Two Events on this Day in History

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” — Winston Churchill

Two historic events happen on this day. Both were turning points in World War Two — one in the Pacific and the other in Europe. One was a victory and the other turned a military disaster into a victory.

We’ll begin with the Pacific theater.

Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States defeated Japan in one of the most decisive naval battles of World War II. Thanks in part to major advances in code breaking, the United States was able to preempt and counter Japan’s planned ambush of its few remaining aircraft carriers, inflicting permanent damage on the Japanese Navy. An important turning point in the Pacific campaign, the victory allowed the United States and its allies to move into an offensive position.

On this day in 1942, the Battle of Midway — one of the most decisive U.S. victories against Japan during World War II — began. During the four-day sea-and-air battle, the outnumbered U.S. Pacific Fleet succeeded in destroying four Japanese aircraft carriers while losing only one of its own, the Yorktown, to the previously invincible Japanese navy.

In six months of offensives prior to Midway, the Japanese had triumphed in lands throughout the Pacific, including Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and numerous island groups. The United States, however, was a growing threat, and Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto sought to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet before it was large enough to outmatch his own.

This fleet engagement between U.S. and Japanese navies in the north-central Pacific Ocean resulted from Japan's desire to sink the American aircraft carriers that had escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Yamamoto, Japanese fleet commander, chose to invade a target relatively close to Pearl Harbor to draw out the American fleet, calculating that when the United States began its counterattack, the Japanese would be prepared to crush them. Instead, an American intelligence breakthrough — the solving of the Japanese fleet codes — enabled Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to understand the exact Japanese plans. Nimitz placed available U.S. carriers in position to surprise the Japanese moving up for their preparatory air strikes on Midway Island itself.

A thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, the strategic island of Midway became the focus of his scheme to smash U.S. resistance to Japan's imperial designs. Yamamoto's plan consisted of a feint toward Alaska followed by an invasion of Midway by a Japanese strike force. When the U.S. Pacific Fleet arrived at Midway to respond to the invasion, it would be destroyed by the superior Japanese fleet waiting unseen to the west. If successful, the plan would eliminate the U.S. Pacific Fleet and provide a forward outpost from which the Japanese could eliminate any future American threat in the Central Pacific. U.S. intelligence broke the Japanese naval JN-25b code, however, and the Americans anticipated the surprise attack.

The intelligence interplay would be critical to the outcome of the battle and began many weeks before the clash of arms. American radio nets in the Pacific picked up various orders Yamamoto had dispatched to prepare his forces for the operation. As early as May 2, messages that were intercepted began to indicate some forthcoming operation, and a key fact, the planned day-of-battle position of the Japanese carriers, would be divulged in a notice sent on May 16. By the time Nimitz had to make final decisions, the Japanese plans and order of battle had been reconstructed in considerable detail.

American combat forces took over where intelligence efforts left off. Scouts found the Japanese early in the morning of June 4. Although initial strikes by Midway-based planes were not successful, American carrier-based planes turned the tide. Torpedo bombers (Douglas TBD Devastator) became separated from the American Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers and were slaughtered (36 of 42 shot down), but they diverted Japanese defenses just in time for the dive-bombers to arrive — some of them had become lost, and now by luck they found the Japanese. The Japanese carriers were caught while refueling and rearming their planes, making them especially vulnerable. The Americans sank four fleet carriers — the entire strength of the task force — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, with 322 aircraft and over five thousand sailors. The Japanese also lost the heavy cruiser Mikuma. American losses included 147 aircraft and more than three hundred seamen.

The only Japanese carrier that initially escaped destruction, the Hiryu, loosed all its aircraft against the American task force and managed to seriously damage the U.S. carrier Yorktown, forcing its abandonment. At about 5:00 p.m., dive-bombers from the U.S. carrier Enterprise returned the favor, mortally damaging the Hiryu. It was scuttled the next morning.

Analysts often point to Japanese aircraft losses at Midway as eliminating the power of the Imperial Navy's air arm, but in fact about two-thirds of air crews survived. More devastating was the loss of trained mechanics and aircraft ground crews who went down with the ships. Some historians see Midway as the turning point in the Pacific theater of the war, after which Americans rode straight to Tokyo; others view it as a cusp in the war, after which initiative hung in the balance, to swing toward the Allies in the Guadalcanal campaign. Either way, Midway ranks as a truly decisive victory for the naval forces of the United States. Military historian John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." It was Japan's worst naval defeat in 350 years

When the Battle of Midway ended, Japan had lost four carriers, a cruiser and 292 aircraft, and suffered an estimated 3,057 casualties. The U.S. lost the Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammann, 145 aircraft and suffered approximately 300 casualties.

Japan's losses hobbled its naval might--bringing Japanese and American sea power to approximate parity—and marked the turning point in the Pacific theater of World War II. In August 1942, the great U.S. counteroffensive began at Guadalcanal and did not cease until Japan's surrender three years later.

Books have been written and films made about the battle. Perhaps the most authentic film about the battle was made in 1976. Midway produced by Walter Mirisch stars Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Glenn Ford, and Hal Holbrook as Commander Joseph Rochefort the eccentric naval code breaker. The film, while having a fictional story line regarding a naval pilot and his Japanese girlfriend, is an accurate portrayal of the events leading to the battle and the battle itself. It is well worth watching if you are interested in naval history. The film made with he cooperation of the United States Navy is one of the best portrayals of the war in the Pacific with the exception of Tora, Tora, Tora.

On the other side of the world on this day another war changing event ended.

On June 4, 1940, the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk on the Belgian coast ended as German forces captured the beach port. The nine-day evacuation, the largest of its kind in history and an unexpected success, saved 338,000 Allied troops from capture by the Nazis.

On May 10, 1940, the Germans launched their attack against the West, storming into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Faced with far superior airpower, more unified command, and highly mobile armored forces, the Allied defenders were a poor match for the German Wehrmacht. In a lightning attack, the Germans raced across Western Europe. On May 12, they entered France, out-flanking the northwest corners of the Maginot Line, previously alleged by French military command to be an impregnable defense of their eastern border. On May 15, the Dutch surrendered.

The Germans advanced in an arc westward from the Ardennes in Belgium, along France's Somme River, and to the English Channel, cutting off communication between the Allies' northern and southern forces. The Allied armies in the north, which comprised the main body of Allied forces, were quickly being encircled. By May 19, Lord John Gort, the British commander, was already considering the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) by sea.

Reluctant to retreat so soon, the Allies fought on and launched an ineffective counterattack on May 21. By May 24, Walther von Brauchitsch, the German army commander in chief, was poised to take Dunkirk, the last port available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe. Fortunately for the Allies, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler suddenly intervened, halting the German advance. Hitler had been assured by Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, that his aircraft could destroy the Allied forces trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk, so Hitler ordered the forces besieging Dunkirk to pull back.

On May 26, the British finally initiated Operation Dynamo — the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk. The next day, the Allies learned that King Leopold III of Belgium was surrendering, and the Germans resumed the land attack on Dunkirk. By then, the British had fortified their defenses, but the Germans would not be held for long, and the evacuation was escalated. As there were not enough ships to transport the huge masses of men stranded at Dunkirk, the British Admiralty called on all British citizens in possession of sea-worthy vessels to lend their ships to the effort. Fishing boats, pleasure yachts, lifeboats, and other civilian ships raced to Dunkirk, braving mines, bombs, and torpedoes.

During the evacuation, the Royal Air Force (RAF) successfully resisted the Luftwaffe, saving the operation from failure. Still, the German fighters bombarded the beach, destroyed numerous vessels, and pursued other ships within a few miles of the English coast. The harbor at Dunkirk was bombed out of use, and small civilian vessels had to ferry the soldiers from the beaches to the warships waiting at sea. But for nine days, the evacuation continued, a miracle to the Allied commanders who had expected disaster. By June 4, when the Germans closed in and the operation came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French troops were saved. These experienced soldiers would play a crucial role in future resistance against Nazi Germany.

With Western Europe abandoned by its main defenders, the German army swept through the rest of France, and Paris fell on June 14. Eight days later, Henri Petain signed an armistice with the Nazis at Compiegne. Germany annexed half the country, leaving the other half in the hands of their puppet French rulers. On June 6, 1944, liberation of Western Europe finally began with the successful Allied landing at Normandy. Many of the British and French troops participating in that landing were veterans of Dunkirk.

Are the Europeans Finally Getting the Message?

“This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.” — Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, 2010

Two things happened last week. One made the news big-time on the mainstream media, the other bore scarcely a mention. Both incidents are indicative of the laissez-faire policy that West European nations have had towards immigration for the past 30 years. With the exception of Germany these nations have accepted immigrants from the Muslim world on almost an unrestricted basis in the name of human rights. Most of these immigrants come from third-world Muslim countries such as Bangladesh, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Sudan. Most claim refugee status to obtain entrée to these European countries and are usually granted it.

Once in the country of their choice or a country that will take them they gravitate to ghettos of their peers and settle in. they rarely learn the language of their new host country and bring all of their cultural baggage with them. This includes food, dress, treatment of women, honor killings, Islamic (Sharia) law, and disrespect for the host nations laws, police, and courts.

They suck off the teat of the host nation taking advantage of the nation’s generous welfare and healthcare systems. They pay little or no taxes and mostly live in public housing. The ghettos they live are run by some group of strong men and the Imams and clerics. The youth are unemployed and radicalized by the Imams

In July of 2001 the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England suffered 2 nights of rioting. It occurred as a result of heightened tension between the large and growing ethnic minority communities and the city's white majority, stoked by confrontation between the Anti-Nazi League and far right groups such as the British National Party and the National Front. According to a report in the Guardian:

“Racial violence erupted on the streets of Bradford yesterday as hundreds of Asian youths fought white extremists and police in some of the worst rioting yet seen in a summer of disturbances in northern towns and cities.

Two people were stabbed and three seriously injured after a protest march against the National Front turned violent. At the height of the trouble, police in Bradford were pelted with petrol bombs, bricks, bottles and road signs and two city centre pubs had their windows smashed. At least 17 people were arrested.

Last night, the trouble spread to the mainly Asian suburb of Manningham, an area of sprawling and deprived terraced housing estates.

A group of about 1,000 Asian youths set fire to barricades on the area's White Abbey Road and tore up bricks and concrete paving stones to hurl at the police.

Thick smoke and fumes drifted down a half-mile length of the road as police tried to beat the rioters back. Youths set fire to several cars and through petrol bombs at buildings, briefly setting the roof of one alight, as mounted police and officers in full riot gear charged the groups of rioters gathered behind a burning wreck.

Fire engines advanced to tackle the blazes behind a tight cordon of riot police. However, under a hail of stones and bricks they were several times forced to retreat. Shortly after 9pm a delegation of community leaders, including local Tory councillor Mohammed Riaz, went through police lines to talk to rioters and calm tensions, but their efforts had little effect.

'What is happening here is terrible. Businesses are being attacked, cars set on fire and I cannot believe these scenes are taking place in a city in England,' said Riaz. 'There's no logic to this. Where is the protest, where are the National Front? There is no justification for this - they are setting back Bradford 10 years.”

Note the use of the politically correct euphemism “Asian” for Muslims.

Two years ago the Guardian reported “A decade after the riots, Bradford is still uneasy about race relations:”

“Ten years ago today Bradford witnessed race riots that lasted three days and brought the issue of race relations in the city to the country's attention. Bradford became known as a "racial tinderbox" where the city's large Asian community was estranged and at odds with the white working class.

You could see the troubles coming as rioting spread across the north from towns on the other side of the Pennines such as Burnley and Oldham. There were the largely forgotten riots of 1995, which should have acted as a warning signal. After those disturbances, Asian residents complained about a lack of opportunities and growing unease about relationships with the police and the white working class. Those calls were mostly ignored, the National Front took advantage and six years later tensions boiled over again.

I was a 17-year-old student at the time, and like many people in the city was shocked to see Manningham turned into a battleground. I remember picking up the Telegraph and Argus and seeing the faces of young men I'd played against in a football semi-final a few months earlier on the front page as wanted troublemakers. Harsh sentences followed for the Asian offenders and the city woke up to the fact that it had been sleepwalking into segregation for more than 30 years.

There was a definite change in the city as the initial shock of the riots turned to disgust and even hatred as people surveyed what "they" had done to "our" city. The fallout continued with the BNP gaining council seats in predominantly white areas like Queensbury and Keighley as far-right groups took advantage of the troubles to reinforce the "them and us" attitude. Lord Ouseley's report and the Cantle report followed and laid out the drastic action that needed to be taken to counteract the effects of segregation in the city and others like it.”

The British have been the most lenient with the immigration policies and until this past week they have been turning a blind eye to the changes in culture this policy is inflecting on the natural British citizens. They believe they are doing God’s work in allowing these “Asians” to dominate their politics and through political correctness have been reluctant to change the policies and take measures, as France and the Netherlands did, to restrict the immigration and begin deporting the radical Muslims.

Islam is London's largest and most significant minority religion. There were 607,083 Muslims reported in the 2001 census in the Greater London area. 40% of England's Muslims live in London, where they make up 8.5% of the population. According to the 2011 census 2.8 million Muslims live in the U.K. (4.8% of the populations of England and Wales).

(Click on the above chart to view a larger image)

According to 2011 report in the Mail Online the Muslim population in the UK will almost double to 5.5million within 20 years:

“Immigration and high birth rates will mean nearly one in ten Britons will be Muslim by 2030, according to a worldwide study about the spread of Islam.

And the forecasts mean Britain will have more Muslims than Kuwait.

From 1990 to 2010 the number of followers of the Islamic faith around the world increased at an average rate of 2.2 per cent annually. Last year there were 1.57billion around the world.

The British increase in the Muslim population from the current 2.8 million will be mainly driven by immigration, according to figures prepared by a Washington think tank.

Projections by the respected Pew Research Centre said the 40 years between 1990 and 2030 will see a fivefold rise in Britain.

In 1990 there were 1.1million Muslims in Britain, representing two per cent of the population.

By last year that figure had risen to 2.8million, or four per cent. By 2030 the number will hit 5.5 million - eight per cent of an estimated 68 million population, Pew researchers said.”

Britain is paying a high price for this nonsensical, liberal progressive social immigration policy.

Last Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed “Allahu Akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much road kill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the lethargic British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

That’s easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there of an afternoon stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter. Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as, say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was “mundane” only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out their cell phones and start filming.

there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes. In fairness to the people of Boston, they were ordered to “shelter in place” by the governor of Massachusetts. In Woolwich, a large crowd of Londoners apparently volunteered to “shelter in place,” instinctively. Consider how that will play when these guys’ jihadist snuff video is being hawked around the bazaars of the Muslim world. Behold the infidels, content to be bystanders in their own fate.

This passivity set the tone for what followed. In London as in Boston, the politico-media class immediately lapsed into their political correct multi-culture blabber that seems to be a chronic side effect of excess diversity-celebrating: No Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam, all these body parts in the street are a deplorable misinterpretation of Islam. The BBC’s Nick Robinson accidentally described the men as being “of Muslim appearance,” but quickly walked it back lest impressionable types get the idea that there’s anything “of Muslim appearance” about a guy waving a machete and saying “Allahu Akbar.” A man is on TV dripping blood in front of a dead British soldier and swearing “by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,” yet it’s the BBC reporter who’s apologizing for “causing offence.” To David Cameron, Drummer Rigby’s horrific end was “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam. Perhaps it will eventually be labeled as “workplace violence.”

In the above video clip note the woman casually pulling her shopping cart as she approaches terrorist and the crowd of sheeple standing by and casually watching. I can guarantee this would not have been the case in Oklahoma or Texas. Also note how the ITV commentator refers to another act of violence when describing that the armed police shot the SOB machete-wielding killer.

The suburbs of the Swedish capital were engulfed in a fourth night of rioting early last Thursday in the country's worst civil unrest in years, leaving locals shaking their heads and wondering when calm would return to their usually tranquil city. A report in USA Today states:

“Since Sunday, hundreds of young residents of the suburbs of Husby, Jakobsberg, Hagsatra, Skarholmenset and others set dozens of cars on fire, damaged buildings — including schools and a police station — and battled with police. There were about 10 arrests, and one police officer was reported injured.

Police spokesman Kjell Lindgren says at least 30 cars were set ablaze across western and southern Stockholm early Thursday. Firefighters said they have "never before seen so many fires raging at the same time."

Fire also destroyed a restaurant in Skogas, south of Stockholm.

Government officials have called for calm while the rioters say they won't stop until there is a full investigation into the shooting death of a 69-year-old mentally ill Husby man last week who, police say, was swinging a machete as police attempted a house search.

"Everyone must work to restore calm," said Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

On Wednesday night and into Thursday, hundreds of residents walked the streets to answer the appeal for calm.

The unrest in poor, immigrant suburbs is only the latest to break out in Europe over the past decade following riots in Paris in 2005 and in London in 2011. But it has shocked both locals and those outside the rich northern country famous for its tolerance and generous welfare system known as the 'Swedish model,' a country also synonymous for its commitment to societal equality and justice.

Now, locals are wondering if Sweden has done any better than its European neighbors in assimilating its immigrant population, especially as administrations in the past two decades have been slowly dismantling the cradle-to-grave welfare benefits. That has led to rising income inequality that has hit the young and immigrants the hardest with unemployment running at 7% for the general population, and 16% among residents of foreign origin.”

In a related report from The Guardian:

“What began in Husby last Sunday has spread to more than a dozen of the city's other suburbs. And on Friday night, while police reported a quieter night in the capital, fires and stone-throwing were also reported in Uppsala, Södertälje, and even further afield in Linköping and Örebro, in central Sweden.

The morning after the truck-burning, however, Husby seems idyllic. There's a busy vegetable stall in the main square and a group of elderly men sipping beer in the sun. The rows of seven-storey blocks, built in the 1960s and 1970s as part of Sweden's "million homes" project, are all freshly painted, the gardens and playgrounds well-tended. At the local school, the windows broken the previous night are already being fixed.

"If you have broken windows and they see it, they will crack other windows, so we must fix it immediately," says Christer Svensson, who has come in to do the work. "I don't care, I make money out of this."

Outside the new library, which opened last month, another white, ethnically Swedish handyman is busy painting. "This place behind me, they've just spent 40m kronor [£4m] on it," he grumbles. "They don't talk about that when they talk to the TV, do they? They talk about the problems, they don't talk about everything people are doing for them.

"These people, they should integrate in this society and just try a little bit more to be like Swedish citizens."

Scratch beneath the surface and this is a sentiment shared by many in a country that arguably has the world's most generous asylum policies. Sweden has taken in more than 11,000 refugees from Syria since 2012, more per head than any other European country, and it has absorbed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 40,000 Somalis over the past two decades. About 1.8 million of its 9.5 million people are first- or second-generation immigrants.

"This is one of the countries that treats immigrants the best," says Mohammed Hassan, a Bangladeshi studying in Husby's new library, who previously lived in Brick Lane in east London. "It's much, much better than any other European country in which I've travelled."

The nightly rioting in Stockholm that establishment media ascribes merely to “youths,” is being carried out by Muslim immigrants.

A report from the Russia-based RT.com is one of the few which dared to print the M-word -- "Muslim" -- and even its author waited until the 21st of 25 paragraphs to mention it. But the report's headline and content deserve credit for properly framing the "segregation" problem:

‘They don’t want to integrate’: Fifth night of youth rioting rocks Stockholm

Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night. Hundreds of mostly immigrant teenagers tore through the suburbs, smashing windows and burning cars in the country’s worst outbreak of violence in years.

The night before, the fire brigades were called to some 90 different blazes. On the fourth night of violence, youths torched over 30 cars in 15 neighborhoods along with a restaurant in Skogas, south of Stockholm. Three law enforcement officers were injured, police spokesperson Kjell Lindgren reported.

Stockholm firefighters were busy throughout the night, saying they had “never before seen so many fires raging at the same time.” Some 90 blazes were reported in total, most of them reportedly caused by the rioters. Still, the fourth night of violence was relatively quiet compared to the previous three, RT's Peter Oliver reported from Stockholm.

Community leaders insist that a main reason for the violence is the high rate of unemployment in immigrant communities, particularly in the suburb of Husby near central Stockholm, one of the worst affected by the nighttime violence, Peter Oliver reported.

“In Sweden you’ve got welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare – to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot through stones and Molotov cocktails. It’s ridiculous and a bad excuse,” Swedish Democrats MP Kent Ekeroth told RT.

For years, Sweden – one of Europe’s most tranquil countries, famous for its attractive immigration policies and generous welfare system – has been accepting an influx of immigrants, which now make up about 15 per cent of its population. These migrants have failed to integrate into Swedish society, and are only in the country to enjoy the country’s social benefits system, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist told RT.

“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” the editor in chief of Dispatch International said. “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.”

Young Muslims who enjoy tolerance, social institutions and welfare while living in Sweden nevertheless refuse to integrate into the West, Gerolf Annemans told RT. Annemans is the parliamentary leader of Vlaams Belang (‘Flemish Interest’), a Belgian far-right nationalist political party.

“It’s always the same problem. There is a massive refusal by Muslim youngsters of the basics of Western society... and they take any excuse whatsoever to show that with violence – that is where the problem is,” he said.

Muslim immigrants in Sweden now total slightly more than 6 percent of the population, providing additional support for the maxim that a Muslim population of 5 percent is a tipping point for political turmoil. In other countries, Muslim immigrants at that point have begun to seek concessions, including, typically, the right to govern themselves by Sharia, or Islamic law.

In Sweden, the Muslim population has doubled in the last 14 years, with Muslims now accounting for over 41 percent of Sweden’s total population growth. The growth reflects not only increasing Islamic immigration but also a disproportionately high birth rate in a nation in which the native birth rate is trending toward zero-growth.

According to European Union statistics, an estimated 574,000 Muslims lived in Sweden in 2012, making up 6.05 percent of the population, compared to 1998, when there were 284,000 Muslims, or 3.21 percent of the total population.

The EU currently estimates that at current rates of growth, the Muslim population will reach 40 percent of the total population in Sweden by 2030.

While Sweden does not keep welfare statistics specifically for Muslims, experts estimate from available government welfare statistics on the foreign-born that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Sweden’s welfare payments go to Muslims, with the percentage on the rise.

In Stockholm, the rioting in recent days has centered on Husby, a low-income suburb of Stockholm with some 12,000 residents. Approximately 80 percent are first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia.

Swedish police estimated that about 200 Muslim youths were responsible for the violence last week that set hundreds of cars and several buildings on fire with Molotov cocktails, including a parking garage fire that forced the evacuation of residents of an adjacent apartment block.

After setting cars on fire, masked Muslim youths waited to pelt with rocks any police responding to calls.

Reports indicate Megafonen, a “youth activist group” funded by the city, planned the Husby riots. Police in riot gear scuffled with Muslim gangs roaming freely in Husby. Some 200 organized Muslim youth rioters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails stood near the burning cars awaiting to pelt with rocks and Molotov cocktails police and fire departments responding.

The Muslim riots in the suburbs outside Stockholm bear a strong resemblance to the Muslim riots that began Oct. 27, 2005, in suburbs outside Paris.

Several common elements between the rioting in France in 2005, and again in 2012, with the rioting currently occurring in Stockholm:

Unemployed Muslim youth immigrants from welfare families relocated from Africa to Europe begin the riot in early evening by tossing Molotov cocktails to set parked cars on fire;

The violence is intensified and spread by mobs of Muslim gangs running wild through the suburb streets, spreading to the area in which cars and buildings are torched;

When police and fire department units respond, the Muslim rioters lie in wait to pelt them with rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails.

In February, the Economist reported that in Sweden, only 51 percent of non-Europeans have a job, compared with over 84 percent of native Swedes.

“The Nordic countries need to persuade their citizens that they are getting a good return on their taxes,” the Economist noted, “but mass immigration is creating a class of people who are permanently dependent upon the state.”

In Sweden, 26 percent of all prisoners and 50 percent of prisoners serving more than five years are foreigners, the Economist detailed.

Nor is the conflict limited to social-demographic characteristics and economics; it also extends to cultural differences.

“Nordics fervently believe in liberal values, especially sexual equality and freedom of speech, but many of the immigrants come from countries where men and women are segregated and criticizing the prophet Muhammad is a serious offense.”

The Economist report concluded:

“The biggest battle is within the Nordic mind. Is it more progressive to open the door to refugees and risk overextending the welfare state, or to close the door and leave them to languish in danger zones? Is it more enlightened to impose secular values on devout Muslims or to dilute liberal values in the name of multiculturalism? Trying to reconcile these contradictions can lead to strange results. Alarmed by reports of female genital mutilation, Nyamko Sabuni, a Swedish cabinet minister, suggested compulsory gynaecological examinations for all young girls in Sweden.

Liberals are increasingly on the defensive. The number of immigration-related attacks is rising. In 2010 Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of Christmas shoppers in central Stockholm; remarkably, he managed to injure only a couple of people. In Sweden median household incomes of non-European immigrants are now 36% lower than for native-born Swedes, whereas in 1991 they were only 21% lower. But Denmark’s much-vilified immigration reforms may be paying off: the employment gap between native Danes and non-Western immigrants has declined to 24 percentage points, compared with 42 in the mid-1990s.

Sweden is now allowing in more skilled workers, having previously combined highly restrictive policies for this group with the world’s most generous policies for refugees. Trade unions used to have a veto over who was admitted and repeatedly used it. This may calm the immigration debate, but it may equally well increase the pressure to open the doors even wider for skilled immigrants while closing them for refugees.

A 20-minute drive from Rosengard to the western harbour takes the visitor to the Turning Torso, a high-rise, high-spec block that twists like a lithe athlete and commands spectacular views over the Oresund bridge linking Malmö to Copenhagen. Directly opposite its entrance is an establishment calling itself a “facelift centre”. Designer houses cluster around its base. Green’s supermarket sells local organic food and advertises yoga classes and tango lessons on the beach.

Thirty years ago Malmö was the capital of working-class Sweden, a no-nonsense city dominated by solid citizens who worked in the Kockums shipyard and voted for the Social Democratic Party. Then the global economy turned against it. The shipyards contracted and the local factories and textile mills closed. The once-dominant working class shrank to near-invisibility and the population split between professionals living in designer lofts and refugees living in Rosengard’s high-rises. The giant Kockums crane that had become the city’s symbol in 1974 was dismantled and sent to South Korea in 2002. In 2005 the Turning Torso became the city’s new landmark.

The decline of the working class and the increasing polarisation of professionals and immigrants is being repeated across the region. The Nordic countries are still among the world’s most equal, and in one important respect they are becoming more so. In 2010-11 around 60% of university graduates in Finland and Sweden were women. Sweden has almost as many female as male MPs. In Denmark the prime minister and a raft of other ministers are women.

But in other respects money is making the Nordics less equal. As a proportion of the economy, Sweden’s private-equity industry is second only to Britain’s in Europe, and Norway is awash with oil money. Some of the new rich are splashing out on Porsches and big houses, but most prefer to spend their money in subtler and less conspicuous ways. Even so, they live in a different world from the immigrants stuck in Rosengard.”

In a May 26^th report from The Independent:

“So is there something rotten in the state of Sweden? The scale of the riots cannot be compared to Paris in 2005 or to London two years ago, which eventually took hold far outside the capital. No one has been killed, and almost no one injured. The little suburb of Husby is a pretty place, built for rich white Swedes who have almost all left. It is incomparable to Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate, the ground zero of the London riots.

But even so, 80 per cent of the population are immigrants, who have for the most part fled from the troubled corners of the world - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Kurdistan and more recently Syria - lured by Sweden’s traditionally welcoming attitude towards asylum seekers. But youth unemployment is high, at least by Swedish standards - 6 per cent.”

In February of 1993 I spent three days in Stockholm on a business trip. The first thing I noticed was the cab ride from the airport to my hotel. I had a Pakistani driver with a new Volvo. Next at the hotel I noticed many “Asian” staff working the restaurant and room cleaning service. When I asked my Swedish hosts about this they looked distressed as the politely attempted to excuse the increase in immigration of Muslims into “their” country. They were concerned about the increasing strain these poor and uneducated immigrants were putting on their social welfare system — a system these businessmen were not very happy about paying high taxes for. They were also concerned that these immigrants were not learning Swedish and assimilating into their culture. Sound familiar?

After a British soldier wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt was run over, stabbed and slashed with machetes and a meat cleaver, and beheaded, the Tory government advised its soldiers that it is probably best not to appear in uniform on the streets of their capital.

Both murderers were wounded by police. One was photographed and recorded. His message:

“There are many, many (verses) throughout the Quran that says we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land women have to see the same. Your people will never be safe.”

According to ITV, one murderer, hands dripping blood, ranted, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

Both killers are Muslim converts of African descent, and both are British born.

Wednesday also, Stockholm and its suburbs ended a fourth night of riots, vandalism and arson by immigrant mobs protesting the police shooting of a machete-wielding 69-year-old.

“We have institutional racism,” says Rami Al-khamisi, founder of a group for “social change.”

Sweden, racist?

Among advanced nations, Sweden ranks fourth in the number of asylum seekers it has admitted and second relative to its population.

Are the Swedes really the problem in Sweden?

The same day these stories ran, The Washington Post carried a front-page photo of Ibrahim Todashev, martial arts professional and friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, with brother Dzhokhar, set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon massacre.

Todashev, another Chechen, had been shot to death by FBI agents, reportedly after he confessed to his and Tamerlan’s role in a triple murder in Waltham, Mass.

Though Tamerlan had been radicalized and Moscow had made inquiries about him, he had escaped the notice of U.S. authorities. Even after he returned to the Caucasus for six months, sought to contact extremists, then returned to the U.S.A., Tamerlan still was not on Homeland Security’s radar.

His father, granted political asylum, went back to the same region he had fled in fear. His mother had been arrested for shoplifting. Yet none of this caused U.S. officials to pick up Tamerlan, a welfare freeloader, and throw the lot of them out of the country.

One wonders if the West is going to wake up to the new world we have entered, or adhere to immigration policies dating to a liberal era long since dead.

It was in 1965, halcyon hour of the Great Society, that Ted Kennedy led Congress into abolishing a policy that had restricted immigration for 40 years, while we absorbed and Americanized the millions who had come over between 1890 and 1920.

The “national origins” feature of that 1924 law mandated that ships arriving at U.S. ports carry immigrants from countries that had provided our immigrants in the past. We liked who we were.

Immigration policy was written to reinforce the Western orientation and roots of America, 90 percent of whose population could by 1960 trace its ancestry to the Old Continent.

But since 1965, immigration policy has been run by people who detest that America and wanted a new nation that looked less like Europe and more like a continental replica of the U.N. General Assembly.

They wanted to end America’s history as the largest and greatest of Western nations and make her a nation of nations, a new society and a new people, more racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than any nation on the face of the earth. This is called multiculturalism.

Behind this vision lies an ideology, an idée fixe, that America is not a normal nation of blood and soil, history and heroes, but a nation erected upon an idea, the idea that anyone and everyone who comes here, raises his hand, and swears allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights becomes, de facto, not just a legal citizen but an American.

But that is no more true than to say that someone who arrives in Paris from Africa or the Middle East and raises his hand to declare allegiance to the Rights of Man thereby becomes a Frenchman.

What is the peril into which America and the West are drifting?

Ties of race, religion, ethnicity and culture are the prevailing winds among mankind and are tearing apart countries and continents. And as we bring in people from all over the world, they are not leaving all of their old allegiances and animosities behind.

Many carry them, if at times dormant, within their hearts.

And if we bring into America — afflicted by her polarized politics, hateful rhetoric and culture wars — peoples on all sides of every conflict roiling mankind, how do we think this experiment is going to end?

The immigration bill moving through the Senate, with an amnesty for 11 to 12 million illegals already here, and millions of their relatives back home, may write an end to more than just the Republican Party.

When a people abandon their language, culture, and borders it is no longer a sovereign nation. It becomes a polyglot assembly of peoples adhering to their native language and culture in the manner of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire — it was neither Austrian, Hungarian nor an Empire. It was a multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural assemblage with vague borders that ended with a gunshot by in Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

Our Founders’ vision of the republic they had created was a nation open to immigrants willing to come to this new land and live under our organic laws.

It was James Madison who stated in a speech at Federal Convention, August 13, 1787: ”America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.” Their intent was not for immigrants to come to America and bring their old world baggage with them and see how much they could take from their fellow taxpayers.

The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, standing above New York Harbor, by Emma Lazarus reads”

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It does not say:

Give me your tired, your poor, your disenchanted, and those wishing a better life,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free and realize the benefits of plunder,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, those who see the streets paved with gold,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me to enjoy the bounty of our social welfare system, and wish for a land of multiculturalism,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door, be you legal or illegal, so you may enjoy your happiness in the generosity of the American taxpayer while retaining your language, culture, and customs.

With the exploding population in the Muslim world and the increasing poverty and civil unrest more and more poor and uneducated Muslims will be looking for refugee status in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The same holds true with our own southern neighbors with the exception of the civil unrest. The twenty years will see a dramatic change in the European welfare states as more and more of these immigrants tax their social welfare systems and there will be more takers than makers. Their liberal progressive social policies will become increasingly unpopular with the native born as the influence of these Muslim immigrants not only drain their government’s coffers, but also change their culture. As Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany stated in October 2010: “This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.”

38 Billion For Fireworks

“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” — Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Taylor — 1816

On Friday night I watched part of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games from London. I did not watch the entire TV coverage as I just could not tolerate the constant interruptions from commercials and the steady stream of chatter from Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.

Two events did, however, catch my attention. One was the portrayal of British history and the other was the lighting of the Olympic Torch. Let me begin with the torch lighting first.

While a spectacular event with the burning copper leaves being elevated above the athletes I could not but wonder what the costs for these games are to the British people and what return will they get.

One thing that everyone can agree on is that hosting the Olympics costs a lot and it's getting more expensive all the time. However, there was little research into the wider economic impact of the Olympics until Montreal emerged from the 1976 games with a gaping deficit of $1.2 billion, an amount local residents are still paying off through a supplementary tax on tobacco. Those games were funded almost entirely through public city funds, and the large amounts of money spent on infrastructure improvements and facilities construction were focused on a relatively small part of the city. Montreal 1976 is widely held up as the example not to follow, and it caused many cities to think twice about bidding for future games.

The first Olympics to turn a profit were the summer games held in Los Angeles in 1984. Since local citizens voted against public financing, those games also became the first to be almost entirely privately funded. Los Angeles marked the beginnings of commercialization of the games and the development of Olympic sponsorship deals.

In 1984, organizational and economic strategies were introduced, under the leadership of Peter Ueberroth, which meant the city could hold magnificent games that wouldn't bankrupt the city 1984 showed that it was actually worthwhile to hold an Olympics. The Los Angeles Olympic Games resulted in a surplus of nearly $250 million. This was subsequently used to support youth and sports activities throughout the United States. Coincidentally, he was born on the day on which the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, died.

Since then, the summer Olympics have made money or at least broken even, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Seoul in 1988 was left with a positive balance of $556 million, Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000 each broke even.

The 1992 games in Barcelona only came out around $3 million ahead, but are held up as a good example of secondary benefits that a financially viable Olympics can bring to a city or region. The Spanish city got a massive makeover for the games: its transportation and telecommunications systems were upgraded; it got new housing and retail centers that are still flourishing 12 years later.

Germany's 1972 Munich games were similar. Although it emerged with a deficit, after the games Munich had a new subway system and much of the city had been renovated and rebuilt after suffering devastation from the bombings in WWII. The games also brought an image of respectability to the Bavarian city that was once the providence of the Nazi Party. The games also exposed the need for increased security. If done the right way, the games can bring a city many long-term benefits, as they did in Munich.

Analysts break up Olympics economics for a city into three phases: pre-game, game and post-game. During the first phase, the city can benefit from tourism and a boost in construction activity. During the games, there are Olympic jobs to be had, revenues from tickets, sponsor shops, etc., not to mention the masses of tourists that descend on hotels, restaurants and other local businesses.

It's when it's all over that the problems come. The challenge is to use all that infrastructure effectively and learn how to deal with the massive, sudden drop-off. Massive Olympic sports arenas often remain un- or underused. Olympic villages fall into disrepair and become headaches for the city. Most cities simply do not need all the facilities.

Even Sydney — which many Australians tout as an economic success story — has had day-after problems. Its huge Olympic Park stands mostly silent and empty, too big to be sustained by regular sporting events alone. It will require an investment of at least $20 million dollars to turn it into the "living precinct" its designers envision.

Analysts say the evidence is just not clear on whether hosting the Olympics will bring a city an important or lasting economic boost. Thanks to new funding strategies and revenue sources, the dark high-deficit days of Montreal will most likely remain in the past. But whether the boost gained by temporary job creation and intense publicity is long-lasting is more difficult to ascertain, say experts.

The final bill for the 2012 Olympics could be ten times higher than the original estimate, according to an investigation. The predicted cost of the games when London won the bid in 2005 was £2.37 billion ($3.7209 billion). That figure has now spiraled to more than £12 billion ($18.84 billion) and could reach as much as £24 billion ($37.7 billion), the Sky Sports investigation claims. The Olympics public sector funding package, which covers the building of the venues, security and policing, was upped to around £9.3 billion ($14.6 billion) in 2007.

The London Mail reported on January 27, 2012 that cost of Olympics to spiral to £24bn... TEN TIMES higher than 2005 estimate (and is it any wonder when we're forking out £335,000 for a single sculpture):

“But the three-month investigation, which used figures from freedom of information requests and public documents, revealed extra spends that could drive up the cost to taxpayers by an extra £2.4bn.

These include anti-doping control officers, legacy schemes, tube drivers being paid extra to work and local Olympic torch relay programmes.

The news comes as it was today revealed that £335,000 of taxpayers' money has been spent on a single sculpture for the games.

'Jurassic Stones' by Richard Harris, described as a 'row of stones on sticks' by locals, has been slammed as a waste of money after it went on display in Weymouth, Dorset.

Several locals to the town, which is hosting the sailing events for the games, took to internet forums to criticise the artwork.

One said: 'Government debt has just gone through the one trillion pounds barrier.

'Obviously deeper cuts still have to be made. May I suggest that they start with the Arts Budget.

….

The investigators say the final figure could exceed its £24bn estimate as many requests for information have been ignored.

Requests for information did reveal that Newham Council, which is staging most of the Games, are providing £40m of taxpayers' money towards the Olympic Stadium and £700,000 on Olympic projects.

However the council's legal bill over the row between West Ham and Spurs FC over the stadium has cost almost £1m.

It has also forked out £29,400 on tickets. In December Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office warned about the real risk of the Games going over budget. ‘Not everything is rosy,' he said.

'The Government is confident that there is money available to meet known risks, but in my view, the likelihood that the Games can still be funded within the existing £9.3billion public sector funding package is so finely balanced that there is a real risk more money will be needed.’

However a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokesman today hit back at the Sky investigation saying: 'The Public Sector Funding Package for the Games is £9.3bn and includes all additional security, defence and public transport provision for the Games.”

In a sidebar the Mail reports of the rising costs of security stating:

“In December the head of the National Audit Office warned of the risk of the government exceeding its Olympics budget of £9.3billion.

This figure includes the build of the venues and the £600million police and security budget. The government has just allocated an extra £41million (with a £7million contingency) from this budget to Locog to pay for the Opening Ceremony, which is set to cost £81million total.

Locog has also been allocated £271m to pay for venue security. The figure also includes £2.8m for Games Time Testing, £35m to convert the stadium after the event and £35m for tourism campaigns.

However Sky Sports investigators drew figures from freedom of information requests and public documents to reveal the cost to the public purse could be as much as £24bn. Highlights of the investigation include the £766m cost of the land used for the venues. Legacy programmes are also set to hit £826m, while the Olympic Park Legacy Company is set to cost £300m.

Then there's the tube drivers who receive extra pay during the games. 13,000 of them will each get £500 each bringing that bill to £6.5m. And what about the quangos? UK Sport received a £29m injection from Andy Burnham in 2008 because of the Olympic Games. Sport England has used some of a £22million handout to measure Legacy work.

Transport for London spent £2.5million taking 30,000 staff on a tour of the Olympic Park, according to the Sky investigation. While so-called 'London Ambassadors' - who will meet and greet tourists, will cost: £3.5million.

It was also revealed that councils across Britain have spent nearly £11.4m on torch relay and other Olympic themed events. But not all local authorities responded to requests for information so this figure could be higher. Local councils have spent £407,102 on tickets.”

Mediaite reports that CNN host Piers Morgan appeared on CNN with Brooke Baldwin last Thursday where he talked about his interview with Mitt and Ann Romney. Prior to playing clips of the interview, Morgan was asked about Romney’s comments to NBC where he wondered if London was up to the security challenges that the Olympics will pose. The comments drew sharp criticism from some members of the British press corps. But Morgan shocked when he defended Romney’s comments saying that the presumptive Republican nominee was “absolutely right” to question whether the U.K. was ready for the Olympics:

“It’s no secret over here that for the last three weeks the security around the Olympics has been a shambles,” said Morgan. “The outside firm they got in to run it has been all over the place – they didn’t have enough people and the army had to be drafted in. So, Mitt Romney was only saying exactly what has been happening.”

“He’s run an Olympics, so I thought he was perfectly entitled to be critical,” Morgan continued. He said that the English press jumped on him because they wanted Romney to “talk us up a bit,” but the substance of Romney’s critique was on point.

“I thought it was a bit of a fuss about nothing,” said Morgan. “He was just speaking the truth which can sometimes be rather unpalatable.”

The BBC reported arrests in critical mass bike ride near Olympic Park during the opening ceremonies:

“More than 130 cyclists were arrested by police close to the Olympic Stadium on the opening night of the Games.

There were scuffles between police and cyclists on the outskirts of the Olympic Park at 22:30 BST on Friday.

People taking part in a monthly mass bike ride held in London said they were "kettled" near the stadium.

The police said cyclists ignored warnings and rode on Games Lanes ahead of the opening ceremony, but they did not respond to the kettling claim.

The Critical Mass ride is a pro-cycling event which takes place in London every month.

The Metropolitan Police said people were arrested under section 12 of the Public Order Act and for causing a public nuisance.

The force said two groups had been detained - the first on Bow Flyover and the other in Warton Road, Stratford.

The Met said up to 500 cyclists had gathered near Waterloo by 18:00 BST, five times the usual number that attended.

Police believed the demonstration "had the potential to cause serious disruption" and said officers used loud hailers and leaflets to explain the restrictions.”

The other thing that threw me was director Danny Boyles, tribute the Britain’s National Health Service during the opening pageant on British history.

Olympics opening ceremony London rehearsal

Regardless of futile attempts at liberal do-goodery, the goal on the left is always the same: constantly demanding undeserved praise for well-intentioned but failed acts of benevolent socialism. That sort of predictable imagery-before-reality mentality was on display during the London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies, where tribute was paid to the Brits' failing socialized National Health Service, affectionately known as the NHS.

Jeannie DeAngelis opines in American Thinker:

“The producer of the extravaganza, London resident and Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, decided to integrate a choreographed tribute to the NHS into the showy opening festivities because, according to Boyle, "universal health care is one of the core values of British society" and an "amazing thing to celebrate."

Sounding as if he was reading off Barack Obama's teleprompter circa 2015, Danny Boyle also said, "One of the reasons we put the NHS in the show is that everyone is aware of how important the NHS is to everybody in this country. We believe, as a nation, in universal health care. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how rich you are; you will get treated."

Besides Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, Boyle directed the movie Shallow Grave — a title more befitting the musical tribute to a health care system renowned for human suffering and premature death. Bleeding-heart Boyle said this about the NHS: "It is something that is very dear to people's hearts."

The NHS may be "dear to people's hearts," all right, but probably not to the hearts of those who've experienced the horror of a loved one dying after being forced by bureaucrats to wait months for life-saving tests and treatment.

The whole eerie performance with nurses from Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (GOSH) dressed in 1950s uniforms pushing around sick children bouncing around on oversized hospital beds was almost as sickening to watch as Barack Obama emerging from the Styrofoam Greek columns at INVESCO Field.

Let's face it: in general, liberals are so proud of their accomplishments that to market their fantasy, they'd gladly don intricate costumes and push stage props around London's Olympic Park. The Brits did it at the Olympic opening ceremonies, and Barack Obama, harbinger of a similarly well-intentioned health care system that is similarly likely to fail, does it symbolically every time he promises the same type of medical quality and access that the NHS has proven for over 60 years is impossible to physically or financially maintain.

In an October 13, 2011 Mail Online article entitled "People are dying from lack of care. The NHS must be held to account," "realist" Julia Manning, chief executive of 2020Health, wrote, "Of course we have much to be proud of in the NHS, but complacency and sentimentality have no place in an NHS in which people are dying for lack of care." Julia, how about dancing Florence Nightingales? Do they have a place?

The truth is that while the NHS was sentimentally praising itself in front of the world, what the organization failed to mention was the minor detail that GOSH was the place where a 13-year-old boy named Arvind Jain died of malnutrition after waiting eight months for a complacent health care system to schedule a routine 30-minute procedure to insert a feeding tube into his stomach. After the boy's death, the NHS Health Service parliamentary ombudsman deemed that Arvind was "left to die in agony after 'chaotic and substandard' care."

…..

NHS detractors agree that although socialist-style health care may have laudable objectives, those objectives do not compensate for the appalling results. In 2009, it was reported that approximately 300 patients died each year of malnutrition in British hospital wards. The truth is that if the NHS wanted to commemorate an achievement, it should have been touting being the best at providing some of the worst health care on the planet.

Whether those merry dancing nurses realized it or not, they were representing a bankrupt system that relegates the very ill to waiting lists and denies drugs that are already paid for with the tax money of poor British citizens. What the nurses promoted was a system that has been known to refuse patients basic human needs like food and water, forces the sick to wait until it's too late for life-saving treatment, and effectively euthanizes 130,000 elderly people a year. Nonetheless, based on what the world witnessed at the Olympics opening ceremonies, the NHS accomplishes all those atrocities with a rollicking sense of national pride.

Like communism, socialism, Marxism, and the newest edition to the lineup, Obamanism, the British health care system obviously perceives itself as well-intentioned, which liberals worldwide obviously translate into ample justification for playing God with other people's lives.”

It just boggled my mind to see such a blatant display of left-wing politics displayed at the opening ceremonies of a so-called non-political event like the Olympics.

And then finally we have Jeannie DeAngelis blogging in American Thinker about the antics of our First Lady in Chief of Eating:

“When Michelle Obama jetted off to Britain to instruct the US Olympic Team on what they need to do to come home with the gold, it became apparent that America's first lady had found a way to party hearty, regardless of the pledge to forgo her annual Martha's Vineyard vacation.

Call me cynical, but just because Michelle Obama has well-cut biceps from doing 15-lb curls in the White House gym, trounced Ellen DeGeneres in a push-up contest, and kicked Jimmy Fallon's butt in a potato-sack race, that doesn't exactly qualify her to dole out pointers to seasoned Olympic athletes. But, then again, this is a woman who appointed herself Healthy Eating Czar while pretty much eating anything she damned well pleases.

For example, just prior to the Olympic opening ceremony at a reception held at Buckingham Palace, as "the Queen [of England] gave a welcoming speech" in front of 200 guests and dignitaries from all over the world, healthy eater Michelle enthusiastically wolfed down "Quail's egg canapés."

Meanwhile, back home Barack was concocting class warfare strategies while across the pond, resplendent in a $6,800 embroidered top and white pleated skirt from the J. Mendel 2013 collection, the first lady mingled with of 95 heads of state, including her "flexible" husband Barack's best Russian friend, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.”

So with the issue of security and final costs the people of the U.K. will have much to think about during the next two weeks. I wonder if their failing economy will be able to bear the final costs of the 2012 Olympic Games.

The Cognitive Dissonance of the Liberal Mind

“It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good." — Thomas Jefferson

I have used the term “cognitive dissonance” in previous posts, but just for a boring refresher let me once again offer a definition of this term.

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions.[2] Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent beliefs. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. A closely related term, cognitive disequilibrium, was coined by Jean Piaget to refer to the experience of a discrepancy between something new and something already known or believed.

Experience can clash with expectations, as, for example, with buyer's remorse following the purchase of an expensive item. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment. People are biased to think of their choices as correct, despite any contrary evidence. This bias gives dissonance theory its predictive power, shedding light on otherwise puzzling irrational and destructive behavior.

A classic example of this idea (and the origin of the expression "sour grapes") is expressed in the fable The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (ca. 620–564 BCE). In the story, a fox sees some high-hanging grapes and wishes to eat them. When the fox is unable to think of a way to reach them, he surmises that the grapes are probably not worth eating, as they must not be ripe or that they are sour. This example follows a pattern: one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces one's dissonance by criticizing it. Another term for this pattern is "adaptive preference formation."

Let’s look at a more concrete, simplified and less academic example of CD. You have a color swatch in front of you and you claim it is blue. By spectrographic analysis the RGB values of the swatch scientifically prove it to be green. If you are suffering a case of CD yu will find it very uncomfortable to admit your claim that the swatch is not blue, but in fact green. Instead you will find ways to hold to your belief that the swatch is blue in order to avoid the embarrassment of having made the wrong choice. This psychological condition is most prevalent and dangerous in political thinking, i.e. if a person is reared in a liberal progressive environment the chances are he or she will remain with this thinking no matter how the facts show the liberal progressive policies have failed all through history. On the other hand conservatives rarely suffer CD as they are able to see facts as facts and adapt their thinking in spite of philosophy, or as John Adams said; “facts are stubborn things.”

Some 160 years ago Frederick Bastiat put it this way when it came to socialist thinking and social justice:

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply, see if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay. No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.”

Now we come to a prime example of what the liberal thought on the recent London riots is. Via Big Hollywood, we learn the actor Russell Brand is blaming not only David Cameron but even Margaret Thatcher for riots in London in a long, incomprehensible, and meandering essay in the left-wing Guardian newspaper:

“These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Brand describes how he once was a London anti-capitalist protester himself at one point, which might explain this article landing in the anti-capitalist Guardian:

“I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.

That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.

I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.

I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.

That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.

Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.”

This is just another example of some pinhead liberal spouting off his closely held CD beliefs regarding capitalism and social justice while living in a posh Hollywood Hills home and driving his BMW or Mercedes Benz to The studio each day. I guess the new spelling for the word hypocrite is: H O L L Y W O O D A C T O R.

They spout off their left-wing progressive anti-capitalist crap while living life of luxury and plenty due to the very capitalist system they decry. They believe society (that means you and me) have to take responsibility for the people who will not take responsibility for themselves and donate to the plunder they receive from the state. They have closely held beliefs that society must take care of these people whose families will not while over and over again the facts speak to the contrary.

In fact it was his disparaged Margaret Thatcher who said:

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it’ and so they are casting their problems upon society, and who is society? There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then after our neighbour and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.” There is no such thing as society”.

As Charles Moore states in his article in the London Telegraph:

“So Thatcher-haters are wrong about what she was trying to do. I wonder why. I suspect that, even among the honest Left, of whom Andy McSmith is one, the idea of Mrs. Thatcher as the great anti-social force provides an alibi for the crimes of over-government. It allows them not to consider the harm done by welfare dependency, council housing, politicized trade unions and producer-dominated public services. After all, they called their creed “socialism’’. An alternative account of society was a much greater threat to them than a crude rejection of its existence.

Any proper critique of Mrs. Thatcher’s time in office should take her beliefs about society as she actually expressed them, and then see how much she succeeded. It is surely a more just criticism of her government that social security remained so high, healthcare so bureaucratic and schools so resistant to parental choice. Unlike in business and industry, where she really did “roll back the frontiers of the state”, the frontiers of the welfare state for the most part remained.”

I am sick and tired of these pinheaded wealthy progressive liberals and left-wing writers constantly telling me that it is the government’s role to provide for those who will not provide for themselves. There are two reasons people will not or cannot provide for themselves. The first is circumstances. Through no fault of their own a person may fall to circumstances such as a disability or a disabling disease. These people are in the minority and a society based in Christian and Judeo principles will look after them.

The second cause is behavioral. When generations grow up having babies out of wedlock, disrespect education, drop out of school, take drugs, buy their groceries with food stamps and use their welfare and aid to dependent children payments for liquor, cigarettes and drugs it’s a behavior problem. It is not government’s responsibility to look after them by taking money from the makers and giving it to the takers. This is wealth redistribution, a product of class warfare and so called social justice. Something Bastiat called “legal plunder”

For generations these people have depended on government entitlements for their existence. They blame the rich for their plight in life and believe they have a right to take what they want from those better off.

Just recently Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack claimed food stamps create jobs. Vilsack backed a White House claim that food stamps, which the Department of Agriculture administers, actually constitute a stimulus program, describing it as “the most direct stimulus you can get into the economy during these tough times.”

Vilsack was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” responding to questions about a recent Agriculture Department report that showed 1 in 7 Americans is on the program, called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

“Obviously it’s putting people to work,” Vilsack said. “Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy. If people are able to buy a little bit more in the grocery store and then someone’s got to stock it, shelve it, package it, process it, ship it, all of those are jobs.”

The reason the number of recipients has increased is that the federal government has been working more closely with local governments to get more Americans on food stamps, Vilsack said.

How absolutely incredibly stupid can a government bureaucrat be. What Vilsack (former governor of Iowa and whose wife Christie is running for Congress against Rep Steve King) is really saying is that if the government takes one dollar out of your pocket it can generate $0.84 for the economy. Isn’t that just great! How about the lost opportunity cost accruing to you when the government picks you pocket of the one dollar. Perhaps you could use the dollar in some more productive way, or not use it at all but put it in your savings account. This is a perfect example of plunder.

And to what ends are the food stamps used? How much fraud and abuse is connected with the SNAP program. Right now there are almost 45 million people collecting food stamps or using EBT cards — that’s 1 in 7. Almost every grocery store check-out clerk will provide you with tales of how food stamps and cards are abused. As I stated earlier the recipients of food stamps will buy their meat, beans and bread with the stamps and then pull out the cash for the prohibited items such as booze, smokes and junk food.

In a recent blog on ExposeTheMedia.com there was a write up by a recipient of an EBT card. The woman claimed:

“As a recipient of the federal food stamp program, I now eat far better than I ever did when I was working and scrimping by on $100/month budget for my children and me. Besides the substantial $525/month I receive as a family of three, I was shocked and appalled to learn what the tax payers are providing for my unworking ass.

Your taxpayer dollars will pay for energy drinks such as Red Bull. I also can purchase ANY candy or gum product. Gum is a food product, right Michelle? I also may purchase any mixers (strawberry daiquiri/margarita drinks) without alcohol in them. People always drink margarita mix as a substantial nutritional beverage, right?

One of my favorite things about this is that I may go to the deli or bakery section and get fresh donuts, customized party cakes, party subs, fresh salad bar, deli salads, etc. – all things I could not afford when I worked for a living. I also can purchase soda (which has a deposit in my state) and then return my empty cans to make some actual cash. Thanks guys! Keep paying your taxes!

I used to cut coupons and watch sale ads. Now I don’t even look at the prices on products. As for these hilarious media interviews, in which food stamp recipients claim to run out of money by the end of the month- I’ll tell ya what- it’s because they are either getting Delmonico steaks everyday or selling their food benefits for cash to buy drugs, etc- which is prevalent in the inner cities. That’s why their kids are hungry.

I don’t even have to go to the store either, as the Schwan’s man will deliver right to my door. Yes, thank you for my $19.99 gourmet fish I had this afternoon. The local butcher also takes them so I may eat farm raised choice meat products. I have lived on both sides of the food spectrum, and frankly it makes me sick to know that I was struggling while providing candy for others. If Michelle wants to regulate any food program, maybe she should look at her voters and regulate what is being paid for by the good taxpayers of America.

Oh, and guess what? Many of my friends and family will be receiving gourmet boxes of chocolate for Christmas this year.

Keep paying your taxes, guys!”

It this isn’t plunder I don’t know what is.

Star Parker, an African American woman who was once a welfare and food stamp liberal now turned conservative business owner, has stated over and over again the failure of the welfare, social justice state. She has compared it to slavery where the government becomes the master and the recipient the slave. They are slaves to the politicians, race baiters, and class warfare advocates who need the slaves to remain in power. They will plunder he makers so they can hand out goodies to the takers while claiming they are promoting social justice. And Obama is the head master of the plantation.