Dedications: Bill Ayers

Obama pal and former 60’s radical terrorist Bill Ayers has been denied “emeritus” status at the University of Illinois in large part because he dedicated his 1973 manifesto “Prarie Fire” to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of RFK. RFK's son, Chris Kennedy just so happens to sit on the board responsible for assigning emeritus status and didn’t take too kindly to Ayers’ dedication to his father’s murder.

Ayers dedicated the book to many “political prisoners”, most of them are nobodies who never received much national attention. Its mainly a list of left wing suburbanite radicals like Ayers from elite families mixed in with black nationalists.

One of those “political prisoners” did receive a bit of notoriety. Darrell Peatry is listed in Ayer’s book as a “political prisoner”. He was a member of the “De Mau Mau” group. The name is taken from the Kenyan Mau Mau movement that sought to drive British citizens from Kenya in the 50’s. The Mau Mau’s only killed a few dozen British and save most of their savagery for the thousands of native Kenyans they butchered.

Peatry’s De Mau Mau group was a kind of fusion between the Kenyan Mau Mau’s and the Manson family. They claimed to be a movement of disgruntled balck Vietnam veterans, but like most “disgruntled veterans movements” in the 60’s and 70’s, their ranks were full of wannabes, posers, and civilian groupies. De Mau Mau’s objective was to eliminate “white power” by randomly murdering middle class and upper middle class white families.

The scenes evoked grisly memories of the Manson killings. In August, Retired Insurance Broker Paul Corbett, his wife and sister-in-law were found dead, each shot in the back of the head with a .25-cal. gun, in the pantry of Corbett's $100,000 home in the fashionable Chicago suburb of Barrington Hills. A fourth victim, Corbett's stepdaughter, was dead in the blood-spattered kitchen, shot in the chest with a .30-cal. weapon. A month later Machine Designer Stephen Hawtree, his wife and teen-age son were executed in a similar fashion in the basement of their rural home in Monee, Ill. In both instances there was no apparent motive for the slaughter.

So here’s to you Mr Ayer’s and all your beloved “political prisoners”, because after all being a good leftist means never having to say you are sorry. Each of those nine trustees who opposed better put the bomb squad on speed dial. Old habits die hard.

Harvard: The Best and Brightest – 9/11 Truther Edition

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University’s stated mission is to "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States". Like most journalistic organizations it has a decidedly left wing audience, staff and editorial policy. Not that it should surprise anyone, an organization run by journalists for journalists being left wing isn’t exactly a man bites dog story.

However I was struck by an article on the Nieman Foundation’s website about the Time magazine cover depicting a young girl disfigured by the Taliban for running away from an abusive husband and his family.

The author of the Nieman article, Ralph Lopez, performs a dizzying array of rhetorical back flips to play the “blame America first card”, including a “history lesson” on how the US destabilized a “progressive” regime through our backing of the Afghan Mujahedeen:

In 1979, the CIA started secretly aiding opponents of the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, increasing the likelihood that the Soviet Union would be drawn into what Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped would be "their own Vietnam." The young socialist government, which had overthrown a centuries-old monarchy, was cosmopolitan, outward-looking, and stressed the education of women as well as men. This was a time when women in Kabul could wear mini-skirts. In its search for proxies to attack the Kabul regime, Brzezinski and the Cold Warriors turned to the conservative warlord elements in the countryside. They were of all ethnicities; Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek. What they had in common was their ability to raise and organize fighters – and their Medieval attitudes toward women.

It’s a simple enough story to lefties like Mr Lopez: America was interfering in the internal affairs of a “progressive” regime. Never mind that in 1978, the year that the “progressive” KGB run People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan launched its coup on the Afghan government, the new “progressive” government instituted a widespread agriculture collectivization scheme, forced the closure of all religious houses of worship, assassinated every tribal and religious leader they could get their hands on, and brought in thousands of KGB advisors to help with re-education. Minor details that Mr Lopez could have included.

After reading this piece of shit left wing apologia I thought, “there they go again”. On a hunch though, I decided to Google Ralph Lopez, not knowing much about the guy, and boy oh boy was I surprised with what I found.

It seems that Lopez writes for Opednews.com and he wrote a delightful article on April 3, 2008 titled: It Has Happened: I'm a 9/11 Truther; A New Investigation, Broad Amnesty, and Forgiveness.

It was happening to me. Reading all that two and four-star brass saying it looked like a conspiracy put me face-to-face with it. I was becoming a 9/11 Truther. Kooks, lunatics, nuts. Everyone knows this. But these experts were just too credible, something the movement hadn't been before. I didn't need to be an expert or do much more research. It had been done, by military personnel with more flying time and expertise than I would have in a dozen lifetimes. And if they said there were a hell of lot of questions that needed to be answered in a new commission, That was good enough for me. I am now a 9/11 Truther. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

So is this what Harvard’s Nieman Foundation found when it scraped the barrel of lefty writers in its pursuit to cobble together another blame America first hot piece ..... a fucking truther?

If this is what Harvard and Yale (since it seems that Lopez is a Yaley), the mills producing America’s political and cultural elite ..... our “Best and Brightest”, are churning out, then we are seriously fucked.

I wonder though, would Harvard’s Nieman Foundation ever give space on its prestigious pages for a Birther, or does being a good left really mean never having to say you’re sorry ..... about anything.

Daniel Ellsberg – another lefty who never has to say he’s sorry.

One of the reasons I love listening to my local NPR affiliate is because every so often they trot out some long forgotten iconic lefty dinosaur and serenade them with love and beatifications.

WNYC’s On the Media resurrected the decrepit anti-Vietnam hero Daniel Ellsberg this weekend to lecture us on the hopelessness of Afghanistan and why we have to surrender there as well .... just praying that some “courageous” DOD functionary will leak the goods to seal Afghanistan’s fate.

For those of who don’t know the whole story, Ellsberg’s claim to fame is that in 1971 he leaked a top secret Rand Corporation assessment of the war in Vietnam to the Washington Post and NY Times. He was later tried on charges relating to espionage but the case ended in a mistrial, due in part to revelations that his shrinks office had been broken into by Nixon’s plumbers.

Ellsberg has spend the past 35 years milking his 15 minutes of fame for all its worth. While a minor player in the Vietnam saga, he portrays himself as one of the vanguard members in the anti-war effort, without whom we’d still be fighting there today. That’s not unusual. Some people who get accustomed to the limelight are unwilling to go quietly into the night and do whatever they have to stay in front of the cameras. They become comfortable with the narrative they construct about themselves and repeat it so often they come to believe it. Think of Lauren Conrad. But the public grows tired of hearing the same story time after time so Ellsberg had to get creative with his message and his audience.

He befriended Jim Jones, and spent time preaching the gospel of why America sucks at the People’s Temple a few short years before the bloodletting in Guyana. Ellsberg claimed that UN Ambassador Andrew Young told him that Martin Luther King jr had actually been assassinated by the FBI. So willing to sacrifice his reputation to get back into the limelight, Ellsberg actually wrote and signed an affidavit to this effect and submitted it to lawyer and crackpot extraordinaire Mark Lane (bosom buddy and legal consul to Jim Jones). He, along with hundreds of other useful idiots, signed a declaration calling for a investigation into the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after some shit head at The Nation Magazine alleged that the civilian airliner was actually a USAF reconnaissance flight and the passengers were sacrificed by Reagan to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment. Not to be out done, he also believes that “hardliners” within the Chairmen of the Joint Chief’s along with the CIA had JFK killed.

More recently Ellsberg has tried to maintain his relevance by hopping on board the 9/11 truth movement and by calling on “patriots” in the DOD to reveal any information about a potential military strike on Iran.

Ellsburg self righteous desperation to remain relevant has led him down a path that would assure, if he were a conservative, that no self respecting person would have anything to do with him … most definitely not one of the beautiful people over at NPR. The shameful allegations, relationships and outright lies, bordering on blood libel, should have guaranteed his relegation to the darker corners of American political life.

But like so many on the left who swim the waters of dark conspiracy, being a good left means never having to say you are sorry.

Science Blogs

I have been spending a few months over at Scienceblogs and have been generally disappointed with the site and its content. After reading some truly first rate articles about … well, science and technology, I found that there exists a large portion of the website dedicated to political and philosophical discussions. It turns out that its not just “large” but appears to occupy a majority of the site’s content … at least based on my observations.

The philosophical topics tend to focus on the New Atheist’s attempt to argue a purely philosophical debate by interjecting “science”. That and by generally being pricks. No surprise there.

The political topics are the usual boilerplate statist/lefty arguments on nearly everything under the sun, but usually go something like this “OBAMA IS GOOD, OBAMA IS GREAT, WE SURRENDER OUR WILL TO HIM ON THIS DATE” and “FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER”.

I think ever since Einstein (maybe Newton, who knows) used his celebrity to step from the scientific to the political realm (read Einstein’s asinine lectures on socialism for more on that), there has been a rush of mainly liberal and left wing scientists to follow suit. It is argued, by them at any rate, that since they are experts in X, Y and Z, that this expertise naturally lends itself to them being experts in policies impacted by X, Y and Z …. as well as every other letter in the alphabet. After all, they are flipping geniuses and who can argue with that?

It’s the notion that the celebrity scientist is an expert on anything the pontificate about and to question them is to reject the scientific method and rationality.

Take Carl Sagan for example.

Sagan was, by all accounts, an accomplished and intelligent man. He was a well respected authority on Astronomy but unfortunately he believed that his reputation on scientific issues should give him equal authority on scientific and moral matters and worse, he allowed his political biases to cloud his judgment of technical and scientific matters. Sagan’s work on “Nuclear Winter” is an example where he was willing to support a scientific theory because it supported his own political biases and not because it was good sound science.

Sagan didn’t actually develop the idea of Nuclear Winter”, it was initially hypothesized in the Soviet Union by Georgy Golitsyn in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee of Soviet Scientists in Defense of Peace, Against the Nuclear Threat. It should have been a flashing red light that a scientific conclusion like “a large nuclear exchange, even if completely one sided, would cause the earth’s climate to plummet 30 degrees C” would be coming out of the Soviet Union. Especially so given the committee’s Orwellian name. Couple this with recent relations that this was disinformation campaign run by the KGB and that one of Sagan’s team members, Soviet physicist Vladimir Alexandrov, disappeared in Madrid never to be seen again, and its painfully clear in retrospect that this was part of the larger Soviet influence campaign on the Nuclear Freeze movement.

Aside from the issue that there are indications that the KGB may have had a hand in shaping Sagan’s conclusions (unbeknownst to Sagan to be sure), “Nuclear Winter” was a sales job to further Sagan’s brand of politics and he hit the circuit to push it. Months before the release of any peer reviewed results Sagan lobbied the press and politicians very hard to sell this to the world.

As Michael Chriton said: “this is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold”

After quite a bit of back and forth over Nuclear Winter in the 80’s Sagan saw his chance to demonstrate to the world the truthiness of his ideas. Near the end of the first Gulf War, Sagan along with toady Richard Turco predicted that the oil fires in Kuwait were spewing so much soot into the air that agriculture in SE Asia would be severely effected by it, so much that there would be frost in spring and summer in SE Asia and the effects globally would lead to a year without a summer*. Sagan debated Fred Singer (noted climate change skeptic) on Nightline during which he made several more dire predictions while Singer said that Sagan was acting like a hysterical Nancy and the soot would quickly settle out.

Needless to say Fred Singer was right and Sagan was wrong.

All of which leads me to conclude the following: Science and politics don’t mix well, regardless of who is doing the mixing. Let relevant scientific fields speak with authority within their relevant fields, and leave it to that.

*given Sagan’s notoriety, the specific nature of the predictions as well as how spectacularly bad they were, its amazing that there isnt a copy of this (for free) anywhere in the internet, so I have cut and pasted it here

Compare and Contrast

Robert Novak’s recent passing has brought out the usual bile that is typical when someone like Novak dies. Nearly every obituary castigates Novak for his role making it publicly know that Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie was responsible for him going to Africa to investigate potential sales of uranium ore to Iraq.

After all, some people who out the identity of CIA agents are actually celebrated as heroes. Compare and contrast the Novak post mortem with The Nation Magazine's eulogy of Philip Agee, CIA turncoat and KGB agent:

We mourn the passing of Philip Agee, the courageous former CIA officer who, in his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, exposed the agency's subversion of democracy and its practices of torture and murder, naming hundreds of officers, agents and companies involved with the crimes. Agee was motivated, he said, by the CIA's support for "the worst imaginable horrors" in Latin America. Agee paid a high price for his courage. Perhaps the best way to remember Agee is to support others who find the courage to expose criminal misconduct by their own governments

Agee's high price was spending the last 30 years of his life living in relative comfort in Cuba running a travel agency when he should have gotten a bullet in the back of his head.

But like most things with the left, its all about politics in the end.

Something that really caught my eye in John Nichol’s obituary was this line.

Some of us also recall--and have a hard time forgiving--Novak's role in what Saul Landau correctly described as the "organized right wing attack" on the memory of murdered Chilean diplomat and dissident Orlando Letelier.

Nichols is referring to a mostly forgotten incident where Novak used his contacts and his column to take the “meme of the day” and turn it completely on its head.

Orlando Letelier was former Chilean diplomat who spent his time lobbying against Pinochet’s government after the coup in 1973. He was a minor celebrity among the leftwing glitterati/literati activist community when he was working out of the Washington DC based Institute for Policy Studies in the mid 70’s until his car was blown up, an assassination that was most likely organized in Chile.

While Letelier’s liberal allies were busy crucifying the Chilean government and the CIA (they must have been involved after all) over this peaceful souls death, Robert Novak and Rowland Evans were leaked the contents of Letelier’s briefcase recovered by the FBI during the course of its investigation into the murder. The contents, not surprisingly, showed that Letelier was part of a coordinated effort to manipulate and coordinate liberals in the United States (where have we heard that before) to lobby against the Chilean government and return a more Soviet friendly government back to Santiago. This coordination, not surprisingly, was being spearheaded by East Block intelligence agencies and its proxies in Cuba, who also not surprisingly were subsidizing Letelier work with cash remittances from the Cuban government. He also had contact information for dozens of suspected and known East Block and Cuban intelligence agents.
Novak didn’t sit idly by with this, went to press with it and was stymied and attacked every step of the way. Only the Washington Post printed his articles, with other outlets (most notably the NY Times) either ignoring it completely or posting attack pieces on Novak.

And this was the sin that Nichols and his pals were referring to: using ones talent and access to sources to spoil a perfectly good narrative about a left wing icon.

We lost a good journalist.

Being good lefty means never having to say you are sorry, #1

I have decided to start a series of entries on hypocrisy and the ability of the left and the popular culture machine in general the ability to forgive any sin, no matter how grave, just so long as you walk the walk and talk the talk.

It will be called “Being good lefty means never having to say you are sorry”.

First at bat, Bruce Springsteen’s stage buddy at the Coronation festivities: Pete Seeger.

Pete Seeger’s life has been marked by tireless and reflexive advocacy for left wing causes. He spent summers entertaining young comrades at the Camp Woodland summer camp for the children of New York City’s left wing community. Seeger sang and donated for other lefty dejour causes such as the end to the Korean War, support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, the Rosenbergs, nuclear disarmament (unilateral naturally), the environmental movement, Vietnam, Nicaragua and just about anything deemed appropriate by the left.

His adherence to the Party line was so strict and unflinching that in 1941 Seeger and his band “The Almanacs” released the album “Songs for John Doe”. It was during that magical time of global peace and prosperity before Operation Barbarossa when the Soviet Union and its gentile and loving leader, Uncle Joe, was helping its pal Hitler put down the totalitarian threat that was posed by their bloodthirsty neighbors in Poland.

The CPUSA was under the complete control of Moscow, and the Soviets now saw an ally, all be it temporary, in Nazi Germany. So they directed their subordinates in Europe and the United States to lobby for peace instead of confrontation with Berlin, and that was the primary message in “Songs for John Doe”.

Seeger’s lyrics eviscerated Roosevelt for aggressive warmongering policies like making sure Britain didn’t starve with “Lend Lease”. (from “Washington Breakdown”)

Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea, You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea.

You may say it's for defense,
But that kinda talk that I'm against.
I'm against, I'm against,
That kinda talk ain't got no sense.

Or ranting against the peace time conscription that began in 1940: (from “C is for Conscription”)

I'd rather be at home,
Even sleeping in a holler log,
I'd rather be here
home,
Even sleeping in a holler log.
Than go to the army
Be treated
like a dirty dog!

Naturally, all of this changed 3:15am June 22, 1941 when the first of 166 German divisions poured into Soviet occupied Poland. The CPUSA changed its tone on war, and all the members fell into line.

Seeger had all copies of “Songs for John Doe” recalled and destroyed because they were subversive and could harm the war effort he now enthusiastically supported. He and the Almanacs quickly penned a new album, “Dear Mr. President”, in which the theme was definitely not the kind of pacifism Seeger preached before:

I'm a-goin' to Berlin
To Mister Hitler's town
I'm gonna take my
forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.

How Hitler went to Russia
In search of Russian oil
But the only oil he'll find there
Is a pot
in which he'll boil.

Seeger later enlisted in the Army and entertained troops in the Pacific . Interestingly enough, in all the lyrics in all the songs, its never about protecting America or defeating Imperial Japan, its always about fighting fascism and the betrayal of Russia.

This episode really underscores what’s wrong with people like Seeger, they root for the coach, not for the home team. They are willing to sacrifice every ideal they claim to hold dear to them when those ideals become inconvenient.

Bur most importantly, when they do these things, when they betray themselves and their principles the pop-culture machine and rest of the left always warmly welcomes them back into their bosoms.

Because being good lefty means never having to say you are sorry.

Sometimes I wonder if these people would be on our sides if Al-Qaeda attacked Cuba or North Korea? One could only wonder.