Lightning Times

Morning Report: 2013-05-30

Syria says its shipment of Russian S-300 missiles (registration) has arrived.

Burmese changes: 'After 50 years of brutal military rule, Myanmar’s democratic opening has been swift and startling...'.

Over the past two years dramatic reforms introduced by a new president, Thein Sein, prompted by the country’s increasingly desperate economic straits, have started a rapid transition from secretive isolation to an open democracy of sorts. The mere fact of such a change taking place has surprised the world; its speed and breadth have caused widespread bewilderment.

China interested in the Azores?

"Hundreds of thousands" of AP phone records seized, says CEO Gary Pruitt.

Richard Fernandez examines the dangers of recruiting informants - if indeed that is the reason so many warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber; Michael Adebolajo, the Woolwich beheader and Alexandre D. the Parisian neck-stabber were ignored.

The biggest cost to using informants is that they can in the meantime continue their life of crime. In fact, they are often expected to proceed as before in order to rise ever higher in the hierarchy of the target. The crimes they may naturally commit along the way often go unpunished. The price of catching the big fish is feeding it bait.

Kathy Griffin. Anderson Cooper. CNN.

New Year's Eve. What could go wrong?

Morning Report: 2012-08-21

Ethiopia: PM Meles dies. 'Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has died, Ethiopian state television said on Tuesday. Meles had not been seen in several weeks. The government said in July that he was taking a break to recover from an unspecified condition. State television said Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn will be acting prime minister. ...'

Syria: FSA bans torture, prisoner killings. 'The Free Syrian Army issued new orders Aug. 20 forbidding the torture and killing of prisoners following criticism by U.N. investigators, Reuters reported. ...'

Russia / Israel: Gazprom eyes Leviathan. 'Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom is studying opportunities to participate in the development of Israel's Leviathan offshore natural gas field, Bloomberg reported Aug. 20 ...'

Turkey: Gaziantep bombing kills 8. CNN: 'Eight people were killed in a bombing in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, an official in the Interior Ministry said Monday. A spokesman for the Gaziantep governorship said 66 people were wounded in the blast. ...' Bianet - English: 'An explosion that took place near the Karşıyaka Police Station in the southeastern province of Gaziantep killed eight people and injured 61 at around 20:00 on Monday. The blast occured after someone detonated the explosives loaded inside a vehicle, Gaziantep Governor Erdal Ata told the broadcasting station NTV. The victims of the blast were passengers inside a nearby automobile and a minibus, according to reports. Two buses also caught fire in consequence of the explosion ...'

Gaziantep, previously and still informally called Antep; ʻayn tāb [ʕajn tæːb] is a city in southeast Turkey and amongst the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The city is located 185 kilometres (115 miles) northeast of Adana and 127 kilometres by road north of Aleppo, Syria. The city has two urban districts under its administration, Şahinbey and Şehitkamil. It is the sixth most populous city in Turkey.

USA / terrorism: Hezbollah funds seized. BBC: 'The US authorities say they have seized $150m (£95m) from a bank allegedly linked to a money-laundering scheme of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Last year, US officials accused the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) of helping the group launder profits from drug trafficking and other crimes. The funds were allegedly used to ship cars from the US to West Africa, with the proceeds smuggled back to Lebanon. ...'

Analysis: Benjamin Kerstein on Chomsky, NPR. Michael Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein on Noam Chomsky:

Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.

Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. ...

Go read the rest. Now via a Facebook friend here's Kerstein in 2010 on NPR:

Put simply, NPR is for coastal liberals what Rush Limbaugh is for heartland conservatives: a means of relating to the world from within the confines of a specific subculture. The difference, of course, is that Limbaugh’s admirers do not force others to pay for it.

Nor, I imagine, are Limbaugh’s listeners laboring under the same illusion as NPR’s. Most of them probably understand that Limbaugh is giving opinions based on his political point of view, which is, to say the least, well known to his listeners. NPR’s listeners, on the other hand, are quite convinced that they are receiving nothing less than the pure, unvarnished, objective truth from the network. They believe themselves to be smart and informed, and thus the network they love must also be, perhaps by definition, smart and informative. ...

"And so I did a lot of bad things, thinking they were good things."

Eric Allen Bell comes clean about the Murfreesboro mosque and the film "Not Welcome."

Steyn: Free the Preening Metrosexual Slug John Edwards

The only thing more disgusting than John Edwards is what's being done to him.

And that's before we get to the affair, and the denial, followed by the admission of adultery but only while his wife's cancer was in remission, and then the admission of non-remission adultery but certainly not leading to any love child, and finally the admission of a non-remission adulterous love child, and the realization that the sainted, stricken Elizabeth was less the victim than a co-strategist in the massive Edwardsian fraud that was his 2008 presidential campaign, and a full participating partner in an even creepier political marriage than the Clintons'.

Oh, and while we're at it, I loathe the American media, whose peculiarly contemptible combination of partisanship, snobbery, and self-neutering of any basic journalistic instinct might easily have led (were it not for the candidacy of Barack Obama) to this preening metrosexual slug's becoming president of the United States.

All that said, his trial is a disgrace.

It should be a national scandal, except that no one this side of the old Politburo is as ruthless as the Democrats at airbrushing former eminences out of the group shot. So, in a critical election season, the Edwards prosecution will be buried at the foot of page 43, and never make the network news.

What's wrong with it? First, there is no crime, if that term is to have any agreed meaning. In Malaysia, the longtime prime minister Dr. Mahathir spent much of the last 15 years battering his political rival, Anwar Ibrahim, with one sodomy trial after another. We're subtler about these things here. ...

Berlinski on Turkey

A fed-up Claire Berlinski is tired of playing Cassandra for free.

Hey, what you're reading in the American news about this region, as far as I can see, is hogwash. And I don't know what the Israelis are thinking; they seem to be working themselves into a lather because Erdogan delivered some tub-thumping speech in Cairo (toward which the Muslim Brotherhood was distinctly cool: Welcome to the real world, Tayyip. Didn't do much good for Obama, either, and remember how I warned you: Turks aren't Arabs?) And Israelis, chill! That's just Tayyip. He flies in, makes a lot of noise, the ladies faint; he flies out, nothing changes. I promise. Just ask the Somalians. Or the Syrians. Or the Turks, for that matter.

The most astonishing thing of all is that everyone in the West--and Israel!--suddenly seems happy to accept two incompatible propositions simultaneously: 1) Erdogan defanged the military and 2) Turkey is a threat to Israel. No recognition that to the extent the former is true, the latter must be less true, so maybe it would be worth asking--which, exactly, is more true? ...

Go read the rest.

60 Minutes Hit Piece Falls Apart

Gateway Pundit has the details.

And not that it's really germane, but is it just me, or does Dana Jill Simpson look like ... ? Oh, never mind.

"Just Americans doing our normal thing and trying to figure things out."

Roger Simon talks sense on American politics.

Zero Dimensional

“No, I mean they would kill me.”

There are problems, and then there are problems.

Requiem for the Last Honest Newspaper

Spook86 breaks the bad news.

The Weekly World News, the outrageous tabloid that never let the facts get in the way of a good story, will cease publication at the end of this month.

It would be appropriate if the tabloid was vaporized by space aliens, or the final issue had been foretold by Nostradamus, but alas, the WWN suffered a more mundane fate--declining circulation among readers who actually believed the wild stories, or those merely in search of a good laugh. During its heyday in the late 1980s, the WWN had a million readers a week; in recent years, circulation has plunged below 90,000, prompting the paper's owners, American Media, to pull the plug. ...