In Brussels, Belgium on Friday (6-10), at the Security and Defense summit, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, in so many words, that our NATO allies are shirking their responsibilities, not carrying their own weight, and primarily relying on the United States, its cash and its young men to be sacrificed in various NATO missions.

And, with that in mind, those US authorities who didn’t live during the Cold War era may be more and more inclined to remove the United States from NATO.

I couldn’t agree more: time for the US to shunt NATO aside. We’ve killed enough Americans in Europe and the Middle East.

Gates retires at the end of June after more than four years as SecDef, first appointed under President G.W. Bush.

For example, from the Christian Science Monitor:

Already, the US accounts for 75 percent of NATO members’ defense spending, up from just below 50 percent a decade ago. While America is planning to trim back projected defense-spending increases in the current deficit-cutting environment, the US share of the NATO military budget pie is still expected to grow.

Britain plans to cut its defense budget by 8 percent by 2015, and Germany this year decided to eliminate its compulsory military service and to trim back its ground forces.

In fact, what few realize is that the UK’s air force possesses fewer craft than it did just prior to World War I.

That’s how broken is NATO, and how Europe would simply rather sit back and allow America to sacrifice its cash and its young men.

Europe and the rest of NATO choose the easy road with undedicated people, instead of the hard road populated by those dedicated to hard work.

Gates said, specifically:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said.

From YahooNews:

The U.S. has been the brawn behind NATO since its birth in 1949. But the disparity between strength and allies’ investment has only grown wider.

In a question-and-answer session after his speech, Gates, 67, said his generation’s “emotional and historical attachment” to NATO is “aging out.” He noted that he is about 20 years older than Obama, his boss.

For many Americans, NATO is a vague idea tied to a bygone era, a time when the world feared a Soviet land invasion of Europe that could have escalated to nuclear war. But with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO’s reason for being came into question. It has remained intact — and even expanded from 16 members at the conclusion of the Cold War to 28 today — but European reluctance to expand defense budgets has created what amounts to a two-tier alliance: the U.S. military at one level and the rest of NATO on a lower, almost irrelevant plane.

And I would submit this (and many of my readers would completely concur, I’ll wager) as well: it’s not only time to kick NATO to the budgetary curb, but the entire United Nations as well. Time for the UN to retire to, say, Vienna, on European soil — and time for the US to step away from the UN entirely — physically and fiscally. They can keep their powder blue powerless helmets.

And time for the UN building to be turned into a wonderful series of apartment or condos — as I wrote quite some time ago.

I don’t find this heretical. I find this cogent and logical considering current historical circumstances.

Please weigh in.

BZ

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Thursday, at a New York University Law School forum, that there is no logic in profiling Muslim men under the age of 35.

. . . what . . . ?

Yes. There is no logic in profiling Muslim men under the age of 35.

Thank God; it’s about time someone in a high profile authority stated the obvious. It’s clearly way past time to focus our profiling measures on Caucasoid grandmothers, paraplegics, the deaf, the blind, crazed Albanian dwarves, Alfred E. Neuman, US military personnel and children under the age of 10. And infants. Let’s not forget the damage that infants can inflict.

Napolitano said:

You’re not using good logic there. You’ve got to use actual intelligence that you received. And, so, you might — all you’ve given me is a kind of status. You have not given me a technique for tactic or behavior. Something that would suggest somebody is not Muslim, but Islamic, that has actually moved into the category of violent extremists,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a forum on U.S. security and preventing terrorist attacks.

“We have ways to make some of those cuts. And they involve the intel that comes in, the analysis that goes on. For example, we often times, for travelers entering the United States, we won’t not do what is called a secondary inspection just because they are a 35-year- old male who appears to be Muslim, whatever that means. But we know from intelligence that if they have a certain travel pattern over a certain period of time, that should cause us to ask some more significant questions than if we don’t.”

This is the same person who, after the system failed, said the “system worked.”

BZ

From UK’s DailyMail:

The ultimate NHS indignity: Body of hospital patient left to die in corridor is ignored for hours… before staff simply drag him away

By Jaya Narain

Last updated at 12:44 AM on 9th June 2011

• ‘He went to them for help and they left him out in the corridor to die’, says Peter Thompson’s daughter
• Senior nurse claims it was ‘the appropriate method of handling the situation’
  

Nurses casually stepped over a patient as he lay dying on a hospital floor.

Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away.

In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like ‘dragging a dead animal’.

The scenes which shame the NHS were all captured on CCTV. Staff thought Mr Thompson was merely drunk and left him to ‘sleep it off’.

Yesterday a coroner condemned the death as ‘wholly preventable’.

An inquest heard that the father-of-one, who had consumed a cocktail of drink and drugs, could have been saved had he received emergency treatment.

The hospital’s accident and emergency department was just 200 yards away.

Last night it emerged that three nurses face a disciplinary inquiry over their inaction.

Mr Thompson’s parents Alan and Rene labelled his treatment ‘inhumane’ and accused nurses of ‘disgusting neglect’.

His father, 71, a retired production line worker, said: ‘Seeing your own flesh and blood being dragged across the floor like a dead animal is heartbreaking.

‘It was just inhumane what they did and I just cannot understand how in this day and age this can be allowed to happen.’

Mr Thompson’s daughter Carly, 23, added: ‘He went to them for help and they left him out in the corridor to die cold, wet and lonely with nothing.’

Mr Thompson, a voluntary in-patient with alcohol and drug problems, was stopped from entering his ward at the Edale House Unit attached to Manchester Royal Infirmary in April last year. He had turned up with a bottle of vodka and refused to surrender it.

He fell asleep in the corridor at around 8.10pm after nurses decided to let him ‘sleep off’ the effects of the alcohol, the inquest heard.

At 6.15am senior staff nurse Dini Oyebadejo found him unresponsive and raised the alarm. Mr Thompson, formerly of Levenshulme, Manchester, was declared dead at 6.43am.

But here is where the government makes it all better. They’re simply sorry. That, as everyone inherently knows, will clearly make things better:

A spokesman for Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust said: ‘This was an isolated incident and does not reflect the high levels of care and dignity with which we treat our service users. We are very sorry.’

And, as you age, when you want healthcare you won’t get it. Under ObakaKare. And O.K. is a program purposely designed to enable government control and, simultaneously, save money for the government. Because it’s not about your individual health; it’s about shoving everyone into the same bag, enabling the same shabby equality and providing more power to the federal government.

• – ObakaKare is already under scrutiny;
• – It appears that judges are quite uncomfortable with government-mandated purchases;
• – An Unconstitutionality Declaration is not entirely impossible;
• – Mr Obama’s approval rating plummets, an actual depression is feared;
• – Only 24% of Americans say they share Mr Obama’s political tenets;
• – Mr Obama, while his nation tanks, offers a fiscal bailout to Greece;

. . . and decides that he’s going to side with anti-American states such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Argentina, against Britain, with regard to the Malvinas Islands, what we know as the Falklands. The British already fought for the Falklands in 1982.

Mr Obama stands for everything that is wrong with our nation and, further, cannot find the ability to stand with our nation, its Western allies, or with its taxpaying citizens.

I logically ask: what is the base authority of Mr Obama’s government, and what, precisely, are its limits?

You’ve been warned, America.

The crash is coming.

BZ

And because governments realize this, there will be a renewed push to disarm the average world citizen and, by extension, this push will occur here in the United States as well.

From Larry Bell at Forbes.com:

It may not come as surprising news to many of you that the United Nations doesn’t approve of our Second Amendment. Not one bit. And they very much hope to do something about it with help from some powerful American friends. Under the guise of a proposed global “Small Arms Treaty” premised to fight “terrorism”, “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates” you can be quite certain that an even more insidious threat is being targeted – our Constitutional right for law-abiding citizens to own and bear arms.

This is occurring for two very important reasons, reasons that you need to realize exist right now, this very moment:

1. The arrogance of government on all levels in every nation is exploding; only the government knows what is best for its citizens who — more and more — are becoming simple Serfs;
2. The fear of government — realization and the concomitant fear that citizens who are armed may be pushed to the point where they not only awaken to the threat governments place and have placed on their lives with onerous taxes, regulations and profligate spending — and the present ability of mere “citizens” to enact their own form of “push-back.”

Here in the United States, people are finally beginning to realize that what Mr Obama has been doing to allegedly “combat” our fiscal predicament isn’t working and, instead, is making things worse. There is no “rebound” in the economy, in the jobs market, in the housing market, in the overall economy. These events are already occurring:

• – The Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that Americans’ disapproval has reached new highs. There is a broadly pessimistic view of the economy due to increasing gas prices, increasing unemployment. By a 2-to-1 register, people think the country is on the wrong track. 6 in 10 say the economy isn’t improving at all. At this point Romney is ahead of Obama, 49% to 46%.
• – This is the 32nd straight month of a continuing federal deficit;
• – China has divested itself of 97% of American debt;
• – The auto bailout was a conglomeration of lies and shockingly-unaccounted spending;
• – No one takes Mr Obama to task for killing darker-hued people in Libya;
• – The US has a history-making, record-making $61.6 TRILLION dollars in unfunded debt, leaving each US household with a $534,000 obligation;
• – 30% of American companies plan to abandon healthcare in 2014 because of the onerous mandates of ObakaKare;
• – And still Mr Obama demands that the debt ceiling be raised and that America continues to spend and spend and spend money that it simply does not possess.

Which brings me to: what is that oft-quoted “definition of insanity”? — that is: “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results“?

Mr Obama and his minions do this precisely, expecting that miracles shall issue forth. And there are no miracles. Precisely the opposite. Printing money is a Death Knell. Spending money that one does not possess is a Death Knell. It beggars stupidity on an incomprehensible level:

When you are in personal or familial debt, is the answer to spend more money you don’t possess?

Because the answer is so plainly obvious, I won’t provide it. That said, what makes anyone think a nation, a series of nations, a planet of governments — is somehow exempt from this common sense stricture?

Therefore, the only final equation can be catastrophe. Catastrophe on a state and national level, and very likely on a global level as well.

When those — in America — come to realize just how ill-managed, arrogant, incompetent, exclusive, elitist, their governments and highly-paid executives are, there will be a clear pushback. It is this pushback or revolt that those in government are attempting to ameliorate or eliminate entirely. Because they realize it means their own very highly once-separated throats.

Mr Bell continues to write:

While the terms have yet to be made public, if passed by the U.N. and ratified by our Senate, it will almost certainly force the U.S. to:

1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.
2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).
3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).
4. Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.
5. In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.

Have no doubt that this plan is very real, with strong Obama administration support. In January 2010 the U.S. joined 152 other countries in endorsing a U.N. Arms Treaty Resolution that will establish a 2012 conference to draft a blueprint for enactment. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged to push for Senate ratification.

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton has cautioned gun owners to take this initiative seriously, stating that the U.N. “is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there is no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.”

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was an aggressive advocate for expanding gun control laws, and even voted against legislation giving gun owners an affirmative defense when they use firearms to defend themselves and their families against home invaders and burglars. He also served on a 10-member board of directors of the radically activist anti-gun Joyce Foundation in Chicago during a period between 1998-2001when it contributed $18,326,183 in grants to anti-Second Amendment organizations.

Further, a very salient and little-published but amazing point:

There are many like me, and fewer of them would be alive today were it not for exercise of their gun rights. In fact law-abiding citizens in America used guns in self-defense 2.5 million times during 1993 (about 6,850 times per day), and actually shot and killed 2 1/2 times as many criminals as police did (1,527 to 606). Those civilian self-defense shootings resulted in less than 1/5th as many incidents as police where an innocent person was mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).

Mr Bell sums up perfectly:

Now, more than ever, it’s imperative to stick by our guns in demanding that all Constitutional rights be preserved. If not, we will surely lose both.

There it is.

BZ

P.S.
Hello? Oathkeepers?

WeinerGate 2.0 has just ended, but it ended in a customary way we knew was coming:

The politician lied.

Imagine that.

WeinerGate 1.0 consisted of:

WeinerGate 2.0 looked something like this:

This is, oddly enough, the same Anthony Weiner who decided to bash Fox News and Megyn Kelly:

But, luckily, Anthony Weiner is so incredibly important to the nation that he is not going to quit, he refuses to, nor is his wife of less than one year, the gorgeous Huma, going to kick him to the proverbial curb.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, his sacrifice is in fact that large and overarching.

I think perhaps instead of excoriating Congressman Weiner, we should hold him up, triumphant, as the Model Man he is in terms of personal perfection.

Weiner: “I accept responsibility as long as there aren’t any consequences.”

I repeat: Imagine that.

BZ

P.S.
I would ask to the men and women of my readership: Weiner is clearly a Horndog. If, I posit, you are what you are, then why-oh-why would you want to get married? Why not simply stay single, sow your oats as you may? I’ll not quite ever understand that. If you commit beyond a mere boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, why did you decide to commit in the first place?

P.P.S.
I’m sure the Left and the NOW women and the DEM/MSM will be strangely silent on the matter. Imagine that. Even the most daft 9-year-old understands the Tawana Brawley Quotient: if you lie, if you post your entire life on the internet, you will surely be exposed and subsumed. Even the most ignorant welfare drone understands there may possibly, potentially, be consequences to posting on Twitter and Facebook and other social media.

Where are the femininsts reviling the objectification of women by a Man In Power?

Oh yeah; that’s correct. Nowhere. They’re all Demorats.

I would ask this: what would your wife think of a situation like this by you?

Further: if you’re in New York, what kind of confidence do you potentially have in any decisions made by your Representative now, eh?

Doesn’t anyone ask about these two very important words?

— JUDGMENT
— HONESTY