Knockouts High and Low | National Review Online

Speaking of appetite, have you played the "Knockout" game yet? Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white (hence the alternate name "polar-bearing") but Asian or Hispanic will do. The trick is to knock him to the ground with a single punch. There's a virtually limitless supply of targets: In New York, a 78-year-old woman was selected, and went down nice and easy, as near-octogenarian biddies tend to when sucker-punched. But, when you're really rockin', you can not only floor the unsuspecting sucker but kill him: That's what happened to 46-year-old Ralph Santiago of Hoboken, N.J., whose head was slammed into an iron fence, whereupon he slumped to the sidewalk with his neck broken. And anyway the one-punch rule is flexible: In upstate New York, a 13-year-old boy socked 51-year-old Michael Daniels but with insufficient juice to down him. So his buddy threw a bonus punch, and the guy died from cerebral bleeding. Widely available video exists of almost all Knockout incidents, since the really cool thing is to have your buddies film it and upload it to YouTube. And it's so simple to do in an age when every moronic savage has his own "smart phone."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364659/knockouts-high-and-low-mark-steyn

A good example of what government should be doing well - defending the rights of individuals against violent assault.

Knockouts High and Low | National Review Online

Which brings us to that other death of November 22: Aldous Huxley. "Don't you want to be free and men?" rages a dissenting voice. "Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are?" Gee, he sounds like a talk-radio guy demanding to know where the outrage is. Written in 1931, Brave New Worldisn't as famous a dystopia as Orwell's 1984 — because it posits tyranny not as "a boot stamping on a human face" but as a soft, beguiling caress of a human face, a land in which enslavement takes the form of round-the-clock sensory gratification: drugs, sex without love, consumer trinkets, sensory distractions . . . Crazy, huh? Like that'd ever happen.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364659/knockouts-high-and-low-mark-steyn/page/0/1

Seemingly, we do not want to be free men.

Iran nukes: This is exactly the deal that Obama hoped to achieve in Geneva.

I hope Kaplan is right.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/11/_iran_nukes_this_is_exactly_the_deal_that_obama_hoped_to_achieve_in_geneva.html

Do What It Takes, Whatever It Takes

The second aspect of this that Republicans find hard to swallow—as they should—is the Democrats' hypocrisy. Perhaps hypocrisy is too mild a word. When George W. Bush was president and Democrats were in the Senate minority, they did everything they could to sabotage his judicial appointments.

They used stalling tactics, the filibuster, and outright character assassination. Obama took great pride in appointing a Hispanic to the Supreme Court, but Bush wanted to do it first. He couldn't even get the brilliant Miguel Estrada appointed to the D.C. Court of Appeals—the same panel that Democrats have now gone nuclear over.

Comparing the quotes of Democrats then to Democrats now—and we're talking about the same people—is a case study in situational ethics. In 2005, when Republicans invoked the very same idea he has now rammed through the Senate, Harry Reid said the filibuster "serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government."

He wasn't the only one. Here's then-Sen. Obama back then: "[A] change in the Senate rules would change the character of the Senate forever. … You would have, simply, majoritarian absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."

And here is Sen. Chuck Schumer: "We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated, by the nuclear option. … It is amazing, almost a temper tantrum."

The two most prophetic Democratic senators were Dianne Feinstein of California and a certain small-state senator with national ambitions named Joe Biden.

"The nuclear option, if successful, will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority," said Feinstein. "It begins with judicial nominations. Next will be executive appointments. And then legislation."

"I say to my friends on the Republican side," added Biden: "You may own the field right now, but you won't own it forever. And I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing." 

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/11/24/the_nuclear_option_and_the_fallout_to_come_120755.html#ixzz2laLB3H9C 

Biden it would seem never has to worry about saying something that he does not believe, since he believes whatever is necessary in that moment.

The Coming Revelation Of The 'Global Warming' Fraud Resembles The Obamacare Lie - Forbes

For example, the authors report, "The IPCC concedes for the first time that a 15 year long period of no significant warming occurred since 1998 despite a 7% rise in carbon dioxide (CO2)."  The authors explain, "The statement represents a significant revision in the IPCC thinking, because their concern about dangerous warming rests upon the assumption that temperature increases will proceed in parallel fashion with CO2 increases."  Climate Change Reconsidered II documents that the same official temperature records used by the IPCC going back over 100 years, and proxy temperature records going back deep into the geologic time scale, show that temperatures have not changed in parallel with CO2 levels.

Central to the IPCC's argument for anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming is its dozens of global climate models and their projections of growing global temperatures over time.  But the SPM now concedes that these models have failed to project the now admitted lack of warming over the last 15 years.  The draft of the SPM circulated in June stated quite accurately that the "Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 to 15 years."  The final draft released in September covers the same by saying, "There are…differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 1998 to 2012)."

The SPM also concedes that the Antarctic ice cap “increased…(by) 1.2%–1.8% per decade between 1979 and 2012.”  So even the UN’s IPCC now concedes that the South Pole’s ice cap has been increasing all along, rather than melting.  The increase in Antarctic sea ice now totals about 1 million square kilometers.  In fact, the extent of Antarctic sea ice is now the greatest evermeasured.

Arctic sea ice has historically fluctuated in regular cycles.  While it did decline during the 1978 to 1998 period, that decline has now reversed, falsifying alarmist predictions that the North Pole would be free of ice by 2013.  Globally, some glaciers have been melting and receding.  Others have been growing and expanding.  Overall, the total extent of global sea ice has not been declining at any enhanced rate since the end of the Little Ice Age around 150 years ago.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/12/the-coming-revelation-of-the-global-warming-fraud-resembles-the-obamacare-lie/

It would be crazy not to worry about human impact on the climate, but it would be equally crazy to let politicians run wild on the immature science on this topic that is available to date.

A Golden Age Of Philanthropy - Forbes

Will cooperation work better than coercion?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/11/17/a-golden-age-of-philanthropy/

JFK, a presidency on a pedestal - latimes.com

Still, it's remarkable that Kennedy's iconic stature in the eyes of most Americans has weathered half a century of assaults, some of them from his own archives, as the less savory side of Camelot has slowly come to light.

We've learned the details of his relentless womanizing, which extended to plying a 19-year-old White House intern with daiquiris and then having sex with her.

We've learned more about the perilous health of a man who in 1960 declared himself "the healthiest candidate for president," including that he had Addison's disease, a serious disorder of the adrenal gland, and that he relied on cocktails of painkillers injected by his physicians.

And we've learned that historians don't think Kennedy was such a great president. As early as 1973, Harvard's Richard Neustadt, who was not only a Kennedy fan but an occasional advisor, concluded sadly that JFK's tenure had been undistinguished.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-kennedy-legacy-20131117,0,7425100.column#axzz2kobu2eda