"Non Stop" Liam Neeson Movie Portrays Military Guy as Criminal

Hollywood works overtime to imply that those about whom we should worry are our military and former military personnel. Forget any concern for Islamic terrorists or NSA spying; watch out for Americans who talk about protecting the Constitution.

theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/28/the-movie-beck-hated-so-much-he-revealed-all-the-spoilers-to-keep-you-from-going/

"Glenn Beck saw the movie “Non-Stop” featuring Liam Neeson on Thursday, and he hated it so much that he spoiled the ending for millions of people on his radio show Friday. He said he hopes that by revealing the ending, listeners have no reason to waste their money on the film.

“It is really great, until you find out that the killer is U.S. military and a guy who believes in the Constitution,” Beck said sarcastically. “Oh, darn it. Did I just wreck that movie for everybody? Oh, I didn’t mean to…”

Beck said the movie, in which Neeson is a federal air marshal trying to catch a murderer on a plane, was so terrible that “even in New York City,” the ending was met with “groans.”

“I’m not going to say anymore, except the killer is … a schoolteacher and so you completely dismiss him,” Beck added. “And there’s a little hole in the bathroom where they do a blow-dart, and they kill the pilot.”........"

I am reminded of the 1998 movie The Siege, which started out looking like a plot in which Islamic terrorists go on such a sustained bombing rampage that eventually the order is given to impose martial law in NYC. In time, the viewer finds that the problem is not Islamic terrorists (who are portrayed as dupes and victims of oppression), but the CIA and the military. We are expected to believe that everything would have been OK had it not been for an arrest/seizing/rendition of a mullah in his home country, and that the grabbing of the holy man (shown devoutly praying in a secret prison with his beads) was an act committed with the purpose of inciting the bombings so that martial law could in turn be justified. 

The timing of the movie could not have been more obvious. Made in the Clinton years, when we witnessed what amounted to murders of citizens at the hands of Justice Department agents at  Ruby Ridge and Waco, Americans were growing concerned with the actions of members of (mostly) the FBI and ATF. 

Denzel Washington's character is an FBI agent who finally sees what's going on, exposes the operation as a set-up against equally victimized and oppressed Americans and Muslim immigrants, and stops the conspiracy before it goes too far. During the cordoning-off of NYC, presumably non-Muslim New Yorkers are seen vigorously protesting the imposition of martial law while holding up signs reading such messages as "Allah is God" - a scene which seemed to be made to impart on us the necessity of equating  the Judeo-Christian God with the deity of Islam. 

The message of the movie was clear. People, it's not the President, the Justice Department, nor Islamic terrorists that should be your concern, what you should be worried about is the military and the CIA. The former three are here to protect you from radical military commanders who, in collusion with the CIA, want to turn their troops loose on you.

I find it ironic that the current presidential administration has been so successful in bringing senior military commanders like General Martin Dempsey* and Lt. Col. Robert Bateman** around to their way of thinking. US military personnel tend not only to be staunch supporters of the Constitution, they also enjoy a stellar record (credit to George Washington for establishing that precedent at Newburgh) of refraining from utilizing their power affect political outcomes. Today, we are inching closer to a situation not unlike that of Venezuela, where the military commanders are absolute supporters, not of the nation, but of the regime. 

*http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/06/military-standards-changing-to-allow.html

https://www.google.com/search?

*http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/08/lies-veiled-as-opinions.html

Progressives and other Leftists have labored for decades to persuade us that the phrase "the people" in the second amendment has no meaning other than in connection with "the militia". When that lie was shattered in District of Columbia v. Heller, Leftists and their allies lost what was left of their minds. Below is a quote from Bateman in which he using what psychologists refer to as "projection" - the affixing of your faults and wrongs onto your opponents. The reality is that the term "the people" was/is treated by Leftists as if it didn't exist - a blatant revision of history, but Bateman would tell us that it was Scalia and the rest of the honest justices who were rewriting history; by the very act of being truthful about it***.  

**http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bateman-on-guns-120313

-Quote from Bateman in Esquire:

"....Five of the nine members of the Supreme Court agreed that the part in the Second Amendment which talks about "A Well Regulated Militia, Being Necessary To The Security Of A Free State..." did not matter. In other words, they flunked basic high school history.

The lengths to which Justice Scalia had to go in his attempt to rewrite American history and the English language are as stunning as they are egregious. In essence, what he said about the words written by the Founding Fathers was, "Yeah, they didn't really mean what they said."...."

***http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/09/youth-assailed-by-false-interpretation.html

When the Left lost in the two key Supreme Court cases of District of Columbia v.Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago, both of which affirmed the actual meaning of the second amendment, they promptly went to work to create a generation of Americans who have no idea of what that amendment means.

The idea is of course plainly insidious but effective; ignore both the words of amendment itself and the landmark court cases and pretend that it only says what you want it so say. In time, Americans (committed researchers, historians, and lawyers excepting) will have no knowledge of a crucial right of theirs at all and will react to citations of those two cases as if the speaker is using a different language .

High schools across the United States are issuing textbooks that falsely assert that the second amendment only applies to the state militia. The interpretations of the Supreme Court are treated as if they do not exist.

-From The Blaze but also in Breitbart:

"The people have the right to keep and bear arms in a state militia,” the definition in the book, “United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination,” which acts as a study guide for the Advanced Placement U.S. history test, reads.

 
I hold the the People cannot run around putting out these fires. We may well need to effect a break between the two versions of the United States. The Left will not stop until they have polluted the hearts and minds of enough of us to provide support for a new Constitutional Convention, one that will have the result of a completely transformed United States

Marl Levin has called for Article V Conventions to try to affect needed changes before our electorate has not been utterly ruined. He makes a lot of sense - if we are not willing to make changes to protect our freedoms and reign in the Left now, our grandchildren will be overwhelmed with an electorate that has been turned into a permanent vegetative and sheeplike state and will support the end of our Republic.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/19/mark-levin-glenn-beck-discuss-re-establishing-the-constitution-in-first-ever-conversation/

I personally believe that such a convention is our last hope to save the Republic. It must be done before a full split of the nation is needed to avert the scenario that those who come after us will have to face.

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/07/article-v-conventions-proposed-some.html


-From previous posts on the purposeful misinterpretation of the second amendment:

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/12/gun-ban-fears-cause-firearms-purchase.html

'".......The Left spent decades telling us that the second amendment, contrary to what is says, provides only for the possession of firearms for State Militias, a term which has come in Newspeak to be restricted to the National Guard.

I still can't believe how easy it is to find old articles with the internet. I recalled an article in Parade magazine* from the 80's in which Chief Justice Warren Burger, knowing fully well what the second amendment meant, instead pimped his influence to tell us that the "people" indicated the militia. Now, this would be partially true as the militia, by the meaning of the word at the time that the amendment was written (The concept is simple yet ignored today- Legislative Intent), meant all able-bodied males. Burger insidiously decided to make a play on words and apply the modern meaning militia to change the meaning of the amendment.

*http://www.guncite.com/burger.html

Burger was featured on the front cover of the magazine holding a lever-action rifle that, if my memory serves me correctly, was a Winchester Model 94. (Sorry the above link does not have the photo)

This was a dirty deed. The US Supreme Court and its individual justices have, until fairly recently, refrained from providing their opinion on laws unless a specific case is brought before them. (Sorry, I forget the name of this practice). Burger's snake-like move had the effect that he wanted. As a result of this, many people in the US would, erroneously, claim that the second amendment has been interpreted to mean the Militia (The modern meaning and contrary to the law) and that the Court had effectively ruled that the people had no such right. 

In reality, the Court had never ruled on this issue until District of Columbia v.Heller in 2008. There, faced with a literal mountain* of evidence proving that those who wrote the amendment had the people in mind, the Court had no option but to rule in favor of the right to own firearms. 

Even so, the stage had been set for the collapse of the Court even at that time. Four Justices chose to ignore the evidence. The 5-4 ruling was narrow enough to make one shudder. 

*Here are just two of the Amicus Curiae briefs that provided a Noahesque flood of evidence that the Legislative Intent of the amendment included the people:

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/07-290_amicus_academicsforsecondamendment.pdf

http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/07-290_amicus_cato.pdf

With Obama being able to make 1-3 possible appointments in his second term, a reversal ofHeller, though. is not out of the question."

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/04/conn-school-material-no-right-to.html

".....A father in Connecticut was shocked to find that the reference material with which his kid was being taught was fraught with somewhat clever twists of the truth and outright lies concerning the right to privately owned firearms.

-Firstly, by now nothing that the Left does, especially when it comes to the malleable and impressionable minds of children, should shock anyone.

“The courts have consistently determined that the Second Amendment does not ensure each individual the right to bear arms,” it purportedly reads. “The courts have never found a law regulating the private ownership of weapons unconstitutional.”


Note that the writer(s) cleverly utilized the fact that in fact some individuals, such as those convicted of crimes, cannot own firearms. They also played with the fact that laws that honestly regulated ownership of firearm's have been upheld. Both of these are examples of lying by employing facts; they are clearly presented in manner that would lead the reader to believe that the courts have not upheld the second amendment (Heller v. District of Columbia, McDonald v. Chicago). They also have lied concerning the facts as most, but not every law, that was made with the purpose of regulating firearms has been upheld.


"The worksheet, published by Instructional Fair, goes on to say that the Second Amendment is not incorporated against the states.

“This means that the rights of this amendment are not extended to the individual citizens of the states,” the worksheet reads. “So a person has no right to complain about a Second Amendment violation by state laws.”

According to the document, the Second Amendment “only provides the right of a state to keep an armed National Guard.' "

These are the more patently false and insidious charges. As Washington DC is not a state, the Left had high hopes that McDonald v. Chicago would be decided in their favor. Their hopes were dashed  as the Court did absolutely apply the second amendment to the states, but this did not stop the writers from falsely claiming that it did not. Heller also put to rest the claim that no honest person ever believed; that the National Guard is the only criteria specified in the second amendment. The people are noted specifically in the amendment, and the literal mountain of evidence that was provided in amicus curiae briefs compelled the honest justices to admit that the writers never intended to restrict gun ownership to an official militia. It must also be noted that, at that time, the militia meant every male 15-16 of years or older, so the National Guard does not apply here, either."

Free Speech Under Fire in Universities

The easiest - and by far the most dangerous thing one can do, is to ignore the logical implications of the growing amount of statements that pit the Socialist agenda against free speech on university campuses in the US.

What the reader will note is that those who make these statements are nothing less than individual Stalins. Western Socialism tends (thus far) to be light on labor camps and heavy on having individuals, NGO's, special interest groups, and state and local governments do their dirty work for them.

Cultural Marxism, the baby of early 20th century Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukaks, has worked well. Tens of thousands of young people each year exhibit the symptoms of a repressed ability to think. They have digested years of Newspeak and Doublethink, and it is shown by the manner in which they make their claims. Inhumanity becomes humanity, injustice becomes Social Justice, and incorrect is morphed - not into correct, but into the only allowable form of speech.

Bully and ridicule the individual to ensure that he remains quiet. We can't allow anyone to hear anything other than what we have approved.

We are facing a totalitarianism that is being enforced - not by Secret Police, but by our fellow citizens that want enslavement for us as well as for themselves.   

The encirclement is being effected in a methodical manner, and The People as a whole have no appreciation of what is in store for their children and grandchildren if they do not act decisively.   

http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/23/harvard-writer-free-speech-threatens-liberalism-and-must-be-destroyed/

"..........In its oft-cited Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors declares that “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” In principle, this policy seems sound: It would not do for academics to have their research restricted by the political whims of the moment.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. .......

Over winter break, Harvard published a statement responding to the American Studies Association’s resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine. Much of the conversation around this academic boycott has focused on academic freedom. Opponents of the boycott claim that it restricts the freedom of Israeli academics or interrupts the “free flow of ideas.” Proponents of the boycott often argue that the boycott is intended to, in the end, increase, not restrict, academic freedom—the ASA points out that “there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation.”

In this case, discourse about “academic freedom” obscures what should fundamentally be a political argument. Those defending the academic boycott should use a more rigorous standard. The ASA, like three other academic associations, decided to boycott out of a sense of social justice, responding to a call by Palestinian civil society organizations for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine. People on the rightopposed to boycotts can play the “freedom” game, calling for economic freedom to buy any product or academic freedom to associate with any institution. Only those who care about justice can take the moral upper hand.

It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just."

http://www.amren.com/features/2014/01/you-cant-say-that-here/

In 1998, Prof. Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silvergate published an exposé of violations of free speech on college campuses. The Shadow University was a best seller, and readers responded with so many horror stories and pleas for help that the authors established the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in order to protect free speech.......

Mr. Lukianoff points out that what he calls the “system of free speech, public disclosure, and active debate” is not universal, but a historical achievement specific to Western civilization. It is the fruit of many centuries, and is still vulnerable. Free speech rests on two principles:

First, no one gets the final say; we all must accept that no argument is ever really over, as it can always be challenged if not disproved down the line. Second, no one gets special, unchallengeable claims of “personal authority.” No one individual is immune to the criticism of others and none can claim to be above intellectual reproach. No one is omniscient or infallible, so we are all forced to defend our arguments with logic, evidence, and persuasion.

Mr. Lukianoff reports that today’s students often do not understand the importance of this system. They are more likely to think that people should be muzzled if that is what it takes for groups from different backgrounds to get along. One 2004 survey of high school students reported that they were “far more likely than adults to think that citizens should not be allowed to express unpopular opinions, and that the government should have a role in approving newspaper stories.”

FIRE reports that 62 percent of American institutions of higher learning have at least one policy that “clearly and substantially” restricts freedom of speech. In most other schools the situation is ambiguous. Only 3.7 percent clearly protect freedom of speech. Many speech codes contain vague prohibitions against “incivility,” “disrespect,” or “offending” or “embarrassing” anyone.

Colleges often use a very loose interpretation of the legal concept of “harassment” as a way to control speech. As Mr. Lukianoff points out, the Supreme Court has limited “harassment” to only to cases in which:

'unwelcome discriminatory behavior, directed at a person because of his or her race or gender, is ‘so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.’

Universities, however, consider trivial things to be “harassment:” “stereotypic generalizations,” “words that interfere with another person’s comfort,” “expressions deemed inappropriate,” “jokes that demean a victim’s culture or history,” “inappropriate gender-based activities, comments or gestures,” and “use of generic masculine terms to refer to people of both sexes.”..........

Many cases of censorship are ideological. The Tufts University campus newspaper published an ad paid for by a student who thought the school’s “Islamic Awareness Week” painted too rosy a picture of Islam. The ad quoted verses from the Koran such as: “Therefore strike off their [unbelievers’] heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” It mentioned the punishment by death of homosexuals in some Muslim countries, and quoted an Islamic theologian’s opinion that “marriage is a form of slavery; the woman is the man’s slave and her duty therefore is absolute obedience.” Another student filed a harassment complaint, and Tufts “made free speech history by being the first institution in the United States to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”

Administrations invent rules so they can go after student groups they don’t like. One Florida community college stopped a Christian group from screening The Passion of the Christ on the grounds that the film was “controversial” and “R-rated.” It soon came to light that the college had sponsored an R-rated movie just the previous year, and was hosting a production ofFucking for Jesus, described as “a piece about masturbating to an image of the Christian messiah.”...........
One popular technique for squelching speech is to designate an area on campus as the “free speech zone.” Such zones are often obscure corners of the campus. At Texas Tech, which has 28,000 students, the “free speech zone” is a tiny gazebo. A waggish mathematician computed that if all students wanted to use the gazebo at the same time, they would have to be crushed down to the density of Uranium 238.........

 r. Lukianoff notes that for more than 10 years, sociologists have reported that students hesitate to express opinions. Unlearning Liberty suggests why. The author explains that students themselves have no idea they have the right to express unpopular views, and that in the “overwhelming majority of cases” other students don’t care when speech is squelched.

Students have heard of free speech, but may misinterpret the concept. Students who muzzle others sometimes say they were just exercising their own constitutionally protected freedom of speech!
The disappearance of debate affects the intellectual climate. Without free speech and discussion, students have only prejudices, clung to emotionally but never examined. Few people can defend their positions, so when they are attacked, their only response is anger and hostility.........

Robert Frost famously defined education as “the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.” In this sense, education has virtually disappeared from American campuses.

American citizens—so long as they are not on college campuses—enjoy greater freedom of speech than the citizens of any other Western country, but failing to exercise this freedom is the first step toward losing it. The author quotes Judge Learned Hand:

A popular belief in the importance of the values inherent in the U.S. Constitution may be more important than the Constitution itself. If citizens are promised certain rights by law but nobody knows they have them—or enough people believe they shouldn’t have them—the law ends up mattering little."

Revised: Never push someone to the point where they have nothing to fear or lose.

Added 2/28/14- Finally, a ray of hope:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/28/mass-department-of-children-families-releases-statement-on-pelletier-case/

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Never push someone to the point where they have nothing to fear or lose.

That is a summary of a basic fact - that once an individual has no reason be concerned about consequences for one's actions or refusal to acquiesce to tyranny, those who have wronged him and those he loves have run out of options to control him any longer. 

"....you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power..."-   Words of warning from a character in a Soviet Gulag to his tormentor in the book In the First Circle by Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

This post is a follow- up to a recent post. I normally add short revisions if new developments warrant it, but this particular case is of a much greater magnitude.

Below is an excerpt from the original post:

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2014/02/hospital-and-youth-services-workers.html

"Mitochondrial disease is not well-known by most of us. The disease affects the part of the human cell that functions as an energy factory. The first time that I even became aware of it was a few years ago when the enormously talented Major League Baseball player Rocco Baldelli* had to spend several years trying to resurrect his promising professional baseball career in spite of his affliction with the disorder. It eventually proved to be too great an obstacle for him to continue playing at that level.

Justina Pelletier had been diagnosed with the same disorder and had been receiving treatment for it. Her sister also has the same condition. At one point, she came down with a case of influenza and was brought to another hospital. She was (very) briefly reviewed by a Neurologist who, apparently in a quite cavalier manner, decided that the problem was psychological. When her parents insisted that she be allowed to continue with the medications for the original diagnosis, things got ugly - very ugly.

I don't know if the Neurologist has good friends in the hospital administration or not, but what has followed the dispute is a prime example of a bureaucratic and Social Services employees both working in collusion and running amok. The parents lost custody of their own child - over one year ago, for working to secure what they and other doctors believe are necessary treatments, no one seems to be willing to allow evidence that runs contrary to what the Neurologist said, and a judge even placed a gag order on the girl's father - who is now, understandably, unilaterally dispensing with the judge's interdict to tell the story of the nightmare that his family is enduring.

To me, this appears to be an event cascade. A host of poor and high-handed decisions were made early on, and everything that occurred after that have been nothing more than feverish attempts to protect the bad moves on the part of the Neurologist, hospital administration, Social Service employees, and the judge that is tyrannically yet ineptly handling this case......."
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With a Contempt of Court charge lodged against him for rightfully refusing to be bound by a gag order imposed by the judge who is mal-handling ("mal" is an intentional prefix) the case, Justina Pelletier's Dad, Lou now has cause to be more concerned than ever about the plight of his daughter.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/19/child-services-files-contempt-charges-against-father-who-broke-gag-order-to-tell-story-of-daughter-kept-in-hospital-against-parents-will-source/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/25/a-national-outrage-father-of-15-year-old-at-center-of-boston-childrens-controversy-says-were-fighting-evil/  (Video of Glenn Beck interviewing Justina's Dad in this link)

"Lou Pelletier says his family is a “wreck” after a judge ruled Monday that his daughter, 15-year-old Justina Pelletier, will be placed into foster care for the time being.

“We’re fighting corruption. We’re fighting evil,” he told TheBlaze’s Lis Klimas, adding that the case is a “national outrage.”

Lou and his family have been engaged in a legal battle for over a year in an attempt to regain custody of Justina. It began when physicians at Boston Children’s Hospital concluded that Justina has somataform disorder, a physiological condition, not mitochondrial disease. After Lou and his wife, Linda, objected, citing Justina’s diagnosis and extensive treatment for mitochondrial disease by doctors at Tufts Medical Center, the Department of Children and Families was brought in and they lost custody of their daughter.

Though Justina was ice skating before being taken to Boston Children’s a year ago, Lou says she is now in a wheelchair and her condition is rapidly worsening, since she is not receiving the medical treatment she needs.

His wife and oldest daughter were able to briefly see Justina last Friday, Lou told Glenn Beck Tuesday, and “what they saw appalled them.”

“She has a port into her colon. There were severe red lines, no doubt poisoned sepsis creeping into the system,” he said slowly. “The DCF [Massachusetts Division of Children and families] people were laughing at it. So we had to raise a red flag. We talked to one of the top surgeons … who goes, ‘that could be deadly! What are they doing? That needs to be checked immediately!’ … We had to beg to get a doctor to come in and look at it.”...............................

Mat Staver, the founder and Chairman of the Liberty Counsel, told Beck that in his 27 years of practicing law, he has “never seen anything like this.”
First, he said, he’s never seen a case when a family following the expert medical advice of one group of physicians over another can lose their daughter for 13 months. He’s also never seen anything like the gag order placed on the family. And he’s never seen a situation where the media and additional legal counsel have been so thoroughly blocked from the case.

Essentially, he said, the state wants to keep the case “quiet” and “kick the can down the road,” so to speak. He added that when Linda Pelletier was able to visit her daughter Friday for her monitored, hour-long weekly visit, she wasn’t even allowed to bring her cell phone “to photograph her own daughter’s condition.”......"

The Pelletier'shave been rendered desperate by a neurologist who will not back down from his piss-poor diagnosis, a hospital administration that will not reverse their decision to support the neurologist who started this criminally negligent debacle, Social Service employees who would not entertain the possibility that Justina's original diagnosis just may be the correct one, and a hubris-filled judge who will do anything but his job.

This is an abomination. 

I would not be surprised  if a rescue operation is launched to get Justina out of Massachusetts and into a state where she can receive the necessary medical treatments.  

Hagel's Military Budget Cuts - Too Much Too Early

Firstly, a brief note from  previous posts (links at bottom)on US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel-

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Am I crazy, or does Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel always look like he just finished a three-day bender?


".....What did you expect from Chuck Hagel? The man couldn't admit the truth about Israel's plight if he himself lived within range of rocket attacks from Hezbollah or Hamas:
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/01/17/In-His-Own-Words-Chuck-Hagel-s-False-History-of-Israel...."

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The proposed cuts in the US military budget start with the usual screwjob on members of the military and their dependents. These include such things as (in Hagel and Obama's eyes) too-high pay increases and housing allowances, both of which are crucial to keeping good, well-trained members from leaving the service for the private sector. The proposed increases in retiree contributions to their medical coverage is the easy one for a jerk like Hagel; we in the US only routinely screw people who have paid into systems by years of service and contributions anyway. Welfare payments and other - non-contributory payouts are never considered for reductions.

Before we continue, we should note that the talking points that are being employed in support of these cuts are nothing more than Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink. When we hear blandishments such as making the military more streamlined and efficient, and are assured that the Special Operations units will not be reduced, or that we must deal with "reality", we are being told that our strength will be drastically reduced. The A10 Warthog is (for example), relatively speaking, a huge bargain when one considers what we get out an inexpensive close-air support plane, and we must note that our current unit/ troop numbers are largely the result of the already-substantial cuts that were made in the 1990's. Any new reductions would be cuts to (of course post 911 did result in some rebuilding) previous reductions. 

I have long been in favor of an substantial change in our strategic outlook and an accompanying withdrawal of our military from many region in the world. Aside from the basic realities that we are no longer the only major power in the world and that we should avoid conflicts that could quickly turn terribly large-scale and long, we just don't have the money any longer. With every American effectively owing well over $100,000 for the offense of  having been born to American citizens, it is no secret that we have to go back to a outlook that is closer to the older isolationist view. 

What makes Hagel's (Read - Obama's) proposed cuts so clearly dangerous is that they are a willful act of putting the cart before the horse. Whenever anything like this is considered, we have to make preparations for it ahead of time. Whether we like it or not, we are not yet energy-independent, we still have allies who expect us to be able to engage in large-scale force projection in a brief period of time (and in more than one location), and those allies have not been given even a brief period of time to make necessary arrangements to deal with offsetting the losses of what they have come to expect in US capabilities. 

I have little doubt that the Obama administration wants it that way. he would revel in watching our allies be rendered - if not helpless, at least in serious trouble. 

Prior to making any appreciable cuts in either troop, unit, or materiel numbers, we would need to spend a few years years doing - at the very least, the following:

-Continuing with our domestic energy programs to make a Middle East (maybe Iran) crisis something we could possibly avoid joining. We can't have oil being something that requires our intervention. 

-Meeting with military leaders from India, Japan, the Republic of (South) Korea, Australia and other far east nations so that they understand how our proposed cuts will affect our strength on the actual battlefield and give them time to consider forming their own alliances. It is a crime to tell them on short notice that we may well be able to do little or nothing if China begins to make large-scale aggressive moves.  

-The same nations would also have to be given more time to make necessary changes in their military capabilities to - again, offset the reductions in what assets would hitherto been available to support them. Japan, for example, is still being held to restrictions on its military that are reflected in  the post-WWII treaty that was signed by people who are long since dead. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been moving as quickly as he can to increase his nation's military capabilities, but that takes time. And, as we would note with Germany, we can't hold sins against people for multiple generations. 

-Latin America will also have to be given time to make preparations for their dealings with cartels, Marxist rebels, and various combinations of both.  

-Israel will be a problem, but I submit that we will simply not be able to afford to fight in that region unless the Israelis obtain agreements of military assistance with their nations. With pro-Palestinian support at all levels of many Western European governments, Israel may have to court Russia (not that this will be easy given Russia's relationship with Iran) or other nations. To sum this up, we won't be able to help much unless we have significant support from other nations. Whatever happens in that case, we still owe it to the Israelis to give them time to make arrangements. 

-Drop the idiocy of acting as if we need troops deployed in Western Europe (or even worse in former Warsaw Pact nations). Russia will not invade through the Fulda Gap, nor will that nation attack her former satellite states. 

Most importantly: 

-Make MAJOR cuts in foreign aid to the vast majority of nations that have been the beneficiaries of our erstwhile strong dollar and accompanying wealth. We should not make any cuts until we have brought these monies back into our own budget. 

Until these steps are taken (and I will probably think of one more tomorrow), Republicans and good Democrats should not budge one inch on reductions. With the foreign aid cuts alone, we may be able to postpone the cuts for many years. 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/24/the-details-on-defense-secretary-chuck-hagels-proposal-to-shrink-army-to-smallest-size-in-74-years/

"He [Hagel] proposed, for example, a variety of changes in military compensation, including smaller pay raises, a slowdown in the growth of tax-free housing allowances and a requirement that retirees and some families of active-duty service members pay a little more in health insurance deductibles and co-pays........

Another proposal likely to draw fire on Capitol Hill is Hagel’s call for a new round of domestic military base closings in 2017. In the years following the last round, in 2005, members of Congress fought to protect bases in their home districts and states, arguing that the process does not yield as much savings as advertised.

Among other changes Hagel proposed:

- The active-duty Army would shrink from today’s 522,000 soldiers to between 440,000 and 450,000 – the smallest number since 1940 when the nation was gearing up to enter World War II. The Army currently is scheduled to be reduced to 490,000.

The Army’s post-World War II low was 480,000 in 2001, according to figures provided by the service. In 1940 the Army had just 267,000 active-duty members, but that number surged to 1.46 million the following year as America prepared for war in Europe and the Pacific.

- The Army National Guard would drop from 355,000 soldiers to 335,000 by 2017, and the Army Reserve would drop by 10,000, to 195,000. The National Guard also would send its Apache attack helicopters to the active-duty Army in exchange for Black Hawk helicopters more suitable for domestic disaster relief missions.

- The Marine Corps would shrink from 190,000 to 182,000.

- The Navy would keep its 11 aircraft carriers but “lay up,” or temporarily remove from active service, 11 of its 22 cruisers while they are modernized. The Navy would reduce from 52 to 32 its purchase of littoral combat ships, which are smaller vessels designed to operate closer to shore.

- The Air Force would retire its fleet of A-10 “Warthog” tank-killer planes for an estimated savings of $3.5 billion over five years. It also would retire the venerable U-2 spy plane, which debuted early in the Cold War as a stalwart of U.S. intelligence.........."

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/06/military-standards-changing-to-allow.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/08/senior-master-sgt-sacked-for-marriage.html

AZ Religious Conscience Bill Derided as Discrimination

What is happening in this article (linked below)  is an easy one for the thinking individual to figure out, but not for the well-trained sheep.

Everything in life requires a degree of discrimination. I could approach a hundred nice ladies and ask them out and strike out each time. If I, however, was seen first by them while engaged in work, talking with friends, a recreational activity, etc., rest assured that maybe three of those hundred will at some point choose to initiate a conversation  with me.

We discriminate in whom we choose to date and marry (very important for choosing will be the Mom/Dad of your children, what company or school  to which we will apply, and the applicant whom is chosen to be hired or allowed to enroll.  This continues with out choices of friends, books and movies,  and house of worship (or lack thereof).

There is almost nothing in life that does not involve discrimination of some sort. What needs to be differentiated is what are illegal forms of discrimination and what does not incur criminal or civil penalties.

Refusing to sell a cake or other product to a man who is a known drinker of alcohol is a wrongful  form of discrimination, even if the vendor is a tea-totaling Baptist. A cake that is specifically ordered to have a message that celebrates Oktoberfest? - In that case, the vendor has the right to follow his or her conscience and inform the customer that that order cannot be filled by that establishment.

That is what this Arizona bill is about - Conscience, that and nothing else.

It is not about refusing to serve someone because of race, sexual orientation, or anything else. It also has nothing to do with old and twisted interpretations of scripture (still held by some) that hold that people of different races should not marry. No honest interpretation of the Bible can twist the words of scripture to mean that marriages between person of the same gender  are anything other than wrong.

People have a basic right to earn their living while avoiding acts that will require them to participate in an event that runs contrary to their faith. Anti-gunners will not sell services to shooting events, pro-life sign makers will not sell signs to Planned Parenthood, t-shirt vendors will not make shirts with printing that celebrates a duck hunt.  At the bottom of this page are links to several older posts in which the implications of the prohibition of the mere exercise of conscience are treated in greater detail.

In the HuffPost article, we are asked to believe that this issue is about something other than it actually is. There is a war on the truth, and there also is a campaign to end the ability of people - not to think for themselves, but to think in the first place;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/20/arizona-religious-freedom-discrimination_n_4823334.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000051&ir=Religion

"The Republican-controlled Arizona state Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to pass Senate Bill 1062, a measure that would allow businesses to reject service to any customer based on the owners’ religious beliefs.

The bill reads:
"Exercise of religion" means the PRACTICE OR OBSERVANCE OF RELIGION, INCLUDING THE ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.

Arizona Democrats, who argue the legislation is a way to legalize discrimination against LGBT individuals, sponsored eight amendments in an attempt to thwart the legislation -- all of which were rejected by Senate Republicans.

"SB 1062 permits discrimination under the guise of religious freedom," state Senate Democratic Leader Anna Tovar said in a statement Wednesday. "With the express consent of Republicans in this Legislature, many Arizonans will find themselves members of a separate and unequal class under this law because of their sexual orientation. This bill may also open the door to discriminate based on race, familial status, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability."

As testament to the bill’s mission, state Sen. Steve Yarbrough (R), one of three lawmakers sponsoring the bill, cited a 2013 New Mexico Supreme Court ruling that banned wedding photographers from refusing to shoot same-sex ceremonies, according to the Associated Press.

"This bill is not about allowing discrimination," Yarbrough said during a nearly two-hour debate on Wednesday. "This bill is about preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith.".......

Arizona’s SB 1062 now heads to the Republican-majority state House, where it is expected to pass."


http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/08/gay-marriage-supporters-launch-hate.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/02/baker-refuses-cake-for-fake-wedding.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/04/washington-state-sues-florist-for-gay.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/12/baker-ordered-by-judge-to-serve-gay.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/08/photographer-found-to-violate-human.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-mob-shuts-down-bakery-but-are-not.html

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2014/01/virginia-ag-will-not-defend-marriage.html

FCC Media Study, Soros, and Leftist Acceptance of Abuse for the Cause

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/02/20/lapdog-that-didnt-bark-fcc-intrudes-on-newsroom

"In an effort that would make George Orwell spin a few turns, Obama's Federal Communications Commission has named the act of sending researchers to monitor newsrooms and grill editors and reporters over their editorial choices the "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs."

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."

How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of "critical information" such as the "environment" and "economic opportunities," that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their "news philosophy" and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.

The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: "Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?" Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.

The WSJ points out that participating in the study is voluntary. But with the FCC holding your broadcast license over your head, " the FCC's queries may be hard for the broadcasters to ignore."......"

-Note that this program was dropped after a outcry - not from the mainstream media, but by Rush Limbaugh, other staunch conservatives, and in the blogosphere and social media


Last year, I recall a coworker stating that the Obama administration's targeting/spying of journalists of all types would be the death-knell for the cozy, hands-off relationship that Obama has enjoyed with the media.

I had no doubt that the media, after a brief flurry of obligatory and feigned outrage, would drop the matter. It turned out that this was exactly the case.

The vast majority of journalists are hyper-liberal at best. Journalism schools are combat zones for Centrists or Conservatives, and it is a case of either get bad grades or pretend to be one of them -  if the student wants to get a job after college, that is.

What must be kept in mind is that, in Leftist thought, no amount or degree of abuse or oppression is wrong if it is for the cause. When cancer patients lose their doctors or coverage as a direct result of Obamacare, if others lose their jobs from either the same or from minimum-wage hikes, or if the freedom of the press is directly violated, Leftist thinking mandates that all is well as long it helps to pave the way for the Socialist future. The effects may not be pleasant, but they are needed to get the mission accomplished.

Leftist apologists are fond of glossing (if they admit to their existence at all) over the atrocities committed by and under Stalin by claiming that his moves were needed to clean the slate of recalcitrant kulaks and others who resisted his central planning. They argue that Russia was so far behind the times that only by making such moves (Conspicuously absent are any references to the enormous amount aid from Western Banks, the looting of Spanish "Republican" gold, and the US mega-support of materiel) could the USSR become a developed nation in a reasonable amount of time.

In short, Liberal/Progressive/ Leftist journalists will willingly of not happily endure any amount of governmental oppression of The Press as long it is for controlling what The People get to hear and read.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/02/22/media-silence-explained-soros-fingerprints-on-fcc-newsroom-probe?utm_source=contentsharing&utm_medium=linkexchange&utm_term=postion1&utm_content=media-silence-explained-soros-fingerprints-on-fcc-newsroom-probe&utm_campaign=foxnews

"The real mystery behind the FCC's now abandoned "study" to police American newsrooms is why the mainstream media refused to raise holy hell over it. While Obama's lapdogs refused to bark, it was conservative media who fought for newsroom independence and got the FCC to finally back down. Other than the media's natural obedience to Obama, the fact that the fingerprints of left-wing billionaire George Soros have been found on the FCC study might also help to explain the media's silence.

CNS News reports that for the first ten years of the last decade, Soros donated more than $52 million to numerous media outlets. In a world where the media is dying a slow, painful suicide (brought about by their own incompetence and corruption), that is no small amount of money. And you can bet that those media organizations that have not benefited from Soros' largesse would someday like to. So why antagonize him?

The media's hands-off policy with Soros is nothing new. While outlets such as Politico and NBC News obsess over every move made by the libertarian Koch brothers, Soros and his spider-web of influential left-wing political operations (Media Matters, Center for American Progress) almost never receive any kind of media scrutiny. A recent media study found that the ratio of references between Kochs' organizations and Soros' organizations, in news outlets that pose as objective, are literally hundreds to one. Politico actually has Ken Vogel, a former Soros employee, constantly harassing covering the Koch brothers.

The mainstream media not only shares Soros' hard-left vision, but also benefits or hopes to benefit from Soros' bottomless billionaire well of funding. And in return, even though Soros' Tides Foundation is many times larger than the Kochs, the media look the other way for Soros and turn the Kochs into America's bogeyman. Which brings me back to the FCC proposal to police America's newsrooms.

As enamored and protective as the media are of Obama, when the Administration was caught spying on journalists last year, his Media Palace Guards still squawked. But still, this attempted move by the FCC, which is probably the scariest move against the media by the federal government since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, resulted in almost uniform silence by the mainstream media. If alternative and conservative media hadn't been vocal, nothing would have stopped FCC from interrogating and intimidating the press.

What might explain the media's silence is the looming specter of George Soros. History already proves the media has been reluctant to cross him. Apparently, even the idea of Soviet-style monitors looking over their shoulder couldn’t change that. CNS News helps to explain why:

Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is "critical" for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.

On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from since 2000.........."

.

Venezuela Violence - Media Blackout

Cursed be the soldier who aims his weapons against his people. - Simon Bolivar

The efforts of the late Hugo Chavez' to enslave Venezuelans, and twist the words and outlook of the Liberator of much of South America to suit his own pride and lust for power, have come to a gruesome fruition under his even more incompetent (if that is possible) successor.

Aside from Breitbart,  the Latin American division of CNN, and a belated article in The Blaze, the horrors that are being perpetrated on protesting Venezuelans have been - not largely, but virtually totally ignored by the media. Almost every video or account that I have seen or read has been through the medium of social media and the blogosphere. Fox News, regularly denigrated by the Left as a right-wing organisation, has barely made any mention of the violence; their coverage of Venezuela seems to have been restricted to the arrest of one of the opposition leaders.

Taking the Sochi Winter Olympics out of consideration, the only event that the media has treated with any real effort is the ongoing violence in Ukraine. What is being ignored there is the fact that pro-EU Ukrainians have expended tremendous efforts to cut off their noses to spite their faces. No one is saying that Putin is a great guy, but the European Union will do far more damage to the sovereignty of their nation than any Russian leader ever could imagine. I suspected from the beginning that the protests were being bankrolled by Socialist oligarchs such as George Soros. One piece from yesterday treated that very subject:

http://www.infowars.com/exposed-ukrainian-protesters-backed-by-kony-2012-style-scam/

The globalists want Russia isolated and to continue with building their Socialist superstate in Europe. Ukrainians may not realize it now, but of in fact they do wind up joining the EU, they will soon go the way of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. The real shock will be when the EU open border policy allows tens to hundreds of thousands of Somalis, Moroccans, Turks, etc. to take the train from Western European nations to the former USSR satellite. There they will promptly take up residence, demand tons of welfare payments, and commence to wildly increasing the violent crime rate at the expense of the then-hapless citizens of the new EU satrapy.

Going back to Venezuela, the Left is in a panic. Awash in petrodollars, that nation should be the one example in which Socialism could in theory be made to function. But dysfunctional ideology and central planning will inevitably do as does water - find it's own level. The Left has no idea of how to report that yet another state that tried their preferred way of doing things has failed again.

When the Venezuelan Socialists needed money, they would nationalize a company. That shot in the economic arm would wear off and the next step would be more confiscations. Farmland, illegally seized by the government, was given to people who had no idea how to utilize it. As it was not theirs in the sense of being private property and thus requiring  both hard work (sweat) and anxiety (tears) common to anyone who owns land and needs to make it productive or lose the farm, these fertile lands ceased to produce food. Farms fail when the "owners" are nothing more than people who work for pay - they treat it as any other job. The nation went from a producer of food surpluses to an importer of the same. Price controls - the last gasp of a desperate regime, were put in place, and more small business owners had to turn to the black market to sell their hidden goods or  lose their livelihood from being unable to cover even the cost of doing business.

The media was taken over. Broadcasting licenses were denied to stations that did not serve the regime, and the freedom of the press was guaranteed for reporting the "truth"  - which meant that reports were restricted to what the Chavistas stated was the truth.

The People were subjected to attacks by Leftist street thugs who often operated on motorcycles. The command staff of the army was restricted to those who adhered to Socialist dogma (note that the command staff of the US military is catching up on that note).

The Cubans, needing oil and cash since their old USSR benefactor is long gone, have a lot to lose if their partners in Venezuela fail. They have had operators and advisory staff  at all levels in that nation, and recently they sent troops to try to save their cash cow.

Even in towns and regions fortunate enough to have elected local governments from the opposition, Chavez had a way to undermine the elected officials. He would install loyal apparatchiks in offices in these areas and set them up with money to bribe the citizens who went to them rather than the municipal offices. By this means he was able to get around the actual local governments by acting as if they did not exist.

The People decided that they had had enough.

When the lid blew off, the Left resorted to it's standard default position - violence, and lots of it. What we are seeing is the logical outcome of  the ideology of Rousseau and Marx. 

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, told us during WWII that this is what would happen at some point:

(These are just a few links)

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/20/beauty-queens-death-fuels-outrage-in-venezuela-uprising/?hpt=ac_bn3

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/02/20/Harrowing-Video-Surfaces-Of-Venezuelan-State-Police-Attacking-Students-At-Night

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=760598113952880 (Brutal video)

http://www.maduradas.com/indignante-estas-son-las-imagenes-que-maduro-no-quiere-que-veas-sobre-la-agresion-a-estudiantes/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/20/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-a-crisis-the-media-are-accused-of-ignoring/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_2SSMogbaw&feature=share

http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/02/19/19f/

http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/140221/janiot-denuncio-hostigamiento-por-parte-de-las-autoridades-venezolanas

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/chavez-heir-threatens-expel-cnn-venezuela#sthash.4p4GeyF4.gbpl

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152602729294112&set=vb.658689111&type=2&theater


https://sj3gusi8t5zbg6zcefy4.r.worldssl.net/video/que-el-mundo-sepa-whats-going-on-in-venezuela-en-ingles/


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=710785055619865&set=pcb.710785552286482&type=1&theater

https://www.facebook.com/OperacionLibertad

https://www.facebook.com/sosVenezuela2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-14/twitter-says-venezuela-blocks-its-images-amid-protest-crackdown.html

Former British Leftist on Progressive Intolerance, Family/Gender Deconstruction, etc

When you come across someone who says exactly what you have been saying - only in an immeasurably better and more articulate manner, there is no need for commentary:

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/02/20/10-quotes-that-shred-progressivism-from-a-best-selling-british-author-who-left-the-left/

"The below quotes come from award winning British journalist and best-selling author Melanie Phillips’ “Guardian Angel.” “Guardian Angel” tells the story of how Phillips started her career in British journalism on the Left in the late 1970s,......

1. The “Chicago Way” (in London) .......... I gradually realised, however, that the left was not on the side of truth, reason, and justice, but instead promoted ideology, malice, and oppression. Rather than fighting the abuse of power, it embodied it.

Through demonising its enemies in this way, the left has undermined the possibility of finding common ground and all but destroyed rational discourse. This is because, as shown by its reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death, it substitutes insult and abuse for argument and reasoned disagreement.”

2. Leftist totalitarianism ”Moreover, while there were undoubtedly serious differences, the distinction between tankie totalitarians and the soft left served to mask the fact that the soft left was also totalitarian in its instincts. It may have recoiled from the tanks rolling into Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but it most certainly parked its own tanks on the lawns of British society. From there it proceeded to lay siege to the fortresses of Western culture, crushing all dissent beneath its tracks.”

3. The Overton Window ”More devastatingly still, by twisting the meaning of words such as liberal, compassion, justice and many others into their opposites, it has hijacked the centre-ground of politics. Left-wing ideology is now falsely said to constitute the moderate centre-ground, while the true centre-ground is now vilified as ‘the right’. This is as mind-bending as it is destructive, for it has introduced a fatal confusion into political debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Redefining the true middle ground of politics as ‘right-wing’ has served to besmirch and toxify the commitment to truth, reason, decency, and reality which characterises where most people happen to situate their thinking. At the same time, by loudly asserting that left-wing ideology is really ‘centrist’, the left has succeeded in presenting extremist, antisocial, or even nihilistic ideas as unarguably good, and all dissent is promptly vilified as ‘extreme’…For by asserting that it embodied the centre ground, what the left actually did was to hijack the centre ground and substitute its own extreme values — thus shifting Britain’s centre of political and moral gravity to the left, and besmirching as extremists those on the true centre ground. And something very similar has happened in the US, where language has been appropriated in order to engineer a seismic shift in attitudes, concealed by a mind-bending reversal of the meaning of words.”

4. The Middle Eastern double standard and Leftist racism ”In a leader conference one day, I asked why the Guardian appeared to be pursuing a double standard in its coverage of the Middle East. Why did it afford next-to-no coverage of Arab atrocities against other Arabs while devoting acres of space to attacking Israel for defending itself against terrorism? The answer I received from my colleagues that day stunned me. Of course there was a double standard, they said. How could there not be? The Third World did not subscribe to the same ethical beliefs as the West about the value of human life. The West therefore was not entitled to judge any mass killings in the Third World by its own standards. That would be racist..........

. They were in effect saying that citizens of a Third World country were not entitled to the same assumptions of human rights, life, and liberty as those in the developed world.............

They are thus deemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong, while groups designated as ‘oppressors’ can do no right. According to this double-think it was simply impossible for the Guardian folk to be guilty of racism, since they championed the victims of the Third World against their Western capitalist oppressors. But when those Third World unfortunates became the victims of the Third World tyrants ruling over them, the left remained silent – since to criticise any Third World person was said to be ‘racism’. This twisted thinking is what now passes for ‘progressive’ thinking in Britain and America. Thus the left actually abandons the oppressed of the world to their fate, all the time weeping crocodile tears for them – while sanctimoniously condemning ‘the right’ for its heartlessness! It is this hijacking of language and thought itself that has done so much to destroy any common understanding of the political ‘centre ground’, the lethal confusion that has so unfortunately polarised political debate into vacuous caricatures that have precious little to do with reality…The really striking thing was that…Israel and Jew-bashing bigotry was strongest on the supposedly anti-racist left. As I noted in 2003, what was going on was a kind of Holocaust inversion with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis, and the Palestinians given a free pass as the ‘new Jews’. Hatred of the Jews now marched grotesquely behind the left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel, but mainstream media chat about the malign power of the Jews over America and world policy.”

5. Progressive education ”By now I had been looking for schools for my own children and I could see for myself that teaching had been hijacked by left-wing ideology. Instead of being taught to read and write, children were being left to play in various states of anarchy on the grounds that any exercise of adult authority was oppressive and would destroy the innate creativity of the child.

Galvanised by the reaction which suggested that things were far worse than I had realised, I wrote more about education. I wrote about the refusal to teach Standard English on the grounds that this was ‘elitist’............... I also observed that those putting such pressure on these teachers from the education establishment were the supercilious upper middle classes, who had no personal experience whatsoever of what it was actually like to be poor and uneducated or an immigrant but were nevertheless imposing their own ideological fantasies onto the vulnerable – and harming them as a result. Teachers wrote to me in despair at the pressure not to impose Standard English on children on the grounds that this was discriminatory. They knew that, on the contrary, this was to abandon those children to permanent servitude and ignorance…Most teachers, I wrote, were unaware that they were the unwitting troops of a cultural revolution, being now taught to teach according to doctrines whose core aim was to subvert the fundamental tenets of Western society. A generation of activists had captured academia, and, in accordance with the strategy of cultural subversion advocated by Antonin Gramsci [The father of Cultural Marxism], had successfully suborned education to a far-left agenda.”......

6. The negligent welfare state ”........... It was also a callousness and indifference amongst the supposedly caring services. It was the hospital nurses who, when my mother broke her hip and through her feebleness was unable to move at all in her hospital bed, left her food and water unwrapped or out of reach and refused to make her comfortable; and the ward sister who, when I complained, told me with a straight face that my mother, who could barely put one foot in front of the other, had a short time before been ‘skipping round the ward’. I realised then that in the National Health Service, Britain’s sanctified temple of altruism, compassion, and decency, if you were old, feeble, and poor you just didn’t stand a chance.”


7. Environmentalism and fascism ”On the left, it was very obviously a new take on the usual anti-Western, anti-capitalist agenda; the West would have to give up consumerism and return to a barter economy to save the planet. Or something like that. But it was also a sanitised version of the disreputable and discredited dogma of population control, which had given rise to the eugenics movement and the semi-mystical worship of the organic, both of which had been deeply implicated in both the rise of Nazism and in ‘progressive’ thinking up to World War II. To me, the clear message of environmentalism was that the planet would be fine if it wasn’t for the human race. So it was a deeply regressive, reactionary, proto-fascist movement for putting modernity into reverse, destroying the integrity of science, and threatening humanity itself.”

8. The disintegration of the family ”Surely, though, the essence of being progressive was to minimise harm and protect the most vulnerable? Yet this was simply tossed aside by left-wingers, who elevated their own desires into rights that trumped the emotional, physical and intellectual well-being of their children – and then berated as heartless reactionaries those who criticised them! The more this was being justified, the more it was happening. Rising numbers of people were abandoning their spouses and children, or breaking up other people’s families, or bringing children into the world without a father around at all..................

...................... And when I started writing about family breakdown, I was also called an ‘Old Testament fundamentalist’. At the time, I shrugged this aside as merely a gratuitous bit of bigotry. Much later, however, I came to realise that it was actually a rather precise insult. My assailants had immediately understood something I did not myself at the time understand – that the destruction of the traditional family had as its real target the destruction of Biblical morality. I thought I was merely standing up for evidence, duty and the protection of the vulnerable. But they understood that the banner behind which I was actually marching was the Biblical moral law which put chains on people’s appetites.

I had not yet realised that the left’s aggression towards any dissent or challenge is essentially defensive. They are either guilty about what they are doing because they know it is wrong, or else at some level at least they know that their intellectual position is built on sand. What matters to them above all is that they are seen to be virtuous and intelligent. They care about being seen to be compassionate. They simply cannot deal with the possibility that they might not be. They deal with any such suggestion not by facing up to any harm they may be doing, but by shutting down the argument altogether. That’s because the banner behind which they march is not altruism. It is narcissism.”

9. Forced paternal child support and sex roles ”the roles of the sexes were being reversed under a policy of enforced androgyny. Women were assuming the roles of both mothers and fathers while masculinity was being progressively written out of the cultural script, and men were being bullied into turning into quasi-women.......................

I saw this as nothing less than outright nihilism which threatened to destroy the West. If all common bonds of tradition, custom, culture, morality, and so forth were destroyed, there would no social glue to keep society together. It would gradually fracture into a set of disparate tribes with competing agendas, and thus eventually would destroy itself. And as I was coming to realise, just about every issue on which I was so embattled – family, education, nation, and many more – were all salients on the great battleground of the culture wars, on which the defenders of the West were losing hands down.”

10. 9/11, moral relativism and appeasement ”.................. A society which professes neutrality between cultures would create a void which Islam, with its militant political creed, would attempt to fill’

…For immediately after the Twin Towers collapsed, I realised that what the West was facing was different from ordinary terrorism; and different again from war by one state on another. This was something more akin to a cancer in the global bloodstream which had to be fought with all the weapons, both military and cultural, at our disposal. And yet in that moment I also realised that the West would flinch from this fight, because it no longer recognised the difference between good and evil or the validity of preferring some cultures to others, but had decided instead that all such concepts were relative..............

So are we doomed? Melanie Phillips says:

“All, however, is not lost. A culture can pull back from the brink if it tears off its suicidal blinders in time. This can still be achieved — but it requires a recognition above all of the paradox that so many fail to understand, that freedom only exists within clear boundaries, and that preserving the values of Western civilisation requires a robust reassertion of the Judeo-Christian principles on which its foundations rest. And that requires moral, political, and religious leadership of the highest order — and buckets of courage.”