Justice and mercy

Megyn Kelly interviews Glenn Beck here about his work to provide for the needs of the unaccompanied minors flooding our southern border. Glenn says he is interested in two things, justice and mercy. He also takes seriously his relationship to God, which is the citizenship that means the most to Glenn Beck.

I listened to Michael Savage Tuesday as I was driving to my dentist in Denver to get crowns and posts on my two front teeth. Savage was savaging Glenn Beck, as only Savage can do. Savage is always jealous of those who stand above him on the ratings chart.

Relocating a rattlesnake

Tonight I was talking with my son Jon on the phone. He was outside his house in New Mexico walking their horse named Pony. A five foot long rattlesnake did not like the horse, and began to rattle just a few feet away. Jon called his mother, who placed a barrel over the rattlesnake and put a board on top, then lifted the barrel onto the back of the pickup truck and headed down the remote country road to relocate the critter. Let's hope there are no neighboring ranchers who have earned bad karma.

They want Hillary, big government, and someone else to pay for it

"Comprehensive immigration reform"

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The next time a politician drones on about “comprehensive immigration reform,” a few questions have to be asked: How is the border made secure first? Is it desirable that legal immigration be meritocratic and ethnically diverse? And does anyone get deported, and if so who exactly?

Silence will follow — or, if not silence, a long string of invectives.

Please read more here.

Plowing the fields with an upside down question mark

Are you the kind of person who has all the answers, or are you a person who has lots of questions? Ann Voskamp writes:

Yeah, sure, there may be those who think they have all the answers, but there’s a comfort walking with those who have questions, those who are wrestlers and wanderers and wonder-ers, who find the leaning into the questions let’s them live into stronger answers.

Read more here

Return them all immediately to their home countries

Dick Morris says the solution to the border invasion is to put them all on a plane and return them to their home countries. He recommends Congress repeal the 2008 legislation designed to help victims of sex trafficking, and substitute new language allowing for the swift return to their home countries. Click here to watch Dick's video.

Children's dead bodies washing ashore on the Rio Grande?

Photo via Drudge


Mexican emigrants crossing the Rio Grande near El Paso, Texas. (Danny Lehman/Corbis)

Gateway Pundit quotes an exclusive Fox News report:

Many don’t make it across the river; multiple sources became emotional when recounting their discoveries of small, lifeless bodies washed up along the riverbank.”

"The less welfare we have, the more immigrants we can absorb, and this will benefit them and benefit us."

John C. Wright weighs in here with a thoughtful analysis of what should be done about the current crisis on our southern border.

Catching a comet

After a 4.3 billion mile non-stop trip the European Space Agency's Rosetta vehicle is about to land a smaller onboard probe on a speeding ice-and-rock comet for the first time ever. Read about it here.

No touching!

Speaking of the blogger named Innominatus, he also has a post up comparing soccer to hockey. Hint: He prefers the latter. Read and enjoy it here.

Comin' to America

While we are on the subject, please check out Innominatus's post on some other people who are traveling light, on top of freight trains across Mexico to Texas. He calls it "Barry Porous Border."

Take it up with your government

Jim Geraghty writes in his Morning Jolt newsletter this morning:

We understand gang violence, drug cartels, and other criminals are making your countries terrible places to live. We’re really sorry to hear that. We’ve also given your government quite a bit of money to make life better down there. Honduras, we gave you $83 million in foreign aid in 2013. El Salvador: $46.8 million. Guatemala: $106 million. If the money wasn’t spent well, take it up with your government. Some of you might say that’s not enough, but we’re not obligated to give you anything. There are a hell of a lot of Americans who think that money could be better spent back here.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

"The last thing you want to be is outgunned by the drug cartels. And we were historically." -- Gov. Rick Perry, TX

Sean Hannity gets a personal tour of the border near McAllen, Texas from Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Big Mother

Scott Ott has a great piece tonight about children playing outside. This is what happened in LaPorte, Texas when a mom sat outside watching her two children ride their scooters in the cul de sac where their home was located:



Scott also writes about a mom in South Carolina who allowed her nine-year-old daughter to play for several hours at a local park while the mom worked at McDonalds. Please read more here.

I am so thankful for the outdoor life my three youngest children are experiencing in New Mexico. On days when they want to work, they earn minimum range on their mom's farm/ranch. On days when they want to play, they explore arroyos, play football with no protective gear, play basketball, and play with animals.

The child protection system seems to be getting out of hand. There is a blog that catalogs its abuses daily. It is called Legally Kidnapped. I should read it more often.

The Mark Levin show

Do you listen to the Mark Levin radio show? I used to not be able to, because I didn't like the way he yells when he is making his points. Now I listen to him when I am in the kitchen preparing dinner. I don't think he is the one who has changed; I think I am the one who has changed. I realize he is telling the truth. I still don't think it is necessary to yell when telling the truth, but I do understand his anger. He loves this country, and sees what the Obama administration is doing to "transform" it.

So they like you

Do you like you?



Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Reporting for duty

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Move? Why?

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Could you get behind this team?

From Doug Ross

My comments? I would have Allan West as Secretary of Defense. Andrew McCarthy as Attorney General. Victor Davis Hanson as Vice President.

Thanks to American Digest

I don't know why you don't trust me

From Michelle Obama's Mirror

Bored to death

Neoneocon writes about Obama the narcissist:

narcissists are grandiose and have delusions of omnipotence, and that if the world doesn’t step up and acknowledge their wonderfulness they suffer a re-opening of the narcissistic wound. The pain that results is almost unendurable, and narcissists will go to great lengths to avoid facing it.

Of course, it needn’t—except for the narcissist. For the latter, no deference can be enough and no reward high enough to satisfy. Obama is fated to be disappointed, because the locus of his problem lies in himself rather than in the world. The narcissistic wound, which underlies everything for narcissists and which they feel most acutely when they face failure and criticism rather than praise from the world at large, is experienced as so painful that it must be evaded at all costs:

Read more here.

In his book on narcissism Dr. Sam Vaknin writes:

He withdraws from his painful existence, where others fail to appreciate his greatness, special skills and talents, potential, or achievements. The narcissist thus ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel universe, punishing it for its shortcomings, its inability to realise how unique he is.

When narcissism thus fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid delusions: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others’ allegedly malign attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive, source of narcissistic supply.

Neoneocon notes that Valerie Jarrett is Obama's closest advisor, and has been for his entire political life. Jarrett had this to say about Obama:

He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Where is the fact-checking?

The media aids and abets a liar. Abortion is the holy grail of the left.



Thanks to neoneocon.

Immoral special interests hijack U.S. immigration law

Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs facility in Brownsville, Texas. (Getty)

Victor Davis Hanson notes:

For all the pop romance in Latin America associated with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, few Latinos prefer to immigrate to such communist utopias or to socialist spin-offs like Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, or Peru.

Mexico strictly enforces some of the harshest immigration laws in the world that either summarily deport or jail most who dare to cross Mexican borders illegally, much less attempt to work inside Mexico or become politically active. If America were to emulate Mexico’s immigration policies, millions of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. immediately would be sent home.

How, then, are tens of thousands of Central American children crossing with impunity hundreds of miles of Mexican territory, often sitting atop Mexican trains? Does Mexico believe that the massive influxes will serve to render U.S. immigration law meaningless, and thereby completely shred an already porous border? Is Mexico simply ensuring that the surge of poorer Central Americans doesn’t dare stop in Mexico on its way north?

The media talks of a moral crisis on the border. It is certainly that, but not entirely in the way we are told. What sort of callous parents simply send their children as pawns northward without escort, in selfish hopes of soon winning for themselves either remittances or eventual passage to the U.S? What sort of government allows its vulnerable youth to pack up and leave, without taking any responsibility for such mass flight?

Here in the U.S., how can our government simply choose not to enforce existing laws? In reaction, could U.S. citizens emulate Washington’s ethics and decide not to pay their taxes, or to disregard traffic laws, or to build homes without permits? Who in the pen-and-phone era of Obama gets to decide which law to follow and which to ignore?

Who are the bigots — the rude and unruly protestors who scream and swarm drop-off points and angrily block immigration authority buses to prevent the release of children into their communities, or the shrill counter-protestors who chant back “Viva La Raza” (“Long Live the Race”)? For that matter, how does the racialist term “La Raza” survive as an acceptable title of a national lobby group in this politically correct age of anger at the Washington Redskins football brand?

How can American immigration authorities simply send immigrant kids all over the United States and drop them into communities without firm guarantees of waiting sponsors or family? If private charities did that, would the operators be jailed? Would American parents be arrested for putting their unescorted kids on buses headed out of state?

Progressives and ethnic activists see in open borders extralegal ways to gain future constituents dependent on an ever-growing government, with instilled grudges against any who might not welcome their flouting of U.S. laws. How moral is that?

Likewise, the CEOs of Silicon Valley and Wall Street who want cheap labor from south of the border assume that their own offspring’s private academies will not be affected by thousands of undocumented immigrants, that their own neighborhoods will remain non-integrated, and that their own medical services and specialists’ waiting rooms will not be made available to the poor arrivals.

Have immigration-reform advocates such as Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Bloomberg offered one of their mansions as a temporary shelter for needy Central American immigrants? Couldn’t Yale or Stanford welcome homeless immigrants into their now under-occupied summertime dorms? Why aren’t elite academies such as Sidwell Friends or the Menlo School offering their gymnasia as places of refuge for tens of thousands of school-age Central Americans?

What a strange, selfish, and callous alliance of rich corporate grandees, cynical left-wing politicians, and ethnic chauvinists who have conspired to erode U.S. law for their own narrow interests, all the while smearing those who object as xenophobes, racists, and nativists.

How did such immoral special interests hijack U.S. immigration law and arbitrarily decide for 300 million Americans who earns entry into America, under what conditions, and from where?

Read a little bit more here.

Hey, why not use the Catholic Church?

Will the Obama administration use the Catholic Church to feed and house illegal immigrants from Central America? Ryan Lovelace writes that it is already happening in California. Please read more here.

The "process"

Andrew McCarthy warns us not to hand over the IRS investigation to a special prosecutor:

As it actually exists, however, an “independent counsel” would be tailor-made for letting the administration and the IRS dodge accountability.

Let’s talk reality. As a matter of constitutional law, there is no such thing as an independent counsel. In our system, prosecution is a plenary executive power. All federal investigations and prosecutions proceed under the authority of the president; neither the Congress nor the courts have police powers. Any prosecutor, regardless of how “independent” we’d like him to be, would have to serve at the pleasure of the president, and would report to Eric Holder.

Ah yes, the process. You’ll have to trust them that it works . . . on those rare occasions when you pause to think about it. But how much thinking about the IRS do you suppose you’ll be doing once Congress stands down and news about it dries up?

When was the last time you thought about Fast and Furious? About the debt ceiling (or is it the retractable debt dome)? Or how about the just-announced EPA regs? It’s only been a few weeks since they were announced, and they could crush the most vibrant sector of our otherwise rigor mortis economy. Yet news coverage barely got to them, buried as they were between the VA scandal and the commander-in-chief’s replenishing of the Taliban. You can be excused for not remembering. Sure, it’s just the blink of an eye ago, but in Obama’s America Transformed, that’s the time it takes to roll out the welcome-mat for 300,000 illegal aliens.

You can have political accountability for abuses of power or you can have an “independent” counsel and “the process.” Political accountability is driven by congressional investigations and court cases brought by citizens whose rights have been trampled. It is messy, combative, and political, but the malfeasance it uncovers can result in the removal of corrupt officials from power.

By contrast, “the process,” under the steady hand of “independent” counsels, is neat, silent, and somnolent. In fact, once it starts, that may be the last you hear about it until President Obama pardons everyone on his way out the door.

Democrats abandon African Americans

Have you seen some of the You Tube videos of African Americans protesting the influx of poor Hispanic shildren? A.J. Delgado asks and answers this question:

Who will be harmed most by amnesty? African Americans.

Meanwhile, the harm to African Americans is not limited to reduced wages, greater competition for jobs, and declining household incomes – now even the black history of suffering is being diluted. Liberal columnist and CNN pundit Sally Kohn penned a column last week arguing that the term ‘illegal immigrant’ is the same as the N-word. Kohn, is usually fair-minded and reasoned in her arguments, lumping black Americans’ unique history and suffering with that of certain Latino immigrants is absurd and offensive. Consider that the N-word was used to describe a person who was whipped daily, while ‘illegal immigrant’ is a word used to describe a person who receives free education (even in-state tuition!), housing, driver’s licenses, legal aid, food, and healthcare. To even claim the two words are similar is an unthinkable affront – and insult – to African-Americans.

Read more here.

How America was reduced to impotence

Dick Morris says that from day one Obama moved the country toward socialism, starting with the one trillion dollar stimulus program. Second was the government takeover of General Motors, in which the stockholders and bondholders were told to step aside, and only the union pensions and wages were protected. Third was Obamacare. These created a tremendous instability and a lack of confidence in the dollar, and we were reduced to impotence.
Watch the video here.

The next revolutionary change coming soon: self-driving cars

Seth Godin believes self-driving cars are going to be happening soon. If so, they will have a huge transforming effect on our lives. Godin lists some of the advantages:

Few traffic jams--cars will have a slower top speed, but rarely stop
No traffic lights--cars talk to each other
Dramatically less pollution
Pedestrians are far safer, bicycling becomes fun again
No parking issues--the car drives away and comes back when you need it
Lower costs and more access for more people more often
Instant and efficient carpooling, since the car knows who's going where

After weighing a few of the advantages and disadvantages, Godin concludes:

This is a bigger shift than the smart phone, and it might happen nearly as fast.

Please read more here.

Hickenlooper's friend Bloomberg makes fun of two Colorado cities

Tom Blumer reports some inaccurate comments made by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg about recall elections in two Colorado cities where gun control Democrat politicans were recalled:

In a story which was apparently prematurely posted at Rolling Stone Magazine’s web site (link is to a separately saved Google cache copy), Bloomberg told Simon Vozick-Levinson that in recent recall elections in the Centennial State, “The NRA went after two or three state Senators in a part of Colorado where I don’t think there’s roads. It’s as far rural as you can get.” Really.

Two “rural” cities located in districts which had recall elections include Pueblo (population: 107,772) and Colorado Springs (population 431,834, which if located in New York would make it the Empire State’s second-largest city by a margin of 70% over runner-up Buffalo).

Read more here.

Glib and guilt-free

Jonah Goldberg weighs in on case of the 12-year-old rape victim whose rapist was defended by Hillary Clinton:

I understand there’s a debate over whether or not Hillary is really laughing in that interview where she recounts how she got her child-rapist off with essentially a rap on the knuckles. But I think it’s fair to say she seems awfully glib and guilt-free about her role in it. For most normal people, I think that’s terribly off-putting. Moreover, you’d think someone who seeks to be the Joan of Arc of womanhood would have a good deal more sorrow about her role in a necessary evil.

Read more at The Goldberg File at National Review.

Is it about amnesty, or about a domestic political power base?

Bill Whittle talks about unearned moral posing:

Choosing joy and rest

Bonnie Gray asks:

Is anything really worth enjoying if it can’t last anyway?

This is why joy feels dangerous. Because for some of us, joy is connected to times in our lives where it was taken away or ruined, when a simple moment of happiness was decimated by a person, place, or thing.

Jesus is kind and gentle, never tiring, always longing to whisper in different ways—

You are loved.

You’re worth it.

Just rest.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

Please read more here.

Crises, chaos: fundamentally change America

Tom Blumer concurs with Ed Driscoll (and visa versa) regarding the importance that Obama places on the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming systems in order to transform America into a socialist paradise.



Blumer writes:

The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border is no naiveté-caused accident. Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.

Cloward and Piven wrote in 1966:

We tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of major disruptions.

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention. Public trouble is a political liability, it calls for action by political leaders to stabilize the situation. Because crisis usually creates or exposes conflict, it threatens to produce cleavages in a political consensus which politicians will ordinarily act to avert.

Blumer adds:

Former Obama adviser and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s oft-cited statement that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste” is in no way an original thought.

As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”

In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.

Please read more here.

Happening by design

Ed Driscoll quotes Tom Blumer:

As to the recent wave of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — that’s the Department of Homeland Security’s term, not mine — make no mistake. President Barack Obama and his advisers had to know that hordes of unaccompanied children would be sent to cross our southern border when he unilaterally imposed “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in June of 2012. Despite seeing its results, Homeland Security renewed DACA for two more years earlier this month. The default assumption simply must be that “Obama is using these children as pawns to implement his goal of universal citizenship for illegal immigrants.”

In other words, it’s Cloward-Piven, yet again.

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan concurs:

There is every sign he let the crisis on the border build to put heat on Republicans and make them pass his idea of good immigration reform. It would be “comprehensive,” meaning huge, impenetrable and probably full of mischief. His base wants it. It would no doubt benefit the Democratic Party in the long term.

The little children in great danger, holding hands, staring blankly ahead, are pawns in a larger game. That game is run by adults. How cold do you have to be to use children in this way?

Driscoll adds:

Which on one level is pretty rich considering that the Wall Street Journal has been calling for open borders for years — to the point of shaming conservatives who supported tighter controls over immigration, but these are still valid points, made by a former White House insider who can’t believe she once supported such a dysfunctional president.

Driscoll then quotes from Peter Wehner writing in Commentary:

The president is a man who has a grandiose sense of himself, a very strong sense of entitlement, and is, even for a politician, unusually prickly and self-pitying. He is blind to the damage he’s doing and the failures he’s amassed. His self-conception–pragmatic, empirical, non-ideological, self-reflective, willing to listen to and work with others, intellectually honest, competent at governing–is at odds with reality. Mr. Obama is constantly projecting his own weaknesses onto his political opponents. There are never any honest differences with Obama; he is always impugning the motives of his critics–they put “party ahead of country”–while presenting his own motives as being as pure as the new-driven snow. And whatever goes wrong on his watch is always the result of someone or something else. There’s a kind of impressive consistency to Obama’s blame game. It never rests, and it applies to every conceivable circumstance.

Driscoll concludes:

on one level or another, by design.

Please read more here.

A governor with a chest?

Paula Bolyard wishes the U.S. was being led by a man with a chest, instead of by a Pajama Boy. She uses this quote:

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Bolyard continues:

Perry, the gun-slinging, tough-talking, God-fearing Texas governor, reminds us of what we’ve been missing: for too long we’ve had a president without a chest. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis imagines a dystopian future without objective truth and divorced from natural law, where “men without chests” rule by their own unreflected whims and according to their own selfish motives. It seems we’ve arrived at that future, or dangerously close to it.

Please read more here.

Paula posts this 2010 speech by Perry as an example of a governor with a chest.


I am not convinced about how wonderful Texas is. I lived in Texas from 1958-1964. It was the time of civil rights passions. I found a lot of bigotry. I was glad to leave to go to graduate school in Kansas in 1964, and have not been back.

Will the new estimate change our behavior again?

Has the crisis been averted? All that's left (in media) is the propaganda wing of the socialist movement. An overblown issue, like all the other overblown issues. Lying and manipulating data is all the left has. We get accused of things for which there is no evidence. Proving facts that don't exist. Latching onto sketchy data to fuel their paychecks and their crony relationships with lawmakers. Information driven by causes: garbage in, garbage out.

What did he learn?

Spencer Collins is a young man who put a box on a stick in his front yard. He fills the box with books, and encourages people to take a book and return it. His city has an ordinance against building structures in yards. He went to the city council to plead the case for literacy and community. He won (with the help of a milk box) a temporary moratorium until October.



When the Fox reporter asks him if he learned something in all of this, he replies, but I cannot understand what he says. Can you?



Thanks to Scott Ott.

Unburdening herself on-line

Did she offer anyone a ride to the grocery store?

Consequences of putting politics first

Jonah Goldberg writes:

horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.

President Obama likes to claim that he’s deported a lot of people. But he hasn’t. What he’s done is count people caught and turned around at the border as “deportations.”

Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” John Sandweg, the former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told the Times.

These immigrants aren’t fools. They’re responding rationally to new information: If you make it past the border, you can stay. If you’re a kid, all you have to do is make it to the border.

But the law didn’t cause the crisis, nor did the violence in Central America. The cause comes from a president who puts politics first.

Please read more here.

How long?

Charles Krauthammer writes about Obama's policies regarding the thousands of illegal immigrant children from Central America:

These kids are being flown or bused to family members around the country and told to then show up for deportation hearings. Why show up? Why not just stay where they’ll get superior schooling, superior health care, superior everything? As a result, only 3 percent are being repatriated, to cite an internal Border Patrol memo.

There is no logic. Just a quirk of the law — a 2008 law intended to deter sex trafficking. It mandates that Central American kids receive temporary relocation, extensive assistance and elaborate immigration/deportation proceedings, which many simply evade.

This leniency was designed for a small number of sex-trafficked youth. It was never intended for today’s mass migration aimed at establishing a family foothold in America.

Stopping this wave is not complicated. A serious president would go to Congress tomorrow proposing a change in the law, simply mandating that Central American kids get the same treatment as Mexican kids, i.e., be subject to immediate repatriation.

Then do so under the most humane conditions. Buses with every amenity. Kids accompanied by nurses and social workers and interpreters and everything they need on board. But going home.

One thing is certain. When the first convoys begin rolling from town to town across Central America, the influx will stop.

When he began taking heat for his laxness and indecisiveness, Obama said he would seek statutory authority for eliminating the Central American loophole. Yet when he presented his $3.7 billion emergency package on Tuesday, it included no such proposal.

Without that, tens of thousands of kids will stay. Tens of thousands more will come.

The new variable is Obama’s unilateral (and lawless) June 2012 order essentially legalizing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came here as children.

For the immediate crisis, the answer is equally, blindingly clear: Eliminate the Central American exception and enforce the law.

It must happen. The nightmare will continue until it does. The only question is: How long until Obama is forced to do the obvious?

Please read more here.chaos at the border

Taking it from the streets to home computers and smart phones

Police have charged Alix Catherine Tichelman with manslaughter in the heroin overdose death of a Google executive on his yacht.

Jessica Guynn reports at USATODAY that

The glare of the national spotlight is on Silicon Valley sex workers after news broke this week that an alleged prostitute is charged with leaving a Google executive to die on his yacht in Santa Cruz, Calif., after shooting him up with heroin. The Internet is rife with anonymous websites that match sex workers with clients and help them avoid being arrested or assaulted. The websites have both broadened the sex market and helped customers hire prostitutes more discreetly. Scott Cunningham, an associate professor at Baylor University who studies the economics of prostitution, said the Internet has made the sex trade "extraordinarily efficient," taking it from the streets and red-light districts to home computers and smartphones. "Before the Internet, clients didn't know where to find the prostitutes and prostitutes did not know where to find the clients. If you think about it in an economic sense, the Internet has removed a lot of the friction from the market," Cunningham said. "And when you reduce search friction, you get a lot more searching and a lot more of that activity."

Read more here.

Deteriorating relations

Germany took an unusual step this week. They ordered a top intelligence official in the U.S. Embassy to leave the country. Their complaint about the Obama administration sounds precisely the same as the complaints about the Obama administration from Republican members of Congress: "U.S. policy has simply been to stonewall, to answer no questions, and to leave Germany alone with this problem," said one German politician. "There is substantial anger in the government."

How about just…winning?

Roger L. Simon writes:

We’ve all built our Arabic vocabularies a touch since 9-11, but the definition of words can often be problematic. The meaning of concepts like, say, jihad, are notoriously difficult to pin down, even when they shouldn’t be; I think deliberately. One of those elusive terms is hudna, meaning a temporary truce or “quiet.” A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle. As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand. The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just…winning?

Please read more here.

Will Lois Lerner be the first of the Obama administration to go to jail?

Representative Steve Stockman announced that a resolution has been filed in the House of Representatives directing the Sergeant-of-Arms to arrest her and detain her in the D.C. jail. Bryan Preston writes:

Lerner has come under renewed scrutiny this week on two fronts. Emails show that she was aware of a key email that later went “missing.” More importantly, other released emails show that she sought to hide information from Congress as it was investigating the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups.

The House has the power to arrest and jail on charges of contempt.

Please read more here.

Which will it be?

Richard Fernandez writes today about the behavior of wolves (John Boehner) and mountain lions (Sara Palin). The prey? Barack Obama.
Please read more here.

Obama: An evil leftist genius, or a hapless putz?

Andrew Klaven's take on President Obama:

Many people on the right think Obama is an Evil Leftist Genius. Not me. I think he is a hapless putz. I think his ideas are all wrong, his application of his ideas is incompetent, and the chaos that he causes with his wrongness and incompetence will not lead in the direction he thinks it will.

I think when the history of the 21st century is written, Obama will not merit more than a single line. Even the fact that he was the first black president may come to seem irrelevant in a couple of decades. In which case, he will not merit any line at all.

The guy is just a sad little schmuck who played cynical politics well and got promoted way above his competence. His policies won’t change the face of the nation. They’ll just make a mess that those who come after him will have to clean up.

Please read more here.

On building fences, taking kids into your homes

Gagdad Bob has some comments on the chaos at the southern border:

Obama is so heartbroken about what's going on at the border that he can't even bring himself to visit the scene. Rather, he needs to console himself by attending a fundraiser with similarly compassionate millionaires and billionaires who wouldn't be caught dead down there, let alone take one of those kids into their homes. They don't believe in fences, except around their estates and compounds.

Please read more here.

Hillary: lie shamelessly to manipulate women

Neoneocon writes today about Hillary Clinton's deliberate misstatement of the law in the Hobby Lobby case. Here is the lie told by Hillary:

It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.

Neoneocon writes:

I’m writing to point out how pernicious her statement was, how purposely and cleverly duplicitous, shameless demagoguery of the worst sort. And the women (or men) who might fall for it are ignorant and manipulable.

Politifact and the WaPo rightly point out that Hobby Lobby offers 16 of 20 kinds of contraception coverage, and they base their criticism of Hillary’s statement mainly on that. What they fail to mention is another purposeful (and IMHO even more pernicious) lie Hillary tells in that same sentence, one that I have yet to see anyone point out. It’s contained in her phrase “her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.”

But Hillary Clinton knows that opposing religious freedom—which is what she is actually doing here—is nowhere near as popular a stance as fighting supposed attempts to stop women from having contraception. Although no one is actually attempting that, it makes good copy for the fight against the War on Women on which she believes the success of her candidacy depends. She will lie shamelessly to manipulate the women for whom she obviously has a great deal of contempt into believing that’s what’s going on.

Please read more here.

President shoots some pool in Denver

Can you believe it? President Obama did the same thing my kids and I do when we go to Denver! Yep, that's him shooting pool at the Wynkoop Brewery, where my kids and I always manage to go for pool and food. We also like to combine the pool with trips to the Tattered Cover Book Store and the Denver Library downtown. Good for Obama to follow in our footsteps!

Please think twice before burning bridges

Are you a bridge burner? I was saddened this week to learn that one of my friends at work just walked off the job. I doubt if I will ever see him again. Then, today Seth Godin takes up the subject at his blog. Seth points out that

life is long and very few paths are only one way. You will need to come around here again.

A bridge well-crossed gets better over time. When you need to break it down to push through, you've not only hurt the person you trampled on, you've hurt your reputation.

Read more here.

Harvesting

Ann Voskamp and her farmer husband celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary camping in the woods with their six children. Because she has realized:

Mothering a mess of kids is as important as preaching to a stadium for a month of Sundays. 



The size of your ministry isn’t proof of the success of your ministry. The very Son of God had a ministry to 12. And even one of them abandoned Him. Forget the numbers in your work. Focus on the net value of your work.

Your most meaningful work in the Kingdom of God may not be the big things that you do — but the one little person you love.

Please read more here.

Hillary Clinton's favorite charity: herself!

Dick Morris writes today about Hillary Clinton's favorite charity - herself!

After an uproar about the exorbitant college speaking fees paid to Hillary Clinton — $225,000 and up for each speech — she suddenly announced that all of these fees “have been donated to the Clinton Foundation.”

So in other words, she’s donated the over-the top $1.8 million in fees to her favorite charity — herself. Is there really much difference between a fee paid directly to Hillary and one to the Bill Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation? That’s like moving money from one hand to the other. It’s not like Hillary’s giving it away and losing control over it. Because, without a doubt, she and her husband control the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Foundation. Is there anyone at all there who would ever say no to them?

Please read much more here.

Consequences of self-righteousness

Victor Davis Hanson asks:

Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?

The list:

In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam.

And what about Richard Nixon? Hansons writes:

A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?

And Obama? Hanson again:

Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.

When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.

As always, this is another Hanson piece that is chocked full of wisdom. You know who I will vote for in 2016? The candidate who asks Victor Davis Hanson to be their chief advisor! Please read his whole piece here.

Looking for a store to rob?

The Police Chief in Tacoma Park, Washington is asked to leave the Ikea store where he was shopping for furniture for his daughter's new apartment.

Filmmaker who glorifies violence to host Obama this week

President Obama is going to Texas this week for three fundraisers. He is not going to the border to investigate the chaotic situation there, but one of his fundraisers for the Democrat Party is being hosted by the Director of this violent film, Robert Rodriguez. Yeah, that Obama. The one who is for gun control.



Thanks to Bryan Preston.

Losing the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson tells us how Obama lost the Middle East:

Fuzzy euphemisms replaced supposedly hurtful terms such as “terrorism,” “jihadist,” and “Islamist.” The administration gave well-meaning speeches exaggerating Islamic achievement while citing past American culpability.

We tilted toward Turkey and the Palestinians while sternly lecturing Israel. Military victory was caricatured as an obsolete concept. Leading from behind was a clever substitute.

Survey the current Middle East, or what is left of it: Egypt, the Gulf monarchies, Iraq, Iran, Israel and the Palestinians, Libya, Syria, and Turkey. It is fair to say that America has somehow managed to alienate friends, embolden enemies, and multiply radical Islamic terrorists.

The more Obama campaigned in 2008 on a failed war in Iraq, a neglected war in Afghanistan, an ill-considered War on Terror, and an alienated Middle East, the more those talking points were outdated and eclipsed by fast-moving events on the ground. By Inauguration Day in January 2009, the hard-power surge had largely defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq. It had won over many of the Sunnis and had led to a U.S.-enforced coalition government, monitored by American troops.

But there remained one caveat: What had been won on the ground could be just as easily lost if the U.S. did not leave behind peacekeepers in the manner that it had in all its past successful interventions: the Balkans, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea.

Likewise, the once-derided “War on Terror” measures — Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, military tribunals, preventative detentions, renditions, and drones — by 2009 had largely worked. Since 9/11, America had foiled dozens of terrorist plots against our homeland and neutralized terrorists abroad, killing tens of thousands in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once more in the Middle East, Barack Obama is looking to blame others for a mess that has grown since 2009. But mostly he just wants out of the lose-lose region at any cost and wishes that someone would just make all the bad things go away.

I had a great deal of trouble deciding which paragraphs to escerpt, because every paragraph Hanson has written here is vital. Please read them for yourself here.
.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause

Carly Fiorini: The War on Women is baseless. Enough!



Thanks to Hot Air

Anxiety

“It’s really your ugly pride that makes you afraid. Just bow in humility — and you’ll rise up in courage.” Today Ann Voskamp writes about her battles with anxiety.

Warriors in the service of joy

Are we warriors in the service of joy? Are we relentless in our generosity in sharing our gift? Do our readers say, "I can't wait to read his next post, and the one after that?" That's what Seth Godin writes about today.

How times have changed in California

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Why exactly is (California) farmland so insanely priced, when canal water is nonexistent and the water table is dropping several feet each month — as tens of thousands of farmers tap their savings to deepen their wells to grab what they can of the shrinking aquifer?

The answer is complex. One, the growth of India, China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific as consumers of California specialty crops coincides with steady inflation here at home in the price of food. In such a perfect storm, farming has never been more lucrative. It is almost as if the more regulations, taxes, and rules that are put on farming, the more food becomes precious.

Prices to almond growers have reached $3 and more a pound. Some mature nut varieties bring $8,000 to $10,000 in profits per acre. As farmers swarm to plant crops like almonds or pistachios, they abandon old marginally profitable produce like grapes and stone fruit — and such reductions in those acreages have likewise revitalized the fresh and dried fruit markets. In a word, price-wise everything in California is now good, and water wise everything is lousy.

The last thirty years saw the final destruction of the long-ailing California family farmer and his parochial world of agrarianism. The family farm was not a business, but a proverbial way of life that revolved around seasonal rhythms, local rural get-togethers, and a shame culture where farmers sought to raise kids that would not embarrass a 100-year family reputation. All that is over here, as their small tesserae are now recombined into larger mosaics of corporate farms. Economy of scale, mechanization, and efficiency leave no room for quaint ideas of raising kids to learn the value of hard, dirty monotonous work, or to neither romanticize nor to harm nature, or to remember to treat the rich and poor man the same, or to remember to match your lofty words with mundane deeds of living what you profess.

As I see the well rigs fly by, the for-sale signs spring up, and the investors scour the countryside, I think of all these small farms whose owners are now dead, whose children long ago moved away with the bad prices, and the now rougher rural communities (illegal immigration, meth labs, and the destruction of manufacturing jobs were not kind to rural California).

Please read more here.

Freedom summer

Tom Blumer writes about what happened that summer fifty years ago, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and then riots erupted:

Is the conventional wisdom that the 1960s race riots and the fractured race relations and white flight to the suburbs they caused were simply manifestations of long-simmering black community frustrations triggered by specific events, or were they proactively fueled by people determined to ensure that the legitimate civil rights movement’s milestone accomplishment would not work out as hoped, and that race relations would not improve?

Blumer thinks it was the latter.
Read more here.

Shorebreak waves

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Let it go!

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

A movie I want to see

P.S.: The book was fabulous.

A man uses his sense of humor to obliterate the BDS movement

Bad news for environmental doomsdayers

Debra Saunders writes:

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers. Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean.

What people think of as a dump doesn't look like floating junk. Instead, ocean current "convergence zones" are swirling with flecks of plastic - like a snow globe half a minute after shaking - and with considerably less plastic trash than expected.

We do know, however, that single-use plastic bags require fewer resources than reusable bags - which you have to wash - and paper bags. Plastic bags litter harbors, but also represent less than 1 percent of the U.S. municipal waste stream. It's a mistake to believe that what might replace them would have no downside.

Please read more here.

And while we are on the subject of replacing plastic bags, the next time you bring your precious cloth bag to the grocery store, would you please offer to bag the items yourself? It slows down the line when the cashier has to hold your bag with one hand while scanning your items and then packing them with the other hand. At the very least, please be thoughtful enough to wash your bags before bringing them on your next trip.

Pawns

Hey, PETA, plants have feelings, too!

Mail Online reports:

Most people don't give a second thought when tucking into a plate of salad.

But perhaps we should be a bit more considerate when chomping on lettuce, as scientists have found that plants actually respond defensively to the sounds of themselves being eaten.

The researchers at the University of Missouri (MU) found that plants can identify sounds nearby, such as the sound of eating, and then react to the threats in their environment.

the researchers found that the plants previously exposed to feeding vibrations produced more mustard oils, a chemical that is unappealing to many caterpillars.

Please read more here.

Trusting employees to do the right thing

What do you want when you go to someone's blog? I want my time to be well spent. In the case of Seth Godin's blog, he never fails to make me think. And he makes his point succinctly every time. Today he challenges business leaders to trust their people.

How much do you trust your people to do the right thing?

Consider giving every person on your team a budget—$1000 a year? $200 an incident? and challenging them to spend the money to make things right, to create efficiency, to delight.

If the CFO freaks out, invite her to meet with each employee at the end of the year to hear how they chose to spend the money. $5 extra to park close enough to the airport to not miss a flight. Giving an unhappy customer a refund on the spot. Buying a subscription to an inexpensive web app that dramatically decreases customer service time...

At the Ritz-Carlton, every single employee (even the maintenance folks) has a budget of $2,000 per guest to make things right. On the spot, without asking.

Without a doubt, the guest is blown away by this rapid response. A caring person who, instead of saying, "I'll have to ask my supervisor," just makes it right. But even more important, I think, is the effect of trusting your people. You've already given them the keys to your brand, you've already made them the face of your organization—isn't it time to trust them enough to do the right thing?

How the Obama Justice Department is blowing it in the prosecution of the one terrorist who is being tried for the Benghazi massacre

Andrew McCarthy explains how to prosecute terrorists, and concludes that the Obama Justice Department is blowing it in its attempt to present a case against the Benghazi terrorists:

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, of course, is the only suspect apprehended in connection with the Benghazi massacre, a terrorist attack on a still-mysterious U.S. diplomatic installation. J. Christopher Stevens, the United States ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans — State Department official Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty — were killed. Until recently, such attacks have been known as acts of war carried out by the enemy. In the age of Obama, they are now known as “crimes” for which “defendants” like Khatallah are “brought to justice” — rather than brought to Gitmo. Meaning: They are whisked into our country when no one’s paying much attention. The red carpet is rolled out at a federal courthouse, where the “defendant” is given Miranda warnings, taxpayer-funded counsel, and all the rights of the American citizens they plot to kill, including lavish discovery-of-intelligence files relevant to their civilian trial.

Gold-plated due process for our enemies begins with the constitutional right to an indictment returned by a grand jury, providing the “defendant” with notice of the charges against him. In Khatallah’s case, the first thing you’ll notice is that the indictment is tiny: less than two pages long — 15 measly lines of text once you discount the caption, citations, and signature lines. This is a startling departure from Justice Department indictments in jihadist terror cases, a turn to brevity that cannot be explained solely by Obama’s banning of words like “jihadist” from the government lexicon.

Khatallah has been identified by the State Department as a “senior leader” of Ansar al-Sharia, one of the al-Qaeda-tied franchises in Libya. Yet there is no mention of Ansar al-Sharia in the indictment, much less of al-Qaeda or the Islamic-supremacist ideology that ties jihadist affiliates together. In fact, the indictment does not even accuse Khatallah of being a terrorist.

Radical Islam’s war against the United States has been underway for over 20 years. Eastern Libya has been an al-Qaeda hotbed for much of that time. That is why our government financially supported Muammar Qaddafi: His regime was providing intelligence on terror hubs like Benghazi and Derna, from which jihadists launched to fight American troops in Iraq. When President Obama turned on Qaddafi, terrorist organizations like Ansar al-Sharia were the beneficiaries. In the months before September 11, 2012, they repeatedly attacked Western targets in Eastern Libya — including one bombing attack on the U.S. diplomatic installation itself. Although this jihadist campaign induced other countries to pull their personnel out of the region, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not only left ours in, they reduced security.

Nothing about a long-running, ongoing jihadist war against the United States.

Instead, the indictment is written to portray a sudden, spontaneous eruption of violence, without much planning or warning, in which Khatallah — who knows . . . perhaps inspired by a video — abruptly joined a disgruntled group of protesters that turned out to include some shady terrorists motivated by . . . well, who can really say? All we know is the violence started without warning and, before you could scramble a fighter-jet or fuel up Air Force One for a Vegas campaign junket, it was all over.

There are a lot of downsides to giving enemy-combatant terrorists all the majesty of American due process. But at least it used to mean that, by the end, you’d have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Now, it’s starting to look like what you get on the Sunday shows.

Please read more here.

Have we been given a false narrative?

Daniel Hannon has a very different take on the founding of America than we have been hearing the last few days. Read it here.

Ask a liberal if he/she thinks America is exceptional.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the glib anti-Americanism of the left here.

The left's preconceptions

Thomas Sowell writes:

If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.

In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which Obamacare has been only the most obvious example.

Please read more here.

Reducing violence by giving a speech?

Mark Steyn writes:

Of his talks with Vladimir Putin, the president said, “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Putin aims to reduce the violence by getting his boy Assad to kill everyone he needs to. Obama aims to reduce the violence by giving a speech about the “intolerance that fuels extremism” — or is it the other way round? The world understands that Putin means it and Obama doesn’t — just as in Afghanistan everyone knows the Taliban means it and the fainthearted superpower doesn’t.

Americans seem not to have noticed that the U.S. has just lost yet another war. But in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, they noticed, and they will act accordingly. On the wings of love, up and above the clouds, Obama wafts ever higher on his own gaseous uplift. Down on solid ground, the rest of the world must occasionally wonder if they haven’t confused the U.S. delegation with the world’s most empty-headed boy band.

Please read more here.

Elena Kagan distorted the most despicable of abortion procedures

Shannen W. Coffin, an attorney in Washington, D.C., was the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of the defense of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act during the Bush administration. She writes at National Review this week about Elena Kaagan's role as a Clinton advisor in 199.

Miss Kagan’s decision to override a scientific finding with her own calculated distortion in order to protect access to the most despicable of abortion procedures seriously twisted the judicial process. One must question whether her nomination to the Court would have the same effect.

Read more here.

Are you becoming more feminized?

Chateau Heartiste writes:

The results from an experiment to domesticate wild foxes has led scientists to theorize that the transformation of humanity from hunter-gatherers to modern civilization is essentially a grand scale project in the domestication, i.e. feminization, of men.

What a shame that the price to be paid for civilized prosperity is male castration. And that’s not a figure of speech. More domestication means lower testosterone. And there is tantalizing evidence of this being a worldwide phenomenon. Sperm count and quality have been falling for generations. Fertility is dropping in all but the most testosterone-y regions (Africa).

The trade-offs would superficially appear to be worth it, (especially for women), but what if we telescope outward to the distant future? What happens to a nation of manboobs and male feminists? A dearth of masculine aggression has downsides: apathy, conformity, lack of creativity, disposition to believe feelgood platitudes. But perhaps worst of all, the fate of such feminized nations is always the same: overrun by manlier cultures.

Read more here.

Is your approval elusive?

Reading Chateau Heartiste has convinced me that I am a pathetic beta male. Is this true:

Compliments breed complacency. Critique breeds conciliation. A woman will never work as hard for a man’s approval as when his approval is most elusive.

How is your grasp of social dynamics?

Are you a good flirt? Chateau Heartiste writes:

Good flirts can read signals in a timely and precise manner, and respond to those signals with interest level gauged to the social context within which the signals occur.

Muscles, looks, and money aren’t the key variables driving, or even instigating, female attraction in most complex modern social contexts. Social savviness — the ability to flirt confidently and skillfully, aka game — is the fitness trait that really matters. Even a top 1% looking man will flounder if he lacks the social prowess of a less good-looking but more socially keen competitor.

Read more here.

Is chivalry dead?

One of the most provocative and superb writers I have encountered in the blogosphere is Chateau Heartiste. Here are some of his thoughts on chivalry:

As CH has said before, chivalry (or gentlemanliness) only works when it is accompanied by a cultural expectation of female deference to men. Since we are far FAR from the social conditions in the West where women are deferential to men (the opposite is more true), chivalry as a concept and a practice becomes a joke, akin to asking men to anoint the feet of haughty, entitled women in exchange for the masochistic delight of cultural contempt.

Read more here.

The love of Christ exploding a heart

Ann Voskamp reminds us on this day of patriotism that

You are doing something great with your life – when you’re doing all the small things with His Great love.

Please read much more here.

Is better a dream worth dreaming?

Seth Godin believes that it is. And even if you have given up on dreaming that for yourself, don't do it to others.

A predictable rhythm of change

Emily Freeman is on the font porch at A Holy Experience today. Here are some excerpts from what she writes about the summer solstice:

If God had made the world straight up and down, we would have no seasons or change; just the sun shining straight at the equator all year around.

Instead, He chose to tilt it on His axis, making a way for strawberries, red leaves, quiet snow, raging hurricanes, spring showers, and sunflowers standing high in salute.

The tilt made a way for long light as well as long darkness.

The tilt made a way for change.

When transition comes, I’m learning to take small cues from the built-in rhythm of the world.

I sometimes long to live in a tilt-less world, one I can maintain and predict. Keep the sun at the equator, please. I don’t like to move with the change.

When change comes, I may lose the rhythm I had before. But I gain something, too.

Like the world, my soul needs a solstice — a predictable rhythm of change.

Instead of fighting the changes and the transitions —

what if we leaned into them instead?

Please read more here.

Have the courage of your convictions, Bill Ayres

You can watch the video here.

Ayres and Kelly: part two

I have much more respect for Megyn Kelly now. "You stole, you lied, you hid, you bombed the New York Police Department, the Pentagon, the US Capitol, the State Department, Ayres only admits that he "crossed lines of legality."

Please watch the video here.

"We should build monuments to the unknown deserters"

Bill Ayres admits only to his colleagues using "inflated rhetoric."

You can watch the video here.

"My Mom packed a Bible"

h/t Scott Ott

Well, maybe we're not doomed

h/t Scott Ott

Three-years-old!

I swear this is a true story. While turning my cart into the health and beauty aisle at Walmart tonight, I hear a small child say to her mom, "Don't judge me, Mom!" I asked the mom if I had heard that correctly. She replied, "Yes, she said Don't judge me, Mom." Then I looked at the little girl. I asked the mom, "How old is she?" The mom answered, "three."

We're doomed.

Winning wars, losing peace

One of Bill's best, in my opinion:

Mideast madness

Observations at the gym

Tonight at the local gym there were lots of people. Most had cell phones they were either looking at or listening to with ear plugs. One particularly obese woman even had Star gossip magazine to sit and read, instead of doing the exercise the machine was there to assist with. Only one person was actually talking on his phone. He was from India, and talking very loudly, saying words and sentences in English that I could not understand. On the television screen was the soccer game between the US and Bulgaria. No one watched it or even glanced up at it.

I must be the classic deferential beta male

Do you believe this? Chateau Heartiste writes that men need to be a little less deferential, and a little more inconsiderate, to the civilized Western woman if you want to make a positive impression on her.

You won’t stop this juggernaut of decivilization. It’s too big and moving too fast. Like the fate of empires that have come and gone before, it has to finish its preordained path of destruction. Something good may rise from the flattened earth, but in the meantime, poolside is the only sensible choice.

When life is easy and contraceptives flow like the River Orinoco, women get bored and seek the orgasmic release of aloof, reckless, throwback assholes. Women in modern industrialized nations come to desire the sexiness over the security.

Civilized, coddled chicks dig jerks.

In the land of the deferential beta male, the rule-breaking alpha is king.

Read more here.

Then he links to this You Tube video of a man picking up women in his Lamborghini, without saying a word.

What name was most popular in your state in 1984?

"Social allergens"

Elizabeth Bernstein writes:

Experts use the term "social allergens" to describe behaviors or habits that drive others nuts. Some of these actions begin to annoy us soon after we meet someone. Others get to us slowly and surely over time.

She also writes that we may be more likely to encounter these annoying habits at work, because who we associate with there is mostly involuntary.

One of the annoying habits of a co-worker of mine who otherwise is a very good employee, is that she regularly seeks me out to tell me something in which she perceives herself as a victim. The minute I see her coming in my direction, I know something "poor me" is going to come from her lips.

What is the best way to deal with this? I just let it go, realizing that is just how that person is.

Will Obama and Kerry accept a unity government that has Hamas a member?

Shmuley Boteach writes at Breitbart that the Ten Commandments say "Thou shalt not murder," rather than "Thou shalt not kill."

Murder is the taking of innocent lives in cold blood. Killing is protecting the innocent from murderers as an act of self-defense. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between the bloodthirsty criminals of Hamas and Israel.

Boteach is referring to the murder and dismemberment of three Israeli teens by members of Hamas.

How could President Obama and John Kerry accept a unity government that has Hamas as a co-member? Does the US not believe that their reprehensible policy of legitimizing murderers will not lead to their being emboldened and commit further acts of carnage? Would the US ever accept an Arab government anywhere in the Middle East that has Al Qaeda as a partner? Would the memory of 3,000 innocent Americans at 9/11 allow it? Would the memory of thousands of dead American soldiers in Iraq allow it? Would the hallowed remains of thousands more in Afghanistan allow it?

In the murder of these three innocent teens, we see the immediate danger of allowing the West Bank to be controlled by Hamas, which is what would happen should Israel withdraw. Hamas came to power in 2006 in Gaza; they channeled the billions they received as the world's largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid into rockets rather than hospitals, bombs rather than universities. And they intentionally launch their rockets from nurseries and schools rendering the innocent Palestinian population human shields, not surprising for an organization which regularly murders Palestinian homosexuals under the false accusation of collaboration and engages in honor killings of young Palestinian women whose only crime is to have a boyfriend. And they send killers, like these from Hebron, to pray on the naiveté of innocent teens to get them into cars, thinking they’ll go home, only to be brutally murdered in caves.

While the brotherhood of man may continue to elude us in an increasingly violent world, an agreement between clerics of all religions to condemn murder is something upon which we must insist. I call upon my Muslim brothers to join me in condemning – in the harshest possible words – the brutal and vile murder of three innocent boys whose parents will now mourn for the duration of their days.

Please read more here.

Whining about the Supreme Court's decision

The Denver Post editors are not happy with the Supreme Court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case. They assert that now anyone can attempt to "play the religion card." Read the editorial here.

The Incumbent Antithesis hypothesis

Cass Sunstein notes that when a president's popularity goes down, as has happened with Obama in his second term, his successor in the next election is likely to be his antithesis. He calls it the Incumbent Antithesis hypothesis.
Read more here.

How it's done in Mississippi

The man in the video below, a registered Democrat, Rev. Stevie Fielder, is an associate pastor at a black church in Mississippi. He alleges in a paid interview with Charles Johnson that he was promised $16,000 to distribute envelopes with $15 in them to hundreds of black Mississippi residents to vote against the Tea Party candidate in the recent primary election, which was won by establishment candidate Thad Cochran. Fielder says thousands of blacks received the envelopes all around the state, and that he was not the only one distributing the cash. He was not paid the $16,000, so now he realizes he's been had, and gave the interview to Johnson. Johnson's organization, GotNews.com has the full story here, including text messages sent to Fielder from Cochran staff members, who later asked him to delete the texts, which he did not do. GotNews.com does not say how much it paid Fielder for the story. The Cochran staff member, a black man named Saleem, sold Fielder on the idea that McDaniel was a racist.

Here is the You Tube posting of GotNews.com's interview with Fielder.


Update: Breitbart reports that John McCain

described Cochran's "get-out-the-vote campaign" as "excellent," then talked about how he will face similar circumstances in Arizona and needs to work equally as hard if he runs again. "The key is you'd better pay attention, you'd better work hard, you'd better organize." He added, "And you'd better understand that there's a strong anti-Washington/anti-incumbency sentiment out there, which is justified and you've got your work cut out for you."

Cronies

Dick Morris today has a video on Hillary's connection to Goldman Sachs. She and Bill and Chelsea have raked in over two million dollars from Goldman since leaving the White House. Morris explains how Goldman has benefitted from the quantitative easing policies of the fed. You can view this excellent video here.

The holy curiosity of inquiry

Is love something that is just lying dormant in you, waiting for magical moments to bestow themselves upon us? Or is love a skill we need to learn to do? Maria Popova examines Leo Buscaglia's book on the subject. Buscaglia quotes Einstein:

“It is nothing short of a miracle that instruction today has not strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant lies mostly in need of freedom without which it will fall into rack and ruin and die without fail.”

Has our commercialized mass media taught us that love is something we just fall into, usually at first sight? Buscaglia wrote that

Each person has the potential for love. But potential is never realized without work. This does not mean pain. Love, especially, is learned best in wonder, in joy, in peace, in living.

Please read more here.