The Media’s Ukraine Hocus-Pocus

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How many times do you have to watch the same magic trick before you start getting wise to the fact that the rabbit was never in the hat to begin with? The media’s approach to any controversy or scandal involving President Obama begins with two basic premises:

  1. Everything Obama does is right and good;
    and
  2. Any critic who says otherwise is wrong and bad.

This has been the way with everything from the 2009 “stimulus” bill to ObamaCare to Benghazi to the IRS scandal, and now we’re seeing the same method applied to the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Don’t listen to Obama’s Ukraine critics: he’s
not ‘losing’ — and it’s not his fight
— Michael Cohen, Guardian

No, American Weakness Didn’t Encourage
Putin to Invade Ukraine
— Peter Beinart, The Atlantic

Translation: “That thing you thought you saw did not actually happen.”

In the initial reaction to Putin’s Crimean invasion, everyone saw it as an obvious embarrassment to Obama.

Then the clever liberals went to work, re-arranging the facts. Within a few days, they will have convinced us (a) that anyone who criticizes Obama for what happened in Ukraine is a neocon chickenhawk who wants to start World War Three, and (b) that Obama’s leadership in this crisis has been faultless, praiseworthy and arguably even heroic. Because in the eyes of liberals, it could never be otherwise.

 


Perverts, Foreign and Domestic

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You have to wonder whether 62-year-old bachelor aristocrat Patrick Rock was chosen to be Downing Street’s child pornography expert, or whether he volunteered. Looks like probably the latter:

One of David Cameron’s closest aides has been arrested on suspicion of offences relating to child pornography.
Patrick Rock, who was one of the government’s advisors on policy for online pornography filters, was arrested last month after police examined computers in No 10 Downing Street.
Mr Rock resigned as a policy advisor to the Prime Minister soon afterwards.
No 10 said he was arrested last month “a few hours” after Downing Street contacted police.
The former deputy head of the No 10 Policy Unit has been close to Mr Cameron for two decades. The two men worked for Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary in the 1990s.

Oh, sure, those decadent British aristocrats, but wait — there’s more dreadful perversion, somewhat closer to home:

The pastor of a Baton Rouge Baptist church was arrested Saturday on accusations he raped a 20-year-old mentally disabled woman who had sex with the pastor at her father’s request, according to the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office.
David “Scott” Lemley, 43, pastor of New Harmony Baptist Church, on Antioch Road, was booked Saturday into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison on a count of aggravated rape.
Lemley also was booked on a count of theft of a motor vehicle and is accused of giving away a car — which he was supposed to be working on as a favor for someone — to a member of his church, who then sold the vehicle to a scrap metal company for about $250 in early February, arrest documents show.
According to an arrest warrant, Lemley is accused of having sex with a 20-year-old woman “with the medical documentation mental capacity of a 7-year-old” after the woman’s father told the woman to have sex with Lemley because the pastor’s wife had been ill and bedridden.
The woman’s father was arrested in November and remains in Parish Prison on a variety of sex counts, including aggravated rape. His name is being withheld to protect the identify of his daughter.

“Allegedly”! It’s important to add “allegedly.”

 

Rule 5 Monday

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, maybe I should have been less certain that we had enough leftovers to make this week’s Rule 5 compendium as double-stuffed as last week’s. My bad. Still, we have what we have, and I must say what we have is pretty nice.

We begin with Randy’s Roundtable and Olivia Garson, followed by Fishersville Mike with Kaley Cuoco, Laughing Conservative with Eva Longoria, and Blackmailers Don’t Shoot with Emma K. Animal Magnetism chipped in with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while Ninety Miles From Tyranny contributed Girls With Guns, Morning Mistress, and Hot Pick of the Late Night. First Street Journal, of course, focuses this week on the women of Ukraine’s military.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes a rug beater, photo editing magic, Miriam Weeks/Bella Knox, and more Duke pr0n.

Wine Women and Politics has black & white blondes, school girls, bath time and other hotness, the Babe of the Day, Saturday Sweeties, Friday Honey, and someone delicious.

A View From the Beach offers Gemma Atkinson, We Really Need Some Summer, “The Principal Of The Silver Lining”, Topping Off the Japanese Weirdness Content, Bad Food Becomes Good Again, Olympic Final, and A Refreshing Pause.

Soylent Siberia says this one could raise the dead. Also, morning coffee, Still No Football, Overnighty Oliveira, Monday Motivationer Mariana, In This Best Of All Possible Worlds, Tuesday Titillation, Humpday Hawt Underboob Awesome, One Million Exiles Flock To Soylent, Fursday Reader Submission Milena, Evening Awesome Further Fursday, Corset Considerations, T-GIF Friday Got Snooch? and a WeekEnder.

Proof Positive’s Babe of the Week is Giada di Laurentiis, his Vintage Babe is Anny Duperey, and Sex in Advertising this week is supplied by Kate Moss. Meanwhile, at Dustbury, it’s Kate Mara and Jessica Alba.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Death by ‘Choice’: Contraceptive Risk Means ‘Safe Sex’ Can Be Deadly

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Erika Langhart died after using ‘third generation’ birth control.

It’s perfectly harmless — until it kills you:

What friends of Durango [Colorado] native Erika Langhart seemed to love most about her was her humor.
“She had great stories. Ridiculous things always seemed to happen to her,” said Jessica Knutzon, 24, a fellow American University alumni. . . .
Knutzon, like so many who knew her, described Langhart as witty, jovial and incredibly driven. Tall and poised, she was headed to law school at Georgetown University.
Instead, Langhart died on Nov. 24, 2011, at just 24 years old, and her family is blaming a prescription contraceptive whose potentially deadly side effect they say was not adequately disclosed. . . .
The contraceptive she was using, a Nuvaring, a vaginal ring approved by the FDA in 2002, is known as “third generation” because it contains a different cocktail of hormones than previous formulations and is supposed to have fewer side effects.

Maybe the side effects are “fewer,” but one of them — “an elevated risk of venous thromboembolism, or deep vein blood clots” — is potentially fatal. This touches upon a common-sense criticism of birth control that is not addressed often enough: Birth control pills (and other types of hormone-based contraception) require women to add synthetic hormones to their system in sufficient quantities to alter their normal reproductive function. If a woman only uses the pill for a few months, maybe a year or two, the long-term health impact might be minimal. However, most women who use the pill are on it for many years, and it seems just common sense that altering the body’s natural hormonal balance on a long-term basis by adding artificial hormones could have serious ramifications.

“Experts” may dismiss such concerns, and I don’t have any “scientific research” to offer you, but if a known side effect of “third generation” contraceptives is deadly blood clots, I’ll count that as validating my common-sense hunch. Jill Stanek at LifeNews points to an article in Vanity Fair about Nuvaring:

What were young women being told by their doctors? As part of my reporting, I asked two college students to go to clinics in New York, inquire about using NuvaRing, and detail their families’ histories of heart issues.
Planned Parenthood, with its distribution centers all over the country, has been a target sales market for NuvaRing. At a clinic it operates in Brooklyn, one student mentioned to the attending nurse practitioner that she had Googled NuvaRing and was aware of the lawsuits alleging that it can cause blood clots. “I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family,” she said. “You yourself have a history of heart disease?” the nurse practitioner asked. “No, but my father has it. And my mother has type 2 diabetes.”
Both facts were indicators of potential problems, but the nurse practitioner did not seem to be alarmed. “Then no. NuvaRing is safe for healthy young women. . . . Of course, with all birth-control methods, there are side effects. . . . Would you like to try it?”

Read the whole thing, including the kicker quote by the lawyer for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the manufacturer of Nuvaring: “I called my daughters and said, ‘Do not ever use any third- or fourth-generation birth control. It could kill you.’”

 

 


The Answer Is At Least As Old As Daniel

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by Smitty

One of the supreme ironies of my lifetime — at least, from my perspective — has been the dogged adherence even the most erudite of cosmopolitan Jews have shown toward the Democratic Party, even as the Party itself has grown increasingly hostile to Israel, increasingly removed from at least basic support for free market principles, and more and more obviously the vehicle of the New Left, who back before they took over the Party deplored it as a bastion of bourgeois ineffectuality.

Whatever else you care to say of Jews (and I’m pro-Israel) they are survivors. From slavery in Egypt to captivity in Babylon (hence the Daniel reference in the title), to the Diaspora at the time of Josephus, the Jews are about finding away to keep everything intact. This should be a lesson to all but the least useful students.

You can do what you want with the other explanations for the Jewish/Democrat alliance, but I think the lens of power pulls it most sharply into focus. The Democrats/Republicans/Progressives are where the power is at.

The rest of Jeff’s post, where he rides his linguistic hobby horse is worth a read, but that’s all just implementation detail.

Update: In almost entirely unrelated news, the great Cynthia Yockey has a product review for Verizon’s SureResponse product that is worth your time if you’re in the market for a response system for that special someone.

She’s also gathering support to make it down to CPAC, so help a lady out.

Hollywood Actress Urges Hollywood to Create More Jobs for Actresses

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If any misogynist is looking for evidence of female mental inferiority, the Huffington Post’s “Women” category is a treasure trove, with dumb writers and dumber topics (e.g., “Why I Hate Wearing Bras” and “I Was On Reality TV — Here’s What It’s Like To Fake ‘Real Life‘”), suggesting that there are two basic ideas behind the category:

  1. Women are too stupid to be interested in actual news, and require their own special kind of non-news reading;
    and
  2. The only people who can write this kind of meaningless drek without embarrassment are untalented women.

Bad women writers producing stupid articles for dumb women readers — that’s the “Huffington Post Women” category in a nutshell. And as if we needed more evidence of HuffPo’s belief in female inferiority, this was a feature article in the section Monday:

Cate Blanchett Lets Hollywood Know
Women Are Not A ‘Niche’ Audience
Cate Blanchett has done it again.
As if there weren’t already enough reasons for us to love Blanchett, last night she stole our hearts all over again with a gracious yet enlightening acceptance speech for Best Actress at the Academy Awards.
Our favorite moment? When she called out Hollywood’s sexist tendencies and reminded everyone that people really do want to see films with female leads:

And thank you to… those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are niche experiences. They are not — audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.

Far be it from my purpose to defend “the industry” from any of its critics. If Cate Blanchett wants the world to believe that Hollywood is run by a bunch of sexist swine whose misogyny is so powerful as to transcend their notorious greed, she’ll get no argument from me. But everybody who follows the movie business knows that the economic challenge in the age of instant-download video and home-theater giant screens is how to create an “event” that will get people to leave home and take the kids to the multiplex. The Top 10 U.S. box-office films of 2013 were:

1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
2. Iron Man 3
3. Frozen
4. Despicable Me 2
5. Man of Steel
6. Gravity
7. Monsters University
8. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug –
9. Fast & Furious 6
10. Oz The Great and Powerful

I don’t pay much attention to movies, so I can’t say if any of those are “female films, with women at the center,” but most of them clearly are not. Cate Blanchett keeps working as Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings series, so she got a spot in the Top 10, but it’s hard to argue for The Hobbit as a movie “with women at the center.”

Why is it, however, that there is something inherently righteous about actresses demanding more work for actresses? Would we applaud Clint Eastwood if he gave an Oscar speech demanding that Hollywood create more roles for geriatric geezers?

But if you’re looking for thoughtful criticism of the self-serving inanities uttered by movie stars — or thoughtful discussion of anything, really — don’t look for it in HuffPo’s “Women” category.

 

British Group Claimed ‘Research’ Showed ‘No Identifiable Damage’ of Child Sex

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Last week, we reported on the controversy about British Labour Party officials’ ties to a group that lobbied on behalf of pedophiles in the 1970s (“The UK Left’s Pro-Pedophile Past“). The controversy has continued, as the dishonest excuses of officials are exposed:

Evidence has emerged that the views of the Paedophile Information Exchange influenced policy-making at the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was run by former Labour Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.
PIE members were lobbying NCCL officials for the age of consent to be reduced and campaigning for “paedophile love”.
Their view that children were not harmed by having sex with adults appears to have been adopted by those at the top of the civil liberties group.
Today we publish extracts from an NCCL report written for the Criminal Law Revision Committee in 1976 when Mrs Hewitt was general secretary.
It says: “Where both partners are aged 10 or over, but under 14, a consenting sexual act should not be an offence. As the age of consent is arbitrary, we propose an overlap of two years on either side of 14.
“Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage.
“The Criminal Law Commission should be prepared to accept the evidence from follow-up research on child ‘victims’ which show there is little subsequent effect after a child has been ‘molested’.
“The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.
“The present legal penalties are too high and reinforce the misinformation and prejudice. The duty of the court should be to inquire into all the relevant circumstances with the intention, not of meting out severe punishment, but of determining the best solution in the interests of both child and paedophile.”

When people put words like “victims” and “molested” in scare-quotes, when they complain that “the age of consent is arbitrary” and talk about “misinformation and prejudice” against pedophiles, it is not unfair to say such people are pro-pedophile. Labour Party officials tried to cover up their shocking record:

Explosive documents in Patricia Hewitt’s name arguing for the age of sexual consent to be lowered and that incest should be legalised have forced the former Labour minister into a humbling apology.
The former Health Secretary finally said sorry after more official paperwork laid bare the disturbing links between National Council for Civil Liberties and the vile paedophile group that campaigned to allow sex with children.
Miss Hewitt finally apologised when doubt was cast on her claims she had never ‘condoned’ child abusers from the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
The Labour minister was the sole name on an NCCL press release issued in March 1976 which says ‘NCCL proposes that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 with special provisions for situations where the partners are close in age’.
The press release came out as NCCL issued a report on sexual law reforms, The Sun said.
In further remarks, Miss Hewitt added: ‘The report argues that the crime of incest should be abolished. In our view, no benefit accrues to anyone by making incest a crime when committed between mutually consenting persons over the age of consent.’
The minutes of a meeting held at the Mother Red Cap pub in north London in January 1976 showed further close links between senior Labour figures and calls to legalise sex with children.
The meeting was attended by 27 people — including Miss Hewitt and her lawyer husband Nicholas Birtles, Jack Dromey and Sir Henry Hodge, the husband of former Labour minister Margaret Hodge until his death in 2009.

This has led to damaging headlines in the UK:

Senior Labour figures
in new paedophile link
— The Sunday Times

Labour MPs’ child sex link row deepens
— Telegraph

Home Office ‘gave Paedophile Information
Exchange £70,000′: Group allegedly given
taxpayers’ money between 1977 and 1980
— Daily Mail

It would have been a tenable defense — probably not popular, but tenable as an argument — if these Labour officials had admitted the truth and said, in effect, “Hey, it was the Seventies. We were a bunch of callow 20-something radicals. Ideas about ‘sexual liberation’ were quite fashionable. When pedophiles came along and made claims that lined up with other popular ideas about ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ we were sympathetic, and really didn’t think through these arguments very well. Obviously, in retrospect, we can see we were wrong. Also, everybody was doing a lot of drugs at the time.”

Such an explanation would not exculpate them, but at least it would be honest. What they did instead was dishonest, and this raises questions not only about their judgment, but also their integrity. Of course, if they had any integrity, they wouldn’t be in Labour, would they?

 

 

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Something For The Evangelical Atheists To Contemplate

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— by Wombat-socho


One of the most annoying things about the new crop of evangelical atheists – the people who not only don’t believe in God but are insistent that you shouldn’t either – is their ingrained belief that no intelligent person could possibly believe in God, and therefore anybody who does is stupid. This says more about their smug ignorance of history than anything else; the history of Western Civilization is rife with learned men who were also men of God, Roger Bacon and Gregor Mendel being merely two of the most prominent. The landscape is also studded with universities founded by Catholics and Protestants alike, many of them ranked among the greatest in the world, while one can search in vain for colleges founded by atheists that have accomplished anything of note.


This came to mind over the weekend when I was visiting Smitty in search of relief from the drudgery that the FMJRA had become, as he had a copy of Donald Knuth’s Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. For those of you that don’t recognize the name, Dr. Knuth is one of the foremost computer scientists; he holds a doctorate in mathematics, is a professor emeritus at Stanford, and has a list of accomplishments as long as both my arms. He is not, by any sensible definition of the word, stupid; rather, the man is a genius, and a humble, humorous one at that. He is also a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, which came as a shock to me since the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans are more than slightly hardcore, and precisely the sort of people the atheists tend to mock as being dumb Christer sheeples.


Perhaps another useful example of the type is the famous science fiction writer (and scientist in his own right) Isaac Asimov. Dr. A saw no conflict between science and religion, and in fact published a well-regarded guide to the Bible despite being an avowed atheist and humanist. His ire was reserved for superstition and pseudoscience, as opposed to organized religion and its adherents. There are many others like Knuth and Asimov, but I just wanted to throw a couple of examples out there to illustrate the type rather than provide an exhaustive list.


Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament