Category Archives: Media Criticism

Home Schooling Is Not For Everyone

…and neither is public schooling:

…unlike those who wish to suppress homeschooling, homeschool parents are rarely if ever heard demanding that the government pass a law demanding that every other family in the country do things the way they do. Unlike our German friends, homeschool parents do not wish to seize custody of other people’s children simply because they prefer a different model of education. The irony here is that more than a few of our public schools are so dangerous and dysfunctional that sending one’s children there really ought to be considered an act of neglect, if not for the fact that those poor parents have practically no choice in the matter.

It’s not about education. It’s about control.

A Mayor Against Illegal Guns

…is arrested for a gun crime:

Schiliro had had police bring 20-year-old Nicholas Dorsam to his home to drink wine, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. When Dorman attempted to leave, Schiliro prevented him from doing so, shooting the gun into a stack of papers and threatened to kill himself. Schiliro later credited Dorsam with helping save his life.

It’s almost as though these anti-gun nuts who want to take away our guns are projecting on us their own lack of control and irresponsibility.

Benghazi

The latest document release makes clear that what anyone paying attention at the time thought had happened was what had happened:

In the fall of 2012, the Obama White House was focused on re-election to the point that it was shutting its real duties out. President Obama was shutting his own real duties out, campaigning far more than governing. He hadn’t met with his jobs council in months. He was skipping his daily security intel briefings. The Sept. 10 release was sent out to make him look presidential, without actually performing the duties of president. There was no security meeting, and no forces were actually moved around anywhere to gear up for the 9-11 anniversary. There was a conference call, a conversation, and a press release.

The administration had been warned that security in Benghazi was deteriorating and an attack was likely and would be deadly, repeatedly. The black flag of Islam was already flying over government buildings in Benghazi. Ansar al-Sharia, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Libya, was gaining power. Terrorists had already attacked the Red Cross and the British embassy in Benghazi, forcing both to abandon the city. The last remaining target of three that al Qaeda had stated its intent to attack was the US facility. But Clinton’s State Department consistently denied requests to beef up security, and Obama couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about anything but winning re-election.

The attack happens. It’s clear from the beginning that it was an attack, the military briefed administration officials that it was an attack, but the State Department had been denying field requests from Benghazi to beef up security, and there’s a paper trail of those denials. Obama hasn’t been attending to his daily intel briefings. Obama, derelict in his duty every bit as much as Clinton, has been campaigning on the theme that “al Qaeda is defeated and on the run.” Well, here they are to spoil that particular campaign line and re-write their own in the blood of four Americans.

The inconvenience of four dead Americans could not be allowed to become speedbumps slowing Obama’s path to re-election.

And so the ongoing parade of lies.

The Vision For Space Exploration

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Bush’s speech, and no one seems to have noticed. Down the memory hole, I guess.

Anyway, I’ll have a piece up sometime today about it at USA Today.

[Mid-morning update]

Heh. Google has picked up this post, and it’s the only one in the top ten that is actually discussing it. I can sort of see why NASA didn’t make a big deal of it, given that most people consider it to have been canceled in 2010. I disagree, though, as you’ll see.

Christian Martyrdom

Meet the new age of it, same as the old one, absent the lions:

It’s chilling to imagine worse treatment than what the average North Korean prisoner has reported, including a mother forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, and tales of subsisting on nothing more than rats and insects. According to first-hand accounts from former prisoners reported by Amnesty International, “every former inmate at one camp had witnessed a public execution, one child was held for eight months in a cube-like cell so small he couldn’t move his body and an estimated 40% of inmates die from malnutrition.”

Syria, ranked as the third-worst country by Open Doors, has devolved in the last year to a horror show for Christians. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea noted in December 2013 a message she received from a contact in Syria who reported, “Kidnapping, killings, ransom, rape . . . 2013 is a tragedy for Christians in Syria. All Syrians have endured great suffering and distress. The Christians, however, often had to pay with their lives for their faith. Our bishops and nuns have been kidnapped, our political leader killed by torture. After our Christian villages have been occupied, our churches have been destroyed and even mass graves were found in Saddad. [T]he Islamists have put [to] the Christians the alternative: Islam or death. Why [is] the West just watching?”

They came for the Christians, and I said nothing, because I was post-Christian.