Month: January 2014

Male/Female Differences (updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

These Physiological and Chemical Differences are Real!

(NYTs) In a female mouse’s brain, a left-to-right pattern in the silencing of the X chromosome. These patterns may influence how individual brains function…. In some brains, for example, a mother’s X chromosome was seen dominating the left side, while the father’s dominated the right. Entire organs can be skewed toward one parent. Dr. Nathans and his colleagues found that in some mice, one eye was dominated by the father and the other by the mother. The diversity even extended to the entire mouse. In some animals, almost all the X chromosomes from one parent were shut; in others, the opposite was true…. Dr. Nathans speculates that using chromosomes from both parents is especially useful in the nervous system. It could create more ways to process information. “Diversity in the brain is the name of the game,” he said. ~ h/t UNCOMMON DESIGN

(Video Description) Are there physiological differences between the sexes that would naturally (or by design) cause one sex to excel in one aspect and not in another? In this short presentation, one lie of 12, you will see an exposing of how politically-correct feminists have undermined what otherwise is common sense.For more information on this topic as well as others, see “The 12 Biggest Lies.” (Used by permission and when embedded please connect to their website). They are also on Facebook: facebook.com/12biggestlies

Are there physiological differences between the sexes that would naturally (or by design) cause one sex to excel in one aspect and not in another? In this short presentation, one lie of 12, you will see an exposing of how politically-correct feminists have undermined what otherwise is common sense.

For more information on this topic as well as others, they are on FaceBook.

Neural Wiring

The participants were split into three age groups, aged eight to 13, 13 and four months to 16, and 17 to 22. The youngest group’s brains showed far less difference than those of the older two.

In one of the largest studies looking at the “connectomes” of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.

“These maps show us a stark difference–and complementarity–in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.

For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.

Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population.

— PENN STATE

Dennis Prager point out that “many in the university are not even intellectually open in the natural sciences if an idea may clash with Left-wing opinion.” He continues,

In a talk before fellow economists, the same Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard University (he had been secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton), addressed the issue of why there were so many fewer women than men in some areas of science, in math, and in engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains. More than one hundred Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, Left-wing alumni threatened not to give any more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize. In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced by the then-dominant Catholic Church to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University, an institution whose motto is Veritas (“Truth”), was forced by the now-dominant Left to recant observable facts about men and women.

Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 102-103.

The ATLANTIC MONTHLY adds their thoughts on the matter:

Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.

Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets.

Summers’s suggestion—now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies—was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only possible explanations for gender imbalances in the math-science area. He noted that high school boys have many more of the highest math scores than girls, and suggested that this might reflect genetic differences. He also stressed the need for further research into all three possible explanations.

The foul brute may as well have rapped that women are “hos,” or declared that they should be kept barefoot and pregnant. The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” that “I just couldn’t breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” and that she had to flee the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day “Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines,” in the words of George Will. (More on Hopkins below.) But most of the commentary has glossed over one important point:

For all its foolishness and irrationality, the feminist hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends. Such preferences are most easily justified as a remedy for male bias. And bias can more easily be blamed for gender imbalances if the possibility that more men than women are gifted with math-science brilliance is banished from public discourse.

This feminist-careerist agenda is conveniently ignored by the less hysterical critics of Summers, who make no claim that he said anything inaccurate but nonetheless reproach him for what a Los Angeles Times editorial portrayed as a gratuitous and insensitive ego trip. To the contrary, until his disgraceful capitulation to the power of political correctness, Summers was making a much-needed effort to break the self-serving feminist-careerist stranglehold on honest discussion of gender imbalances….

(ATLANTIC MONTHLY)

(Video Description) Oprah recently mentioned an incident that happened in Europe. It looks like — more and more — that this incident was fictitious… but nonetheless, it offers a great opportunity for discussion of the differences in the male/female brain. This is true whether you ascribe it to eons of evolution or creation ex-nihilo.

WebMD comments on the science involved:

Recent studies highlight a long-held suspicion about the brains of males and females. They’re not the same. So how does the brain of a female look and function differently from a male’s brain, and what accounts for these differences?

Disparities Start Early in Life

Scientists now know that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the fetus. A recent study by Israeli researchers that examined male and female brains found distinct differences in the developing fetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy. The disparities could be seen when using an ultrasound scanner. The corpus callosum — the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the right and left sides of the brain — had a thicker measurement in female fetuses than in male fetuses.

Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. “Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain,” says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Consider these recent findings. Researchers, using brain imaging technology that captures blood flow to “working” parts of the brain, analyzed how men and women process language. All subjects listened to a novel. When males listened, only the left hemisphere of their brains was activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.

This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. “If there’s more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined,” says David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.

As a whole, girls outperform boys in the use of language and fine motor skills until puberty, notes Denckla. Boys also fall prey to learning disabilities more frequently than girls. “Clinics see a preponderance of boys with dyslexia,” Denckla tells WebMD. ADHD also strikes more boys than girls. The symptoms displayed by girls and boys with ADHD differ, too. Girls with ADHD usually exhibit inattention, while affected boys are prone to lack of impulse control. But not all differences favor girls.

Boys generally demonstrate superiority over female peers in areas of the brain involved in math and geometry. These areas of the brain mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls, according to a recent study that measured brain development in more than 500 children. Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-old boy. Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys…

[….]

Geary suggests that women use language skills to their advantage. “Females use language more when they compete. They gossip, manipulate information,” he says. Geary suggests that this behavior, referred to as relational aggression, may have given females a survival advantage long ago. “If the ability to use language to organize relationships was of benefit during evolutionary history, and used more frequently by women, we would expect language differences to become exaggerated,” he tells WebMD. Women also use language to build relationships, theorizes Geary. “Women pause more, allow the other friend to speak more, offer facilitative gestures,” he says.

When it comes to performing activities that require spatial skills, like navigating directions, men generally do better. “Women use the cerebral cortex for solving problems that require navigational skills. Men use an entirely different area, mainly the left hippocampus — a nucleus deep inside the brain that’s not activated in the women’s brains during navigational tasks,” Geary tells WebMD. The hippocampus, he explains, automatically codes where you are in space. As a result, Geary says: “Women are more likely to rely on landmark cues: they might suggest you turn at the 7-11 and make a right at the church, whereas men are more likely to navigate via depth reckoning — go east, then west, etc.”….

(WEB-MD)

(Video Description) While on the show, Dennis Prager brings up a previous call to Adam Carolla where a college student, Erin, from Wellesley College called into Prager’s “Male-Female Hour.” She believes that our nature is totally by convention, that society brings out what we see in the male and female differences. After Adam Carolla gives his “patented” input, I then include the actual call. It is sad that all this money is flushed down the proverbial toilet in this girl’s life… but life tends to carry a big swat board. One hopes she reads books like: “The Myth of Male Power” or, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.”

Another brain website comments:

…The female and male brain is different and the two brains process information differently. The good news is that with some conscious effort communication can be enhanced between the brains and frustrations lowered.

In general, female brains tend to employ both sides of their brain to process information while male brains tend to rely primarily on their dominant or language side to process. As the dominant hemisphere tends to be analytic, problem solving, task oriented, detailed, and verbal this helps to explain male behavior. A female brain can also process in this manner, but the non-dominant hemisphere that can process emotion, meaning without words, empathy, tone, and disposition is also engaged by the female.

Perhaps this helps to explain why females enjoy shopping while most men view it as a chore, women vote differently than males, men and women struggle communicating with each other, and men do not understand psychotherapy. Men tend to be more isolative, less talkative, and focused on solution. Women tend to be more group oriented, more talkative, and focused on the means and not necessarily the ends. This gets played out in the U.S. at this time as women and men tend to view the same debate between candidates differently (men tend to focus on content and women both content and style)…

(FIT BRAINS)

The Lies of the Left Mount

Published by Papa Giorgio

Like Obama’s lies about many aspects in his book, to Elizabeth Warren’s lies, to Wendy Davis… when you on on policies driven by emotion… you tend to emotionally driven fairy tales by said people:

CNN is actually looking into this, where other places, ahem… *MSNBC*… are not:

(From an older post) Some new information about Obama’s grandfather and his treatment by the British may be another lie penned by Obama. Mail Online has this:

A new biography of Barack Obama has established that his grandfather was not, as is related in the President’s own memoir, detained by the British in Kenya and found that claims that he was tortured were a fabrication.

‘Barack Obama: The Story’ by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book ‘Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance’. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life.

One of the enduring myths of Obama’s ancestry is that his paternal grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, who served as a cook in the British Army, was imprisoned in 1949 by the British for helping the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels and held for several months.

Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah, Onyango wife, who is still living, is quoted in the future President’s memoir, as saying: ‘One day, the white man’s askaris came to take Onyango away, and he was placed in a detention camp.

‘But he had been in the camp for over six months, and when he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice. He was so ashamed, he refused to enter his house or tell us what happened.’

In a 2008 interview, Sarah Obama claimed that he was ‘whipped every morning and evening’ by the British. ‘They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with metal rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together. He was lucky to survive. Some of his fellow inmates were mutilated with castration pliers and beaten to death with clubs.’

But Maraniss, who researched Obama’s life in Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii and the mainland United States, found that there were ‘no remaining records of any detention, imprisonment, or trial of Hussein Onyango Obama’. He interviewed five people who knew Obama’s grandfather, who died in 1979, who ‘doubted the story or were certain it did not happen’.

This undermines the received wisdom that Obama’s grandfather was a victim of oppression, an assumption that has in turn fuelled theories that Obama harbours an animus towards Britain based on a deeply-rooted rage about the way Onyango was treated.

John Ndalo Aguk, who worked with Onyango before the alleged imprisonment and was in touch with him weekly afterwards said he ‘knew nothing’ about any detention and would have noticed if he had gone missing for several months.

…read more…

…read more…

Barometer of Failure: `Competition`

Published by Papa Giorgio
No Free Market Here

Obama shouldn’t want his “son” to play football because he may die under Obama-Care!

  • In the vast majority of states, the number of insurers competing in the state’s exchange is actually less than the number of carriers that previously sold individual market policies in the state.
  • At the local level, in over half of the 3,135 counties in the U.S., consumers will face an exchange market that is either a duopoly or monopoly. In 78 percent of U.S. counties, exchange enrollees will have a choice of coverage from three or fewer carriers.
  • The exchange market in over 94 percent of U.S. counties will feature competition among five or fewer companies. In Alabama, about 96 percent of that state’s counties will have only one insurer offering coverage in the exchange.

(Heritage)

(NYTs) …Of the roughly 2,500 counties served by the federal exchanges, more than half, or 58 percent, have plans offered by just one or two insurance carriers, according to an analysis by The Times of county-level data provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. In about 530 counties, only a single insurer is participating….

(HotAir) Last year, Politifact called “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” the Lie of the Year for 2013, after having defended Barack Obama’s promise for two years. Perhaps in 2014, they might consider the second part of Obama’s promise a candidate in 2014. The second part, where Obama promised that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” is proving just as false….

(The Blaze)

  • Ken Davert has spina bifida. Melissa “Missy” Davert and their two children have a condition that makes their bones fragile and susceptible to breaking. 
  • When the Davert family was told their insurance for their children would be cancelled, they turned to Obamacare and were denied. 
  • Now, with a fixed income, the family is worried about being able to afford the out-of-pocket maximum for the private insurance their children need.
  • “… we’ve overcome many obstacles in life. And now it’s a shame that one of the obstacles we have to overcome is our own government to pay for health care,” Ken Davert said.

Every member in the Davert family has a medical condition requiring special care. But after losing their preferred insurance upon the enactment of the Affordable Care Act and being denied federal coverage, the Michigan family is now worried about high costs associated with their new private plan.

According to The Bay City Times, Ken Davert has cerebral palsy and his wife, Missy, and their 15-year-old fraternal twins all have a condition called osteogensis imperfecta, which makes their bones very fragile….

(Gateway Pundit)

….“The Health Insurance Marketplaces provides new options for healthcare coverage that we believe our part-time members may prefer,” she wrote. “In fact, by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense.”

Kozlak added that at present, fewer than 10 percent of part-time employees that are eligible have actually enrolled in the company’s healthcare plan.

“Our decision to discontinue this benefit comes after careful consideration of the impact to our stores’ part-time team members and to Target, the new options available for our part-time team, and the historically low number of team members who elected to enroll in the part-time plan,” Kozlak continued…..

The Target release talked about more choice? Please! This just isn’t true. In only a few states the choices remain about even (just more expensive on average now through the “ACA,” but many people went from 12-to-20 choices to 2, or even one! It does not increase competition, government mandates decrease competition. The exact opposite.

The two who lost their health insurance in my shop, one could afford the higher rates, the other…. who was a responsible guy who got himself covered, was penalized, and now cannot afford the new premiums. Even with a credit.

I love George Gilders comment sooo much, and it is applicable here:

♦ “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge”

No growth in what actually works… just tighter-and-tighter controls on what businesses and providers can provide. Making it more costly to do business and provide care.

Is Obama`s Son A Drug Induced Delusion?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Obama`s Son Would Be Kicked Off Football for Drug Use

I noticed L.Z. Granderson (in the CNN video above, who debates Amy Holmes) said there is science behind the gravity of health risks in the NFL. Agreed. There is science behind the dangers of pot use as well, that far outweigh anything comparatively to alcohol.We do know about Obama’s parenting skills, L.Z.:

“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said. “All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.” ~ Obama

Trayvon was a

✰ drug dealer;
✰ he made a concoction called “the poor man’s PCP“;
✰ suspended from school for drug use;
✰ he used weed a lot;
✰ was found with stolen property and a “burglary” tool.

But, we know Obama wouldn’t want his son to play football. Great parenting skills. Maybe his parenting skills shined through by taking his daughters to a church that sold anti-Semitic, anti-white literature, books, and sermons by Louise Farrakhan, and other black-nationalists that paint God as a counter-white deity. Here is just one comparison of books sold in his church’s bookstore to Mein Kampf:

✰ “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” ~ Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
✰ “The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.62
✰ “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.64

I wouldn’t want my kid going to his church!

This post should be combined with my previous statement about marijuana. The Washington Times notes Obama’s hypocritical actions that can be added to his “list of confusing messengers who perpetuate false notions.” Like his fiscal and political notions. They continue:

President Obama’s latest claims about marijuana are contradicted by research and official positions of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is part of the White House. And Mr. Obama’s words have anti-drug leaders worried about negative repercussions among youth.

Mr. Obama claimed to The New Yorker magazine that marijuana is no worse than cigarettes or alcohol and he promoted state efforts by Colorado and Washington to legalize marijuana, which remains illegal under federal law.

The National Drug Control Policy’s official stance, posted on the whitehouse.gov website, says the opposite of Mr. Obama on all counts.

For example, as documented in agency reports, marijuana smoke has significantly more carcinogens than tobacco smoke.

And as reported by the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, adolescent use of marijuana does something that alcohol does not; it causes permanent brain damage, including lowering of I.Q.

Taxpayers have spent billions of dollars warning about drugs, often about marijuana, but these efforts were dramatically undercut by the president’s comments.

Mr. Obama might as well have rolled that money into a joint and smoked it on national television.

He told the interviewer, David Remnick, that his earlier years of prodigious puffery were “a bad habit and a vice.” Yet he doesn’t warn others not to follow in his footsteps.

The Drug-Free America Foundation responded on its blog: “His laissez-faire attitude about legalization has drug policy and prevention experts scratching their heads in confusion as to why the president will not give clear guidance…either he is seriously ill-informed about the issue or is completely ignoring warnings from his highly-esteemed advisors.”

The foundation called it an “irresponsible move for such a person in the most highly-regarded position in this country.”

[….]

[….]

Be on the lookout for the White House to remove warnings of marijuana use from its Website, such as this gem: “The Administration steadfastly opposes legalization of marijuana and other drugs because legalization would increase the availability and use of illicit drugs, and pose significant health and safety risks to all Americans, particularly young people.”

Mr. Obama, however, tried to attribute it to class warfare and racial bias — and in so doing voiced a myth that his own anti-drug people are shooting down.

As Mr. Obama stated: “Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot and poor kids do. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties. We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”

But Mr. Obama’s claim was shot down by an earlier federal publication, “Marijuana Myths & Facts: The Truth Behind 10 Popular Misconceptions”.

Myth #10 is “The government sends otherwise innocent people to prison for casual marijuana use.”

In fact, less than 1% of all drug incarcerations are for simple possession or use of marijuana. And those few tend to be plea-bargains for people who actually were dealers.

Mr. Obama’s own White House website contradicts his light-hearted claims about marijuana in other ways as well. Multiple pages are devoted to describing clear dangers of marijuana, including these excerpts:

  • Marijuana use is associated with dependence, respiratory and mental illness, poor motor performance, and impaired cognitive and immune system functioning, among other negative effects.
  • Marijuana intoxication can cause distorted perceptions, difficulty in thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory.
  • Studies have shown an association between chronic marijuana use and increased rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and schizophrenia.
  • Other research has shown marijuana smoke to contain carcinogens and to be an irritant to the lungs. Marijuana smoke, in fact, contains 50‐70 percent more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than does tobacco smoke.

[….]

Furthermore, the studies cited by the National Institute for Drug Abuse, regarding brain damage among regular adolescent pot smokers, has no parallel from alcohol. And making one dangerous drug legal is, of course, never a good reason to add another, or a third, or more.

Mr. Obama’s ramblings in The New Yorker show an effort to project an intellectual approach to the marijuana issue when in fact his was pseudo-intellectualism.

He offers up loose arguments, even discredited arguments, because he doesn’t expect serious follow-up from the media. Even if he gets it, Mr. Obama simply talks in circles, ends the questioning, and shuts that reporter out in the future.

Anyone who believes otherwise must be smoking something.

The “Hulk” (Mark Ruffalo) Repeats a Liberal Mantra

Published by Papa Giorgio

This comes via The Blaze:

Representing “The O’Reilly Factor,” correspondent Jesse Watters attended the annual Sundance Film Festival to talk some politics and see if any celebrities would admit they are disappointed with President Barack Obama’s job performance.

Actress Marisa Tomei walked away when Watters asked her about Obama, saying “yuck” to the simple question. Meanwhile, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman “abruptly ended his smoke break” when he saw him approaching….

The Right Scoop quickly adds to the HULK confrontation:

  • Jesse Watters went to Sundance Film Festival and spoke to a few actors and actresses about Obama and politics. When he got to Mark Ruffalo, who played the Hulk in Avengers, he brought Benghazi up and this liberal buffoon had the audacity to blame Republicans for Benghazi because he said they cut funding for security – even though we know that is absolutely false based on congressional testimony. Which is why we call him a buffoon.

A while ago, Breitbart put up this exchange in Congress about this very issue:

The Daily Caller makes the point that i will follow up on with an example from the Bush days about veterans benefits:

…“Since gaining the majority in 2011, House Republicans have voted to reduce embassy security funding by approximately half a billion dollars below the amounts requested by the Obama Administration,” the memo reads. “Although the Senate has been able to restore a small portion of these funds, the final appropriations enacted by Congress in the previous two Fiscal Years have been far below the amounts requested by the Administration for embassy security, and far below the levels enacted in Fiscal Year 2010, the last year Democrats controlled the House.”

What Cummings and the Democratic Oversight Committee staff are referring to is the final fiscal year 2012 omnibus appropriations package that included $2.075 billion for the programs – $567.5 million less than the Obama administration’s request.

Cummings and the Democratic staff memo don’t mention that Democrats made those cuts into embassy security funding possible.

This explains why Charlene Lamb…

Who Is This Charlene Lamb?

In testimony Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, was asked, “Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”

Lamb responded, “No, sir.”

Recall that Lamb is the person who denied requests from the top diplomatic security officer in Libya to retain a 16-man team of military personnel who had been protecting diplomats.

That would seem to be the end of the story.

(The Daily Beast)

…the woman responding “no” in the video above, said “no”. A tactic used often in politics is to say somethig is “cut” that is merely a decrease IN ACTUAL increases in spending. From the Bush days we heard Democrats harping that Bush “cut” veterans benefits, when they have increased every year till then:

(Only in politics can an increase in a budget be considered a negative.) And this budget graph (below) likewise supports that the State Department got all the monies needed for their security, via Heritage (h/t, Publius1787):

….It is tempting to look for a scapegoat for the tragic events in Libya. However, if one exists, the overall budget for embassy security is not it. Funding for that purpose has risen sharply over the past decade. Moreover, the State Department has considerable latitude in allocating security funds based on current events and intelligence on possible threats. Why that latitude was not applied in Libya deserves further scrutiny.

…read more…