Flak Attack: Hunters Open Fire on Animal Rights Surveillance Drone 2-23-12 |
"When it comes to nukes, who has them matters a lot more than how many there are."
The top act at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week featured Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche peddling his company’s new gadgetry under a huge picture of Che Guevara, who sported the Mercedes logo on his beret. “Viva la Revolucion!” beamed the cheeky Herr Zetsche while unveiling hisbrilliant ad campaign.
By Humberto Fontova On January 16, 2012 In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
The top act at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week featured Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche peddling his company’s new gadgetry under a huge picture of Che Guevara, who sported the Mercedes logo on his beret. “Viva la Revolucion!” beamed the cheeky Herr Zetsche while unveiling hisbrilliant ad campaign.
In other words: to sell cars in the U.S., Mercedes-Benz is relying on the mass appeal in the U.S. of the mass-murdering Stalinist who craved to destroy the U.S.
“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” once raved Mercedes-Benz new U.S. sales icon. “Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ [Americans] very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy [Americans] must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm! If the nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The solutions to the world’s problems lie behind the Iron Curtain. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”
No doubt Mercedes-Benz chuckles at the ironic cheekiness of using a Communist “man of the people” to tout a luxury product. After all, Time magazine’s encomium to Che Guevara in 1999 as “Hero and Icon of the Century” asserted that: “Nothing could be more vicariously gratifying than Che Guevara’s disdain for material comfort and everyday desires.”
Alas, Time’s (and Mercedes’) “research” overlooked some important details. In fact, quite unwittingly, Mercedes-Benz has chosen an ideal sales emblem—and one utterly devoid of irony. To wit:
“Che’s mansion was among the most luxurious in Cuba,” wrote Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes in 1960. After a hard day at the office signing firing squad murder warrants and blasting defenseless teenagers’ skulls apart with the coup-de-grâce, Che Guevara retired to his new domicile just outside Havana on the pristine beachfront (today reserved exclusively for tourists and regime apparatchiks). Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor, who escaped Cuba just ahead of a Guevara firing squad. “The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets,” continues Llano Montes. “One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959). This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.”
-read on at link-
An all-star list of progressive and liberal media folks came to the White House today to chat with President Obama over coffee in the Roosevelt Room.
The group chatted with the president about economic messaging, his agenda for 2012, the various campaign arguments against different GOP candidates, the desire among some Democrats for him to highlight his foreign policy accomplishments, fighting corporate influence and the “crappiness” of the Senate filibuster , as one attendee put it.
Those there included the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, MSNBC anchors Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes, the Nation’s editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, the New York Times‘ Frank Bruni, and stars of the interwebs Arianna Huffington, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, Faiz Shakir of ThinkProgress and Joy Reid of The Reid Report.
MILITARY forces are on high alert after the death of North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-il, whose little-known youngest son will now take control of the nuclear-armed rogue state.
Oddball communist Kim, known for his love of cognac and Russian dancing girls, died from a heart attack during a train trip, aged 69.
The official Korean Central News Agency said he had died from "a great mental and physical strain" after years of hard work and dedication to his people.
FORMER North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was the world's best golfer, sparked a fashion phenomenon and didn't defecate - that is, if you believe everything you read.The severely impoverished nation he led for 17 years has been ordered to mourn him until December 29.
Its people have been instructed to bow down to his son, in his 20s.
-read on at links-
The original post:
“No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a Corolla. So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.”
Those were the words of Johan de Nysschen, president of Audi of America, who recently spoke (quite candidly) to Lawrence Ulrich in MSN Autos about the Chevrolet Volt. Early estimates for the price of the Volt are around $40,000, and Mr. de Nysschen said that he doesn’t see many people paying that much for a car that competes with small compacts, which top out at around $25,000. He called the the Chevy plug-in hybrid “a car for idiots.”
Mr. de Nysschen was clearly making a point, as Mr. Ulrich, a frequent contributor to The New York Times’ Automobiles section, goes on to explain:
De Nysschen expressed frustration with regulators and policy makers, saying the public has been hoodwinked into believing that E.V.’s are the only answer to global warming. The U.S. government, he said, is pouring billions of dollars into E.V. technology, yet diesel technology could deliver a more immediate and dramatic decrease in global-warming emissions. And the man knows of what he speaks: Modern diesels already power half of Audi’s cars in Europe and have helped Audi dominate recent runnings of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Diesels have been shown to emit 25 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline engines, while using 25 to 35 percent less fuel.
Audi and Volkswagen have never been abashed about their push for diesel. Stefan Jacoby, the president and chief executive of the VW Group of America,has also criticized proponents of electric vehicles and hybrid technology.
Americans being an enterprising band, it is of course possible that the country will develop bootleg markets in incandescents. Though I would recommend against such law-breaking. The federal government may not have control of America’s borders, but in Washington such stuff as border security can’t hold a candle to having control of America’s light bulbs. Presumably, federal authorities will now be spending U.S. tax dollars (excuse me — “creating jobs”) to deploy light bulb cops. In years ahead, if you haven’t amassed a private stash of the old incandescents, and find yourself yearning for their comfortable glow after the sun goes down, you may have to head overseas and comb the developing world for someplace where people are still free to choose what bulbs they sell and buy.
But I promised you the confessions of a light bulb addict, and so far I have mainly been talking about the drawbacks of the incandescent ban. So here begins the real confession. Never mind the crony capitalism, or the latest news ofClimategate 2.0, or the simple ornery pleasure of exercising free will to choose how I individually will spend my scarce resources to light the night. I surrender. I give in. The federal government says this is for my own good. Washington can choose my ideal energy efficiency tradeoffs much better than I can do it for myself.
-read on at above link-
Two Thanksgiving Dinners. A tale of very different realites, one of Polar Bears and the other of Pederasty.
On Sunday, my riding friend had an early Thanksgiving dinner for her friends and some neighbors. It started with hors d'oeuvres and drinks. As we had drinks, one of the neighbors turned on a football game, so conversation subsided. When we could talk, away from the TV, one of the neighbors started talking about all the excess Polar Bears that are migrating south and invading populated areas because the "poles are melting due to global warming."
I said, weren't we just warned a couple of years ago that Polar Bears were becoming extinct because the "poles are melting from global warming"?
Well, which is it?
Here is what it is: It is Global Warming is a Hoax!
So I caused trouble.
Things were more peaceful with the TV on.
Come Thanksgiving, I was invited to a relative's house. His in-laws live for sports. He does too. Soooo, the football game is on the GIANT TV that can be seen everywhere, no just in the house, but the whole block.
I exaggerate, a little.
The game was on during the meal and I could see it any time I wanted, but I wanted not.
Since football was omnipresent, the subject of Penn State came up. It turns out, much to the contrary of the indictments, that some of the victims are just making this stuff up or exaggerating. So the idiots football fanatic frat boys (and girls) at Penn State were right to protest the firing for the pederasty and those who covered it up? According to "fans" at that Thanksgiving Dinner they were.
Maybe it was the turkey, or knowing it wouldn't be worth my time arguing, but I didn't get into it with them. It would have been ugly.
"...We are Penn State!”
One student participant said of Paterno’s firing that “having that taken away from us made us feel lost.”
The initial shock of the child-abuse scandal at Penn State was disturbing enough — but what came later may have been even more so.
That Joe Paterno, other coaches, and members of the administration could have failed in a straightforward, utterly uncomplicated moral task — to protect defenseless children from rape — is almost mind-numbing. No weighing of competing interests or complex variables was required. On one hand, you had children being abused, and on the other, the reputation of a hugely profitable football program. They chose the football program. In a condign coda, they’ve done far more damage to the program’s reputation by choosing the immoral path than they would have by doing the right thing. If the alleged predator, Jerry Sandusky, had been arrested for child abuse in 2002 (or at any point in the previous decade as reports filtered up of his criminal conduct), it would have been a one-day story. Instead, the beloved Joe Paterno has been fired. The president of the university is out, and Penn State stands revealed (and reviled) as a corrupt institution.
When people violate our standards of decency, our desire for justice demands a certain social sanction. A crime or sin is a tear in the social fabric, and our collective disapproval and censure is the way we begin to repair it. When that process breaks down, it makes us feel insecure, and makes the transgression all the more threatening.
So it was almost as dismaying to see the response of a mob of Penn State students to the ouster of Paterno as it was to hear about the child abuse itself. When word of the firings first reached campus, thousands of students surged from their dorms and rampaged down the streets of State College, Pa., blowing air horns and other noisemakers in the middle of the night. They chanted Paterno’s name, threw rocks and fireworks at police, knocked down two light poles, and overturned and crushed a local TV-news truck. According to the New York Times, the mob also tore down street signs, smashed car windows, and tipped over trash cans and newspaper-vending boxes. Call it Occupy State College. The only missing piece was public defecation.
-read on at link-
Penn State’s moral adolescents
There is a famous if apocryphal tale of a Fleet Street theater critic covering the first night of a new play in the West End of London. At the end of the evening, he went to a public telephone and dictated his review. The following morning, a furious editor called him and demanded to know why he had neglected to mention that, midway through the third act, the theater had caught fire and burned to the ground. The critic sniffily replied that it was not his business to report fires, but that, if the editor had read more carefully, he would have observed that the review included a passage noting discreetly that the critic had been unable to remain for the final scenes.
That, more or less, is the position of those Americans defending the behavior of the Penn State establishment: It would be unreasonable to expect the college-football elite to show facility with an entirely separate discipline such as pedophilia-reporting procedures, and, besides, many of those officials who were aware of Jerry Sandusky’s child-sex activities did mention it to other officials who promised to look into mentioning it to someone else.
From the grand-jury indictment:
On March 1, 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant (“graduate assistant”) who was then 28 years old, entered the locker room at the Lasch Football Building on the University Park Campus on a Friday night. . . . He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant was shocked but noticed that both Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught.
The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno (“Paterno”), head football coach of Penn State. The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno . . .
Hold it right there. “The next morning”?
Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The “child” in this vignette ought to be the ten-year-old boy, “hands up against the wall,” but instead the “man” appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so “distraught” that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing 30, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray’s “My Three Sons” might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter.
Squatters and drug addicts invade Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street protests - NYPOST.comThe criminals are crashing the party.
Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street, The Post has learned.
“I got warrants. I’m running from the law,” boasted Dave, 24, a scrawny, unshaven miscreant in filthy clothes from Stamford, Conn. “I’m not even supposed to be here, but it’s as good a spot as any to hide.”
Wanted for burglary, the drug-addled fugitive said some of his hard-partying pals clued him in that the protest was a good place to be fed, get wasted and crash.
...
'OCCUPY WALL STREET' PROTESTS ENTER FOURTH WEEK
“I’ve been smoking and drinking in here for eight days now,” said Dave, booze on his breath and his eyes bloodshot as he lay sprawled on a tattered sheet of cardboard. “I need to get some methadone. Every day, I wake up, and I’m f--ked up.”
Drugs can be easy to score -- a Post reporter was offered pot for $15 and heroin for $10.
They’ve already fueled at least one violent incident, when a wasted nut job socked a medical volunteer in the face before others hauled the attacker away.
His policies are of no consequence to him personally. The US in an alien, foreign country to him that needs to brought in lune with the international community. His title should be International Community Organizer, on tour. ♘And it’s doing that while screwing average Americans who have been responsible and lived within their means.
The Federal Reserve is quietly continuing with one of the many outrageous bank-bailout programs it initiated during the financial crisis–the one in which it pays big banks interest on their “excess reserves.”
What are “excess reserves”?
Money that the banks have but aren’t lending out–money that banks are just keeping on deposit at the Fed.
The Fed is paying banks 0.25% interest on this money.
0.25% interest may not sound like much, but it’s more than the banks are paying you to keep money in your savings or money-market account. It’s also more than you’ll earn if you lend the Federal government money for 2 years.
Oh, by the way, why, exactly, are you earning so little interest in your savings accounts and money-market funds?
Well, because, thanks to another one of its bank-bailout programs, the Fed is keeping short-term interest rates at zero.
In other words, the Fed is paying banks not to lend money and screwing you, ... [Read on at above link.]
Posted 08/11/2011 ET
Updated 08/11/2011 ET
[Read the article at the above link.] |
Al Gore is using this hot summer to turn up the heat on climate skeptics.
The former vice president angrily denounced "bulls--t" from climate skeptics whom he accused of emulating the disinformation tactics once used by the tobacco industry.
Real Aspen reported on Gore’s comments at an Aspen Institute forum Thursday and included an audio snippet on its website.
Last updated at 8:50 PM on 27th July 2011
The unmanned solar-powered airship was only in the air for less than three hours after it launched in Akron, Ohio, on Wednesday morning.
It ascended as planned up to 32,000ft but the Lockheed Martin airship then encountered problems and was not able to get up to 60,000ft.
Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting—it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.
