No Regrets For Playing With Lives

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Military, Terrorism

You can play with lives when you are the POTUS. You give life; you take it. President Barack Obama, like his predecessor, likes to use the levers of powers to score political points. Hoping to score, he launched a failed operation to rescue two hostages from al Qaeda in Yemen: American Luke Somers and South African Pierre Korkie. As a consequence, both hostages were killed mid-raid.

Here’s the rub, via The Hill:

… “A second hostage, South African Pierre Korkie, was also killed by his captors during the raid, to the dismay of his family, who believed they had brokered a ransom payment for his release.
Earnest said the U.S. had no knowledge of the negotiations being taken for Korkie’s release. South Africa’s government, like the U.S., does not negotiate for the release of hostages, but the Korkie family had pursued such a deal privately — although some reports indicated U.S. officials might have been aware of the proceedings.”

Eminently quotable is one of the bimbos on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” who, when reporting on the dismal failure of Rome’s army to liberate these men, went on to scoff at the “amateur hostage negotiators” who, but for Obama, had in fact accomplished their their mission to ransom their loved one.

How Frat Feminists ‘Report’ On Rape

Feminism, Journalism, Propaganda, Socialism

In reporting on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, Rolling Stone Magazine’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely made a pledge not to the facts of the case and the principles of investigative journalism; but to her sorority of feminists. In so doing, this frat feminist followed the propagandizing principles of radical leftist ideology, which is to pursue consciousness-raising on issues they deem important.

Now, an earlier apology over the failure to fact-check the story has been retracted. Instead, editor Will Dana is prepared only to apologize for failing to do her journalistic due diligence. She concedes she was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request [the alleged victim] to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.”

Her equivocating, disgraceful words:

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school investigates sexual assault allegations.
Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely reported the story, Jackie said or did nothing that made her, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question her credibility. Jackie’s friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported her account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of Phi Psi, the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but that they had questions about the evidence.
In the face of new information reported by the Washington Post and other news outlets, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account. The fraternity has issued a formal statement denying the assault and asserting that there was no “date function or formal event” on the night in question. Jackie herself is now unsure if the man she says lured her into the room where the rape occurred, identified in the story, as “Drew,” was a Phi Psi brother. According to the Washington Post, “Drew” actually belongs to a different fraternity and when contacted by the paper, he denied knowing Jackie. Jackie told Rolling Stone that after she was assaulted, she ran into “Drew” at a UVA pool where they both worked as lifeguards. In its statement, the Phi Psi says none of its members worked at the pool in the fall of 2012. A friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone) told the Washington Post that he found Jackie that night a mile from the school’s fraternities. She did not appear to be “physically injured at the time” but was shaken. She told him that that she had been forced to have oral sex with a group of men at a fraternity party, but he does not remember her identifying a specific house. Other friends of Jackie’s told the Washington Post that they now have doubts about her narrative, but Jackie told the Washington Post that she firmly stands by the account she gave to Erdely.
We published the article with the firm belief that it was accurate. Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.

Will Dana
Managing Editor

Most journalists these days are activist reporters-cum-celebrities. Prime examples are Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon and Brooke Baldwin, not one of whom deserves to be called a journalist. They do not report on the central events of the day, as journalists of old were obliged to do by definition. Rather, they decide which story should matter to YOU. The activist-journo-celebrity proceeds from the working premise that you don’t care about the right things, and that You, the hick-rube viewer, needs some good old Marxist consciousness-raising.

Race Demagogues Vs. The Misrule of Law

BAB's A List, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism, The State

By Myron Pauli

In 2006, 50 bullets were fired at 3 unarmed drunk black men leaving a strip club in Queens – killing one, maiming 2, and almost wounding a bystander and two nearby Port Authority patrolmen. America’s number one race baiter, Al Sharpton, started to growl until it was discovered that the first cop to fire, Gescard Isnora, was black – oh, well… never mind!

Yes, blacks kill blacks, blacks kill whites, whites kill whites, and (surprise) whites sometimes even kill blacks. But only the last of these phenomena is an excuse for the Sharptons to rouse up crowds and, if the opportunity arises, looters to rob and burn every store in town. By the way, the Queens cops were exonerated of all charges (yawn)!

One issue that arises is whether certain laws have “disparate impact”? Yes, rape laws affect men more than women. Prostitution laws affect women more than men. Burglary laws affect poor more than rich. Brokerage fraud laws probably affect Jews more than Buddhists. If improperly wearing a hearing aid was criminalized, it would probably affect the elderly more than the young. I do not see “disparate impact” as a reason to invalidate a law that is otherwise proper.

Nevertheless, while the Torah has 365 prohibitions – some “secular” such as dishonest weights, stealing, and murder; and some “religious” such as not eating pork—in Bloombergian America, we need tens of thousands of laws to regulate all of us sinful citizens – the Torah is almost anarchistic. And to enforce Bloombergia, we need lots of cops armed with the latest from the Department of Defense with SWAT “no knock” raids, “stop and frisk”, zero tolerance, TSA gropes, Tasers, ….

The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is the higher rate of criminality by black men. The recent “Hollaback” video – which has some feminists calling for laws against talking to women on city streets – shows mostly black men coming up to the white girl walking. Even Jesse Jackson has admitted that he would be more likely to clutch his groceries more tightly or cross the street at night if walking alone and seeing Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown than 3 elderly Asian women. Now, perhaps, elderly Asian women should start committing more crime to make things “fair” but this might not improve the world.

So imagine 10,000 business regulations in Bloombergville – which companies are more likely to “comply” – Con Ed and Verizon or Pedro’s Bodega and Mobutu’s Taxi? Personally, I am happy with the law that says “don’t defraud your customers” but perhaps the other 9999 laws can be scrapped because they are idiotic onerous laws, not because they are part of a “racist conspiracy” again Pedro and Mobutu.

And so it is, often in “liberal” minority communities, that one finds the most idiotic and corrupt governments, onerous petty rules, highest taxes, idiotic traffic traps, and (sadly) the worst cops. The Cleveland cop who shot the 12 year old boy had been dismissed from his job in suburban Independence. My revulsion over race-baiters and looters does not mean I need to admire corrupt governments and pathological policing.

The case of Eric Garner is illustrative. Garner was making a few bucks avoiding the 300% cigarette tax and the cops came to bust him. However, they did not bother to ask him a few times (time was not urgent) to put out his hands for arrest but all of a sudden pounced on him, riding him like Secretariat and tackling him to the ground to handcuff him. He said a couple times that he couldn’t breathe. Then, he lay in front of the cops for 7 minutes. The NYPD is trained in CPR – “Curtesy, Professionalism, and Respect” AND Cardin-Pulmonary-Resuscitation – but practiced neither. WAS IT “CRIMINAL”?? – I personally did not hear from the dozen witnesses nor gone frame-by-frame over the Garner – Cop – Jujitsu part nor know the “mens rea” requirements pursuant to an arrest to determine involuntary manslaughter vs. reckless endangerment vs nothing. So far, the ONLY one indicted was the (white) cameraman, Ramsey Orta, on “criminal possession of a weapon” based on an undercover police investigation.

Respect for the law goes down the toilet among civilians of ALL races unless the government holds itself accountable.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A Lis

Adding Fire Power To The Literary Canon

English, Human Accomplishment, Literature, The West

With respect to the column “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon,” my good editor at Quarterly Review rightly griped that I should have added more titles fit for the precocious child reader.

Leslie’s favorites are Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick. Seconded. And boy, did I adore Molière, “one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature.”

Add Don Quixote by Cervantes, Kafka, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling. The Hebrew Bible is a very racy, great read. I’m no expert on the New Testament.