Emails Reveal Nidal Malik Hasan’s Pageant of Red Flags

An indication of how deeply moonbattery has eaten into our society is the degree of inadequacy even the military will put up with in the name of diversity:

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, charged in the Fort Hood shootings, was too fat and “chronically” unprofessional during his psychiatric training, according to internal e-mails exchanged by his superiors.

The communications are the latest in a series of early signs that showed officers had reason to suspend Maj. Hasan’s training, and perhaps re-evaluate his suitability as a military physician, but failed to do so.

Yet, his bosses at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington allowed him to complete his residency in 2007, enter an advanced fellowship program, win promotion to major and transfer to Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

It was there on Nov. 5, while shouting “God is great,” Maj. Hasan fatally shot 13 Army colleagues, according to witnesses.

Hasan’s other shortcomings include his enthusiasm for Islam:

The e-mails highlight another point at which the U.S. military government could have intervened to stop Maj. Hasan’s career before the shooting. The FBI and other intelligence agencies learned that Maj. Hasan had sent e-mail messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda-affiliated radical imam in Yemen who urged followers to join the terrorist group and kill Americans.

Hasan hadn’t put in sufficient months in a psychiatric clinic to complete his residency. But Army bureaucrats — no doubt terrified of being accused of “racism” against a Muslim — pushed him through anyway.

Then came Maj. Hasan’s research project that was required for completing the residency. Walter Reed calls the practice, “Psychiatry Scholarly Activity Oral Presentation at the Psychiatry Regularly Scheduled Conference.” Maj. Hasan chose not a psychiatric topic, per se, but one titled, “Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” The slide presentation promoted Islamic law over the U.S. Constitution.

That is, the Constitution he was sworn to uphold. Army brass had found just the guy to serve as a psychiatrist, counseling soldiers returning from battle with terrorists who share Hasan’s ideology.

Predictably, the Affirmative Action mentality that led to Hasan being shuffled forward as if he were qualified didn’t turn out so well. Even Army Chief of Staff General George Casey was alarmed at the outcome:

“It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Not to worry, liberals: the Army resolved to double down on the head-in-the-sand political correctness that put Hasan in a position to pull off his terrorist killing spree.

On a tip from Edward. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Atheism and IQ again

I commented briefly last month about the rather florid claims by Kanazawa — including a claim of a positive correlation between atheism and IQ. I noted that his findings were probably an artifact of the Leftist influence on the educational system. I am therefore rather pleased to see that a writer on the Puffington Host has drawn similar conclusions. That an atheist conservative such as myself and a religious Leftist such as Josh Schrei should come to similar conclusions does rather reinforce those conclusions, I think. His argument is an extensive and careful one but I think that his strongest point is this:

Kanazawa’s test group were all Americans. In America, atheism and liberalism are both value systems embraced by the educated middle class and are part of the cultural fabric of liberal arts universities, Ivy League colleges, and the American intelligentsia. Therefore, saying that among a small group of Americans, liberals and atheists had higher IQ test scores is a bit like saying that people with more college education in this country tend to know more.

Putting it another way, smarter people are more likely to go to college and there they come under pressure to adopt Leftist ideas, which include a contempt for religion generally and Christianity in particular. As I said previously, the correlation is almost certainly a product of the sociology of the situation, not a product of genetics. There are a couple of other generally good comments here and here.

Sadly, a later article by Schrei on the same subject was much more naive and illogical. I suppose we can’t expect too much from a Leftist. He should have read this.

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Latest AGW Scaremongering: Harms Women The Most, Causes STDs

Like I, and so many others have stated, as we run into the warm season in the Northern Hemisphere, the Climahysterics start emerging from their burrows like so many hibernating skunks (the comparison might not be fair to the skunks), and we end up with

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS/TerraViva) – The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men, from higher death rates during natural disasters to heavier household and care burdens.

In the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were reportedly women; in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women.

And following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women, who were the poorest population in some of the affected States in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, faced the greatest obstacles to survival, according to the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).

The 2007 Human Development Report, issued by the U.N. Development Programme, points out that women are particularly affected by climate change because they are the largest percentage – accounting for about 70 percent – of the poor population.

Because massive tropical systems never occurred before Man started messing up the climate. And we see the “climate change causes earthquakes idiocy” again. Uh huh. Another explanation would be that, and I’m sure I will be called a misogynist or something, too many women become pregnant at a young age, receive no education, and basically become Welfare Queens.

Climate change is apparently also responsible for women’s health problems, a loss of basic civil rights, reduced education, sexism, and…

In neighbouring Uganda, the food crises associated with climate change have been linked to higher rates of early marriage for girls, as they are exchanged for dowry or bride price.

These “famine marriages” – as they are called – not only lead to girls dropping out of school, but also make them vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections and related reproductive complications.

Double “uh huh.” Because there were never marriages like that before. Face meet palm. How is it possible to take climate alarmists seriously when they keep trotting out silliness like this?

Hat tip Tom Nelson

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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AP Slips in ‘Poverty’ as Reason For Nigerian Massacres

-By Warner Todd Huston

True to its fealty to left-wing, western pop psychology, the Associated Press thinks it knows one of the principle reasons why roving gangs of Muslims are hacking Christians to death and burning their villages to the ground in Nigeria: It’s “poverty.”

Liberals that struggle to understand why man is often so cruel to his fellows seem always to have assumed that poverty is a key factor in violence and crime, but rarely it is the factor that liberals assume it to be. Poverty is no picnic, but it is not the cause of crime and violence. It is more likely a symptom itself rather than a catalyst.

It’s a chicken and egg question, of course. What came first, the poverty or the crime? But the simple fact of the matter is that poverty is seen in every corner of the Earth, yet crime rates vary wildly from area to area and era to era. So, if poverty is constant and is the catalyst for crime, why doesn’t crime hold at a fairly constant rate? It seems pretty obvious that crime is not directly caused by poverty.

Poverty is caused by a myriad of factors. A lack of education, racism, government oppression, social factors and the like all create poverty. But these same factors also mitigate crime in some parts of the world.

Typically, however, the AP has decided that “poverty” has caused the religious-based violence in Nigeria. While poverty most certainly is a problem in Nigeria, it has changed so little for generations that I find it hard to believe that it could be a cause of this newest wave of violence.

The real cause is both religious and cultural. That poverty abounds in the region is of little difference to the cause of the violence. The clash is between Muslims from the north and Christians in the south. It’s a fight for cultural supremacy. Poverty doesn’t figure into it very much, when all is said and done.

Yet here is the AP presenting “poverty” as a “cause” of the violence as if it is fact. The truth is that “poverty” being a catalyst for crime is a pop psychology trope, not a fact.

It is not fact.

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Global Warming Demented Parents Shoot Own Kids, Commit Suicide

-By Warner Todd Huston

Argentine parents Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, were so worried about global warming that they decided to kill themselves and their children to avoid the calamity. It is surprising that this is the first suicide pact we’ve heard of connected to globaloney as the way the left carries on about this faux disaster most certainly lends itself to such unhinged, illogical behavior.

The couple shot their son, a seven-month-old baby girl and then themselves. Three days later the family was found and miraculously the baby girl was still hanging onto life. Fortunately, the baby girl survived the attempted murder.

The parents left a suicide note pinning their murderous outrage on a fear of global warming.

I find this craziness, however, to be the logical end game of those globaloneyists that are religiously convinced that the world is ending. Why stick around for the final iceberg to fall, right? Wouldn’t it be a merciful release to just kill yourself instead of being forced to endure the end of the world?

I say with this action, people like Al Gore have blood on their hands.

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