence,” Berkeley police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said in a statement. “(Police) would like the individuals in the park to follow the law voluntarily.”

Following that, many in the camp decided to pack up and move out. Most said they wanted to avoid conflict on what was expected to be a bitterly cold night.

In recent weeks, the make up of the camp shifted from ideological activists to homeless campers.
…

While many campers moved out without incident, others pledged to stay in the camp and resist any attempt by police to clear out the tents. A handful of tents were still standing Thursday morning.

There was a brief clash with the cops during the eviction last night, but no arrests:

Now there are only 20 tents left, and those are likely to be gone by tomorrow, despite threats from the few remaining die-hards to fight to the bitter end:

Occupy Berkeley protesters remain camped at Civic Center Park despite a city deadline to leave by Wednesday night.

Protesters were still camped in the park early Thursday morning with no visible police presence nearby. Police did clear some tents the night before that were left unattended, but there was no full-scale raid.

The Contra Costa Times reports that the number of tents had dropped to about 20 from about 70 on Tuesday

Yes, this it it: the final curtain. All the Occupations of any significance from coast to coast have now been evicted, and have faded from memory. The only remaining camps are either so small that they barely merit notice, or so non-confrontational that they have no impact on the political debate.

If you’re a left-wing movement that’s not welcome even in Berkeley, you know it’s time to throw in the towel.

Christopher Hitchens at His Best: Rare Video of Hitch Disemboweling the American Left

Obituaries for Christopher Hitchens are now popping up all over the Web from former classmates, friends, rivals and seemingly anyone who ever chatted with him at a cocktail party. Me, I never met the guy personally, but one night in 2007 I did have the pleasure of witnessing him utterly destroy leftist hero Chris Hedges and a hostile audience of far-left Berkeley radicals. “Destroy” is metaphorical in this context, of course: Hitchens didn’t need a knife to gut his opponents — he just needed a few well-chosen words and a rapier-like mind that was sharper than any knife.

I took video of the night’s proceedings and quickly made a post about it on zombietime, but it turned out I was too quick — a radio station planned to sell DVDs of the debate, and didn’t want any competition pre-empting them, so I was forced to take the videos down. I subsequently uploaded a short “best of” compilation from the evening to an obscure video-streaming site, but their video embeds didn’t always display consistently, so my record of Hitch at his best was essentially lost in the whirlwind of subsequent current events.

Luckily, by now the whole DVD/priority issue is a moot point, so I feel it is legitimately newsworthy to re-upload that unforgettable “best-of” compilation to YouTube this time as my tribute to the late great Christopher Hitchens.

For the full context of what you are about to see, visit my zombietime report “Christopher Hitchens vs. Chris Hedges: The “Is God…Great?” Debate, King Middle School, Berkeley, May 24, 2007“. In brief: Chris Hedges is a far-far-far-left-wing journalist who earlier in the evening had offered up a Marxist political rationale for Palestinian suicide bombing and for fundamentalist Islam, to the great glee of the radical Berkeley audience, the majority of whom were there to cheer Hedges in the night’s debate.

Christopher Hitchens, needless to say, was thoroughly disgusted with this entire mindset, and spent the rest of the night inflicting a world of rhetorical hurt on Hedges and everything he stood for.

There’s a lot to say about Hitchens (I, like nearly everybody, found him brilliant on some issues but exasperating on others), yet this is the way I will always remember him, when he was the most righteous he had ever been — Hitch at his best:

(Here’s an exact transcript:)

Hitchens: The decline — not to say the moral eclipse — of the secular left has just been illustrated on this very platform by someone, who makes excuses for suicide murder and tries to trace them to a second-rate sociology.

…

Hitchens: But, to what I think is the hidden agenda of the question: ‘Is George Bush on a Christian crusade in Iraq and Afghanistan?’ Obviously not, obviously not. Anyone who’s studied what’s happening in either of those countries now knows that the whole of American policy — and by the way a lot of your own future, ladies and gentlemen — is staked on the hope that federal secular democrats can emerge from this terrible combat. We can protect them and offer them help while they do so. We know that they’re there, that we are — I’ve met them, I love them, they’re our friends. Every member of the 82nd Airborne Division could be a snake-handling congregationalist, for all I know, but these men and women, though you sneer and jeer at them, and snigger when you hear applause and excuses for suicide bombers — and you have to live with the shame of having done that — these people are guarding you while you sleep, whether you know it or not. And they’re also creating space for secularism to emerge, and you better hope that they are successful.

Hedges: I feel like I should be reading Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.

Audience: Laughter.

Hitchens: What you mean is you wish you had read it.

…

Hitchens: It’s exact equivalent of the evil nonsense taught by Hedges and friends of his, who say the suicide bombers in Palestine are driven to it by despair. Have you read the manifestos of these suicide bombers? Have you seen the videos they make? Have you seen the manifestos they put out? The propaganda that they generate? These are not people in despair. These are people in a state of religious exultation. Who are promised everything. Who are in a state of hope. Who are in a state of adoration for their evil mullahs. And for their filthy religion. It’s this that makes them think they have the right to kill others while taking their own lives. If despair among Palestinians was enough to create psychopathic criminal behavior, there’s been enough despair for a long time, and enough misery to go around. It is to excuse the vicious, filthy forces of Islamic jihad to offer any other explanation but that it is their own evil preaching, their own vile religion, their own racism, their own apocalyptic ideology that makes them think they have the right to kill everyone in this room, and go to paradise as a reward. I won’t listen, nor should you, to anyone who euphemizes or excuses this evil wicked thing.

…

Religion consists now, we find, no longer of moral absolutes. It used to be, when I debated with religious types, they would say, ‘Yes, circumcision is good; masturbation is bad. We know this, because God tells us so. Hacking of the genitals of a child with a sharp stone is divine; touching them with a hand — not so great.’ We know — so we knew where we were. We were absolute. Now [gesturing towards Chris Hedges] it’s all relative. Now it’s all completely relative. It’s made up a la carte and cherry-picked by mediocre pseudo-intellectuals who want you to believe that the following thing that would have happened — in the year, in the month of the year that the liberation of Iraq took place, that finally, after an endless thesaurus of United Nations resolutions condemning every aspect of its regime, that Iraq was free from the proprietorship of Saddam Hussein — that was March, 2003 — do you know what would have happened in April, 2003? Iraq was going to be the chair of the United Nations Special Committee on Disarmament. Some people think that would have been a better outcome. More humane, more legal, less troubling, altogether more dealable with. Just as Iran and Libya have just been re-elected to that very Committee on Disarmament at the United Nations. I ask you: You pick that kind of relativism, you’ll also find you’re dealing with a very surreptitious form of absolutism, which is only capable of describing as fascistic relatively comical forces (who I’ve denounced up- and downhill all my life in the United States), but cannot use the word totalitarianism about the religion that actually conducts jihad, actually organizes totalitarianism, actually inflicts misery, pain, unemployment, and despair upon millions of people, and then claims what it has done as the license for suicide and murder. A perfect picture [gesturing towards Chris Hedges] has been given to you of the cretinous relationship between sloppy moral relativism, half-baked religious absolutism, and the journalism that lies in between.

Thank you.

Moderator: Chris Hedges? [Inviting him to respond.]

Hedges: [Waves his hand, to indicate 'No more.']

The Coming Rift between OWS and the Unions: Longshoremen Reject Port Blockade

Monday December 12 is Armageddon Day for the Occupy movement on the West Coast. Or at least it was supposed to be Armageddon Day until recent events have somewhat dampened prognostications. Well over a month ago, when the whole OWS thing was full of piss and vinegar, Occupy Oakland convinced all the other Occupations from San Diego up to Vancouver to stage a total blockade of all West Coast ports on December 12, bringing (it was hoped) the capitalist system to a sudden crashing halt.

While the plan is still afoot, the intervening weeks changed the political landscape so much that now I’m pretty sure many of the Occupiers wish they hadn’t made such grandiose pronouncements. On the day the plans were made for the overly ambitious port blockage, OWS felt (in its delusional little bubble, at least) that it was on the upswing, that America was joining them, that the revolution had arrived. Now? Not so much. My, what a few short weeks can wreak.

The first and most visible setback was that the Occupation has ceased being an actual “occupation.” In practically every city participating in the blockade, the leftist mayors and liberal municipal governments have evicted the Occupiers from their encampments, leaving the movement with no physical locus, no rallying point, no raison d’être; since they lack specific demands or a coherent worldview, the physical fact of their bodily agglomeration was their only distinguishing characteristic. Now: Oakland? Evicted. San Francisco? Evicted. Los Angeles? Evicted. Portland? Evicted. Seattle? Soon, very soon.

The second, possibly more devastating setback, was when the media stopped putting Occupy news on the front page, while sympathetic academics unwittingly accelerated the demise of the OWS movement by announcing that it had “already won” because it had “changed the terms of the national discourse,” which is what leftists always say whenever one of their schemes goes belly up.

And now this, the final nail in the coffin:

Union not keen on new Occupy Oakland port blockade:

Remember last month’s several-hour shutdown of the Port of Oakland – that “historic and effective action” that “lives in the hearts of people across Oakland and around the country,” according to Occupy Oakland?

Well, on Monday, there’s to be an encore, not just in Oakland, but up and down the West Coast, “in solidarity with longshoremen, port workers and truckers in their struggle against the 1 percent,” says the group.

“We will blockade all of the West Coast Ports on Dec. 12. Together we are unstoppable! Strike while the iron is hot!” it declared in a call to arms.

Trouble is, the folks they purport to be in solidarity with don’t seem hot on the idea to “effectively shutdown the hubs of commerce” at all.

“Any actions organized by outside groups, including the proposed Dec. 12 shutdown of various terminals on the West Coast, have not been vetted by our union’s democratically led process,” the International Longshore and Warehouse Union said. “Any decisions made by groups outside of the union’s democratic process do not hold water, regardless of the intent.”

The Occupy movements that make a fetish of applying direct democracy and near absolute consensus to its own decision making might want to take note of that.

Richard Mead, president of Local 10, which represents dockworkers at the Port of Oakland, said, “Our position is in the international’s press release. We’re not facilitating (Occupy Oakland’s strike call) in any way. We just want that clear.”

Jeff Smith, president of ILWU Local 8 in Portland, Ore., went further, telling the Portland Tribune his union won’t honor picket lines. “This is a third-party strike. We have to go to work,” he said.

As you may remember, the Occupy Wall Street protests were pitiably small at first, and only reached the tipping point of newsworthiness when tens of thousands of union members joined the street marches after the union leadership decided to co-opt the Occupiers’ platform for their own purposes. Even the Longshoremen themselves supported Occupy Oakland’s earlier strike calls.

Two People Reported Shot, Killed at Virginia Tech

As you likely have heard by now, a shooting incident on the Virginia Tech campus has left two people dead. This is an open thread to discuss the incident and post links with the latest breaking updates.

[Updates below in reverse chronological order, with the latest breaking news at the top]:

Well, it looks like the immediate danger is over, and by now the evening news channels have jumped on the story and camera crews are all over campus, so we’ll stop posting updates here (unless some major new aspect emerges).

AP reports that the shooter was not actually the person pulled over at the traffic stop – the suspect approached the officer on foot and shot him for no apparent reason:

Police: Va. Tech Shooter Not Person Pulled Over

A gunman walked into a parking lot and killed a Virginia Tech police officer who was conducting a traffic stop on campus Thursday, state police said.

Sgt. Robert Carpentieri said it appeared that the shooter was not in the car that had been pulled over. The sergeant said another officer later spotted a second person in a different parking lot who was alive at the time. That person later died.

Police would not say during a Thursday afternoon news conference whether the second dead person was the gunman who killed the officer. However, a law enforcement official who had knowledge of the case and spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that the gunman was believed to be dead.

Virginia Tech officials said on the school’s website that a weapon was recovered near the second body found on campus. School officials also said there was no longer an active threat Thursday afternoon and that normal activities could resume.

NBC’s Washington affiliate confirms that the second body is the gunman:

Law enforcement officials believe the second shooting victim at Virginia Tech was the man who shot and killed a campus police officer during a traffic stop.

The campus-wide alert for a gunman at large was lifted about 4:30 p.m. Students no longer need to shelter in place and can resume their normal activities as there is no longer a threat on campus.

KZTV confirms that the campus lockdown has been lifted:

Officials at Virginia Tech have informed students and faculty that the campus wide lockdown has been lifted as a threat no longer remains after two people were shot and killed this morning.

KVUE confirms that the shooter is dead and that the active crisis is over:

Law enforcement official tells AP that Virginia Tech gunman is believed to be dead.

Nick Cafferky is at the press conference and tweets that the second victim may in fact be the shooter and that the threat is over (still not yet officially confirmed):

“there is a RUMOR that the second victim was actually the shooter. Will be able to confirm or refute it shortly.”

He also tweeted:

“NBC4 in DC area is reporting that the 2nd dead is in fact the suspect, can you confirm?” Haven’t heard anything.”

A press conference is starting right now on campus; new details will likely be revealed soon. Stay tuned.

Even Luzi’s Twitter feed contains a dramatic photo of officers from various agencies searching a stairwell for the suspect:

Time magazine also comments on the strange coincidence that today’s shootings happened at the exact same time as a hearing about the 2007 shootings:

The shooting came the same day as Virginia Tech, which has an enrollment of about 30,000, was appealing a $55,000 fine by the U.S. Education Department in connection with the university’s response to the 2007 rampage, when a student gunman killed 32 students and faculty and then shot himself.

Mike Gangloff of the Roanoke Times has tweeted a map showing the exact locations of key moments in the incident:

The Virginian-Pilot has a few more details about how it all began:

A university statement said the incident started shortly after noon when a campus police officer stopped a vehicle during a routine traffic stop in the Coliseum parking lot near McComas Hall.

The officer was shot and killed. Witnesses said the shooter fled on foot toward the Cage, a parking lot near Duck Pond Drive. At that parking lot, a second person, also dead, was found.

The suspect was described as a white male wearing gray sweat pants, a gray hat with neon green brim, a maroon hoodie and backpack.

As sirens blared, heavily armed police officers were seen running through the area around the roundabout at the end of Washington Street, and officers searched cars around the Cage. At the Coliseum, what appeared to be a body was covered with a cloth in a taped-off area of the parking lot. Officers there told a dozen student-age onlookers to leave for their own safety.

The campus was swarming Thursday with heavily armed officers walking around campus. Caravans of SWAT vehicles and other police cars with emergency lights flashing patrolled nearby. Students hunkered down in buildings.

Collegiate Times as of two minutes ago:

“Suspect is at large. Police still conducting searches. No changes in campus situation.”

The L.A. Times confirms:

“Virginia Tech shooting: `We are looking absolutely everywhere.’ ”

WDBJ has a video of a press conference that just concluded on campus, but it contained no significant updates other than the news that the shooter has not yet been captured.

More photos of the police response on campus can be found at the link.

Here’s a map showing where the two shootings took place on campus.

Update (11:39am PST):

Here’s a YouTube video uploaded moments ago taken by a student in a dorm room, showing the police response shortly after the first shooting:

“This was the beginning of the shootings, the police and FBI are still on the hunt for the shooter or shooters. Right outside of my dorm a police officer was shot and killed, with another shooting reported in a nearby parking lot. Quickly took this footage of what I can see. Still in progress.”

Update (11:37am PST):

The L.A. Times blog has a few more details:

A suspect remained at large Thursday afternoon on the campus of Virginia Tech after a police officer and at least one other person were shot dead, the university said.

During a traffic stop on campus, the suspect shot and killed a Virginia Tech police officer and then fled on foot through a nearby parking lot.

A second person was later found dead in that parking lot, the university said.

The university said the status of the shooter was unknown and the school remained on lockdown.

Update (11:30am PST):

The Collegiate Times Photo Editor has just uploaded some pictures taken on the scene. Here is one of a policeman preparing his weapon as he gets ready to enter the campus:

Update (11:27am PST):

From Twitter:

“6 ATF agents are on campus, 20 others on standby. FBI rushing agents down also.”

Update (11:24am PST):

From the Collegiate Times:

“Suspect killed police officer in Coliseum Lot, then fled toward Cage. Second victim was killed in parking lot.”

(Note: “The Cage” is the name of a Virginia Tech parking lot.)

Update (11:18am PST):

At Least 2 Dead in Virginia Tech Shooting

Two people, including a police officer, were fatally shot on Virginia Tech’s campus on Thursday, according to a university spokesman.

A police officer and an unidentified victim were confirmed dead just before 2 p.m.

The suspect, according to the posting, is described as a white male wearing gray sweatpants and a gray hat with a neon green brim. He was believed to traveling on foot near McComas Hall, a campus gym.

Update (11:00am PST):

As of 2pm EST, the shooter is still at large, according to the Collegiate Times:

Update (10:57am PST) by Ed Driscoll:

A CBS affiliate is reporting “Virginia Tech confirms two people killed. One of those is an officer.”

Update (10:50am PST):

The Twitter feed of the campus newspaper, the Collegiate Times, has breaking updates. Looks like someone has been arrested, but it is unclear as of this writing if it is definitively the gunman. (Fox News TV is reporting that it is the gunman, but let’s wait for a confirmation):

Update (10:46am PST):

Here’s a screenshot of the Virginia tech homepage as of 1:46pm EST:

Update (10:40am PST):

In a bizarre coincidence, the school’s Police Chief was testifying at a hearing today about the infamous 2007 shooting on campus, defending his department’s actions in that case, the bloodiest in U.S. history. Apparently while he was testifying, an entirely new shooting incident was happening on campus:

Virginia Tech police chief defends school’s action

After two Virginia Tech students were shot in their dormitory on April 16, 2007, there were no immediate signs of an additional safety threat on campus, the school’s police chief said Thursday.

But more shootings did follow that morning, leaving a total of 33 people dead. The Education Department has fined the university $55,000 in connection with its response to the rampage, a penalty that Virginia Tech is contesting before an administrative law judge.

The department says the school violated the law by waiting more than two hours after the dorm shootings before sending an email warning. By then, student gunman Seung-Hui Cho was chaining the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more people and then himself.

The department says the email was too vague because it mentioned only a “shooting incident,” not the deaths.

The police chief, Wendell Flinchum, testified on the second day of the hearing that the evidence indicated the dorm violence was a domestic shooting and the assailant probably had fled.

It seems as if the new procedures established after the 2007 shooting are already in place: the school issued a campus-wide lockdown order as soon as today’s shootings were first reported.

Update (10:35am PST):

Virginia Tech on lockdown after officer shot

Virginia Tech is on lockdown after a police officer was shot, the school said Thursday.

“A police officer has been shot. A potential second victim is reported at the Cage lot. Stay indoors. Secure in place,” the school said on its website.

The suspect remains at large, the school said.

Minutes earlier, the school said shots were reported at the coliseum parking lot.

“Suspect described as white male, gray sweat pants, gray hat w/neon green brim, maroon hoodie and backpack. On foot towards McComas,” the school said on its website.

Update (10:29am PST):

Virginia Tech Says Shots Fired on Campus

Virginia Tech says gunshots have been reported on campus, and authorities are seeking a suspect.

The university said in a Thursday post on Twitter that the shots were reported at the coliseum parking lot and that people should remain inside.

The suspect is described as a white male wearing gray sweat pants, gray hat with neon green brim, maroon hoodie and backpack.

Pearl Harbor Day menu at Sasha and Malia’s school: Teriyaki chicken and edamame

This is either tone-deafness taken to extremes, or a hideous coincidence, but the pricey private school attended by President Obama’s daughters served Japanese food to its middle school students today, December 7 – a day that apparently no longer lives in infamy amongst the progressive elite.

As reported by WUSA,

What are President Obama’s kids eating at school on Pearl Harbor day? Japanese food, of course!

Sidwell Friends School’s website shows the menu for Wednesday December 7th, 2011, the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, as an Asian food day.

Took me a while to track down the actual menu, but I found the hidden pdf on the Sidwell site listing the lunch selections for each day. Each day has a different ethnic theme, and by sheer “coincidence” December 7 features both Japanese and Chinese food options, including “Teriyaki Marianted [sic] Chicken Strips” and “Garlic Roasted Edamame” (edamame are Japanese soybeans, for you non-foodies out there) as well as the ethnically unspecified but potentially Japanese “Asian Mushroom Soup” and “Oriental Noodle Salad”:

Obama’s daughters are of course completely blameless in this, as is President Obama himself; rather, it’s a reflection of either the cluelessness or the conscious expungement from the progressive mind of any historical fact which might stir feelings of patriotism.

At $32,960/year tuition, I’d expect a little more historical awareness.

Obama’s new gay rights strategy? FAIL. Check out MY new gay rights strategy.

As various sites reported today, President Obama has just issued a new “directive” (or “memorandum” or “strategy” — no one can quite agree what to call it) in which, as the New York Times put it, “the United States would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.”

Tina Korbe at Hot Air rightly characterizes the directive as “insincere” and “symbolic,” but I think that criticism is far too mild. A more accurate description might be “hypocritical mealy-mouthed horse shit.” Why? Because Obama doesn’t really want to promote gay rights in foreign countries — he just wants to lock up the American gay vote in the 2012 election by spewing feel-good mendacity as a sop to the gay community.

Obama’s proposal, which you can read in full at whitehouse.gov, involves a lot of gentle nudging and “engaging multilateral agencies” and tut-tutting and speaking loudly while carrying a small stick. In other words, it will be totally (and intentionally) ineffectual.

I too want to protect gay rights around the world. I mean, really protect gay rights around the world. Not merely pretend to like Obama and his “good for few headlines and then quickly abandoned” lip service.

And so I hereby call out President Obama on his so-called gay rights strategy. I throw down the gauntlet.

President Obama (and his supporters): are you up for the challenge? Here is my proposal:

Zombie’s No-Holds-Barred International Gay Rights Strategy

 

• Enforce a total embargo against any country that has a death penalty for homosexual activity, including most importantly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Yemen, Iran, Mauritania, and Somalia.

• In order to implement the embargo and make the United States energy-independent from these death-penalty countries, open up to drilling all American-controlled offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico, and loosen any existing restrictions against oil production on U.S. territory.

• Enact punitive tariffs and other severe economic penalties against any US trading partners that continue to do business with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or other countries where gays are executed.

• Withhold all – and I mean ALL – foreign aid from any countries where homosexuality is officially illegal and where gays are imprisoned or punished simply for being gay. Promise to restore aid only when homosexuality is legalized. The countries affected by this order include Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories (Gaza), Syria, Qatar, Malaysia, Oman, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Burma, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Ghana, among many others.

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The media’s deception about the Occupy Oakland murder

BizzyBlog dissects the media deception surrounding the murder at Occupy Oakland last month. It follows the prototypical arc of lies so common in situations like this:

- First, a small fact leaks out that reflects badly on some leftist cause;
- As the breaking news reaches its apogee in the public consciousness, the media will issue a flurry of unsupported and often patently untrue denials and obfuscations, so that the average reader doesn’t associate the inconvenient fact with the leftist cause;
- After the story ceases to be breaking news, and the average person is no longer paying attention, the original fact is conceded to be true after all, and the denials and lies and conveniently swept under the rug, having served their purpose;
- Success: the fact was suppressed and a scandal avoided, but after it’s all over the media can say in retrospect that they reported the truth eventually (when it was no longer damaging).

In this case, the “inconvenient truth” was that one of the Occupy Oakland protesters was murdered at the Occupy Oakland camp back on November 10. As BizzyBlog details, an initial eyewitness account of the victim as one of the Occupiers was subsequently thrown into doubt by the San Francisco Chronicle‘s reportage, in their furious attempt to disassociate the Occupy movement from any taint of violent crime:

Surprise (Not): AP Now Reports That Murder Victim Stayed at Occupy Oakland for Two Weeks; SF Chron Still Covering Up

On December 2, the Associated Press carried a story by Terry Collins with the following headline: “Murder charge filed in Occupy Oakland slaying.”

What? I thought that the related November attack, despite a statement from an actual eyewitness, “was unrelated to the ongoing protest of U.S. financial institutions” — i.e., that it was unrelated to Occupy Oakland. After all, the San Francisco Chronicle and the AP both carried statements to that effect several weeks ago.

…

Very few news readers, listeners, and viewers who were told that the murder had nothing to do with Occupy Oakland will ever learn that it really did. For the malpracticing leftist press, that probably goes into the “Mission Accomplished” file.

See the link for the full story, with damning quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle.

(Also see my original post on this topic.)

The Bay Citizen also has a mugshot of the murder suspect.

This “briefly cover up unwanted facts with a blizzard of unsupportable lies” technique is by now so commonplace in media practice that no one even gets worked up when a clear example is exposed. Just another day in medialand. As I said in my original post, “This is how history is molded. One crucial detail at a time.”