Neil Tyson Has Nothing to Say But He Says It An Awful Lot

Sorry, I'm just so sick about what Obama's done to this country, and what this country has permitted him to do.

Enjoy, if you can, alleged Master of Science Neil Tyson repeatedly saying the same stupid shit to his sheep and garnering literally thousands of retweets for each identical iteration.

Oh, and Boehner and his people claimed there was no "deal" struck with the Democrats for the DHS vote.

Boehner and his people were, get this, lying.

Great piece on Obama's pompous, "provincial" foreign policy.

In November 2009, German chancellor Angela Merkel invited US President Barack Obama, still in his first year in office, to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall....

The leaders of Europe were all in attendance, from the prime minister of Britain to the presidents of France and Russia. Obama, however, was not.

The president was busy, the White House said, citing "commitments for an upcoming Asia trip."

The Europeans were shocked. "Barack is too busy," read the acerbic headline in Der Spiegel.

The event didn’t really clash with his schedule, but rather with his foreign policy sensibilities. Obama would travel to Copenhagen a month before the event to lobby the International Olympic Committee to grant the 2016 summer games to his hometown of Chicago, and would return to Europe a month after the commemoration to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. His travel itinerary as president signaled something about his vision of the world, and of America’s and his administration's place in it. The commemoration of America’s rescue of Europe did not rank high in that vision.

...

At a recent gathering of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, the eminent former director general of the Foreign Ministry, Prof. Shlomo Avineri, called Obama's foreign policy "provincial." It was a strange choice of words to describe the policies of a president with such a cosmopolitan outlook and so much eagerness to engage the world.

But Avineri had a point....

"In every society, young men are going to have violent tendencies," an educator in one majority-black Chicago high school told him in the late 1980s. "Either those tendencies are directed and disciplined in creative pursuits or those tendencies destroy the young men, or the society, or both."

The book is full of such ruminations, and they echo throughout Obama’s rhetoric as president. In his last speech to the UN General Assembly, he asserted that "if young people live in places where the only option is between the dictates of a state or the lure of an extremist underground, no counterterrorism strategy can succeed."

For Obama, terrorism is, at root, a product of social disintegration. War may be necessary to contain the spread of Islamic State, for example, but only social reform can really cure it....

posted by Ace at 07:34 PM

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