Wotka World Wide

Friday, April 27, 2012

The culture of Jew-hatred has been widespread throughout history.  And it continues apace today, with much the same ambivalence from many quarters to the implications.  Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe looks at anti-Semitism through history, from the time of the pharaohs to the plagues to the persecutions of the Holocaust, while Caroline Glick looks at the problem of Jew-hatred today, as it animates the lifestyles of large swaths of the Middle East.  It is a sad state of affairs, and one that gets only occasional lip service from the powers that be.

Case in point, President Obama recently gave a speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.   It was apparently a moving speech, but while he shared the stage with Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, he simply ignored Wiesel's challenges regarding the threats to Israel from Syria and Iran.  And coincidentally, it was also the first day on the job for Samantha Power as Chair of the President's new Atrocities Prevention Board.  Which is ironic because this is the same Samantha Power who has called for an armed invasion of Israel to force a two state solution upon them, as well as castigating Israel for so-called "war crimes" on multiple occasions.

So the White House again demonstrates it policy of saying one thing and doing another.  I've always thought actions speak louder than words, but it would be nice if voters would start applying that policy to this President, as his actions continually help to further legitimacy for anti-Semitic interests, from empowering the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by endorsing the deposing of Hosni Mubarak to failing to act against a still-tottering Syrian regime to failing to voice any support for the Green Revolution of Iran in 2009 to calling for a return to Israel's 1967 borders.  But then, it is hard to ignore the trends of history.  It is often easier to just go with the flow.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

An autistic child in New Jersey was bullied by his teachers and his father has the an entire day's worth of abuse on tape.  But the teachers responsible can't be fired, most likely because of union regulations.  There should be criminal charges filed here!
Obama's Labor Department is busy creating new regulations that ban farm chores for minors.  This government just gets more insane every day.  They are sure good at creating jobs for bureaucrats and illegals, but a farmer can't show his kid how to milk the cows.  Unbelievable.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

More evidence of bias at NPR.  Not that anyone who has been paying attention is surprised by this.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Neal Stephenson on the problem of Innovation Starvation. A sample:
Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.

In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” vs. the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
But read the whole thing.

Sunday, April 08, 2012

When people talk about their fears of a nationalized health care system letting older patients die because it isn't cost effective to cure them, this example from the NHS in the UK is exactly what they are talking about. An estimated 14,000 deaths a year from lack of treatment because medical professionals decided they were too old! You'd think folks in their sixties and seventies would get routine medical treatment for curable diseases like a bladder tumor, but instead they just get told it is their time to die and are sent home. Unbelievable.

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Looking at the real unemployment rate, from James Pethokoukis at The American. Hint, it sure ain't 8.2 %...

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Good piece in HuffPo highlighting the seizure issue in Madison County, Illinois with the experiences of a particular individual. The police engage in elaborate "fishing expeditions" designed to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. And when bad evidence spoils cases and federal officials urge for a particular officer's removal, the police union steps in to save his job and put him back on the street. Also, good insight into the world of K9 searches, and how unreliable they really are. These things go on all over the country. And they always prefer to seize the cash on the way out rather than the drugs on the way in, which telsl you quite a bit about what their true incentives are. State legislatures should remove the forfeiture incentives from police seizures, but with state budgets getting slashed, this is one of the only ways for police to make up the shortfall. So don't expect things to change.