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The not-so-guilty pleasures of Brad Thor

Brad Thor writes action adventure stories, largely directed to men, in which our hero tosses Islamic terrorists out of cars, pummels them, kneecaps them, threatens their wives and children with torture to obtain timely information from their terrorist husbands, and generally behaves as we would like to Islamic terrorists, without scruple or diffidence. In short, well written “penny dreadfuls“.

Tiring of high-minded discussion of morality and evolution, fatigued by discussions of Edmund Burke versus Thomas Paine, bored by the evolutionary implications of religion, Brad Thor was a welcome diversion.

One of the great things about Brad Thor books is that he writes what everyone knows or believes about Islam, and cannot say in more respectable venues:

  • Jihad is essential to Islam
  • moderate Muslims (in other words, sensible human beings) are failing in their religious duty to kill us
  • they are intent on colonizing us, not adapting to us
  • jihadists  consider non-Muslims sub-human chattel
  • any Muslim may decide to fulfil his religious duty to wage religious war at any time
  • There is no such thing as “radicalization”; it is only a matter of hearing the call “dawa” and off the young man goes to Syria, or London, to take up the cause of holy war against the infidels.

Observing this, my wife commented, “that is why in tyrannies they are as much concerned with fiction as with facts. They do not want literature to discuss feelings, thoughts, or perceptions that go against the official line.”

Thor is available in airports everywhere.

What did they think they were agreeing to? Eating ice cream?

Occasionally the gap between what I know for a fact and what appears in the newspapers to cries of shock! horror! is wide. Take the NSA and Snowden for instance. Of course the NSA and CSE and every other British commonwealth signals intelligence agency has been vacuuming everyone’s email and phone messages for years. What did you think they were doing? Playing bridge with each other in those sealed conclaves of Cray computers? They are not looking for you or your porn habits, your secret trysts, or your bad habits, though I am sure a  moment’s tracking will reveal everything you ever wanted to hide. They are looking for patterns that indicate Islamic terrorism, needles in haystacks the size of Jupiter. We are more transparent to them than the Emperor Shaddam IV was to the Guild Navigators.

The top lawyer for the National Security Agency told a civil liberties oversight board on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s data collection – knowledge which the firms have vigorously denied having.

NSA general counsel Rajesh De said companies like Facebook and Google had complete knowledge of all communications information and metadata collected by the agency pursuant to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, whether the material was gathered by the internet data-mining program PRISM or by the “so-called ‘upstream’ collection of communications moving across the internet,” the Guardian reported.

How could they not know? The tech companies had signed agreements with the NSA, acting under authority of law, to conform to the intelligence requirements of signals intelligence agencies. This from Wikipedia:

The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act also added a new Title VII to FISA which contained provisions similar, but not identical, to provisions in the Protect America Act of 2007 which had expired earlier in 2008. The new provisions in Title VII of FISA were scheduled to expire on December 31, 2012, but two days before the U.S. Senate extended the FISA Amendments Act for five years (until December 31, 2017) which renews the U.S. government’s authority to monitor electronic communications of foreigners abroad.[8]

Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States, but is limited to targeting non-U.S. persons. Once authorized, such acquisitions may last for periods of up to one year.

Under subsection 702(b) of the FISA Amendments Act, such an acquisition is also subject to several limitations. Specifically, an acquisition:

    May not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States;

  • May not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;
  • May not intentionally target a U.S. person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;
  • May not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States;
  • Must be conducted in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Section 702 authorizes foreign surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA), like PRISM and some earlier data collection activities which were previously authorized under the President’s Surveillance Program from 2001

You ask, quite reasonably, does this not exempt US citizens?

Yes it does.

So how do you collect data on US citizens?

Simple. What do you think the CSE does? The British and Australian counterparts?

Oh. So every signals intelligence agency uses its foreign intelligence powers to snoop on citizens of other countries and then shares data with a select trusted few agencies according to long-standing agreements?

Yes. The intelligence sharing among Anglosphere signal intelligence agencies is a deeper political fact than NATO.

Without breaking any law?

Yes. But note that, if any foreigner is involved, then the NSA can legally target the communications, even if the preponderance of them involves resident US citizens. So if Abu-Jihad abd el Nasir is targeted, his American correspondents in the territory of the US are a legitimate target.

The lies and hypocrisy start when the Googles of this world deny their active cooperation. The phone companies have been hand in glove with the intelligence agencies for ever, and why should it be any different in the Internet-protocol world?

And did I forget to mention Executive Order 12333 on the subject of US Intelligence activities?

An inconvenient truth: icebreaker stuck in high summer Antarctic ice

On Christmas Eve, at the height of the Antarctic’s summer, a group of scientists, tourists and journalists and Russian crew became trapped on the icebreaker Akademik Shokalski off the coast of  Antarctica. An Australian icebreaker sent to rescue it had to turn back because of thick ice. The previous rescue attempt by a Chinese icebreaker had to turn back.

Onboard the Finnish-built Shokalskiy were 26 tourists, 22 Russian crew, four UK journalists and 22 scientists from Australia and New Zealand hoping to recreate Sir Douglas Mawson’s epic Antarctic expedition to Commonwealth Day.

Well, that is what they claimed. In fact the entire affair was a publicity stunt intended to show the dramatic loss of Antarctic ice since the time of Sir Douglas Mawson’s tour of the Antarctic coast in 1911 by sled dogs.

The expedition originally set out to investigate the effects of climate change on the region. It is still expected that the ship will make its scheduled return on Jan. 4, 2014.

In their statement to the press, the warmist scientists said, in part:

We’re stuck in our own experiment. We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We followed Sir Douglas Mawson’s footsteps into Commonwealth Bay, and are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship.

Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up. We have found this has changed the system on many levels. The increase in sea ice has freshened the seawater below, so much so that you can almost drink it. This change will have impacts on the deep ocean circulation.

 

ait_mawson

Two of the four journalists aboard the ice-bound ship come from Britain’s left-wing standard bearer, the Guardian. One of them reports:

On Christmas Eve, a blizzard hit our ship with 50-knot winds – mild for these parts – that made it difficult to stand up straight on the deck … By Christmas morning, we were beset with ice. Our expedition was forced into a temporary pause, while we waited for the polar winds to be kind to us and blow the pack ice out of our way.

So here we have an icebreaker full of global warming agitators stuck in ice just past the summer solstice. What a global embarrassment!

So what are they going to do? Hide the decline! Nothing to look at here! Move on! Move on!

  • The scientific nature of the expedition will be hidden, it will be a tourist ship, an Antarctic adventure ship, a Russian ship.
  • The obvious connection between the build-up of ice and the presence or absence of global warming will go unmentioned, unlike the case of what would have happened if the bay had been ice-free.
  • It will become a story of heroic rescue efforts and doughty tourists surviving for weeks at minus 5C in a warm ship. [It is minus 15C outside tonight in Canada’s capital].

When Lawrence Solomon wrote that it was the year from hell for global warming catastrophists, he wrote too soon, but he was right. The global embarrassment will continue. Watch them try to hide it.

More on this at Wattsupwiththat.

I was wondering when this story would make it to the mainstream media

Various adventurers, seeking to show how warm the Arctic is becoming (they read the news too) have had to be rescued after they found themselves trapped in ice.

Arctic ice has increased 60% this year over 2012 levels. When did you first notice reading anything about it in the newspapers, or see it on television? Haven’t? I thought so.

You had to be readers of the UK Daily Mail or Fox News. (In 2012 Arctic sea ice was shrinking).

You can read also the comforting words (to an AGW enthusiast) of the debunker of the deniers in Slate, who seems to confuse the claim from warming since 2012 (Daily Mail) to warming since spring 2013. However, after you have done so, you can also go to Watts Up with That, on any given day, or see Christopher Monckton’s article here.

My point remains. When did this important piece of news about global cooling reach your eyes, and did you see it first in a blog or in the MSM?  Things that have been  known and discussed for weeks in the blogosphere reach the newspapers only after careful vetting.

 

Things I do not understand

1. Elvis Presley: I never got him. I still do not understand why the greasy drug-addicted hillbilly had the effect he did. What about Carl Perkins? Why of all the rockabilly musicians emerging in the 1950s was Presley singled out for world adulation?

2. Tattoos: Are vulgar signs of abandonment of the ideal of the body beautiful for the body distorted. They are ugly. They make one look uglier the older one gets. They indicate a propensity for hepatitis C, which was once virtually unknown outside the South Pacific Islands, and is now spreading with tattoo needles, among other needle-driven disease vectors.

3. Photographing your wife having sex with black men: I would not lend out my wife to anyone I would not trust with my chain saw, my rifle, or my wallet. In fact I do not think I would lend her out at all, both as she is not really mine to lend and because I might not like the results if I did.  Yet there seems to be a genre of home-made pornography that seems to involve wives being pictured penetrated by one or more black men, and there seems to be no lack of participants in this craze. Apart from the vulgarity of  posting photographs of the commission of group sex to the Internet, which is quite understandable in the conditions of life these days, and the possible embarrassment years later when she runs for alderman, school trustee, or member of parliament, the whole idea of letting one’s wife be fucked by others while the husband photographs the event is  detumescifying, to find a polite term. Call me a prude. I do not mind healthy people having sex. I do not mind people taking pix of same. I do not object to putting sexual stuff on the Internet, really. But I am mystified by this particular fetish.  My objection is not merely to the portrayal of it, it is to the weirdness of the act itself. Sexual tastes are beyond rational comprehension, aren’t they? Forgive me, readers, next thing you know I will be quoting Malcolm Muggeridge.After this reactionary outburst, I will sign myself in for anti-racist programming from a nearby human rights commission. But I still don’t get it.

The insufferable arrogance of Scott Pelley

Scott Pelley is the senior news anchor for CBS TV. He was recently awarded the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University. In his acceptance speech, Pelley says that the problem with the Internet is that it is spreading gossip and  rumours, while “journalists”, such as himself, are spreading “news”.

Read about him being trashed here in PJ Media by Tom Blumer.

Pelley’s speech is here; his part begins after 14 minutes in. “Amateur journalists became digital vigilantes” after the Boston bombings by the Tsarnaev jihadists. Shame, shame!

The legacy media

An entertaining exchange occurred between Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna and a reporter for the New York Times concerning the legacy media and the alternative media- the blogosphere.

Bodissey writes:

Our view of the legacy media might be summed up this way:

1.It creates a bubble of shared assumptions, whose inhabitants remain largely unaware of those assumptions.

2.It enforces this shared uniformity through a combination of monetary/professional incentives (“You’ll never work in this town again!”) and the fear of shaming (“What you said in your article borders on racism!”). Those who step outside the boundaries may be consigned to a small ghetto of people who share similar opinions, or experience legal problems (e.g. Andrew Bolt, Ezra Levant). Some exceptions are those who are too famous and too shrewd to be suppressed, with Mark Steyn being the most obvious example.

3.It stigmatizes information obtained through sources other than those within the bubble. This is true even when the material in question is first-hand, original reporting — which is generally of higher quality than that of the legacy media.

4.Because of its immense financial resources, its protection by governments, and its virtual lock on popular awareness, practitioners in the legacy media do not have to hold themselves to high standards — in fact, the opposite is true: those outlets that hew consistently to the august high principles of journalism may not do well.The blogosphere, on the other hand, is ruthless in culling out mendacity, obfuscation, short-cuts, etc. I learned this the hard way early on in my blogging career — when you make a mistake, you get eaten alive by your readers (assuming you allow comments) and your fellow bloggers. After a while, I learned not to publish things that weren’t well-sourced, and to issue prompt and prominent corrections and retractions when I made mistakes.

 

Economic news coverage

John Taylor notes the following on his blog.

Twenty years ago this month my colleague Bob Hall and I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about how “in recent months press reporting about the economy has become so pessimistic that it has completely lost touch with reality.” (October 16, 1992)…

Today press reporting seems to have switched to the other side of reality. Compared to October 1992, economic growth is now slower, unemployment is higher, and tragically the long-term unemployment rate is twice has high. And reported economic growth has been declining rather than improving as it was in 1992. Yet, in recent months much reporting about the economy has turned so upbeat that it has again lost touch with reality…

When asked what caused the switch, I answer, facetiously, that people must have read our article, remembered it, tried to make a correction, but unintentionally overcorrected…

1992 had a Republican incumbent and 2012 has a Democrat incumbent. That is all you need to know about the news coverage.