[guest post by Dana]

For the first time since the Paris massacre that left 130 dead and hundreds more wounded, and for which ISIS claimed responsibility, President Obama met with France’s President Hollande today at the White House. Showing that steel spine of resolve and the slick strategery we’ve come to expect from President Obama as he steadfastly works to contain, degrade and destroy ISIS, he threw down the gauntlet and reminded ISIS just who it is they are messing with:

Next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.

This is the same world leader who believes there is no challenge that poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change. You might ask, but what about the Barbarians at the Gate??? Meh. What’s a few heads rolling here and there and the destruction of Western civilization compared to fresh, clean air for the future Caliphate of the West living that awesome 7th century lifestyle?

–Dana

I . . . might have made up that last bit — but surely the boy wants to be put back to the status quo ante, no?

Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohammed wants $10 million* from the City of Irving because of the whole clock thing that got him fame and an invitation to the White House. Here’s how his lawyers describe what the young would-be millionaire did:

Ahmed used some spare parts and scrap pieces he had around the house to assemble a digital clock. He routed the circuitry to run through a motherboard and enclosed his creative contraption in a little locking pencil case with the dimensions of approximately 8.5 x 5.75 x 2.5 inches.

Not long after the controversy broke, an electronics enthusiast with an engineering degree wrote a blog post that purported to debunk the notion that the kid’s clock was an original invention:

Ahmed Mohamed did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.

If we accept the story about “inventing” an alarm clock is made up, as I think I’ve made a pretty good case for, it’s fair to wonder what other parts of the story might be made up, not reported factually by the media, or at least, exaggerated.

I have never seen this blog post debunked.

If he was truly wronged, give him a few hundred dollars. Think of all the Radio Shack clocks he could buy! But $10 million? Puh-leeze. If anything, this further suggests that this was all a trumped-up hoax.

If that makes me a Clock Boy Truther, so be it.

*I see a bunch of stories online saying he has asked for $15 million but the linked demand letter says $10MM. If they sent a second letter upping the demand by another $5MM, I have not seen it yet.

Lately I have been reading The Thomas Sowell Reader — a collection of essays and passages from across the gamut of Sowell’s writing. One of Sowell’s most valuable contributions comes in the form of hard statistics showing that people like Bernie Sanders are wrong.

Over the next few days, I will present some of the most compelling statistics in different categories, showing Bernie Sanders is wrong. I’ll start with movement between income categories.

MOVEMENT BETWEEN INCOME CATEGORIES

Sanders implies that the top 20% of income earners is a block of powerful people, getting rich at the expense of everyone else:

Sanders fails to recognize that income categories are not stagnant, but that most people move in and out of them throughout their lives. When we hear about how “the top 20% is doing better than the bottom 20%” we are not, by and large, talking about the same people. The people in the top 20% do not stay there. Nor do the people in the bottom 20%. Consider:

Studies in Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Greece show similar results.

Perhaps the most staggering error comes from measuring income and not wealth. When Sanders says “you have 99 percent of all new income today going to the top 1 percent” (not true, by the way, because it’s a statement about income pre-tax), you would, again, get the impression that the top 1% is this static category of the same people.

So I’ll tuck the next statistic under the fold and make you guess. Among those in the top 1/100 of 1% of income earners in 1996, what percentage do you think were still there in 2005? Is it more or less than 90%?

Answer below the fold.

(more…)

[guest post by Dana]

The Pentagon’s IG is investigating claims that US Central Command analysts were told by DOD officials to tone down their reports about ISIS in an apparent effort to line up with the president’s reassurances that the “JV squad” was “contained”. However, in actuality, ISIS continued to increase in strength and gain territory.

Analysts at U.S. Central Command were pressured to ease off negative assessments about the Islamic State threat and were even told in an email to “cut it out,” Fox News has learned – as an investigation expands into whether intelligence reports were altered to present a more positive picture.

Fox News is told by a source close to the CENTCOM analysts that the pressure on them included at least two emails saying they needed to “cut it out” and “toe the line.”

Separately, a former Pentagon official told Fox News there apparently was an attempt to destroy the communications. The Pentagon official said the email warnings were “not well received” by the analysts.

Those emails, among others, are now in the possession of the Pentagon inspector general. The IG’s probe is expanding into whether intelligence assessments were changed to give a more positive picture of the anti-ISIS campaign.

The president discussed the issue of whether his intelligence reports had been altered:

“One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don’t want intelligence shaded by politics. I don’t want it shaded by the desire to tell a feel-good story,” Obama said Sunday.

“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in Centcom,” Mr. Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”

[I] have made it repeatedly clear to all my top national security advisers that I never want them to hold back, even if the intelligence or their opinions about the intelligence, their analysis or interpretations of the data contradict current policy.

Because this administration has always been about fidelity to the facts and truth. Just think: Benghazi, IRS, Fast and Furious, the VA, and so on…

–Dana