† The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II: George Grier was about to drive his cousin home when all of a sudden his Uniondale, LI home was surrounded by gang members – the vicious MS-13 gang has 2,000 members in the county – so he ran back inside the house and told his wife to call 9-1-1 while he grabbed his AK-47 – which he owns legally – and went back outside to stop what he thought was an imminent home invasion, reports WCBS-TV (Channel 2-New York):

 

I tell them, you know, ‘Can you please leave?’ Grier said.

 

Grier said the five men dared him to use the gun; and that their shouts brought another larger group of gang members in front of his house.

 

“He starts threatening my family, my life. ‘Oh you’re dead. I’m gonna kill your family and your babies. You’re dead.’ So when he says that, 20 others guys come rushing around the corner. And so I fired four warning shots into the grass,” Grier said.

 

Grier scared off the gangsters, but was charged with a Class D felony - reckless endangerment – which his attorney explains requires a depraved indifference to human life by creating a risk to human life. Aside from the few blades of grass on his lawn that were killed, no one as injured. But since none of the gang members drew a gun, NY law makes a criminal of Grier, who had never before been in trouble with the law. Oh, and before gun-grabbing libs slam Grier as an anti-Hispanic racist, he happens to be black.

 

† Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much Foreign Policy: Not only the quotes ringing President Barack Hussein Obama’s new Oval Office rug are banal (Arianna Huffington sneers, “Perhaps the Oval Office bookshelf could use a copy of Bartlett’s Book of Less Familiar Quotations.”), but they are historically incorrect or contextually inaccurate. Jamie Stiehm, a journalist, is writing a book about 19^th-century abolitionist and women's rights pioneer Lucretia Mott, writes in a Washington Post op-ed that a quote attributed to Martin Luther King (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”) and one attributed to Abraham Lincoln (Government of the people, by the people and for the people.”) were, in fact, the words of 19^th century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. And the suspiciously Socialist-sounding quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt (“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally on the welfare of all of us.”) is a Dowdification. Here is the complete quote – taken from “The Square Deal speech” - courtesy of the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail:

 

The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

 

In fact, one could argue that Roosevelt would have heartily disapproved of such social and economic engineering policies as affirmative action, hate crime laws and Obama’s income redistribution to finance such spending boondoggles as Cash for Clunkers and the homebuyer’s tax credit.

 

† An Unholy Alliance: Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has backed off an assertion she reportedly made in a local TV interview that headless bodies were found in the desert (The Stiletto cannot find a transcript and none of the articles in the MSM that reference the interview provide a link to a transcript):

 

"That was an error, if I said that," the Republican told The Associated Press on Friday. "I misspoke, but you know, let me be clear, I am concerned about the border region because it continues to be reported in Mexico that there's a lot of violence going on and we don't want that going into Arizona."

 

She said she was referring to beheadings and other cartel-related violence in Mexico in comments she made earlier this summer about decapitated bodies found in the state's southern region. …

 

A Republican legislator who was the prime sponsor of Arizona's immigration law said Brewer's critics were just playing games and ignoring the real issue — violence bleeding across the border into the United States.

 

"I can tell you there's been 300 to 500 beheadings and dismemberments along that border," state Sen. Russell Pearce said Thursday. "It is a national security concern, yet we're worried about this game-playing, this word-smithing."

 

Pearce is right. As The Stiletto pointed out, there are headless bodies in the desert but they are on the Mexican side of the border - so, technically, Brewer misspoke. But it's only a matter of time before she will have to retract her retraction, because Mexican drug lords control as much as 100 miles of territory on the AZ side of the border (ninth item). If only the MSM would get as worked up over that instead of playing the gotcha game. 

 

† Mama, Don’t Take My Incandescent Bulbs Away: In another instance of Obama’s “green economy” creating jobs that won’t put any green in the pockets of Americans, The Washington Post reports that the last large-scale GE plant manufacturing incandescent light bulbs in the U.S. will be shuttered and 200 workers in Winchester, VA, will be jobless as a result:

 

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

 

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs. …

 

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

 

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States. …

 

In Obama's vision, the nation's mastery of new technology will create American manufacturing jobs. …

 

But a closer look at the lighting industry reveals that isn't going to be easy.

 

† Multiculturalism Vs. Animal Rights: Sacramento’s Nishiki Sushi has taken the Japanese delicacy odori ebi (dancing shrimp) off the menu after a complaint by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The Sacramento Bee reports:

 

"We were informed that it was unacceptable as far as animal cruelty," said Tony Malpartida, a bartender and manager at Nishiki.

 

According to Amanda Fortino, a campaign coordinator for PETA, dozens of calls were received by PETA about Nishiki's live prawns. The prawns were bathed in cold sake before the tail was removed. They were then served live and still moving to customers. …

 

PETA bases its stance on a 2007 study from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. The research found that prawns acted as if they had an injured paw when acid was dabbed onto an antennae, and the crustaceans also responded to numbing effects of painkillers.

 

Malpartida tells The Bee that "People would normally get excited about them. It's kind of taken the wind out." The prawns are now served in as nigiri and sashimi.

 

† Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing: The Wall Street Journal reports that the “never-ending drive to trim costs” by the UK’s National Health Service has saddled nurses with additional, “leave[ing] them with less time to make sure patients are getting fed” so “239 patients died of malnutrition in British hospitals in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available”:

 

A British charity, Age U.K., has been seeking for years to raise awareness of the issue. Yet despite increases in screening, training and inspection programs, the problem has only gotten worse. The charity reports that in 2007-2008 148,946 Britons entered hospitals suffering from malnutrition and 157,175 left in that state, meaning that hospitals released 8,229 people worse-off nutritionally than when they entered. In 2008-2009, that figure was up to 10,443.

 

The problem is not a lack of food. Hospital malnutrition mostly affects the elderly or otherwise frail, who often need individualized mealtime assistance. Spoon-feeding the elderly may not seem like the best use of a nurse's time, but for some it may literally be a matter of life and death.

 

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: Berlin tour guide Anna Haase gives tourists a crappy crapper tour of her city, Reuters reports:

 

She takes groups around the city's lavatories, telling them about the history of the toilet's development from biblical times to the present day and showing them toilets ranging from the oldest and most primitive to the newest and most technical. …

 

Highlights of the tour include a visit to a toilet block dating from the late 19th century and a trip to the Kaiser's fully restored bathroom at the Potsdamer Platz square. …

 

In keeping with the tour's theme, the meeting point is at the 19th century toilet block at the Gendarmenmarkt square, whilst a restaurant called 'The Loo' is the finishing point.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, “Daddy, What Causes Global Warming?”): Another of the alarmist claims central to the “settled science” of global warming has been walked back, Agence France-Presse reports:

 

Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

 

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.

 

Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

 

But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.

 

This is the term for the rebounding of Earth's crust following the last Ice Age.

 

Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight.

 

When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.

 

The analogy Delft Technical University scientist and study author Bert Vermeersen uses to explain the phenomenon is that a mattress compresses downward and outward when someone lies down on it, and plumps back up by variously moving upward, downward and sideward as the padding shifts around to fill in the hollow left by the sleeper.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: The New York Times reports that after the Obama administration “rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure” in order “to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live,” some are suggesting a different tack:

 

[T]here is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

 

When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.

 

“Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels,” said Anthony B. Sanders, a professor of real estate finance at George Mason University. “If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.”

 

The further the market descends, however, the more miserable one group - important both politically and economically - will be: the tens of millions of homeowners who have already seen their home values drop an average of 30 percent.

 

The poorer these owners feel, the less likely they will indulge in the sort of consumer spending the economy needs to recover. If they see an identical house down the street going for half what they owe, the temptation to default might be irresistible. That could make the market’s current malaise seem minor.

 

Caught in the middle is an administration that gambled on a recovery that is not happening.

 

“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”

 

In other words, the clueless Obama is so desperate, he’s going against his every instinct and considering letting the free market decide what home prices and mortgage rates should be. You know, capitalism. It appears that we are not all Keynesians any more. Or socialists.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed): Last December, Duong Nghe Ly – a Vietnamese teenager who came to the U.S. two years earlier, speaking nearly no English, the son of poor, uneducated parents – was amongst a group of Asian 30 students attending South Philadelphia High School who were beaten up by black students. Similar, isolated incidents had been occurring for years but school administrators did nothing to stop the violence against Asian students. After what Ly calls “the riot” 50 Asian students boycotted school for a week, reports The Associated Press:

 

"Before, I was timid. I didn't really want to get myself into trouble," says Ly, 18. Then he realized, "If everybody's silent, nobody speaks up, the problem keeps going on without being resolved. I feel like I or my friends have to speak up and organize to tell people this is not right.

 

"We had to fight for it." …

 

The boycott was not an easy step to take. Some students were afraid of being expelled. Many parents were against it, fearing their children would become even more conspicuous targets. Some said local activists were making the situation worse.

 

Once it started, though, attitudes changed. "After the boycott, I felt much more confident and powerful because our voices were heard by the people," Duong Ly says.

 

The district installed 126 security cameras. A "50-50 club" took Asian and black students on group outings. More bilingual staffers and diversity training were added. Principal LaGreta Brown was forced out on the eve of a faculty no-confidence vote after a local newspaper discovered her certification had lapsed. …

 

The Vietnamese embassy has complained to the U.S. State Department. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a complaint with the Justice Department, which on August 27 found merit in the claims and advised the district to settle the matter. An investigation by the state Human Rights Commission is pending. The dynamic that exploded on Dec. 3 has not disappeared.

 

Still, Ly hopes to find “a changed school” as he begins his senior year at South Philadelphia High.

 

Editorial Note: Despite PA’s Human Rights Commission examining the history of black-on-Asian violence at the school, AP insists “few observers believe the violence was due to racial hatred” and backs up the incredible assertion with quotes from a black community leader ("It's not based on race, it's based on opportunity. If [black students] go to the bathroom and take your money, and you don't report it, they'll just keep riding it until the wheels fall off.") As The Stiletto once noted, forced busing turned out to be financially lucrative for some of the students in her school.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (tenth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): The Central Falls High School teachers who were fired over their refusal to accept Superintendent Fran Gallo’s plan to improve student performance in one of RI’s most troubled school – a longer school day, rigorous teacher evaluations and additional days of professional development – were rehired when they relented. Knowing that their jobs are on the line, teachers have a new sense of purpose, reports The Associated Press:

 

Before school started on Wednesday, some juniors attended a math boot camp to help them prepare for October's tests and school leaders visited the homes of incoming freshmen. The administration is also reaching out to recent dropouts and others who have been out of school to help encourage them to return, Superintendent Fran Gallo said.

 

"We want children back, and we'll find paths for them, multiple pathways, whatever it might take to work for our students, we're committed to," Gallo said. "I think that kind of public commitment has never been clearly defined, clearly hasn't been put out there in a transparent way." …

 

There's plenty of work to be done, both to raise performance and soothe lingering bruised feelings.

 

Though the union and administration struck a unified tone in announcing the new agreement, many teachers remain apprehensive and need to rebuild trust lost during the acrimonious dispute, said Jane Sessums, president of the local teachers' union. Fewer than 10 decided not to return.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Wanda Rodriguez, a hospice nurse at Calvary Hospital in The Bronx, who thought there was something familiar about one of her patients, Victor Peraza. The New York Daily News reports:

 

The new patient bore the same name as Rodriguez' father, who left her family when she was an infant. …

 

It turned out that patient and nurse are indeed father and daughter.

 

"It was a miracle," Peraza said, as his newfound child patted his arm and stroked his head. "She's right here beside me." …

 

Her parents married young, had two daughters, and split up. She never saw Peraza again. Her mother, Esther, raised her and her older sister Gina in the Bronx, working for the Postal Service. Peraza moved to Queens. He worked in banking. …

 

"He begged me to forgive him," she said. "He said he wasn't a good father. I held his hand and embraced him and kissed him, and he started to sing This Magic Moment.

 

"I forgive him because I've wanted to meet him all these years. I don't know how long he has left."

 

Peraza thought he would die alone, but now he has his children and grandchildren with him.