Deadly Hesitation

I wish I’d had a gun, not a camera.

The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D’Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. “I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

“Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop,” he recalled. “The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down.”

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

One police officer, one armed citizen who was willing to step up and fight back would have made a difference in Mumbai. That nobody did step up until it was already too late meant that at least 195 people died in Mumbai in the past few days. The Mumbai police need some very, very extensive retraining. Because this is not going to get any better in the short run.

Want A Five Percent Raise?

Become left handed. That’s the ticket to earning 5% more than right-handers, according to British researchers.

Left-handed boys underperform at school but enjoy greater financial success in later life than right-handers, studies suggest.

They appear to adapt well to life in a right-handed world and end up earning around 5 per cent more per hour.

Researchers from Bristol University and Imperial College London tracked 12,000 children from birth to 14 and found that left-handers were behind when they started school and in tests at 11 and 14.

And academics at University College Dublin, who studied 18,000 men and women in their thirties, found that left-handers earn £1,112 more per year, 5 per cent extra.

Around 10 per cent of people are left-handed, a phenomenon more common among men than women.

Until quite recently, left-handedness was seen as sinister, the Latin word for left. Some children were even forced to switch to their right side by their teachers or parents.

So start using those left hands, you right-handed folks! Of course, this advice will not work for those of you who are already left-handed. You could go demand a raise, though. Although that probably isn’t a winning strategy.

What this story does not address is those of us who were born ambidextrous. Which I was when I was younger. Drove my teachers completely crazy, that did. I’d pick up a pencil with whichever hand was closest and just go to town drawing or writing. They more or less forced me to use my right hand by about the third grade, however. Eventually, I stopped using the left – except that I shoot left handed. (That’s more a function of being blind in my right eye, at least with long guns. But I can shoot a pistol with either hand equally well.)

By the way, I rather suspect there is something else in play here, not just which hand is dominant. The story hints that some researchers feel that way as well.

Sandbagging

Remember the doom and gloom the media was reporting about how bad the holiday shopping season might be? The dire warnings? The whole sky is falling routine? Well, not only were there shoppers on Black Friday, but those shoppers spent money. Rather a lot of it. $10.6 billion in sales yesterday alone – up about 3% from last year.

The nation’s retailers got a much-needed sales boost during Black Friday’s traditional shopathon as consumers spent more money than they did last year.

According to preliminary data released Saturday, sales on the day after Thanksgiving rose to $10.61 billion.

This is somewhat better than the retail industry’s own prediction of 2.2% growth for the entire period. Get the feeling you’re being sandbagged by the media and the retailers?

Retail is a brutally hard business these days. Local stores essentially have to compete in a global market – tough for the large operators, brutal for the smaller ones. Even so, the retailers appear to be on track to do substantially better than the media would have you believe.

So, ask yourself: What else is being misreported by the media? What else are they sandbagging you about? The economy? The election just completed? The environment? Global warming?

If you answered all of the above you’re on the right track.

Myths Unravel

Another day, another media-generated Obama myth destroyed. This time it turns out that those hordes of small donors everybody knows contributed Obamoney to Obama in such huge numbers were actually not really there at all – at least not in the numbers that were touted. That is not to say that Obama’s fundraising was not impressive – obviously, it was. But the money from large contributers dwarfed the amount from small, individual donors. In fact, 80% of Obama’s money came from large donors, many of them multiple repeater donors.

The reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors (those giving $1,000 or more total) than from small donors.

Through the Democratic National Convention, the Institute estimates, Obama received $119 million from genuine small donors, an impressive sum, to be sure.

But not as impressive as the $210 million he’d raised by then from bundlers and large donors.

“After a more thorough analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC),” the CFI study says, “it has become clear that repeaters and large donors were even more important for Obama than we or other analysts had fully appreciated.”

Expect the media to widely ignore this study by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. It doesn’t fit the narrative they want told. But truth will out. Just another item showing how far into the tank the media was for Obama. And a hint of how much damage that will do to them when people realize they were sold a bill of goods by the MSM.

Via Memeorandum

When Candy Canes Are Outlawed….

…Only outlaws will have candy canes. A California man fended off – nay, subdued – a knife-wielding attacker with a giant, plastic candy cane Christmas decoration.

A man using a candy cane lawn ornament fended off a knife-wielding neighbor who had been attacking holiday guests at a Sacramento home.

Police spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong says the man used the two-foot-tall plastic ornament to subdue the attacker until officers arrived.

He says the 49-year-old suspect became intoxicated, went over to a neighbor’s home on Thanksgiving and began waving a kitchen knife at people gathered on the lawn.

Representative Henry Waxman, D(emagogue) – California, immediately announced that he would hold hearings into the complicity of oil companies which may have supplied the polymers used in creating the giant candy cane. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for “Immediate, strong, common-sense regulation of these potentially lethal decorations.” Andrew Sullivan blamed the incident on Sarah Palin.