BLOGGING DAWG STYLE
THIS IS MY BLOG!
You WILL Affirm All Things ‘Gay’
How in the hell our freaking ass government can go and really put the push on over 97% of the population of the USA to be gay is beyond me. We really do need to take back our government and cleanse it completely of all those who are liberal, commies, etc. Right down to the newly hired janitors.
In addition to the Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting of political dissenters, and the illegal seizure of media phone records, whistleblowers within the Department of Justice (DOJ) have contacted Liberty Counsel to express grave concerns over this administration’s latest attack on freedom.
Our sources have provided Liberty Counsel an internal DOJ document titled: “LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers.” It was emailed to DOJ managers in advance of the Left’s so-called “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month.”
The document is chilling. It’s riddled with directives that grossly violate – prima facie – employees’ First Amendment liberties.
Following are excerpts from the “DOJ Pride” decree. When it comes to “LGBT” employees, managers are instructed: “DON’T judge or remain silent. Silence will be interpreted as disapproval.” (Italics mine)
That’s a threat. And not even a subtle one.
Got it? For Christians and other morals-minded federal employees, it’s no longer enough just to shut up and “stay in the closet” – to live your life in silent recognition of biblical principles (which, by itself, is unlawful constraint). When it comes to mandatory celebration of homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors, “silence will be interpreted as disapproval.”
This lawless administration is now bullying federal employees – against their will – to affirm sexual behaviors that every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology reject.
The directive includes a quotation from a “gay” federal employee to rationalize justification:
“Ideally, I’d love to hear and see support from supervisors, so it’s clear that there aren’t just policies on paper. Silence seems like disapproval. There’s still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace (particularly for transgender people), or that people who bring it up are trying to rock the boat.”
Of course there’s “still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace.” When well over half of federal employees, half the country and most of the world still acknowledge objective sexual morality (and immorality), “the workplace,” especially the federal workplace, should, at the very least, remain neutral on these highly controversial and behavior-centric issues.
Still, to borrow from self-styled “queer activist,” anti-Christian bigot and Obama buddy Dan Savage, “it gets better”:
“DO assume that LGBT employees and their allies are listening to what you’re saying (whether in a meeting or around the proverbial water cooler) and will read what you’re writing (whether in a casual email or in a formal document), and make sure the language you use is inclusive and respectful.”
Read it all at Godfather Politics.
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The humble hero
Containers have been more important for globalisation than freer trade
THE humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.
Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”
Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart).
The container’s transformative power seems obvious, but it is “impossible to quantify”, in the words of Marc Levinson, author of a history of “the box” (and a former journalist at The Economist). Indeed, containerisation could merely have been a response to tumbling tariffs. It coincided with radical reductions in global trade barriers, the result of European integration and the work of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Read it all HERE.
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Three blogs to read often to keep up with all those islamic asswipes who are out to kill our country, our way of life, and kill US! Islam is NOT a religion of peace people!
The word ‘Islam’ in Arabic means submission, NOT peace. And there you have it….
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[T]hese formative experiences prompted her to found two organizations: King Street Patriots, a local community group that hosts weekly discussions on personal and economic freedoms; and True the Vote, which seeks to prevent voter fraud and trains volunteers to work as election monitors. It also registers voters, attempts to validate voter-registration lists, and pursues fraud reports to push for prosecution if illegal activity has occurred.
In July 2010, Catherine filed with the IRS seeking tax-exempt status for her organizations. Shortly after, the troubles began.
That winter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking with questions about a person who had attended a King Street Patriots event once. Based on sign-in sheets, the organization discovered that the individual in question had attended an event, but “it was a come-and-go thing,” and they had no further information on hand about him. Nevertheless, the FBI also made inquiries about the person to the office manager, who was a volunteer.
The King Street Patriots weren’t the only ones under scrutiny. On January 11, the IRS visited the Engelbrechts’ shop and conducted an on-site audit of both their business and their personal returns, Catherine says. [...]
Two months later, the IRS initiated the first round of questions for True the Vote. Catherine painstakingly answered them, knowing that nonprofit status would help with the organization’s credibility, donors, and grant applications. In October, the IRS requested additional information. And whenever Catherine followed up with IRS agents about the status of True the Vote’s application, “there was always a delay that our application was going to be up next, and it was just around the corner,” she says,
As this was occurring, the FBI continued to phone King Street Patriots. In May 2011, agents phoned wondering “how they were doing.” The FBI made further inquiries in June, November, and December asking whether there was anything to report.
The situation escalated in 2012. That February, True the Vote received a third request for information from the IRS, which also sent its first questionnaire to King Street Patriots. Catherine says the IRS had “hundreds of questions — hundreds and hundreds of questions.” The IRS requested every Facebook post and Tweet she had ever written. She received questions about her family, whether she’d ever run for political office, and which organizations she had spoken to. [...]
On the same day they received the questions from the IRS, Catherine says, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) launched an unscheduled audit of their machine shop, forcing the Engelbrechts to drop everything planned for that day. Though the Engelbrechts have a Class 7 license, which allows them to make component parts for guns, they do not manufacture firearms. Catherine said that while the ATF had a right to conduct the audit, “it was odd that they did it completely unannounced, and they took five, six hours. . . . It was so extensive. It just felt kind of weird.”
That was in February. In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid a visit to Engelbrecht Manufacturing while Bryan, Catherine, and their children were out of town. The OSHA inspector talked with the managerial staff and employees, inspecting the premises minutely. But Bryan says the agent found only “little Mickey Mouse stuff, like, ‘You have safety glasses on, but not the right kind; the forklift has a seatbelt, but not the right kind.’” Yet Catherine and Bryan said the OSHA inspector complimented them on their tightly run shop and said she didn’t know why she had been sent to examine it.
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Atlas Shrugs
Endangering national security and higher unemployment? Another giant middle finger to the American people by the Obama administration. “Supporters say the high rate makes sense given the motivated pool of youngsters, known as ‘Dreamers’ because of the Dream Act legislation that would give them full citizenship rights.”
Yes, the motivated pool of youngsters like Al Harbi and Tamerlan Tsarnaev or Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari (building bombs to use on the home of George W. Bush, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, nightclubs and the homes of soldiers) or Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh (who plotted to bomb a New York Synagogue and the Empire State Building) or Amine El Khalifi (who plotted a suicide bombing plot of U.S. Capitol) or Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis (who plotted to bomb the Manhattan office of the Federal Reserve Bank) and so many other highly motivated youngsters.
Non-deportation rate drops — to 99.2 percent Washington Times, may, 2013
The Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama’s new non-deportation policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday.
That’s a slight drop from the 99.5 percent approval rate reported last month.
The policy, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, grants legal status to most illegal immigrants under the age of 31 who came to the U.S. before age 16 — usually brought by their parents. They are allowed to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation, and are given work permits. Most states have agreed to issue them driver’s licenses as well.
DACA is seen as a test-run should Congress pass a broad legalization for the 11 million illegal immigrants estimated to be in the U.S.
That’s one reason why the high approval rate is striking.
Critics of the Obama policy say a rate that high means the administration isn’t doing much screening of those who are applying. MORE
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Before the Justice Department was secretly obtaining phone records of Associated Press reporters, the Obama administration was investigating a Fox News journalist.
The Washington Post reported Sunday evening that the federal authorities went to great lengths to investigate how James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, was able to report on classified intelligence on North Korea in 2009.
According to the Post, the Justice Department went further in investigating Rosen than they did with AP reporters. They obtained his security badge access records at the State Department, looked at records of his calls with a specific State Department adviser and even went through his personal e-mails.
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Obama’s New Campus Persecution System
Imagine you send your son to college and he gets accused of sexual harassment. You find the charges unbelievable and you trust an investigation will vindicate him. You assume that, until the complaint has been investigated and a ruling has been made he won’t be disciplined.
Not true.
Get it all HERE.
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Front Page Magazine
The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.
Benghazi
The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.
Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.
The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.
For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.
The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.
So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up.
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“Why Is It You Apologize To Muslims and Lie To Americans?”
“Why is it that you use the IRS to silence political dissent and the DOJ to threaten the press?”
“Why is it that you mobilize the IRS to go after political enemies but you can’t mobilize troops to save American lives in Benghazi?” –Jeanine Pirro
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Caulking gun porn….hahahahaha
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Muslims fly Nazi flag next to mosque near Jerusalem
Like I said last week, kill the IRS and institute a flat or fair tax…. YES #irs
WTH? THE WHOLE DAM ADM NEEDS AN EXORCISM! >More Secrets Huma Abedin
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Gun porn….
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NASA scientists have recorded the biggest observed meteorite impact on the moon, with an explosion equal to 5 tons of TNT. The event is part of ‘lunar meteor showers’ observed by astronauts of the moon exploration program.
The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the moon’s surface on March 17, 2013.
The explosion from the impact, glowing like a 4th magnitude star, was so bright that it could have been seen from Earth with the naked eye. However the flash of light lasted only for a second and was rather difficult to detect.
Ron Suggs an analyst at the Marshall space flight center was the first to notice the explosion on a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring programs.
“It jumped right out at me. It was so bright” he acknowledged.
In this picture the moon is seen illuminated solely by light reflected from the Earth. (NASA Planetary Photojournal)
“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.
“It exploded in a flash nearly ten times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to protect it. As there is no oxygen, it poses the question of how they explode.
“Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” NASA explains.
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Gun porn….
Bill Gates: ‘Death is something we really understand extremely well’
“I always use this chart of childhood death,” Bill Gates says. “In 1960, 25% of kids died before the age of 5. And now we’re down below 6% of kids dying before the age of 5.”
We’re sitting in a bare conference room at his foundation’s D.C. headquarters. Gates — who Bloomberg News calculates is once again the world’s richest man — is in town to talk to members of Congress about his top priority this year: Global health – and, in particular, the total eradication of polio. He wants to drive that 6 percent even lower, and he believes he can. Wiping out a disease like polio sounds impossible. But it’s actually, Gates tells me, completely achievable. Perhaps even by the end of 2013. This is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Bill Gates holds vaccine during a news conference after his address to the 64th World Health Assembly at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, May 17, 2011.
(Denis Balibouse / Reuters)
Ezra Klein: Your Foundation is known for taking a particularly data-driven approach to its work. So how do you know what’s actually working when you’re in failed states with very little data-collection capacity?
Bill Gates: Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, “Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?” People don’t forget that. If you say to them, “Did your kids get vaccines or not,” they might have done it and not remember, or they might think, “Oh, this person wants me to say yes, maybe I look bad if I don’t say yes.” Death is something we really understand extremely well.
But you can save a lot of lives. One thing about the childhood death rate is you really can split it into the first 30 days of life versus 30 days to 5 years. Thirty days to 5 years is all vaccine preventable stuff — it’s diarrhea, respiratory and malaria. The first 30 days, the primary healthcare system really has to engage with the mother pre-birth, and then get the mother to do things like keeping the baby warm, making sure to avoid doing things that break the baby’s skin, breast-feeding, and that’s been harder. We’ve had sites in India where we can cut those deaths down by over 50 percent just by training the mother. But the worker has to engage with the patient, hopefully speak the same language or be of the same caste so that they’re willing to trust the advice that they’re getting.
Read all of this at the WONKBLOG.
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Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting?
We’ve come a long way, as a species. And we’re better at many things than we ever were before – not just slightly better, but unimaginably, ridiculously better. We’re better at transporting people and objects, we’re better a killing, we’re better at preventing infectious diseases, we’re better at industrial production, agricultural and economic output, we’re better at communications and sharing of information.
But in some areas, we haven’t made such dramatic improvements. And one of those areas is parenting. We’re certainly better parents than our own great-great-grandparents, if we measure by outcomes, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Why is that?
Down to the market…
Let’s turn first to the system that created the desktop computer and the perfected the mobile phone: the relentless churn of global capitalism. Why aren’t companies selling us products to make us super-parents?
But in parenting capitalism, who is the consumer? You could take the kids themselves as the consumers, as they’re the primary concerned. But they have no purchasing power, which means they don’t count. In practice, the parents are the consumers. So the strongest feature of the free-market – that the purchaser directly experiences the quality of the product – is diluted.
And capitalism has indeed responded to parents’ demand, making available a whole variety of products, from car seats to push chairs to nappies to baby monitors. Problem is, though, parents aren’t very good consumers, in that they have a limited ability to figure out (and demand) what they actually need. In part, this is because they have few children apiece: most parents in rich countries (i.e. the most important consumer-parents) will have one, two, or three children, seldom much more. Bearing in mind that children have different personalities and change as they grow, we can see that the average parent will have very little experience in, well, parenting.
Read it all HERE.
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Call To Inaction
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Syria: Iran Shows How It Is Done.
Satellite imagery of Israeli airstrike at Damascus airport released – .
Al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing takes over the oilfields once belonging to Assad – .
Russia’s missile shipment will embolden Syria: US.
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Syrian-Hizballah’s capture of Qusayr opens direct weapons route to Lebanon.
In Tomorrow’s Wars, Battles Will Be Fought With a 3-D Printer.
.:Middle East Online::US-led navies flex muscles in Gulf manoeuvres :..
Strife hangs over China billions in Myanmar .
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How the IRS’s Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say.
The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years.
Moves launched in the 1990s were designed to streamline the tax agency and make it more efficient. But they had unintended consequences for the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division.
Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.
All this combined to create an isolated office in Cincinnati, plagued by what an inspector general this week described as “insufficient oversight,” of fewer than 200 low-level employees responsible for reviewing more than 60,000 nonprofit applications a year.
Read it all HERE.
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13 Ways to Know if the Government is Reading Your Email
The National Security Agency is the primary cryptographic and signals-intelligence agency of the United States. To spy on foreign communications, it operates data collection platforms in more than 50 countries and uses airplanes and submarines, ships and satellites, specially modified trucks, and cleverly disguised antennas. It has managed to break the cryptographic systems of most of its targets and prides itself on sending first-rate product to the president of the United States.
Inside the United States, the NSA’s collection is regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in 1978 to provide a legal framework for intercepting communications related to foreign intelligence or terrorism where one party is inside the United States and might be considered a “U.S. person.”
Three bits of terminology: The NSA “collects on” someone, with the preposition indicating the broad scope of the verb. Think of a rake pushing leaves into a bin. The NSA intercepts a very small percentage of the communications it collects. At the NSA, to “intercept” is to introduce to the collection process an analyst, who examines a leaf that has appeared in his or her computer bin. (An analyst could use computer software to assist here, but the basic distinction the NSA makes is that the actual interception requires intent and specificity on behalf of the interceptor.) A “U.S. person” refers to a U.S. citizen, a legal resident of the United States, or a corporation or business legally chartered inside the United States.
So the big question everyone wonders is: does the NSA read my e-mail? Based on the public statements of the former director of the National Security Agency, Justice Department attorneys, and others involved in NSA operations—as well as confidential information provided to the authors and verified independently by officials read in to the programs—here is how to tell if the NSA spies on you:
Read at Mental Floss now.
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