Scapegoating Fox-Jon Stewart asks: What difference does it make?

Jon Stewart incites audience hatred of Fox News.

They love it!

http://youtu.be/rDbABdX1V2w

Video was flagged as copyright violation after 57 hits!

So go here and watch from 7:30 to 8:39:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Kbe0pDcutRo#t=455

Then read the description:

Jon Stewart incites audience hatred of Fox News. They love it.

The irony of Stewart’s Hillary Clintonesque “What difference does it make?” schtick is easily missed because the irrationality of the humor misdirects the audience from the obvious fact that Obama always had the power to not drop the bombs.

This clip is excerpted from a monologue which explains the Syria red line fiasco shortly after the Kerry press conference when he glibly suggested a bombing strike could be averted if Syria gave up their chemical weapons in a week.

longer version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbe0pDcutRo %5Bsame as above]

Scapegoating:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_boy

“A whipping boy was a young boy who was assigned to a young prince and was punished when the prince misbehaved or fell behind in his schooling. Whipping boys were established in the English court during the monarchies of the 15th century and 16th centuries. “

A picture from the past

Deprogramming available here: https://secure.palmcoastd.com/pcd/document?iid=054DDI2FPFD 

Rx: six weeks

Christmas at sea

It a surprisingly easy to read poem from the 19th century. It’s by Robert Louis Stevenson:

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rlstevenson/bl-rlstevenson-chratsea.htm

 

ABC documentary producers caught in sting!

If only they had brought Kruschev!
Documentary producers negotiate what to do about the surprise cameras with Joanne Nova and husband in the kitchen

ABC here is the Australian Broadcast Network

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/abc-doco-uncut-evans-nova-minchin-and-rose-the-full-unedited-video/

When the Smith and Nasht came to our house (on behalf of the ABC) to take footage for the “I can change your mind” documentary, David and I asked fellow skeptic and camera-man Barry Corke if he could film them filming us, so we have our own copy of what happened. He agreed — it was obvious to all of us that we needed some insurance against biased edits. We all knew that petty chicanery was possible. James Delingpole had recently given the BBC three good hours of his time, only to find they trimmed all of his clever answers down, waited for him to have a hypoglycemic vague moment and then crowed about how the great James Delingpole was, can you believe, tongue tied (the failure!)

It just goes to show what all should know about TV news: if you give people power and a camera, they will lie (and continue to as they must keep up appearances for the casual observers who can’t see the tangled web.)

There’s uncut video at the link which begins with wrangling over the extra cameras that were used as insurance.  It seems that this was done as a surprise! An agreement was reached that the insurance video could only be used in full, uncut.

In other climate news today:

Too Funny! I send Michael Mann a free WUWT calendar as a Christmas gift, and he goes full conspiracy theory

The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition

 

The Spanish Inquisition was the target of a propaganda campaign fueled by the novelty of the newly invented printing press.  As a result, its place as the top symbol of all that was wrong with (fill in the blank yourself) is likely an error.

 A New Look At the Spanish Inquisition

The above link mentions the YouTube video in the next link and seems to borrow quite a bit from it:

Timewatch – The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition (BBC 1994)

The video documentary is somewhat gruesome and lasts 46 minutes. It’s quite serious, but the first two minutes may seem otherwise, they seem to try to capture the vagaries of the myth of our imaginations.

The documentary fails to capture the entire importance of this myth today.  It ends with references to the red scare of the fifties without getting into detail. Perhaps that’s because Democrats always controlled the House  Un-American Activities Committee.

There is a more subtle aspect though.  People with a vague sense of history may have the idea that the Spanish Inquisition was the inevitable outcome of some sort of religious tyranny that began with the so called “Dark Ages” and the Dark Ages were the result of the beginnings of Christianity since they coincided in time.  These are false views.  The film does dispel somewhat the religious tyranny angle as there is mention of the secular role.  The dark ages were the result of the collapse of Rome and bad climate as far as I know.

 

Study Says Community Reinvestment Act Induced Banks To Take Bad Risks

http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/21/study-says-community-reinvestment-act-in

Note that the authors of the study caution that their work here may actually understate the impact of the CRA. How? Because the study assumes that the major impact of CRA took place when banks were undergoing examination regarding their compliance with CRA goals. If banks found it difficult to shift gears in preparation for such exams, they may have altered their overall behavior to satisfy politicians and regulators. Or, as the authors put it in their conclusion, “If adjustment costs in lending behavior are large and banks can’t easily tilt their loan portfolio toward greater CRA compliance, the full impact of the CRA is potentially much greater than that estimated by the change in lending behavior around CRA exams.”

h/t @HipsterLiberty

Paper from prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18609

New study confirms economy was destroyed by Democrat policies

http://www.examiner.com/article/new-study-confirms-economy-was-destroyed-by-democrat-policies?CID=examiner_alerts_article

h/t @thetalentscout

But non-Fox media have spent years deliberately and relentlessly inoculating people against the facts, training them to mindlessly blame Bush for being in charge when Democrat policies destroyed the economy. So here we sit, to this day, still watching Obama excuse and shrug off endless economic failures, illegal government takeovers and utter national bankruptcy with zero accountability.

Gun controversy yields exciting talking heads! (really)

I was about to post a video of an intense discussion(links at bottom) between Piers Morgan and  Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, when over the radio, I heard the much heralded press event from the NRA by Wayne LaPierre.

It really has to be seen to be appreciated, but here’s a couple quotes:

Immediately following a disruption which the media were all too eager to photograph, he says (continuing with his speech apparently uninterruptedly, not responding to the heckling reporter asking a question):

Rather than face their own moral failings,
the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.

Later he says:

Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you’re willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.

There’s so much more, video is here:

http://www.therightscoop.com/watch-wayne-lapierres-speech-at-the-nra-press-conference/

If you fear being persuaded by charismatic common sense, you can read it all here:

http://home.nra.org/pdf/Transcript_PDF.pdf

HOT MIC: REPORTERS OVERHEARD SLAMMING NRA PRESSER, PRAISING CODE PINK PROTESTERS

POLITICO RUNS ‘HITLER PHOTO’ OF NRA CHIEF

Political and celebrity ghouls gin up outrage over NRA press conference

After Columbine:

Flashback: Bill Clinton Pledges Funds to Add Police to Schools

Link mentioned at beginning:

Here is Piers Morgan being destroyed by level headed common sense:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FVQgLkbLjQ

found here:

Obama’s Media Parrot Demolished on CNN.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-media-parrot-demolished-on-cnn/

found here:

http://badblue.bitnamiapp.com/trendr8.htm

What Piers Morgan doesn’t want you to know about Britain and violent crime

So were Piers Morgan and Christiane Amanpour dishonest about crime rates last night?

Top climate bureaucrats at the IPCC continue theater of the absurd

IPCC Declares Its Intent to Circumvent Expert Reviewers

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/12/15/ipcc-declares-its-intent-to-circumvent-expert-reviewers/

It doesn’t matter how carefully those 800 people examined the IPCC’s text. It doesn’t matter how long they laboured over their comments. The IPCC reserves the right to keep changing the substance of the report.

The external reviewers will see none of this new material. They will be given no opportunity to critique it.  Let no one dare say that the final report can be relied on because 800 external expert reviewers gave it their blessing.

This Is Called Cheating (Part 1)

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/12/20/this-is-called-cheating-part-1/

IPCC officials know that the papers to be published in that issue of the PNAS have not been written yet. Their own document says the submission deadline isn’t until January 31, 2013.

So why is the IPCC giving its authors this kind of heads-up? Is it clairvoyant? Does it already know that these papers will be so ground-breaking the IPCC won’t be able to ignore them?

Perhaps. Or perhaps IPCC officials are telling authors where to look for material that fills inconvenient gaps in their narrative.

 

h/t and comments here:

http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/12/21/cheating-at-the-ipcc.html

 

 

 

 

JournoLister @ National Journal: Where’s Obama in the Benghazi Report?

A Libyan girl places flowers at the gate of the U.S. consulate, in Benghazi, Libya, Monday, Sept. 17, 2012. The U.S. Ambassador, Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in an attack on the consulate Tuesday Sept. 11, 2012, part of a wave of assaults on U.S. diplomatic missions in Muslim countries over a low-budget movie made in the United States that denigrates the Prophet Muhammad. Arabic reads, “private property.”

In a replay of Abu Ghraib, the government excuses itself at the highest levels.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/where-s-obama-in-the-benghazi-report-20121219

This article actually tries to draw a parallel with Abu Ghraib. This appears to be a rather devious way of absolving Obama while seeming to do the opposite.  It’s plenty easy to rationalize this away as the failings of bureaucracy, or as Bush did it too, and the results were worse. Note how they keep the idea that this is about a video in the caption.  This too, is a “blame conservatives” strategy.

Update: the text about Abu Ghraib is here:

The Pickering-Mullen report was also reminiscent of  the early reports on the Abu Ghraib interrogation and detention scandal of nearly a decade ago. Even as President George W. Bush continued to blame the scandal on “a few American troops who dishonored our country,” it only gradually came to light that the practices at Abu Ghraib stemmed from a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including the president himself. And much as the State Department did here, the Pentagon sought to investigate itself over Abu Ghraib, carefully limiting in rank those it questioned at first.

Note that among the far left, Obama and the MSM are viewed as too conservative, this should help clarify what’s going on here (this is really the fault of conservatives).  Wiki says the writer, Michael Hirsh, was a member of JournoList.

end update

h/t: http://www.lucianne.com/thread/?artnum=716260

Couldn’t find on Memorandum, the report stories had dropped to the bottom of section one, top story is “CNN poll: are GOP policies too extreme?”  Attached stories are about fiscal cliff as yesterday Boehner gave his sub one minute ultimatum press conference to announce a vote on Plan B.

FIRE: New Report: Three-Fifths of Colleges Seriously Restrict Free Speech on Campus

http://thefire.org/article/15257.html

Note: A lot of the links in the article do not work for me.

The article notes a 13% improvement over five years ago, I guess so much damage has been done they can relax their grip now.