Again, the United States negotiates from a weak position

Good Grief!

Secretary of State John Kerry flew to China on Saturday and sought to elicit China’s help in dealing with an increasingly recalcitrant nuclear armed North Korea by saying that American missile defenses could be cut back if the North abandoned its nuclear program.

Mr. Kerry’s trip to China, his first since taking office, is part of an intensive three-day push to try to calm tensions on the Korean Peninsula that have threatened to spiral out of control and rattled world leaders.

In a news conference, Mr. Kerry suggested that the United States could remove some newly enhanced missile defenses in the region, though he did not specify which ones. Any eventual cutback would address Chinese concerns about the buildup of American weapons systems in the region.

China has zero to fear from US missiles, unless they try something they should not, and China knows it. Here is how I handle this. I tell the Norks that ANY attack on us, or South Korea or Japan, will be met with an overwhelmingly violent response. Further, I let them know that continued threats will be taken seriously, and that we WILL strike them the very next time they issue a direct threat, PERIOD! I tell China that they know, and we know that our missiles will ONLY be used in defense, so we have absolutely no plans to cut anything back.

Call it the Hagin Doctrine. We walk softly, we will carry a big stick, and if we are ever forced to use that stick, we will use it with such devastating force that no one will ever even want to think about screwing with us or our allies again. Of course if I were president John Kerry would not only not be in any position of authority, he would not even be allowed to shovel Rino dung, but that is another post altogether.

Your reality check of the day- Communism never died

Bob Belvedere speaketh the truth!

Many on the Right [I'm ignoring the Left on this subject because they are all lost causes in matters like this] have been going around for over two decades saying something exactly or near the following statement: ‘When the Soviet Union fell, we defeated Communism’.

What brought this to mind was reading and hearing people use a variation of that phrase these past several days when they were discussing the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. It’s gone something like this: ‘Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II together defeated Communism’.

We never ‘defeated Communism’.

We defeated Soviet Communism when The Iron Curtain was lifted and the USSR fell.

Communism still lives and, in some places like Red China, thrives [as much as such an unnatural system can thrive].

The battle against it rages on.

Communism is still a menace.

In fact, it is more of a menace now that the Democratic Party in America has been taken over by Communists.

I have no compunction about using that word because

Since the Progressives began moving into the Party in the late 19th Century and up until the 1960′s, the Leftist Democrats were Fascists — they had no desire to nationalize every industry and no plan to eventually take ownership of all private property. They merely wanted to construct a large regulatory state, where government kept a firm and controlling hand on commerce and took a hands-off approach to what they considered private and personal matters [such as what went on in bedrooms].

This all began to change in the late 1960′s when the, for lack of a better term, New Left [really a collection of Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyites, and all sorts of other -ites] decided to gain power from within the Democratic Party. People like the Socialist Michael Harrington fought with the more violent-minded of their comrades on the Radical Left in favor of adopting the strategy of pursuing this course of action — and they eventually won. The Radical Left took control of the Party in less than two decades. They were aided in this effort by those of their ilk who had invaded other influential institutions, such as think tanks, the Mainstream Media, and education. For years, they all worked behind the scenes, occasionally releasing trial balloons to gauge, via the reaction to them, how far they could now push their Revolutionary Agenda. It was a Creeping, Stealthy Socialism.

Go read it all. Bob nails it! The Left has never stopped believing in Marxism. They might have become more stealthy, using indoctrination, and that slow-moving Socialism Bob talks of. But, in the heart of the Left is still that darkness, that evil, and yes evil IS the proper description of Communism. It was, after all, under the veil of Communism that 110,000,000 people died last century. No, Communism is not dead, and sadly, I do not know if there are enough Americans left who know that.

Melissa Harris Perry is your Marxist Moron of the Day UPDATED! Video added

She believes, as most Leftists do, that that whole parental rights thing is sketchy at best

I think it’s getting even more amazing for the regressives in that they are slipping more and more.  And, in that slippage, they’re letting out more and more of their ideas, and they don’t even get that it’s the most totalitarian drivel.  I guess if you live in the unreality bubble, it’s a matter of time before you slip and think that tyranny is the normal state of man.

In the latest example of regressive truth slippage, we have Melissa Harris-Perry, who happens to think that all of your children are belong to us. MRC has the video…

The video is stunning to say the least. Harris-Perry whether she knows it or not, is simply regurgitating the talking points of Statists past as Matt points out.

Now, this whole concept of children belonging to the “community,” read, the state, is not new at all. Here are some historical references…

When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Adolf HitlerSpeech November 1933, quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer

Yes, the children belong to the community!

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future.”

–Professor Chester M. Pierce, M.D., Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard

Much more at Conservative Hideout

Is This A Pandemic Being Born?

Is This A Pandemic Being Born? – Foreign Policy

Here’s how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. Two would quickly die of severe pneumonia and the third would lay in critical condition in an intensive care unit for many days. Government officials would announce that a previously unknown virus had sickened three people, at least, and killed two of them. And while the world was left to wonder how the pigs, ducks, swans, and people might be connected, the World Health Organization would release deliberately terse statements, offering little insight.

.

It reads like a movie plot – I should know, as I was a consultant for Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. But the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China. The events could, indeed, be unrelated, and the new virus, a form of influenza denoted as H7N9, may have already run its course, infecting just three people and killing two.

Or this could be how pandemics begin.

On March 10, residents of China’s powerhouse metropolis, Shanghai, noticed some dead pigs floating among garbage flotsam in the city’s Huangpu River. The vile carcasses appeared in Shanghai’s most important tributary of the mighty Yangtze, a 71-mile river that is edged by the Bund, the city’s main tourist area, and serves as the primary source of drinking water and ferry travel for the 23 million residents of the metropolis and its millions of visitors. The vision of a few dead pigs on the surface of the Huangpu was every bit as jarring for local Chinese as porcine carcasses would be for French strolling the Seine, Londoners along the Thames, or New Yorkers looking from the Brooklyn Bridge down on the East River.

And the nightmarish sight soon worsened, with more than 900 animal bodies found by sunset on that Sunday evening. The first few pig carcass numbers soon swelled into the thousands, turning Shanghai spring into a horror show that by March 20 would total more than 15,000 dead animals. The river zigzags its way from Zhejiang province, just to the south of Shanghai, a farming region inhabited by some 54 million people, and a major pork-raising district of China. Due to scandals over recent years in the pork industry, including substitution of rendered pig intestines for a toxic chemical, sold as heparin blood thinner that proved lethal to American cardiac patients, Chinese authorities had put identity tags on pigs’ ears. The pig carcasses were swiftly traced back to key farms in Zhejiang, and terrified farmers admitted that they had dumped the dead animals into the Huangpu.

Few Chinese asked, “What killed the pigs?,” because river pollution is so heinous across China that today people simply assume manufacturing chemicals or pesticides fill the nation’s waterways, and are responsible for all such mysterious animals demises. The Yangtze, which feeds Shanghai’s Huangpu, has copper pollution levels that are 100 times higher than U.S. safety standards, and leather tanning facilities along the river have notoriously been responsible for toxic waste, including chromium. And across China – especially in Beijing – air pollution was so bad in January and February that pollution particulate levels routinely peaked at higher than 10 times the U.S. safety standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. When I was in Beijing in late January, the air pollution was so thick that it visually looked like fog, obscuring all sunlight and even skyscrapers located less than three city blocks away. So, hideous as the pig carcasses might be, Shanghai residents tended to shrug them off as yet another example of the trade-offs China is making, pitting prosperity against pollution.

But 12 days after the first Shanghai porcine death flow was spotted, pig carcasses washed up along the shores of Changsha’s primary river, the Xiang – also a Yangtze tributary, this one located hundreds of miles west of Shanghai. Known as “the Sky City” for its 2,749-foot-tall central tower, Changsha is home to more than 7 million people and capital of Hunan province. Along with some 50 dead pigs, authorities collected a few thousand dead ducks from the Xiang on March 22 and 23.

Two days later, another mass duck and swan die-off was spotted, this time along the Sichuan River hundreds of miles to the north, near Lake Qinghai. The lake is the most important transit and nesting site for migratory aquatic birds that travel the vast Asia flyway, stretching from central Siberia to southern Indonesia. In 2005, a mass die-off of aquatic birds in and around Lake Qinghai resulted from a mutational change in the long-circulating bird flu virus, H5N1 – a genetic shift that gave that virus a far larger species range, allowing H5N1 to spread for the first time across Russia, Ukraine and into Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – it has remained in circulation across the vast expanse of Earth for the last seven years.

On March 25, Chinese authorities seized manufactured pork buns that were found to be made from Zhejiang pigs that had died of the mysterious ailment. The possibly contaminated pork was in the Chinese food supply. By the end of March, at least 20,000 pig carcasses and tens of thousands of ducks and swans had washed upon riverbanks that stretch from the Lake Qinghai area all the way to the East China Sea – a distance roughly equivalent to the span between Miami and Boston. Nobody knows how many more thousands of birds and pigs have died, but gone uncounted as farmers buried or burned the carcasses to avoid reprimands from authorities.

While environmental clean-up and agricultural authorities scrambled to remove the unsightly corpses and provide the anxious public with less-than-believable explanations for their demise, a seemingly separate human drama was unfolding. On Feb. 19, a man identified by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, only as Li, an 87-year old retiree, was hospitalized in Shanghai with severe respiratory distress and pneumonia. On March 4, Li went into severe cardio-respiratory failure and succumbed.

On Feb. 27, a man identified only as Wu, a 27-year-old butcher or meat processor, fell ill with respiratory distress, was hospitalized, and died on March 10. The day Wu succumbed a third individual, a 35-year-old woman identified as Han, was hospitalized in the city of Nanjing, though she came from distant Chuzhou City, in Anhui province, about 300 miles northwest of Shanghai. Han is reportedly in critical condition, in intensive care. To date, no connection between the three individuals has been found.

The elderly Li may have been part of a family cluster of illness, as his 55-year old son died of pneumonia in March, and another 67-year-old son suffered respiratory distress, but has survived.

On March 31 – Easter in the United States – China’s newly created National Health and Family Planning Commission (which includes the former Ministry of Health) announced that 87-year-old Li, Wu, and Han all were infected with a form of influenza denoted as H7N9 – a type of flu never previously known to infect human beings. The commission insisted that Li’s two sons (one dead, the other a survivor) were not infected with the flu virus – their ailments were reportedly coincidental, though they occurred at the same time as the elder Li’s demise.

So much for the backstory: What is going on?

According to Chinese authorities, some of the dead pigs tested antibody-positive for circoviruses, or PCV-2, and samples of the virus were isolated from Huangpu River. The implication was that the Shanghai pigs died of PCV-2, a type of virus that is harmless to human beings, as well as birds. Photographs of the carcasses reveal that the animals were large adult hogs, but PCV-2 does not kill adult pigs – it is lethal to fetuses and newborn piglets.

The Chinese health authorities have to date offered no cause of death for the ducks and swans, failed to describe any unusual genetic features that might have turned the PCV-2 into an adult pig-killer virus, and insisted there is no connection between the pigs, people, and birds. Though the surviving woman, Han, had some contact with live chickens, according to Xinhua, neither Li nor Wu had any known contact with birds. Wu has been identified variously as a butcher, meat processor, and employee of a meat plant – all of which might imply he had contact with pigs.

Influenzas are named according to the specific nature of two proteins found on the virus — the H stands for hemaggluntinin and the N for neuraminidase. These proteins play various roles in the flu-infection process, including latching onto receptors on the outside of the cells of animals to transmit the virus into their bodies. Those receptors can vary widely from one species to another, which is why most types of influenza viruses spreading now around the world are harmless to human beings. As far as any scientists know, the H7N9 forms of flu have never previously managed to infect human beings, or any mammals — it is a class of the virus found exclusively in birds. It is therefore extremely worrying to find two people killed and one barely surviving due to H7N9 infection.

One very plausible explanation for this chain of Chinese events is that the H7N9 virus has undergone a mutation – perhaps among spring migrating birds around Lake Qinghai. The mutation rendered the virus lethal for domestic ducks and swans. Because many Chinese farmers raise both pigs and ducks, the animals can share water supplies and be in fighting proximity over food – the spread of flu from ducks to pigs, transforming avian flu into swine flu, has occurred many times. Once influenza adapts to pig cells, it is often possible for the virus to take human-transmissible form. That’s precisely what happened in 2009 with the H1N1 swine flu, which spread around the world in a massive, but thankfully not terribly virulent, pandemic.

If the pigs, people, and birds have died in China from H7N9, it is imperative and urgent that the biological connection be made, and extensive research be done to determine how widespread human infection may be. Shanghai health authorities have tested dozens of people known to have been in contact with Wu and Li, none of whom have come up positive for H7N9 infection. Assuming the tests are accurate, the mystery of Li and Wu’s infections only deepens. Moreover, if they are a “two of three,” meaning two dead, of three known cases, the H7N9 virus is very virulent.

“At this point, these three are isolated cases with no evidence of human-to-human transmission”, the WHO representative in China, Dr. Michael O’Leary, told reporters on Monday. But, O’Leary added, the possibility of a family cluster of illness could not be ruled out, and, “We don’t know yet the causes of illness in the two sons, but naturally, if three people in one family acquire severe pneumonia in a short period of time, it raises a lot of concern.”

But Hong Kong authorities, smarting from years of outbreaks spread from mainland China including H5N1 (1997) and SARS (2003), have put the territory on health alert. “We will heighten our vigilance and continue to maintain stringent port health measures in connection with this development,” the Centre for Health Protection in Hong Kong stated in a press release on Monday.

The Chinese National Influenza Center has posted the H7N9 genetic sequences of viruses from Li, Wu, and Han on the WHO flu site. A number of H7N9 sequences found in birds over the last few years are also posted: The human and bird strains do not match, though none of the birds strains were obtained from animals in 2013.

The mystery is deep, the clock is ticking, and the world wants answers.

If we were imagining how a terrible pandemic would unfold, this could certainly serve as an excellent script.

Timeline of Events

Feb. 19
First male patient, 87, became ill with H7N9 (Medical News Today).

Feb. 27
Second male patient, 27, became ill with H7N9 (Medical News Today).

March 4
First male patient dies (Medical News Today).

March 9
First female patient, 35, from Anhui province became ill with H7N9 (Telegraph).

March 10
Initial report of over 900 dead pigs in Shanghai’s Huangpu River as of Saturday, March 9 (China Daily)

Second male patient dies (Medical News Today).

March 11
Count of dead pigs in rivers near Shanghai reaches nearly 3,000 (Business Insider).

Laboratory tests find porcine circovirus (PCV) in one water sample from Huangpu River (Xinhua News)

March 13
Officials say the number of pig carcasses in Huangpu River has risen to 6,000 (BBC).

March 14
Workers continued to haul dead hogs from a river in the Shanghai suburbs Thursday, where the pig body count now exceeds 6,600, according to the municipal government (USA Today).

Farm in Zhejiang province confesses to dumping pig carcasses into river (Bloomberg)

March 20
The number of dead pigs discovered in Chinese rivers around Shanghai has risen to almost 14,000 (BBC).

March 22
50 pigs wash up onshore in Changsha, Hunan province; ~1,000 dead ducks are also discovered (NTDon China via YouTube)

Number of dead pigs found in Shanghai river rises to 16,000 (Independent)

March 25
China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river (BBC).

Government officials say that 1,000+ rotten duck carcasses pose no threat to human and livestock along river banks (Xinhua News).

Illegal Zhejiang pork found in food chain (South China Morning Post).

March 26
Dumping of thousands of dead pigs linked with Chinese crackdown on pork black market (Business Insider)

More than 1,000 dead ducks, in 60 woven plastic bags, are found in Sichuan province (China Daily, Time).

March 31
The government’s National Health and Family Planning Commission said over the weekend that two men, aged 87 and 27, died in Shanghai in early March after being infected with H7N9 avian influenza (AFP).

April 1
Widespread reporting about two human deaths and one severe casualty of a “lesser-known bird flu virus” (USA Today, AP).

Dr. Michael O’Leary, World Health Organization, says that there is no evidence to show that a type of bird flu which has killed two Chinese men can be transmitted between people (Reuters).

April 2
Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from Huangpu River and found no flu viruses (Shanghai Daily).

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

.

This is certainly not encouraging

Not encouraging at all

(Boston Globe) — America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

“People are surprised sometimes,” he added, describing the reaction to his assessment. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

Good Grief!

 

BREAKING NEWS! Dirty Little Communist Penguin still dead, to be stuffed and put in Douche Nozzle Museum

Oh wait, actually he is going to be forever displayed in a military museum in Venezuela

Venezuela’s Vice President Nicolas Maduro has announced that the late President Hugo Chavez will be embalmed and his body displayed forever in a Caracas military museum.

Mr. Maduro compared the late president to other revolutionary leaders whose bodies also have been preserved, including Russia’s Lenin and China’s Mao. He said President Chavez will lie in state for seven more days to give more Venezuelans the chance to pay their respect.

 

 

If I were president……..

I have stated before that I would have, as president, a very distinct stance on using our military. I would add to Teddy Roosevelt’s “walk softly and carry a big stick” line. My addition would be, and when we use that stick, it will be in such devastating fashion that no one will ever think of attacking, or threatening us, or our allies again. I thought of this this morning after reading this at Weasel Zippers

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea threatened the United States on Thursday with a preemptive nuclear strike, raising the level of rhetoric while the U.N. Security Council considers new sanctions against the reclusive country.

North Korea has accused the United States of using military drills inSouth Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war and has scrapped the armistice with Washington that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea, which has one major ally, neighboring China, threatens the United States and its “puppet”, South Korea, on an almost daily basis.

“Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to preemptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest,” the North’s foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.

Now, I doubt the North Koreans could hit a bull in the ass with a handful of rice, but, this is a direct threat to both our nation and South Korea. So, what would I do in response? Well, North Korea has air bases, naval bases, and other military posts. I would, how should I put this, eliminate the biggest one they had. This would send them a message. That message would be, we erased your largest military post for simply threatening us, think what actually attacking us would cost you?

Is that over the top? Maybe, but, face it, having the biggest stick only matters if everyone else knows you will USE THAT STICK, and North Korea and other enemies do not believe we will use the stick we hold.

Thoughts?

 

Obama’s foreign policy fiasco: F-16′s to our enemies, but not to our friends?

Sure, we will sell tanks and fighters to Egypt, run by the Muslim Brotherhood, but Taiwan? A free republic? Naw

Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which faces no existential threat, our Asian ally faces an increasingly belligerent and well-armed China. Yet only one gets the latest weaponry and the question is why.

On Jan. 30, a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer in the East China Sea near the disputed Senkaku Islands just north of Taiwan was “painted” by fire control-radar from two People’s Liberation Army warships, believed to be the Chinese frigates Linyungang and Wenzhou.

This was just the latest provocation by a China flexing its deep water naval muscle as it asserts itself in the East and South China Seas and pursues long-held territorial ambitions. One of those ambitions is the absorption into the People’s Republic of its alleged long-lost province of Taiwan.

China continues to add missiles targeted on Taiwan, adds naval capability including an aircraft carrier, expands its amphibious capabilities, as well as developing its own stealth fighter said to be roughly equivalent to our now-canceled F-22 Raptor.

In this context, Taiwan has sought to improve its defenses with the acquisition of 66 F-16C and F-16F fighter aircraft, also known as Block 52 planes.

These are not stripped down versions that are sometimes sold overseas, but state-of-the-art aircraft with the latest bells and whistles, one of the most capable fighter aircraft in the world.

While Taiwan languishes in military limbo, Egypt, under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, has received the first of 20 such aircraft scheduled for delivery in 2013, 16 single-seat F-16Cs and four double-seat F-16Ds.

Egypt’s new F-16s will raise its inventory of the Lockheed Martin jets to 240. But unlike Taiwan’s request, they have an offensive mission — they’re targeted mainly against the Islamists’ enemy, Israel. That’s our ally.

The administration insists Egypt’s F-16s merely constitute an honoring of a $1.3 billion a year U.S. military aid program signed by the regime of Morsi’s predecessor, President Hosni Mubarak.

Yet it balks at fulfilling Taiwan’s request for defensive F-16s, a sale mandated by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.

Here you have it. Increasingly I am thinking this administration will be remembered as the WTF? Administration. And again, the question is posed, is Team Obama really this naive? Or is this deliberate?

Report: Island Ownership Dispute Could Lead To War Between China, Japan

Report: Island Ownership Dispute Could Lead To War Between China, Japan – Big Peace

The Senkakus Islands off the coast of Japan have become a point of contention that may draw the U.S and Japan into war with China in 2013.

According to reports, the islands are claimed by both Japan and China – China calls them the Diaoyu Islands – and the tensions over them are so great that Japan’s incoming Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has suspended the stationing of Japanese officials on the islands in order to stave off further conflict.

While there has been no explicit explanation for the focus on the islands, it is believed China has seized on them as a way to push back against growing U.S. involvement in Asia. To this end, China’s goal may be to drive a wedge between Tokyo and the Obama administration and get the U.S. to pressure Tokyo into giving up claim to the islands.

There seems to be an underlying belief on China’s part that if they keep pushing, the U.S. will eventually buckle and ask Japan to join them in capitulating.

And while a spectator to these events may be surprised at the audaciousness of China, others believe China is simply using the leverage they’ve created by nurturing an economic environment that makes it difficult for the U.S. to buck Beijing.

Suffice it to say, the tensions are multifaceted.

As of right now, America wants to hold to the power it enjoys in Asia, Japan doesn’t want to appear like a pushover to China, and China doesn’t want to give an inch to either country. It seems the only thing these three divergent views have in common is war.

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

When assault weapons are outlawed, only psychos will…..

….run down school children with cars

A man angered by a court ruling in the murder of his daughter rammed a car loaded with a gas tank and firecrackers into a group of middle schoolers, injuring 13 in the country’s latest attack on students.

The man ran down 23 students at Fengning No. 1 Middle School in northern China’s Hebei province on Monday, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday, citing local police.

Xinhua said the man, identified as 48-year-old Yin Tiejun, later lit a bottle of diesel in an attempt to set his car on fire.

I wonder if David Frum made light of this on Twitter like he did the Newtown shootings? When he Tweeted this

Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.

What a loathsome, intellectually lazy douche nozzle.

 

Right on cue, here come the tragedy pimps and the incredibly clueless gun bashers

We knew as soon as we heard of yesterday’s shooting that the cries to have “gun control” would come in droves. And, of course they did, as if Adam Lanza, who broke law on top of law, including the ones installing schools as gun-free zones would have been stopped by some new law. A magic law that would have somehow prevented a deranged man like Lanza from committing mass murder. Of course many of these buffoons are simply victims of a concentrated effort to demonize guns. The gun-grabbing left tells repeated lies about the “easy accessibility of guns, and naive Liberals believe them and repeat them. They cry out for a new law to prevent such tragedies. They might as well pray to the tooth Fairy frankly. Many in the blogging world have been chronicling these calls for gun control, and the tragedy pimps who almost seem delighted that they can possibly use yesterday as a tool to disarm Americans.

Doug Giles has a great quote from Penn Jillette

“Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking away rights from good people”

Very true, and the Statists who seek to take guns away from us use rhetoric to stir the emotions of Liberals who react with cries for more gun control. Giles also calls for allowing teachers to arm themselves

But imagine if at least one teacher (with a concealed weapons permit) had their .40 caliber Glock with them, locked and loaded, when this weed Adam Lanza began his murderous mayhem today on the Sandy Hook Elementary School campus? What would have happened differently?

Would idiot boy have been able to slay 20 children and 6 teachers? I doubt it. But then again . . . who knows?

However, I’m guessing that this terminal turd might not have dealt out as much death (if any) if the good guy with the gun drew down on him and doubled tapped the center mass of this jackass with a couple of jacketed hollow points.

Unfortunately, there was no concealed weapon in the possession of a teacher to stop this satanic weed from taking root because guns are disallowed on campus. Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t the majority of the mass murders within the US in the last 20-30 years been in the Gun Free Zones?

Gun Free Zones turn the people who inhabit such places into sitting ducks for insane whack jobs with death wishes. I know, some schools have campus cops and security systems however, that line of defense brings zero comfort to most parents if serious bullet flying $#*& starts hitting the fan in one of their kid’s classes.

Look, even the best Rambo like police force equipped to the teeth, driving Vipers and descending en masse on a school in Black Hawk helicopters could not have responded fast enough to kill this Lanza piece of crap. But a fast thinking, well-trained teacher could have.

I have already posted my thoughts on having adequate security in our schools. And I have no problem with allowing concealed carry permit holders who are teachers to carry either. We have to admit to ourselves that we MUST be willing and able to meet evil when it shows its face. Even if every gun were taken by the government, evil would still seek to prey upon us

A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country.

The man attacked the children at the gate of a school in Chenpeng village in Henan province, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Police arrested a 36-year-old man, identified as villager Min Yingjun, Xinhua said. It did not give further details of the extent of the injuries.

There have been a series of attacks on schools and schoolchildren around China in recent years, some by people who have lost their jobs or felt left out of the country’s economic boom.

The rash of violence has prompted public calls for more measures to protect the young in a country where many couples only have one child.

In 2010, a man slashed 28 children, two teachers and a security guard in a kindergarten in eastern China.

Sound familiar? A rash of violent attacks, calls for greater security. And this in a country that, according to Liberal theology, should have no violence, since there is no right to have a gun at all. But that has not stopped  evil men

Early in the morning on March 23, Zheng Minsheng walked in front of an elementary school in Fujian province. Wielding a knife, he attacked the students who happened to be around, killing eight and wounding several others.

Authorities said Zheng, 42, carried out the attack because he was frustrated at “failures in his romantic life,” according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Whatever his real motive was, the senseless killing, reported widely by the Chinese media, shocked the nation. Zheng was tried, sentenced to death and executed on April 28.

If Chinese authorities thought Zheng’s execution would deter similar attacks, they were wrong. The day he was executed, a knife-wielding man attacked elementary school students in southern Guangdong province, wounding 16 students and a teacher. The attacker was later subdued by the police, and no one died.

The next day, a man in Jiangsu province barged into a kindergarten and stabbed 31 people, including 28 students, two teachers and one security guard. “It was too horrible to imagine,” one eyewitness told local reporters. “I saw blood everywhere.” Police apprehended the suspect, 47-year-old Xu Yuyuan.

Then, on April 30, a man barged into a village school in Shandong province, carrying a hammer and a can of gasoline. Wang Yonglai, a local farmer, attacked preschool students with the hammer, causing head injuries. He then set himself on fire and died. According to a Xinhua report, the local farmer went berserk after the local police told him that the family house he had just built using 110,000 yuan (US$16,110) of family savings had to be torn down because it had been built on farmland, which is illegal in China.

It was the third such school attack in three days.

So, taking away the guns will not work. Yet, the Left never learns. Japan also has strict gun laws? Have these laws prevented evil doers?

Tomohiro Kato, arrested after his Sunday lunchtime stabbing spree that left seven dead and 10 injured, has been handed over to prosecutors and is likely to face the death penalty.

Perhaps that is what he wanted.

The police say that he went to Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district to kill people, saying he was tired of life.

Again, has gun control in Japan ended school attacks by lunatics?

A knife-wielding man burst into an elementary school in Osaka this morning, killing at least eight first- and second-grade students and injuring at least 21 other pupils and faculty, police said.

Although crime has been on the rise in recent years in Japan, the massacre deeply shocked this nation, which outlaws guns and generally is considered so safe that parents let their 6-year-olds ride the subway alone to school.

How about in Australia? How has banning guns worked there? Has crime ended?

Erica Vowles: It seems a week doesn’t go past without a report of a knife attack in one of our major cities. These reports are adding to fears that a knife crime culture is spreading across Australia. Police say more people are carrying knives, and using them, while hospitals report having to treat more patients coming in with stab wounds.

As a result, in 2009, Victoria passed tough stop-and-search laws aimed at stopping people carrying knives. These laws were strengthened in July this year.

New laws are also being considered in Western Australia and South Australia. Civil libertarians warn, however, that these laws might be having some unintended consequences. Criminologists also question whether our governments truly have a handle on the nature and number of knife crimes in Australia. But the stories of victims are hard to ignore.

How about the UK, SURELY their strict gun laws have stopped crime. Ask all the folks being attacked with knives

The latest UK knife crime statistics have shown that thousands of persons were attacked with intent to rob in 2011. The disturbing statistics about knife and gun crime are nothing new, and they are problems which do not appear to be getting better.  Protect Yourself is currently campaigning for body armour to be made a tax-free commodity, to allow those professionals and concerned citizens at risk to protect themselves, at a lower cost. Currently body armour is charged at normal VAT, yet protective boots are VAT free. See BODY ARMOUR PETITION for more information on that. We plan to start promoting that throughout this year, and it is something Director Peter Nunn of Protect Yourself Ltd is very clear on:

“Body armour should be a tax-free purchase for all, you should not tax essential personal protective equipment, it’s not right”

The knife robberies statistic of over 15 thousand attacks (only those reported, many more are not) during 2011 in the UK, shows that thousands of people were robbed at knife-point last year, which is over one thousand per month. It is a disgusting and worrying, yet accurate, depiction of a crime ridden nation which can only be solved through drastic action, ideally a massive increase in police numbers, and a greater public awareness and intolerance of violent and anti social behaviour.

Yet the Left uses the UK as a shining example of gun controls effectiveness. I guess they see stabbings as safer somehow?

More than 350 people are the victim of knife assaults every day in England and Wales, the latest crime figures have revealed. 

Last night a teenager in Lambeth, London, became the latest victim of the stabbing epidemic, dying in hospital after a frenzied attack.

Almost 130,000 attacks involved knives last year  -  equivalent to one every four minutes  -  according to the annual British Crime Survey. 

This figure does not include the tens of thousands of assaults against under-16s. However, unlike the police records published yesterday, it does include crimes which are not reported to the authorities. 

The police data revealed 22,000 serious knife assaults  -  including 231 attempted murders  -  were reported to the police last year. 

There were also almost 14,000 reported robberies and more than 8,000 woundings. 

As the Daily Mail revealed exclusively yesterday, the forces’ data, which was gathered for the first time this year, starkly illustrated how knife crime has spread beyond the major cities into the shires. 

The British Crime Survey figure of 130,000 knife attacks is substantially higher than the police’s figure. This is thought to be because many victims never report being threatened with a knife  -  and even assaults needing hospital treatment go unrecorded.

130,000 knife attacks? That number reminded me of David Frum, who mocked the victims on Twitter yesterday 

davidfrum@davidfrum

Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.

Hmmm, overlooking how despicable such a comment is for a second, let us look at something else Frum wrote recently

Last week, I presented in this space some evidence of the dangers of gun ownership: the elevated risks of accident and suicide in households that own guns. I pointed to a paradox: More Americans support gun rights, even as fewer Americans own guns. I explained this paradox with data that suggested many Americans hold false ideas about the prevalence of crime — and wrongly look to gun ownership for self-defense.

Over the following seven days, I heard from many angry gun-rights supporters.

They argued that gun ownership is necessary for self-protection. They narrated stories of how their guns had saved them or their loved ones in armed confrontations.

And of course that must sometimes be true. The question is: How often is it true? And how do the benefits of widespread gun ownership compare with the measurable harms in higher rates of accident, suicide and crime?

Government figures from the National Survey of Criminal Victimization suggest 100,000 uses a year of guns in self-defense against crime, the vast majority of these uses being the display of weapons to deter or dissuade.

For gun advocates, however, the main problem with the government estimate is that it is not nearly high enough to support their case that private gun ownership is the best way to stop crime.

I would ask Frum if he has ever doe the math on that number? If you divide the number of days in a year, 365 into 100,000, which is by the way the LOWEST estimate of defensive gun uses I have found, you get this result, 274. That is 274 American using guns to defend themselves daily. Certainly that is a significant number. A number Frum finds too low to matter apparently. So how many gun murders were there in America in 2010?

In 2010 – the latest year for which detailed statistics are available – there were 12,996 murders in the US. Of those,8,775 were caused by firearms.

OK, that works out to 24 Americans per day. A number everyone wishes were lower, zero would be good to me frankly. But, consider that the number of defensive gun uses are more than 11 times that number. What would the murder rate be if those 100,000 Americans were disarmed? Certainly it would be higher, as would the number of dead in a few school shootings where armed citizens cut the rampage short because they were armed.

So, crime, and violent attacks seem to be something that more laws do not stop, even gun bans have not worked in several nations. Yet, the Statists will still tell their lies, and the gullible Liberals will drink that Kool-Aid all too gladly. They prefer to believe that armed good guys, who never commit acts of evil are causing the actions of psychopaths. Again, one more glaring example from here, in America. Chicago with possibly the strictest gun laws in the nation has had seven shootings since yesterday afternoon

Seven people —including four teenagers— were wounded in separate shootings since Friday afternoon throughout the city.

The latest shooting happened about 9:45 p.m. in the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. A 26-year-old man was standing with a group of people in the 1500 block of South Sawyer when shots were fired, police said.

If Liberals believe gun control works, all they need do is look to Chicago. Or maybe Germany, as Ace points out

One failed law is just the predicate for the next one.

WINNENDEN, Germany — A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town, where he then killed himself after the police wounded him.The attack left Germany, which tightened tough gun controls after a similar attack at a school seven years ago, struggling to understand the carnage that had again befallen it, a country with relatively little violent crime. In 2002, a gunman killed 16 people before killing himself at a school in Erfurt, in eastern Germany.

 They had tough gun laws; they had a school shooting. They tightened those tough gun laws; they had another school shooting

Joe Biden, his mouth is always one half size bigger than his feet!

The Other McCain notes yet another gaffetastic moment from Crazy Uncle Joe

All these darned Midwestern states look alike!

During a campaign stop in Ohio on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden forgot where he was. Again.
“I mean literally,” Biden said (probably meaning “figuratively”), “ladies and gentlemen, this is a guy [Mitt Romney] who’s running all the ads here in Iowasaying that he’s going to get tough on China.”
“I’ve had the great privilege of being able to be in this state now, I think it’s my 25th event (I’m not sure), but I’ve been all over this state.

The man has no idea what state he is in, what a joke

 

Lightning Kills 143 Goats In China

Lightning Kills 143 Goats In China – Weird Asia News

A thunderstorm that hit Chagankule Village in Xinjiang at 1:00 p.m. on July 10 brought extreme disaster to everyone, human and animal alike.

Lightning claimed the lives of 143 goats. Thirty more were washed away by flood waters.

The damage caused to the livestock alone is estimated to have reached 200,000 RMB ($32,000).

Apart from the unfortunate toll on the livestock, people were also greatly affected by massive floods, but there haven’t been any reports of any human casualties or structural collapses.

Grasslands and farmlands also suffered from the storm.

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

Awwww, Liberty makes Transportation Secretary LaHood a sad clown

Via HotAir 

I love Red China! None of that freedom stuff to get in the way

It’s bad enough to have a columnist at one of America’s most prominent newspapers regularly singing the praises of Chinese authoritarianism.  It’s worse when high-ranking members of the American government do it.  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood griped at the Aspen Ideas Festival about having to deal with political opposition, and yearned for the ease in which Beijing could impose solutions without having to deal with dissent:

Echoing the laments of pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood argued Saturday that China outpaces the United States in building major transportation infrastructure like high-speed rail because of its authoritarian system and because the Chinese don’t have the Republican Party holding up progress.

“The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million,” LaHood said in a short interview with The Cable on the sidelines of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival on June 30. “In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don’t do it that way in America.” …

“Two years ago, between 50 to 60 Republicans were elected to the House of Representatives to come to Washington to do nothing, and that’s what they’ve done and they’ve stopped any progress. Those people don’t have any vision about what the government can do. That’s been a real inhibitor in our ability to think outside the box and think big,” he said.

Yet another revealing statement from a prominent “Progressive”. The Democrats love to scold Republicans for wanting no government, which is, of course, a completely fallacious argument to make. Republicans see the need for SOME, government, for SOME taxation, for SOME spending. Democrats, on the other hand see government spending, taxes, regulation and power as the ONLY solution to every problem.

It’s not just stupid, it’s MSNBS!

Is there any doubt that MSNBS is the worst news organization in  the history of news? Consider this nugget

There’s some good news behind the discouraging headlines on the economy: Gas is getting cheaper. At least two states had stations selling gas for $2.99 on Friday and it could fall below $3 in more areas over the weekend.

A plunge in oil prices has knocked more than 30 cents off the price of a gallon of gas in most parts of the U.S. since early April. The national average is now $3.61. Experts predict further decline in the next few weeks.

See, it is WONDERFULLY  WONDERFUL! But……

The downside? Lower oil and gas prices are symptoms of weakening economic conditions in the U.S. and around the globe.

On Friday, oil prices plunged nearly 4 percent as a bleak report on U.S. job growth heightened worries about a slowing global economy and waning oil demand. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent. Sobering economic news from China and Europe also contributed to the drop.

Ah, yes, REALITY!, The most important part of the story is not lower gas prices, it is the weakening economy. Does anyone think that MSNBS would have done a similar headline if Bush were president? Or any Republican were president for that matter? There would have been no “silver lining”, just bad economic news.

Hypocrisy overload in 3, 2, 1…..

China, you know RED, as in COMMUNIST China, as in no liberty, China, as in FORCED abortions China, has now called the United States a violater of human rights. Why? Well we actually allow people to own firearms

A report issued by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China has included U.S. gun ownership among a list of  human rights violations, Law Enforcement Examiner Jim Kouri reported yesterday.  ”The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011″ was published last Friday on the PRC’s Consulate General in New York website.

“The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens’ lives and personal security and exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership,” the report claims. “The U.S. people hold between 35 percent and 50 percent of the world’ s civilian-owned guns, with every 100 people having 90 guns [and] 47 percent of American adults reported that they had a gun.”

Odd how much Communists in China sound like the gun grabbers here in American isn’t it? Think about that as you read this next part

The conclusion that gun bans will result in enhanced protection of lives and personal security flies in the face of both the American and Chinese experience. Predictably, the report presents many of the same cherry-picked arguments used by “leading” U.S. and international “gun control” organizations that totally ignore the protective benefits of arms in private hands.  And, as typical with advocates of a centralized monopoly of violence, Chinese-style genocide, which resulted in government-caused deaths of unknown tens of millions of defenseless human beings in the 20th Century, and the current brutal occupation and tyrannical suppression of Tibetan sovereignty, is left unacknowledged. Left unsaid is the inconvenient truth that rendering captive populations unable to resist makes such monstrous crimes against humanity not only possible, but inevitable.

Remember this, gun control is not about guns, it is about CONTROL!

*VIDEO* Girl Swallowed By Pavement In China

Like a bad case of food poisoning, Governor irrelevant is back

Yep, John Huntsman, of the Charlie Crist/Dede Scozzafava Wing of the Republican Party is auditioning to be “That” Republican. “That” Republican being the Republican that the media will fawn over because “that” Republican will throw Conservatives under the bus, painting the Right as “nutty” or ” out of touch”. In short “That” Republican, be it Davis Frum, David Brooks, Charlie Crist, Meghan McCain, or John Huntsman is willing to be a useful idiot for the media.Stacy McCain, like me, is, shall we say NOT a fan of Huntsman

“Jon Huntsman quit the 2012 presidential campaign just as he ran it all along: Sowing confusion with contradictory messages. …
“Students of American political history who examine the peculiar course of Huntsman’s campaign will undoubtedly scratch their heads and ask themselves, ‘What the f–k was that all about?‘”
– Robert Stacy McCain, “A Fitting Finale to the Huntsman Flop,” Monday, Jan. 16, 2012

And now, Huntsman has gone the way of Crist, sinking a knife into the back of the GOP

Keep that in mind as you read this report from Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller:

Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China’s Communist Party and criticizing it’s standard bearer in a wide-ranging interview at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night.
Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question “Is this the best we could do?”
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party. . . .
“So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you’re was an oddball,” Huntsman said, explaining why he was “toast” in Iowa. . . .
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents’ hard-line positions on China. “I don’t know what world these people are living in,”he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.

Dude. I was there at the press conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., when Huntsman quit and endorsed Romney. What was the New York Timesheadline on the story about that press conference?

Huntsman Leaves Race
With Plea for Party Unity

That was Monday, Jan. 16, just six days after he called his third-place finish in New Hampshire a “ticket to ride” and barely five months after the Aug. 11 Fox News debate in Ames, Iowa, where I first dubbed him “Governor Asterisk.” From the outset, his candidacy lacked any plausible rationale. One might call Jon Huntsman a “useful idiot,” but this would immediately prompt the question, “What actual use did he serve?” He never had any “path to the nomination,” and his faux campaign existed only to garner glowing coverage from the liberal media, to hog up time in televised debates, and to enrich the ruthless campaign consultants who somehow managed to convince him he had a chance.

So here we are in April, three months after he endorsed Romney and pleaded for “party unity,” and Chumpsman is publicly trashing the GOP? Once more we must ask: “What the f–k was that all about?”

It is all about getting a show on CNN or MSNBS maybe, or maybe just a personal vendetta. Or maybe Huntsman is mad at the GOP voters for being too “stupid” to vote for him. No wonder, since all he did was kick Conservatives in the teeth with his pompous act in the campaign. Frankly, Huntsman sounded more like a Liberal every debate. And now, he is going to try to teach us rubes us all a lesson. But, he is too irrelevant to matter.

Thanks Barack… China, Canada Reach Quick Deals On Oil, Uranium

China, Canada Reach Quick Deals On Oil, Uranium – Hot Air

Last month we discussed the rather alarming news that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was planning a trip to China to discuss possible natural resources deals with the economic superpower. It seemed no coincidence that the trip was announced close on the heels of Barack Obama’s decision to kick the can down the road on the Keystone XL pipeline yet again. But at that time, I retained some hope that perhaps this was just a warning siren to Obama which would remind him that Canada had plenty of other options should we decide not to do business with them.

..

Apparently Harper hasn’t cared much for what he’s been hearing out of Washington and found a very willing ear across the Pacific because it seems that some deals have been struck already.

China and Canada declared Thursday that bilateral relations have reached “a new level” following a series of multibillion-dollar trade and business agreements to ship additional Canadian petroleum, uranium and other products to the Asian superpower.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Chinese leadership said Thursday the economic co-operation agreements – and billions of dollars in new private-sector deals – signed by the two countries over the past few days are unprecedented and will open the door to additional trade and investment.

Harper announced Thursday, following meetings with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, that the countries have struck an agreement that will allow Canadian uranium companies to “substantially increase exports to China.”

“We expect to see similar success stories in Canadian energy exports to China, once infrastructure is in place.”

Harper has said building pipelines to the West Coast – such as the proposed Northern Gateway oilsands pipeline and a separate one for liquefied natural gas – is a national priority as Canada looks to ship its vast resources to Asia.

This just gets better and better, doesn’t it? Not only do we have to keep an eye on the Canadians building a shorter pipeline to their western coast to ship all of their oil overseas, but now they’re going to aggressively up the ante on delivering uranium to the Chinese. Oh, I know… you probably think I’m being an old worry wort, right? I mean, China would only use the fuel for peaceful, energy production purposes and would never “lose track” of any of it, right?

Yet again we see that elections matter, and decisions coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. can have both immediate and long term effects not only here at home, but across the oceans as well. Harper’s deals wont be finalized until the Canadian legislature approves them, but they would be foolish indeed to turn it down with no assurances of a market in the U.S. There was never any doubt that Canada would pursue their own best economic and national interests and find a buyer for their resources. It was only a question of who would strike the right deal. And – again – I do not place any blame on Harper for this. He has to look out for Canada’s interests first, not ours. The fault here lies with the White House for playing politics with such a critical issue.

Click HERE For Rest Of Story

The Hell that is Stalinism

Josef Stalin was a deeply evil bastard. History tells us of his evil deeds, the slaughtering, imprisonment, and persecution of tens of millions of Russians is one of the darkest chapters in history. Stalinism, is the worst form of Comminism, the most brutal, draconian, version of Totalinarianism imagineable. Sadly, no tragically, Stalinism did not die with Stalin in 1953. Mao, another murderous bastard killed even more innocents in China than Stalin did in the USSR. Today, only one Stalinsit state exists. That is North Korea.Complete with Gulags and human suffering on a scale we cannot fathom.

Doug Powers has the details on the latest crimes being committed by North Korea’s new leader.

I know I tend to joke around a bit and have some snarky fun here, but when Kim Jong Il died and I wrote that North Koreans had better weep uncontrollably “or get sent to a labor camp,” I wasn’t kidding. And of course now it sounds like that is indeed the case:

North Korean authorities are punishing mourners who failed to exhibit sincere sadness and despair after the death of Kim Jong Il on Dec. 17, the Daily NK reported Wednesday.

The online North Korean newspaper, which is published by opponents of the governing regime, said a source in North Hamkyung Province revealed the information. The source told the paper “authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine,” according to the Daily NK.

Like I said, those of us who have been blessed to live in the West cannot fathom such atrocities. But they are real none the less. remember those suffering in North Korea the next time some Lefty praises Communism.