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GET OVER IT! WE ARE NOT ALL CREATED EQUAL |
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Written by Capt. Katie Petronio, USMC
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013 |
The Marine Corps
Times recently published a handful of articles in regard to opening
Infantry Officer Course (IOC) to females and the possibility of integrating
women into the infantry community. In mid-April the Commandant has directed the
‘integration' of the first wave of female officers into IOC this summer
following completion of The Basic School (TBS).
Before the
Marine Corps moves forward with this concept, should we not ask the hard
questions and gain opinions of combat-experienced Marines (male and female
alike) as to the purpose, the impact, and the gains from such a move?
As a combat-experienced Marine officer, and a female, I am
here to tell you that we are not all created equal, and attempting to place
females in the infantry will not improve the Marine Corps as the Nation's
force-in-readiness or improve our national security.
This issue is being pushed by several groups, one of which
is a small committee of civilians appointed by the Secretary of Defense called
the Defense Advisory Committee on Women
in the Service (DACOWITS). Surprise: none of the current committee members are on active duty or have
any recent combat or relevant operational experience relating to the issue they
are attempting to change.
Here's what they and the DoD need to know: should the Marine
Corps attempt to fully integrate women into the infantry, we as an institution
are going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending
medical conditions for females.
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THE BREXIT AND THE TEXIT |
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Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013 |
Last year, Europe's fear was the Grexit - Greece's leaving
the EU. Now, the fear du jour is the Brexit - Britain's departure.
Yet British Prime Minister David Cameron's pledge for an
'in-or-out' referendum on UK membership in the European Union will be overtaken
by internal events long before we reach 2017. The vote may never be necessary.
The eurozone's North-South misalignment has not been
resolved. The Club Med bloc is still sliding into deeper depression. The
financial crisis - never more than a symptom - has graduated into a more
intractable economic, social, and therefore political crisis.
Take a moment to read Eurozone
crisis: it ain't over yet by Professor Paulo Manasse from Bologna
University, posted on VOX EU.
Look at the German-Italian gap below. The two economies have
diverged 14% of GDP since 2006 and the split is certain to keep growing this
year, next year, and the year after that:
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IT’S TIME TO STAND UP TO THE FASCIST BULLIES OF THE LEFT |
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Written by James Delingpole
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Tuesday, 29 January 2013 |
Who are the most unpleasant people on the internet?
Obviously with so much competition, it is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, like
arguing the toss between lice and fleas. Disability rights activists would be a
strong contender. Thanks to them, money
which could go to the genuinely needy is instead being hijacked by scroungers
and fakes.
Yet this doesn't just apply to disability rights, of course.
It applies to almost everything in the political domain. Pick any issue - the
environment, education, healthcare, the economy - and time and again you'll find
the agenda has been successfully hijacked by a handful of zealots who are not
remotely representative of the broader public interest.
Why? Because politicians will do almost anything for a quiet
life and find it much easier to buy off noisy troublemakers by capitulating to
their demands, however unreasonable, than to take a principled stand.
Also, of course, it's much, much easier for a lobby group to
make a powerful, emotive case for more government spending on its favorite
deserving cause than it is for the government to explain why it can't afford
it.
I don't know about you lot, but I've had just about enough
of this apathy, ignorance, purblind denialism and culpable dishonesty.
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IN PRAISE OF THINK TANKS |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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Tuesday, 29 January 2013 |
A "think tank" is an organization where scholars and
specialists seek to find solutions to problems and then promote their findings.
Some think tanks deal with many public policy issues, and others concentrate on
one or a few, such as medical care, defense, foreign policy or economic policy.
Both the number and size of think tanks has grown
exponentially in the past several decades. One reason is the growth of
governments, which has created a need for organizations to feed government
policymakers with ideas and information -- and, more importantly, to fulfill
the need for independent research to critique the many bad ideas emanating from
policymakers, politicians and the media.
For instance, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
Peter Wallison, a former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury, has just written
a book explaining, with all the supporting evidence, how a politically
inspired, false narrative about the financial crisis led to the destructive
Dodd-Frank Act and what corrective action is needed.
It's: Bad
History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative About the Financial Crisis Led to
the Dodd-Frank Act.
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HOW POLITICAL AND PERSONAL SERENITY IS POSSIBLE |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Friday, 01 February 2013 |
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
This is the famous Serenity
Prayer. There are things you can control, and things you can't. If you're spending
time on things you can't control, and not much time on things you can, you will
become depressed and miserable.
It's almost guaranteed. This is a recipe for
helplessness, and depression is a symptom of a sense of helplessness. This is one reason why we
feel so miserable when we look at the political situation. The same applies to our personal lives.
Identifying what you can and cannot control makes you much more
effective, much more happy and satisfied - and successful. So let's start identifying.
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INSTANT KARMA |
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Written by To The Point News
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Friday, 01 February 2013 |
This news article was recently published by the Brush News-Tribune, the community newspaper of Brush, a small town in northeast Colorado.
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HALF-FULL REPORT 01/25/13 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Friday, 25 January 2013 |
Ia orana! That's Hello!
in Tahitian (ee-ah-rana).
Captain
James Cook (1728-1779) made his first voyage to Tahiti in April 1769. Whenever introduced to a chief, he would doff
his hat, sweep it before him with a slight bow, and greet him by saying, "Your
Honor." Tahitians have been greeting
each other by saying how they pronounced "your honor" ever since.
Most all of
us dream at one time or another of living in a Polynesian paradise of perfect
balmy weather, palm trees wafting in the breeze over soft sandy beaches, turquoise
lagoons laden with fish, dramatic mountains covered with fruit-laden tropical forests
- something like this, maybe...
I took this
on a motu or sand islet on the reef
surrounding the island of Raivavae in the Austral Islands of French Polynesia. This is remote or real Polynesia, not the
tourist version. No hotels, no restaurants,
no air conditioning, no swimming pools (infinity or otherwise), no Internet,
intermittent electricity, and what few modern conveniences exist from a cold
Hinano beer to a liter of gas are exceedingly expensive.
Which is why
there are so few tourists in this "unspoiled" idyllic island, and almost no one
comes here to retire. The islanders who
live here are wonderfully friendly, Raivavae is breathtakingly beautiful, you'll
never forget a visit here - but it won't take long before you want to get back
to America.
The current
on-going tragedy, of course, is that the America we'd want to get back to seems
no longer to exist. Reading every
morning's news these days is like reading - and living in - a horror
story. When will it end? Will we ever get our country back from the fascist thugs in Washington who
have stolen it?
Two events this week suggest we may.
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IS TEXAS AMERICA’S HOPE FOR THE FUTURE? |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Tuesday, 22 January 2013 |
Papeete, Tahiti. Yesterday (1/21), at the very moment Zero was
being sworn in to his stolen second term and delivering a speech so bad even
WaPo's premier liberal columnist panned it as "flat,
partisan, and pedestrian," I was on a shark dive off a remote French
Polynesian island.
We were 70 feet down and surrounded by a half dozen ten-foot
long lemon sharks sporting impressive arrays of knife-sharp teeth. But they were after the multitude of schools
of brightly colored tropical reef fish all around us, searching for those whose
abnormal swimming (sensed by electroreceptors in their head) meant easy prey.
I wanted no part of the irretrievably disgusting spectacle
in Washington and was happy to be as far away and as oblivious to it as
possible. When you're diving, you are
totally in the moment. You are in a
completely different universe of incomparable beauty, and while you are in it,
the world of dry land and all that is happening there, does not exist. Especially if very large sharks are swimming
very close to you.
It was only when I got here today and learned of the
spectacle in DC that it occurred to me Americans are surrounded by fascist
sharks like Zero and his thugs. Many of
them will be easy prey. How do we make
sure we are not?
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HILLARY ANSWERS ON BENGHAZI? |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Thursday, 24 January 2013 |
"We have four dead Americans!"
Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton shouted at Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk
one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point,
does it make?"
Ms. Clinton had a point, of
sorts, about "at this point." More than
four months have elapsed since 9/11/2012, when Chris Stevens, our ambassador to
Libya; Foreign Service Office Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty
and Tyrone Woods were killed during a seven hour assault on the U.S. consulate
in Benghazi and its annex. Wednesday
(1/23) was the first time the secretary of state appeared before Congress to
answer questions about what happened.
The State Department knew "in
near real time" there had been no protest; knew within hours an al-Qaida
affiliate claimed credit. So why for
more than a week afterward did she and other senior officials claim a video
ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad was responsible, Sen. Johnson was asking when
Ms. Clinton interrupted him.
Other lawmakers wanted to know
why the consulate was guarded by unarmed Libyan security guards rather than by
U.S. Marines, as is customary for diplomatic installations. Why were Ambassador Stevens' pleas for more
security ignored?
Ms. Clinton responded...
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DANCING AROUND THE DEBT |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Thursday, 24 January 2013 |
It would be fiscally
irresponsible to raise the ceiling on the national debt from $8.1 trillion to
$8.9 trillion, the junior senator from Illinois said when President George W.
Bush wanted to do that in 2006.
Raising the debt limit "is a sign
of leadership failure," he said.
"Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs
of our children and grandchildren."
The national debt has doubled
since 2006, but Barack Obama says now it would be fiscally irresponsible NOT to
raise it. For hypocrisy, this can't be
topped. But the president isn't the only
hypocrite. Nothing has generated as much
posturing and grandstanding as the all too frequent votes to raise the debt
ceiling.
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THE EARTH GETTING GREENER EXPOSES CLIMATE ALARMISM AS A TOTAL FRAUD |
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Written by Matt Ridley
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Wednesday, 23 January 2013 |
Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite
literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on
the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those
accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem
destruction.
This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist
whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii
first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling's famous curve showed not only a year-by-year
increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the
concentration.
The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to
be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston
University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for
30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world's vegetated area got
greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change.
What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer
causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There
are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer,
wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming,
an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants.
CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging
from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale.
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JUDGEMENT DAY ON OBAMA’S SPENDING |
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Written by Richard Rahn
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Wednesday, 23 January 2013 |
The current debate about the debt vote is minor league
compared to what will happen when the government literally cannot spend more
than it is taking in. That time may be nearer than you think.
It is true that the U.S. government can always
"print" money to pay its bills, but at some point, printing more
money becomes self-defeating because the resulting increase in the government
bond interest rate and required interest payment will spiral out of control. At
that point, the government will be forced to operate on a pay-as-you-go basis,
as any individual or business is forced to do when they can no longer get
credit. Several California cities are now in this situation.
The U.S. government now receives about $200 billion a month
in revenue and spends about $320 billion a month. Any responsible business or
individual faced with a situation where receipts are only 60 percent of
expenditures would make changes before their credit was cut off or, at the very
minimum, have a plan for which bills to pay first -- but not the U.S.
government.
It appears that President Obama is once again going to
produce a budget that assumes very high levels of deficit spending can go on
forever. It also appears that Senate Democrats will continue to not bother to
pass a budget.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the ultimate spoiled
child, accusing the taxpayers of engaging in child abuse by not giving him an
unlimited allowance.
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WHAT IS THE REPUTATION YOU’D LIKE TO EARN WITH YOURSELF? |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Tuesday, 22 January 2013 |
When you get to know people,
you are, in part, building a reputation with each other. "What kind of person
is he?" "How does she handle a difficult situation?" "What kind of attitude
does he bring to his work?" "How does she respond to confrontation or adversity?"
Over time, we learn whether a
given person is honest, whether they can be relied upon, how playful they are,
to what degree their actions reflect what they say. We get a sense of their
style, their likes, and their dislikes.
Here is a piece that is often missing: We watch ourselves just like we watch others, and we develop a reputation with ourselves accordingly.
This is the essence of earned
self-esteem. Here's how to increase yours.
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"THE BITCH IS BACK" |
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Written by To The Point News
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Friday, 25 January 2013 |
Whoopi
Goldberg had high praise yesterday (1/24) for Hillary's testimony to Congress the day before, exclaiming, "The bitch is back!" Indeed, she certainly is...
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HALF-FULL REPORT 01/18/13 |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Friday, 18 January 2013 |
This was an exceptionally busy week of spinning, posturing,
grandstanding, lying, smearing and demagoguery as President Barack Obama sought
to thwart Republican efforts to restrain the growth of federal spending; to
impose new curbs on guns, and to win confirmation of his "in your face"
Cabinet.
It began with a news conference Monday (1/14) so remarkable
for mendacity, hypocrisy and churlishness even Dana
Milbank of the Washington Post and Maureen
Dowd of the New York Times noticed.
"The next time Mr.
Obama holds a press conference, somebody should ask him to identify by name
those who want to repeal Social Security, steal food from orphans and cancel
science funding," said the
Wall Street Journal.
Fat chance of that. "The
deeply unethical relationship between the White House and the Washington press
corps ensures that nary a statement of Obama's will be subjected to questioning
or scrutiny, much less the mockery that attends just about anything a
Republican says," said Michael
Walsh.
* * *
The president used children
as props for his news conference Wednesday (1/16) calling for new gun
control measures. Here's more on the infantile
spectacle. But, said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, it is "repugnant
and cowardly" for the NRA to note his daughters have armed protection.
* * *
Nothing has generated as much posturing, grandstanding, and
hypocrisy as Congress' now all too frequent votes to lift the ceiling on the
national debt.
* * *
Little illustrates Zero's "my way, or the highway" attitude
better than his choices for his Cabinet. Jack Lew, slated to replace Turbo Tax
Tim Geithner, may be the worst.
* * *
The French have intervened in Mali,
where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" (AQIM) has established a larger base
than al-Qaeda had in Afghanistan.
With the French intervention, "the stage is set for another bitter, chaotic al-Qaida defeat,"
said my friend Austin
Bay. The harshness of Islamist rule
will backfire, as it did in Iraq and Algeria, he thinks. But Walter
Russell Mead wonders if another Dien Bien Phu looms. Or another Afghanistan,
frets the London Daily Mail.
* * *
"The shortest distance
in modern politics is the one between a Republican willing to denounce his
party for extremism and the set of a cable or Sunday morning talk show,"
says Artur
Davis,
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