Then and now

2012 – media and sophisticated, nuanced liberals ridiculed Romney for bringing up terrorism in Mali.

“Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali by al Qaeda type individuals,” Romney said. “With Mali now having North Mali taken over by al-Qaeda, with Syria having [Bashar al-Assad] continuing to kill, to murder his own people, this is a region in tumult.”

Prior to the third and final presidential debate, Romney had received intelligence briefings from the Obama administration. It’s tradition for presidential candidates to receive these types of briefings following their nominating conventions. A former Romney adviser later confirmed to BuzzFeed that Romney had indeed been given intelligence on possible terrorist activity in Mali.

Bring on the fool parade: 

“I bet Romney couldn’t point to Mali on a map,” Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas said at the time on social media.

Longtime Clinton ally and CNN contributor Paul Begala added elsewhere, “POTUS has mentioned Israel at least three times Romney has cited Mali twice. Really.”

Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias joked in a note of his own, “Romney going for the vote of single-issue Mali voters. Obama for people who don’t like Osama bin Laden.”

He added later, “Teachers unions have thrown Northern Mali into chaos.”

Politico’s Roger Simon laid into Romney particularly hard, painting a deeply unflattering portrait of the former governor’s debate performance in an article titled “Obama Takes Romney to School.”

“And there is another problem with foreign policy, which Romney demonstrated when he twice mentioned Mali,” Simon wrote. “Mali? Is Romney not aware that in an oft-quoted Roper poll sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2006, 75 percent of American young people couldn’t find Israel on a map — which might be understandable considering it’s pretty small — but also that 50 percent couldn’t find Ohio? Or New York?”

“And he wants people to know from Mali?” he asked again.

November 22, 2015, President Obama: “We will stand with the people of Mali”.

Romney made his remarks based on intelligence briefings he had received from Obama’s own people. Romney understood what he was reading; Obama did not. Probably still doesn’t, in fact.

 

Cause and effect, not “correlation does not imply causation”

A trifecta that can’t lose: butterflies, rainbows and unicorns

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook on how he’ll run the company:

“We do things for other reasons than a profit motive, we do things because they are right and just,” Mr Cook growled. Whether in human rights, renewable energy or accessibility for people with special needs, “I don’t think about the bloody ROI,” Mr Cook said, in the same stern, uncompromising tone that Apple employees hope they never have to hear. “Just to be very straightforward with you, if that’s a hard line for you . . . then you should get out of the stock.”

And how’s that working? Just as you’d expect.

STEVE JOBS IS OUT. TIM COOK IS IN.  APPLE IS SLIDING. ” Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist. The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use.”

Prediction: The worse Apple does, the more Tim Cook will talk about social justice.

Sell, now.

 

I think that’s been the point of this administration’s actions

It soon will be

And the media, and our institutions of higher learning [sic].

Poll: Majority of Americans feel like strangers  in their own country

Our new Americans

Couldn’t we take some of those global warming stickers and paste it over these people’s mouths?

The feminist’s guide to eating non-indigenous foods without being culturally appropriative.

Sarah Hoyt:

NOVEMBER 22, 2015

Thanksgiving at the White House

WE ALL LIVE IN AN ONION WORLD: The Feminist Guide to Being a Foodie Without Being Culturally Appropriative. And if you don’t want to give hits to crazy people, the gist of the article is that if you enjoy the authentic cuisine of other traditions this means you’re “culturally appropriative” which is bad, because, you know, we’re all born with our cuisine engraved in our DNA, just like our language and our religion.  (Removes tongue from cheek before it pokes through.)  FORTUNATELY I’m an American.  Being culturally appropriative IS our culture.  We take other people’s food, clothing and entertainment traditions and we make it bigger, better and more amazing than the original culture could try.  And the feminist guide can put that in its pipe and smoke it!

The Locust Eater – Tastes like Buffalo wings!

Doomed to disappointment

HMS Ganim runs afoul of reality

Bridgeport hopes for spillover effect from new Bass-Pro store. In fact, that was one of the main arguments in spending state funds to subsidize the project. But the store is south of  I–95, on its own peninsula, and, like a casino, is designed to keep customers inside and spending; no one who’s driven fifty miles to ogle bass boats and shotguns is going to be particularly interested in schlepping up to Bridgeport main, to risk a mugging for a taste of Geraldo’s Genuine Enchiladas. Ain’t gonna happen.

Bass Pro’s Bridgeport store was the chain’s eighth and final opening of the year in North America. The business says it brings in 120 million visitors annually, even as the average shopper only goes twice a year, store officials said, making each trip an event.

“This is experiential shopping,” Jerry Van Huis, vice president of retail at Bass Pro Shops’ Missouri headquarters, said during a tour of the store last week. “It’s about differentiating yourself from the Internet.”

With a restaurant, bar, bowling alley and other attractions all within its four walls, Bass Pro Shops is designed to bring people in and keep them there. The store enjoyed a hugely successful opening last week, and promises to draw thousands of people into the city. But the gains it provides are to some degree self-contained.

The most significant barrier to Steelpointe Harbor’s effect on the rest of the city remains the elevated I-95 overpass that separates the development from the East Side. North of the highway is a neighborhood of homes and businesses that has long been in need of an economic jolt, but the Bass Pro business model doesn’t necessarily lend itself to neighborhood exploration.

“This is a full-day experience,” Van Huis said.

Well, maybe after that full-day experience, the guys in flannel will wander outside and give the hookers some business, but that’s probably about it.

What is it about gay terrorists?

Off to the mall

The leader of the 9/11 strikes, Mohammed Atta, was revealed to be a homosexual, now it turns out one of the Paris killers is too. These guys drink, screw young boys and kill innocents all of which, I believe, are forbidden by the book of peace (okay, probably not the young boys part, but otherwise….) Maybe our progressive friends who plead for “understanding” of Muslim bombers should crowd fund a psychiatric team to look into what’s happening. Although he’s not much in fashion these days, Sigmund Freud could have a field day with this stuff.

The missing Paris jihadist had a taste for gay sex, drugs and PlayStation. As the international manhunt for 26-year-old Belgian Salah Abdeslam continued, patrons of a gay bar in Brussels told The Sunday Times of London that he was a regular there — known for boozing, smoking hash and flirting with other men.

“We had him down as a rent boy,” a bartender named Julien said of Abdeslam, who’s been on the run since the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris.

Weird

How incredibly annoying

The city council of North Vancouver votes to put global warming labels on gasoline nozzles.

This in-your-face propagandizing of spurious “facts” by the government would spur me to some act of civil disobedience, were I unfortunate enough to live in wherever North Vancouver is. What exactly that act would be can be decided later, when this bull crap flows south of the border, as it surely will.