Confidence?

What is short for Confidence?

Obama held himself out to be one thing during the election (a bipartisan moderate), and on taking office became quite the opposite. Cons, like Obama, are ordinarily out to deceive people as to their true purposes. But it’s an error to think they come across as sleazy. The most effective ones are unusually likeable and charming, even as they pull off their scams. This likeability is not a tangential characteristic of con artists, either; it is a central one.

“Con,” after all, is short for “confidence.” The con artist works by gaining the victim’s confidence and trust. The successful con artist is so very likeable, in fact, that he seems especially credible, and people who might otherwise be wary and cynical drop their guard around him. They don’t examine him too closely, so great is their desire to believe.

Contradictions are waved away. Acts that would arouse suspicion if they were committed by someone else are excused. Important omissions go unnoticed. Inconsistencies are rationalized. Shady company is defended or ignored. Sound familiar?

Yes yes it does.

Something lighter.

Via Goldberg

Dogs Welcoming Home Soldiers

And then Bill Whittle A Message For All of America's Veterans

Sad. Expensive. And frightening.

How are things going in the United Kingdom?

Well... Roger Kimball has the story:

Every phone call. Every email. Every text message. Every web site visited. I land at Heathrow and discover that Big Brother in England will be recording it all: the entire electronic career of every private citizen will salted away for a year in a gigantic database and “available for monitoring by government bodies.” Six-hundred and fifty-three government bodies, to be precise, including the police and local council authorities. They will not need a warrant from a judge but only the authorisation of a “senior” police officer or equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority to rifle through who you’ve talked to when about what. This is more or less the equivalent of a hall pass in your local high school. Adding insult to injury, the British taxpayers are going to be forced to fork over some £2 billion to spy on themselves.
...

29 percent of the British people are in favor of this preposterous scheme. But the Home Office insists that it will push it through anyway. In this post-democratic era, what does the will of the people mean when put up against the inclinations of political bureaucrats?

Despite how much it's revilved, expect it to pass. After all, what would the public do? Protest, refuse to comply? Vote the bums out?

I have been quoting this observation of David Hume frequently of late: seldom is freedom lost all at once. Here in England we have another example of how it oozes away. Sad. Expensive. And frightening.

And that's why, their liberty has been nibbled away bit by bit. So what's another bit?

It's come to this

Roger L. Simon talked about how Political Correctness kills.

Tip of the iceberg.

Why did the Feds drop their investigation of Hassan?

He wasn't "likely to be violent."

Wonderful. That worked out so well.

Though even if he wasn't voilent, that doesn't excuse him contacting the enemy.

Ace shows just how clueless some people are

Chris Matthews: "It's not a crime to call Al Qaeda, is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Matthews spins on behalf of his wannabe-boyfriend Obama and the incompetents in the federal government.

Funny, seems to me that after 9/11, National Security Concern Trolls like Chris Matthews were pretty sure we should have rolled up the Mohammad Atta cell based upon pilot-training inquiries.

But now we have a guy in the army calling Al Qaeda on the phone and Chris Matthews is generally perplexed as to what we could have possibly have done to stop this.

Um, in any security position, having or attempting to have communications with the enemy is a crime, or at least a cashiering-level offense, if it's not reported immediately.

Meanwhile how does our president respond?


Well on Saturday he said this:

“Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Lovely. He tells us not to "jump to conclusions" about Hassan but those that disagree with his political plans...

Glen Reynolds has more.

Best of hands.

And what made Hassan's count so high? “Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks.”

Because "An Army base is no place for weapons.”

Safety Deposit?

Not so safe in the United Kingdom.

In the UK the police can break into a safety deposit boxes if they feel that there's enough criminal use. And not just the boxes they've confirmed to be used or owned by criminals. Nope, all of them.

However, by talking to scores of box-holders, none of whom have spoken before, Live has uncovered a different version of Operation Rize, one that shows how the vast majority of those caught up in the raids were innocent. They have had their lives turned upside down over the past 17 months. Many have struggled to recoup their money and possessions, been forced into legal trench warfare with police lawyers and told they must prove how they came by the contents of their boxes.

In the eyes of the UK, it's your fault for keeping cash and valuables in a facility criminals also happen to use. And you'll be guilty until you can prove otherwise.

Charming.

Quarantine

Via Instapundit, Breitbart has a clip on what the Whitehouse is trying to do...



National Review has a bit more on the subject.

It's not science when physical evidence is a problem.

The global warming lobby is in a spot of trouble.

The global warming alarmists have a problem: They've claimed for 15 years that there is simply no natural mechanism that could possibly explain a one degree change in global temperatures, so all warming must be man-made.

Now that we have a period of cooling, they're claiming there is a natural mechanism big enough to both cool the earth from its 1998 high and also wipe out the "expected" additional warming that should have occurred since then. (The big cooling year of 2007 wiped out over a degree Farenheit of global warming -- in fact, it erased most of the warming that occurred this whole century.)

So -- um, what? There is no natural mechanism to explain a degree of warming, but there's a big-ass natural mechanism you now concede to conveniently explain away the cooling? Couldn't the 1975-1998 "warming" be explained as simply as the diminishment of the 1940-1975 cooling phase? If a cooling force abates, does not the earth warm?

Ponder that. These people have a problem squaring that's happening in the real world with their pet theories.

And here's more thoughts on being wrong.

According to the BBC, the world has been cooling since 1998, although some claim the warming is only in hiatus. What do we make of that? The issue has been so politicized that it is hard to find rational scientific judgement. For someone like Gore – a non-scientist – to be so adamant about it feels almost off-putting. It makes me want to believe in global warming less. He’s the exact wrong person to be delivering this kind of message, especially since there are scientists who write well (many better than Gore). But his narcissism and greed have placed Al out front.