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POPSProject Valour-IT USMC Birthday Edition Blatherings Blog offers a Birthday Toast from former Commandant General Louis H. Wilson. Right Pundits salutes our Marine of the Day, Corporal Jason Dunham: You can see a photo of Jason below, and watch the moving video of President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Honor to Corporal Jason Dunham, USMC, posthumously. Courtesy of Dr. Melissa, Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com gives a shout out to his fellow Marines. No Sheeples has General Conway’s Birthday message. The Marines have given a lot for us. Ercille has thoughts on how you can pay it forward. Michelle Malkin rocks!!! Mike the Marine’s Birthday video from 2008. See also: Drew at AoSHQ has a USMC birthday post up, as well. Coalition of the Swilling weighs in on that long, unbroken line. .Remembering Cpl. Jason Dunham: Blatherings Blog has a tribute to Jason Dunham and video, too! Read the following
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POPSRights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense (Israel) and those perpetrated intentionally (Hamas and Hezbollah).
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POPS"Violence is animalistic" meme reduces support for war More: Although right-wing authoritarians "typically show strong in-group bias and support for violence against out-groups, their heightened need to view themselves as non-animals makes them reticent to demonstrate violence when it is linked to animality," Motyl concludes. It should be noted that 104 of the 136 participants in the test were women. Before generalizing these results too widely, one would like to see them duplicated with a mostly male sample, preferably one from outside the walls of academia. Nevertheless, these are hopeful findings for those looking for ways to inspire peaceful resolutions to problems.
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POPSRon Clark Academy Obamacare Rap on CNN (Propaganda Video) The kids from Ron Clark Academy were featured on CNN singing a definitely pro Obamacare song . CNN made no qualms about not only letting the kids rap in favor of healthcare reform, but they also displayed the lyrics loud and clear for all to see. The left in this country has a clear and sometimes not so clear agenda, but an agenda none the less. It’s simply reprehensible that the left would stoop to the level of using school children to push that agenda. The Ron Clark Academy video on CNN proves that without a doubt. By Shannon Bell More Legal News: Detroit Teenagers Shot: Cody 9th Grade Academy Students Shot Raymond Clark, III: Lab Tech Arrested in Annie Le Murder Case (Photo) Obama Health-Care: 5 Freedoms Lost Herman Thomas: The Spanking Judge (Video) Randy Quaid and Wife Arrested! Deval Patrick is Obama Supreme Court
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POPSStart seeing micro-inequities More: A micro-inequity can be very micro. It can involve an action or words or even a tone of voice or a gesture. The inequity can be a deliberate attempt to harm someone or it can be unintentional, rooted in a person's perceptions about others. Whatever the source and however minor each separate event, over the years the cumulative effect of these little incidents, words, and gestures on an individual and on various segments of society (academia, business, even within families) is not so micro. There is a complete spectrum between the mini-incidents and the big unambiguous ones that most people would agree are sexist or racist. Clearly we need to eradicate the big unambiguous examples of discrimination, but are some (most?) people willing to accept micro-inequities because the incidents are, in many cases, so ambiguous? Where do you draw the line between deciding that someone is oversensitive vs. the target of habitual disrespect?
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POPSHope in Toledo. May it Rub Off Here. I admire their courage, but nothing will change, the school administration is equally, if not more liberal than the professors. If anything they're jeopardizing their grades and therefore their futures, there's no way to liberate academia from the left. The best thing we can do is prepare our kids for the inevitable indoctrination...."> (quote from http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/ )
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POPSNew Democrat Town Hall Strategy: Have Constituents Arrested Today's Democrats use the instrumentalities of government to suppress free speech (consider the "Fairness Doctrine", the "Local Diversity Rule" and other mechanisms to silence conservative opinion). Liberals simply cannot compete on a level playing field, so they try to control the flow of information in this country at every turn, as they have done with academia, Hollywood, and are now even starting to do with the Internet.
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POPSB.C. university adds grade worse than F "The FD would remain on a student's transcripts during their time at SFU and for two years after graduation, which could affect the possibility of postgraduate studies or even getting a job if a potential employer asks to see transcripts. Severity of the offence and incidences of previous cheating would both be considered before handing out an FD. "If a student thinks they have been unfairly dealt with, they have the opportunity to appeal (to the ombudsman)," said Gordon. "I thought we would have a lot of push-back from students but (student response) has been overwhelmingly favourable." Gordon said in one extreme case a few years ago, a student had their degree rescinded after it was learned they plagiarized their thesis almost entirely from six sources. But he said that, overall, cheating seems to be on the decline. The University of Alberta hands cheaters an F8 or F9 grade, which can be reduced after three years to an F."
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POPSIdiocy Reigns, Be Honest About It
"maybe there's such a thing as learned stupidity. How else can so many people be so idiotic? Our national IQ has dropped to about 75: Several standard deviations below normal. " "Well, we have now voted in a President for the lowbrows. Yes, Obama himself is smart enough; even smart enough to say a few years ago that he didn't feel ready for the presidency. Well, now we can see why he said that. But legions of idiots voted for a man who was plainly unqualified, even by his own estimation, and surrounded by a bunch of malignant sociopaths like Wright and Ayers and all the rest. How could he possibly win? Well, Obama cynically appealed to the idiots -- the young, the stupid, the naive, the silly, the rock idol worshippers, and probably the drug-addled masses, all the lowbrows in the land. That includes the idiot savants of academia. Academics have a very narrow band of intelligence, something that satirists since Aristophanes have noticed and poked fun at. Obama's 22 White House c
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POPSArmy Gives Money To Harvard The minister who gave the invocation could barely disguise his disgust for the military, while the president of a university that declines to be involved in the cadets’ military education felt compelled to condescendingly hand out copies of “Just And Unjust War,” as if they might not be familiar with the concept. Having Gen. Petraeus on hand seemed to be a draw, though. Big crowd that cheered and clapped a lot. Here’s Harvard student handbook warning to students: Current federal policy of excluding known lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals from admission to ROTC or of discharging them from service is inconsistent with Harvard’s values as stated in its policy on discrimination. (See Harvard’s policy on discrimination on page 292.) Although the University respects the right of undergraduates to choose to participate in ROTC, the University does not provide any financial or other direct support for the ROTC program at MIT.
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POPSWelcome Back, Carter It's not about us. The reign of the ayatollahs in Iran has an expiration date, and the ayatollahs know it. Seventy percent of Iran's population wasn't even alive in 1978, and they've had enough of the mullahs and their Basij bully boys. Whether their yoke is thrown off in 2009 or in 2012 or 2020, it's going to happen, probably within the next decade or so. I hope any sane person would agree that sooner would be better, but here's a question for all of those who are eaten up with concern over "what will they think of us?" Whenever the turn comes, what exactly will they think of us, if we turn our backs on them today? What will they think if we just hedge our bets against the ludicrous idea that we might be burning (nonexistent) bridges with the mullahs otherwise? I've meet a lot of Eastern Europeans who have pictures of Ronald Reagan on their mantles. They never forgot the way he stood up for them, in public, against the commissars.
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POPSWhat Hinders YOUR Obama-adulation? We witness the dying-off of Mr.&Mrs. John Citizen. Tradition. Values. Those people in that ranch-style home on the suburban lane; the family in that bungalow and their thousands of neighbors in every corner of the city; or those farms and scattered homes out on the road to the next town; in the many homes and apartments, most believed in what made America strong and free and in sustaining that for a lasting America. They were Democrats and they were Republicans. That was not the main issue. It was the body of America vs. people with subversive notions, Communist sympathizers, or any other loony or dangerous ideas. Differences were to be discussed and decided, and then all came together to face down those that would undermine us. Not any more.
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POPS Bloggers Get Budget Briefing This booklet contains a series of 40 charts on federal spending, taxes, debt and deficits, and entitlements. The charts outline the increases in federal spending that are projected to occur during the Obama administration. Nicola Moore of the Heritage Foundation described the new material as “blogger-friendly.” Bloggers will be able to “save it and embed that image directly on blog,” Moore said. Moore added that this year, there is a new interactive feature with a flash graphic version of one of the charts. Moore also welcomes input from those who have new ideas for charts and other suggestions. The contents of the book can be found online at www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook. Brittany Fortier is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
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POPSLeaked Agenda: Bilderberg Group Plans Economic Depression Details of the economic agenda were contained in a pre-meeting booklet being handed out to Bilderberg members. On a more specific note, Estulin warns that Bilderberg are fostering a false picture of economic recovery, suckering investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market again only to later unleash another massive downturn which will create “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” according to a Canada Free Press report.
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POPSThe Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism 
, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are nowwatching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong. Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed. The government has been abetting this trend for years by exempting an increasing number of Americans from federal taxation. My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liabi
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POPSHow to Improve Your Self-Control Some people seem to find it easy to resist temptation while others can be relied on to always yield to self-gratification. To a certain extent we have to accept our starting point on the self-control sliding scale and do the best we can with it. 3. How to improve your self-control: Global processing. This means trying to focus on the wood rather than the trees. Abstract reasoning. This means trying to avoid considering the specific details of the situation at hand in favour of thinking about how actions fit into an overall framework - being philosophical. High-level categorisation. This means thinking about high-level concepts rather than specific instances. Any long-term project, whether in business, academia or elsewhere can easily get bogged down by focusing too much on the minutiae of everyday processes and forgetting the ultimate goal.
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POPSSeamus HEANEY, Word Smith, Today, 70 years Young On Monday, 13 April RTÉ lyric fm will premiere three pieces specially commissioned by RTÉ Performing Groups from Rachel Holstead, Kevin O'Connell and Ian Wilson for the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet. A new RTÉ Television 'Arts Lives' documentary, 'Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous', will be screened on RTÉ One on Tuesday, 14 April. On RTÉ Radio there will be a non-stop, 12-hour broadcast of Seamus Heaney reading his 11 poetry collections on RTÉ Radio 1 Extra, available on LW, DAB, Online and UPC Channel 940. Full details on these programmes and other events are available on the specially commissioned website: www.rte.ie/heaneyat70.
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POPSSoftware to take control of chronic illness Awesome! Now let me just find an open source program that is available for free. Rather than having to go through the hoops of getting medicare/ medicaid/ tbi waiver to pay for something that will empower me and REALLY help me recover. Would also be a good addition to a health-related participatory research project. Maybe the company wants to start an open source branch to speed up the development of customized versions- well, since I haven't even been to the site yet, I will do that before any further speculation.
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POPSWhy Is Rick Wagoner Fired and Nancy Pelosi Still Working? Just off the top of my head, how about Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and everybody at the Department of Education? How about firing all the former Weathermen, like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, whose university salaries are subsidized by the taxpayer? Nearly every university in the country accepts government money. Is there any industry in America more in need of some "restructuring" than academia? What's Berkeley's "business plan" to stop turning out graduates who hate America?
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POPS'MBA graduates led the world into recession' If these business leaders were not able to spot the flaws in the businesses they were running, one has to look into the matter of what business and management schools had been teaching them. The schools promoted a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook, and encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. And also, all the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.
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POPSTax Questions Here's another tax question: Which worker receives the higher pay: a worker on a road construction project moving dirt with a shovel or a worker moving dirt atop a giant earthmover? If you said the guy on the earthmover, go to the head of the class. But why? It's not because he's unionized or that employers just love earthmover operators. It's because having more capital (tools) makes him more productive and therefore earn higher wages. It's not rocket science to conclude that whatever lowers the cost of capital formation enables workers to have more capital to work with and enjoy higher wages. Policies that raise the cost of capital formation such as capital gains taxes, low depreciation allowances and high corporate income taxes, and thereby reducing capital formation, serves neither the interests of workers, investors nor consumers.
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POPS The Zero-Sum Fallacy I picked up a handful of sand, and said “this is almost pure silicon, virtually identical to what powers a computer. Take as much labor as you want, and build me a computer with it — the only limitation is you can only have true manual laborers - no engineers or managers or other capitalist lackeys”. She replied that my request was BS, that it took a lot of money to build an electronics plant, and her group of laborers didn’t have any and bankers would never lend them any. I told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I will give you and your laborers as much as you need. The only restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel, land, silicon - in their crudest forms. It is up to you to assemble these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make me my computer.
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POPSSix Questions for Juan Cole, Author of Engaging the Muslim World In the Cold War, the U.S. blithely overthrew democratically elected governments in Syria and Iran to ensure Western European access to inexpensive petroleum, considered by elites in Washington, D.C., to be key to free market economic growth and to defeating the Communist bloc. Iran in particular never forgave the United States for this heavy-handed intervention. Going forward, the temptation to conduct further oil wars will be severe. Once the world economy recovers, demand will spiral up, and the discovery of new fields is unlikely to keep pace with that new demand, especially that of China, India, and other rising Asian powers with large populations.
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POPSNew York Post's Vile Cartoon Only Serves To Reinforce Our Racist Legacy Of Stereotypes It's fine to have a cartoon that illustrates this bill's financial quackery, but to equate its author -- or the person responsible for it (i.e. the president) to a chimp that became wild and threatened the public's safety and had to be shot and killed is a direct insult to our biracial president in view of our nation's embarrassing history of racist stereotypes. Many racists have equated blacks with chimps, apes, etc., with the implication that they are "stupid." The cartoonist and New York Post should not have published the cartoon because of the horrific American racist legacy, often supported by academia and politicians, that African-Americans are stupid. Yet that is not the worst part of the cartoon. The fact that the chimp, symbolic for the president, was shot and killed is outrageous.
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