Category Archives: Propaganda

The Abortion-Rights Linguistic Trickery

English, Individual Rights, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Propaganda

When feminists and their media lickspittles speak of “abortion rights,” they mean federal funding for abortion. Nothing else.

Don’t conflate “abortion rights” with federal funding for abortion. A “right” to undergo an abortion is to be distinguished from a right to federal funding of your abortion.

Fact: In America, “women have the right de jure to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” The only question is, should taxpayer rights, especially those of anti-abortion faithful, be compromised to fund the procedure.

So quit capitulating to leftist linguistic chicanery.

More about the distinction in From Benghazi To The Abortion Killing Fields:

Trojans, Trivora or a termination: An Americans woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals. Some of these individuals do not approve of the products and procedures mentioned. Americans who oppose contraception, abortifacients and abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership.

Taxpayers who oppose these products and procedures have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. America’s adult women may terminate their pregnancies (to the exclusion of late-term infanticide).

What America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope other, presumably free Americans into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience apply to all Americans.

No Republican has ever come close to articulating the ethical elegance of a libertarian argument.

Megyn Kelly’s Leading, Invalid, Elephant-Not-In-The-Room Question

Elections, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Media, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans

Megyn Kelly gets away with a lot of antics, so why not this one at the debate in Des Moines, Iowa? There, Kelly referred to Donald Trump as “the elephant not in the room,” and asked Sen. Ted Cruz: “What message do you think Trump’s absence sends to the voters of Iowa?”

Kelly’s question is a leading question, not a probative question, because the question suggests the answer. Hers is a bad-faith question. I wish Donald Trump’s campaign had the analytical wherewithal to point out Kelly’s despicable antics.

And you know that when CNN approvingly describes (on “Outfront,” 1/29) a Fox News anchor as a consummate professional “staying above the fray”—said anchor is likely everything but. What the Left likes about the badly behaved and unprofessional Kelly, as chronicled in the more meaty version of “The Me Myself and I Megyn Kelly Production,” is that she reflects their side.

UPDATED: Ranchers Hammnod And Bundy: The Best Of America

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Government, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Regulation, States' Rights

Friday, at 8:10 AM Pacific Time, I will be chatting to Bill Meyer, Program Director for News Talk FM106.7/AM-1440 KMED, in Medford, Oregon, about the WND column, “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.” An excerpt:

America, as one wag put it, is a “post-constitutional” country. Even worse, a plurality of Americans has now turned, en masse, against the First Principles of its founding. The organizing principle that currently informs American thinking is statism. It’s the state über alles: its laws, and the foot soldiers that enforce hundreds of thousands of arbitrary rules.

This sorry state-of-affairs is abundantly clear from the standoff between farmers and Fédérales, brewing in Burns, Oregon.

To look at rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son, Steven, 46, is to see the salt of the earth; the best of America. Any decent American ought to be able to see that these family ranchers, so different from politically connected agribusiness, are better and braver than all of us city slickers put together.

We slickers consume the rancher’s grass-fed, organic, “local” beef, while we cheer his oppression. Fellini, the Italian film maker who excelled at portraying corruption of the soul, as expressed in the decay of the flesh, could not have set the scene better. The idiom of Greek Tragedy works, too:

Our protagonists are the two ranchers aforementioned—sentenced to five years in jail, due to a double-jeopardy like maneuver by the federal government.

The Antagonists are the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service, The Courts, who’ve come down upon citizens with limited resources, citizens whom this Federal juggernaut is supposed to serve, not screw.

Other Antagonists in this morality play are the chorus of trash-talking radio, TV mouths and assorted bobbing heads (Republicans and Democrats), who say they care for The Folks but don’t know good folks when they see them.

Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, has come to stand in solidarity with Dwight and Steven Hammond. The case of the Bundys of Bunkerville, Nevada, is instructive in understating the First Principles involved in the Oregon standoff.

In 2014, the BLM had come to steal Cliven Bundy’s cattle, in lieu of back taxes the BLM claims the rancher has owed it since 1993, when Bundy stopped paying grazing fees. The Bundys had homesteaded the disputed land, southwest of Mesquite, in 1877. Bundy’s forefathers had lived off the land well before the Bureau of Land Grabs came into being. The Feds subsequently passed laws usurping Bundy’s natural right to graze his cattle. The elderly rancher offered the following rejoinder: “I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. … I can raise cattle there because I have preemptive rights,’ among them the right to forage.”

Also edifying, via The Conservative Tree House, is that “the Hammonds were forced to grant the BLM first right of refusal.” In other words, were “the Hammonds ever to sell their ranch, they would have to sell it to the BLM.” The BLM may get its way, for how are the Hammond women to pay the shakedown fines levied by the Fédérales? These amount to hundreds and thousands of dollars. How will the wives continue the Sisyphean struggle against the federal occupier, and, simultaneously, run the ranches sans the men?

Here we arrive at the “Catastrophe,” also an element in Greek tragedy. …

… Tune into to patriot Bill Meyer’s show. And, of course, read the rest on WND. The complete column is “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.”

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

UPDATED: Muslim Public Affairs Council Shapes FBI Counterterrorism Training

Homeland Security, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Terrorism

When they touch on the topic, media use milquetoast words. They should use the word treason to describe what the White House and FBI leadership did: Invite the Muslim Public Affairs Council to shape American counterterrorism training on matters Islam.

In Feb., 2012, WIRED magazine, in particular a bloke writing on security matters, published an article: “FBI Purges Hundreds of Terrorism Documents in Islamophobia.” In the article (hashtagged #Islamophobia), the magazine appears to take some credit for urging the FBI to scrub couterterrorism training manuals of what thinking human beings would view as broad trends in Islam and in the proclivities of its practitioners. Boasts the author: “The White House ordered a government-wide review of counterterrorism training late last year [2011]. A Pentagon document responding to the order cited Danger Room’s series as an impetus for the effort.”

To better defend you and know thy enemy, your defenders have purged honest scholarship like that of Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes from training protocols.

An internal FBI investigation into its counterterrorism training has purged hundreds of bureau documents of instructional material about Muslims, some of which characterized them as prone to violence or terrorism.

The bureau disclosed initial findings from its months-long review during a meeting at FBI headquarters on Wednesday with several Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, attended by Director Robert Mueller. So far, the inquiry has uncovered and purged over 700 pages of documentation from approximately 300 presentations given to agents since 9/11 — some of which were similar to briefings published by Danger Room last year describing “mainstream” Muslims as “violent.” And more disclosures may be forthcoming, as the FBI continues its inquiry and responds to Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents themselves.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen confirms to Danger Room that the bureau found some of the documents to be objectionable because they were inaccurate or over-broad, others because they were offensive. Allen explains that the documents represent “less than 1 percent” of over 160,000 documents reviewed by the inquiry, which was prompted by a Danger Room investigation in September. The FBI purged documents according to four criteria: “factual errors”; “poor taste”; employment of “stereotypes” about Arabs or Muslims; or presenting information that “lacked precision.”

Danger Room uncovered several such documents in the fall, including some instructing FBI counterterrorism agents that “mainstream” Muslims sympathized with terrorists; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult” leader; and that the more “devout” a Muslim was, the more likely he would be to commit a violent act. Some documents even purported to graph the correlation. The FBI initially said the instruction occurred “one time only.” But when Danger Room uncovered additional anti-Islam materials — in briefings that compared Islam to the Death Star; in books on the shelves of the FBI training library at Quantico; and in pages hosted on internal FBI websites — the bureau began an extensive internal review.

Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, attended the FBI meeting. He came away worried that the volume of anti-Muslim training documents hands al-Qaida an unnecessary win.

“People will report criminal activity to the authorities, that’s been proven time and again,” Marayati tells Danger Room. “But if we are giving propaganda to al-Qaida, resuscitating this dying ideology that al-Qaida is promoting, by continually exposing anti-Muslim propaganda published by the government, that undermines our pluralism, which is the best defense against any transnational ideological threat.”

Others think that the FBI can’t stop at purging internal documents. “It’s a bit hard to avoid the conclusion there isn’t a problem of culture in the [FBI] training division,” says Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute, whose subordinates also attended the meeting. “It’s one that appears to have some built-in biases when it comes to the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities.” Allen declined to respond.

But the FBI isn’t finished. The bureau plans to publish a “touchstone document” in the coming weeks that explains its criteria to ensure new anti-Islam documents won’t enter counterterrorism training in the future. Similarly, the Justice Department plans on March 21 to release “Cultural Competency” guidelines for dealing with Arab and Muslim communities on counterterrorism, according to Xochitl Hinojosa, a department spokeswoman.

Several civil-rights advocates said they appreciated Mueller’s personal attention. The Wednesday meeting had been scheduled by the FBI’s public-affairs arm, whose deputy assistant director, Jeff Mazanec, briefed the groups for about 40 minutes before Mueller unexpectedly joined.

“Director Mueller acknowledged the seriousness of our concerns and expressed a commitment to maintaining contact with the inter-religious community,” says Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, another attendee at the meeting. Mueller “seemed to understand the hurt and pain as well as the fear, engendered by the offensive, inappropriate and insensitive materials.”

But the worst may not have passed. Allen acknowledged that the internal review, assisted by the Army’s counterterrorism specialists at West Point, hasn’t yet concluded. Several additional organizations have filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the specific offending documents; attendees came away with the impression that their disclosure will be ugly.

The White House ordered a government-wide review of counterterrorism training late last year. A Pentagon document responding to the order cited Danger Room’s series as an impetus for the effort.

Berry says she could “see the seriousness with which [the FBI] has approached this.” But she calls the problem a “systemic” one, with urgent implications for U.S. domestic counterterrorism — a concern voiced by Attorney General Eric Holder as well.

“They’ve never owned this problem. It’s not a problem of outside contractors,” she tells Danger Room. “They’re producing these kind of documents that inhibit our counterterrorism efforts. We need our communities engaged, and these have done nothing but alienate us.”

UPDATE (3/7/016):