Harvest

Ann Voskamp reflects:

Sometimes the only way you hear if God’s knocking is if you are standing right by the door — ready to go.

When someone stops doing nothing and just starts doing something, anything — this is what starts to change everything.

Read more here.

Is it empowering to play the victim?

Found here.

Compare 2006 with 2014

How did the three major television networks cover the midterm elections in 2006 during the sixth year of George W. Bush's presidency, versus the sixth year of the Obama presidency?



Thanks to Mike's America

Give it a rest, Democrats

Senator Mark Udahl isn't doing well in his campaign for reelection. First, in a debate, he referred to his challenger, Congressman Cory Gardner, as "Senator." Then he cited Martin Luther King and said Democrats judge people by the "content of their color." He needs an extended rest.

Michelle Obama was here to campaign for Udahl this week. She also made a gaffe, saying that Udahl, who was born in Arizona, was a "fifth generation Coloradan." No, actually, Michelle, Cory Gardner is a fifth generation Coloradan. He is Udahl's opponent.

Under his aloof nose

Michelle Malkin catalogs many of the Islamic jihad attacks that have taken place on American soil during his presidency, and asks, where was Obama?

Where was Obama? Sabotaging our borders, restricting our gun rights, working to free Gitmo jihadists, decrying Islamophobia, demonizing conservatives, welcoming jihad sympathizers to the White House and putting politics over national security.

Now “shaken” over the death of a Canadian soldier killed by a jihadist, our president has barely stirred in response to the homegrown Islamic terror campaign against our men and women in uniform under his own aloof nose.

Read more here.

New Harry Potter book coming out on Halloween

Abbey Stone reports:

J.K. Rowling has a very special treat in store for Harry Potter fans this Halloween. A series of games and riddles posted to Rowling’s website Pottermore.com this week culminated in Friday’s big reveal that the Rowling will release a new Harry Potter story on October 31.

According to a statement obtained by Time, Rowling’s new story will feature one of the most terrifying characters in Potter’s world (no, not Nagini): Professor Umbridge.

“Umbridge is not only one of the most malicious Potter characters, she is the only person other than Lord Voldemort to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry,” Time reports Pottermore.com of saying. “The new exclusive J.K. Rowling content provides a rich, 1700-word back story about Umbridge’s life filled with many new details, as well as Rowling’s revealing first-person thoughts and reflections about the character.”

Dolores Umbridge, the pink-clad, giggly sadist, enters Harry’s life in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as Hogwarts's new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. She finds immense pleasure in torturing her students, most notably with her blood quill—a piece of dark magic that etches all words written with the quill into the skin of the writer.

Read more here.

Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!

Will there be a repeat of the 1980s crash?

I remember all too well the early 1980s, when oil prices dropped severely. I was owner of a store in Durango, Colorado called The Greenery. We had just expanded into a 12,600 square foot store and started two satellite stores in downtown Durango. Then, the oil bust came, and Durango lost its usual visitors from Denver, Texas, and Oklahoma. From that point on it was a struggle to pay the rent each month.

In a column in the Denver Post today Jonathan Thompson recalls that bust/boom cycle in the oil and gas business and its effects on Colorado. Once again, in 2014,

One estimate has 30 percent of Denver's downtown office space occupied by oil and gas industry workers.

Over the last couple of decades, Denver has transformed itself into a greener, transit-oriented city, and a trendy magnet for millennials. Fossil fuels have helped drive the metamorphosis. According to statistics by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Denver now has one of the healthiest gross domestic products in the nation. The metro area's GDP grew by 4 percent in 2013, about half of which is attributed to extractive industries. Close to 30,000 people are directly employed by the fossil fuel industry in northern Colorado, either in Denver offices or the oil fields of Weld County, which yielded some $4.5 billion worth of crude last year. Greeley, a cow-town north of Denver with a massive meatpacking plant, saw its GDP jump by a whopping 10 percent, and it has nothing to do with cattle.

A repeat of the 80s crash is unlikely — the preceding boom was driven less by scarcity than by geopolitics, first, and then federal price controls and massive subsidies, which were discontinued by the Reagan administration. This boom is driven by drilling technology and the rising price of oil, which is fueled by burgeoning demand from China, India and developing countries. That's not likely to go away entirely, but every boom busts someday, and when it does, Colorado may regret throwing away all those would-be severance tax revenues.

But when that day comes, Denver will be far better prepared to deal with it. Despite energy's outsized role, the economy is far more diversified than in the early '80s — finance, high tech and so-called cleantech, which includes wind and solar companies, are also big sectors. Plus, public funds have been invested wisely in infrastructure, transportation and in making the city a desirable place for companies — including oil companies — to relocate, with or without high taxes.

Read more here.

Come on in. Vote Democrat. Kill deputies.

CNN reports that one of the suspects in the California shooting spree had already been deported back to Mexico twice. No mention of our porous border in the story. Read more here.

How the Catholic vote became neutralized

Mark Gallagher explains how the Social Development and World Peace staff at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

prevailed and they pursued with the relevant bishops’ committees the first-ever Catholic voters guide published in 1976, called the “Political Responsibility Statement” (now called Faithful Citizenship).

Laura Wood writes that this voters guide for Catholics

presented moral relativism as a reliable guide for Catholics’ consciences and declined to identify the pro-abortion position as one Catholics may never support by voting for candidates who hold it

Social Justice Warriors

Have you heard the term "Social Justice Warriors?" Roosch defines the term for us:

Social justice warriors believe in an extreme left-wing ideology that combines feminism, progressivism, and political correctness into a totalitarian system that attempts to censor speech and promote fringe lifestyles while actively discriminating against men, particularly white men. They are the internet activist arm of Western progressivism that acts as a vigilante group to ensure compliance and homogeny of far left thought.

The true definition of SJW is up for debate, but most generally it has become a catch-all term that describes feminists and liberals who actively try to solve the perceived social injustices of modern society by organizing in online communities to disseminate propaganda, censor speech, and punish individuals by getting them terminated from their employment. They have also been successful at positioning themselves in the upper echelons of universities, media organizations, and tech companies.

The lack of such objectivity in SJWism is by design. It’s borrowed from Cultural Marxist thought, which argues that objectivity and the idea of right or wrong is less important than consensus.

You’ll often encounter SJW debate tactics trying to use consensus to persuade you: “How can you think X when so many people think Y?” As you may already know, consensus is a poor judge of facts or morality. Consensus used to believe that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the Earth. Sadly, many great men were imprisoned or executed for going against consensus on beliefs that we know are true today. Consensus in America also supported the institution of slavery, which of course didn’t make it right. And not long ago consensus believed in segregation between whites and blacks, even in the north where slavery was not practiced. Consensus has been shown to be a dangerous method to validate ideas or behavior.

A big chunk of their activism depends on subjective feeling and perceived value of the parties involved. Before an SJW can make a decision on what is right or wrong, she must first know the race, gender, and sexuality of the involved participants so that she can decide whether or not to be outraged. A statement or idea in isolation is not enough for them to come to a conclusion on the acceptability of a statement. For example, consider the following statement:

“Abortion should not be used as a method of birth control.”

An SJW could not definitively respond to this statement unless they knew who uttered it. If I—a Caucasian man—published this statement on a popular site like CNN, the outrage would be immense. Most comments would accuse me of hating women and wanting to control their bodies. A petition would be started to prevent me from ever writing on CNN again. On the other hand, if a popular feminist like Jessica Valenti said this statement in the same publication, the response would be more balanced. She would receive some criticism but even support from individuals who would try to destroy my life had I said the exact same thing.

A person who believes in the scientific method would not be swayed by the messenger. They would analyze the statement and attempt to either verify it or not based on logic. SJW’s avoid such objective behavior.

Read more here.

Gamergate

Have you heard of Gamergate? Aaron Clarey decides to explain it in this You Tube video.

Do they contribute to health?

The blogger at Cooling Inflammation writes:

More healthcare begets more health costs and less health. Tests detect symptoms that trigger treatment, but more often than not fail to contribute to health.

More public interaction and scrutiny is needed to keep the public safe from the health industry and to hold doctors to their pledge to do no harm.

The blogger goes on to make the following points:

Breast, Prostate and Pelvic Exams Lead to Costly, Harmful, Unnecessary Interventions

The Health Industry Pursues Profitable Tests and Treatment, not Causes and Cures

Read more here.

Anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle

writes:

Health is dependent on:

an Anti-Inflammatory Diet,
gut flora adapted to your diet
exercise and
adequate sleep

The rest (genetics, vegan vs. paleo, environmental toxins, organic veggies, GMOs, etc.) are minor contributors, less than 10% in aggregate, to overall health.

Read more here.

From the heading of the blog entitled Cooling Inflammation:

Inflammation is the foundation for cancer and degenerative/autoimmune diseases. Small changes in diet and exercise, e.g. omega-3 oils, vitamin D, low starch, and maintaining muscle mass, can dramatically alter predisposition to disease and aging, and minimize the negative impact of genetic risks. Based on my experience in biological research, I am trying to explain how the anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle combat disease.

Cashing in

Roosh writes:

Haven’t you noticed what’s happening in the media and on the internet? Companies are cashing in on the backs of those with a brainwashed belief system. Sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Policy Mic, Medium, Huffington Post, and Gawker are raking in money hand over fist providing content which either acts as soothing soma for your modern progessive or emotional outrage at something that conflicts with their worldview. Providing content targeted at liberals, social justice warriors, and white knights who believe in mythical fantasies is now a huge profit-generating industry.

To which Hawaiian Libertarian adds:

Of course it's all tied in. It's not like the editors and publishers of all this $ocial Justice content need to micro-manage the journalists, bloggers, reporters, interviewers and writers to make sure they all adhere to the progressive party line. The University system has already taken care of indoctrinating several generations of students, and we have now reached a critical mass of brainwashed progressives in enough positions of media influence to ensure that the $ocial Justice narrative is our society's primary paradigm. With so many sheeple now in with the program, it's time for the managers of our proverbial feedlot of a society to cash in.

Out in these fringes of teh Interwebz, most recognize that Tell-A-Vision programming has basically become one big commercial broadcast to market to the consumer-driven vagina. Professional Sports represents the last bastion of male virtue. It is the last space in which athletic competition as proxy for war that appeals to the intrinsic males aggression and drive for victory through violence, is still recognized and celebrated to some degree.

It allows men to vicariously experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat from the comforts of home. Of course, I am one of those who has previously excoriated young men to find real, meaningful ways of satiating the male desire to engage in positive outlets for aggression and violence, instead of solely experiencing it as a passive spectator parked on the couch in front of the boob-tube.

Did you know that the NFL has appointed a new Vice President of "Social Responsibility?" Hawaiian Libertarian continues:

It's now just a matter of time before all NFL players and everyone else employed by the league, are soon going to be forced to attend workshops and conferences where they will be subjected to power point presentations, skits, videos and tearful testimonials of Women's Studies graduates and interns, all as a part of this new program for "sensitivity training" and "social responsibility."

I'm sure this will undoubtedly improve the quality of the game.

Read more here.

Another "victim" lashes out

Paul Farrell gives us some facts about Jaylen Fryberg, the 14-year-old member of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington who shot other students this week. He had just broken up with his girlfriend whom he had taken to the homecoming dance on October 17 (he was named Freshman Homecoming King at the dance). He has been tweeting angry and despondent messages on social media. He shot his cousin in the head during the attack. Read more here.

Can your kid pull up his pants properly?

Do you know about TS Gold? Michelle Malkin writes:

“TS Gold” stands for Teaching Strategies Gold. This “school readiness assessment system” was mandated in our state several years ago. It has already permeated private day-care centers and preschools; pilot testing in publicly funded preschools and kindergartens is currently taking place. More than 42,000 kids in Colorado alone have been subjected to the assessments.

Aligned to the federal Common Core standards, which were designed and copyrighted by a small cadre of Beltway educrats, TS Gold received $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The assessors have 38 “objectives” arranged under nine topics of academic learning, psychomotor data and social-emotional development. Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like “respond to emotional cues,” “interact cooperatively” and “cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.”

TS Gold directs teachers to document student behaviors with videos, audio files, journals and photos — which are then uploaded to a central database cloud. Already overwhelmed by myriad testing burdens, teachers must undergo intensive training that takes scarce time away from actual instruction. Educators must gather disturbingly intimate and personal data every school day, collate and upload it, and then file lengthy “checkpoint ratings” on each child every 10 to 12 weeks.

Creeped out yet? This is just the tip of the data-mining iceberg. Last spring, parent Lauren Coker discovered that TS Gold assessors in her son’s Aurora, Colo., public preschool had recorded information about his trips to the bathroom, his hand-washing habits and his ability to pull up his pants.

“When I asked if we could opt out of the system,” Coker told me, school officials told her no. She pulled her son out of the school and still doesn’t know whether or how the data can be removed.

Edutech firms such as Pearson, Microsoft, Google and Knewton are salivating at the lucrative opportunities to exploit educational Big Data and sell “customized learning” products in the most data-mineable industry in the world. And the politicians who can hook them up are reaping rich rewards in their campaign coffers.

Read more here.

Today's America

35% of the students in Denver Public Schools are learning the English language! Only 53% of these students graduate from high school, which isn't much worse than the pitiful overall graduation rate of 61%. 40% of the students speak Spanish.

Yesenia Robles writes about the problem in today's Denver Post.

The 10 most common languages in the district:
English: 44,587 (52.09 percent of district)
Spanish: 34,824 (40.68)
Arabic: 893 (1.04)
Vietnamese: 892 (1.04)
Amharic: 411 (0.48)
Somali: 405 (0.47)
French: 250 (0.29)
Russian: 250 (0.29)
Nepali: 232 (0.27)
Burmese: 194 (0.23)
Mandarin Chinese: 194 (0.23)

Read more here.

What are the figures in your community?

Rules help us reduce our uncertainty

Why is it so easy for us to obey orders, even when we know they are wrong?

My time, your time, our time!

All he really needs is moral courage

Joy, love, expressiveness, movement

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Acknowledging Christ as Messiah

No problem with miracles: I am one!

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Make him own it!

Got your excuse ready?

The Second Amendment: Who is it for?

I think this explanation by Bill Whittle is one of the best I have seen, and very needed.

You thought businesses and corporations create jobs?

Letting the left win the language wars

In his memory

Gateway Pundit reports that Michael Brown's mother, grandmother, and auntie had a brawl over rights to sell these tee shirts.

No means no

Russia now has more deployed nuclear warheads than the U.S.

Michaela Dodge reports that Russia now has more deployed nuclear warheads than the U.S. What can be done about it?

To reaffirm U.S. commitment to its allies and international security, the U.S. should withdraw from New START and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, modernize its nuclear forces and infrastructure (which have been underfunded for decades), develop and deploy a comprehensive layered missile defense system that would be capable of addressing Russia’s ballistic missile threat, and re-evaluate its strategic posture. U.S. and allied security and stability in the European theatre depend on these steps being taken.

Read more here.

He was just obeying Mohammed

A man reported to have Islamic "extremist leanings" attacked police officers in New York City with a hatchet on Thursday, injuring two before being shot dead, police and a monitoring group said.

The man, identified in the US media as Zale Thompson, had posted an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook that "display a hyper-racial focus in both religious and historical contexts, and ultimately hint at his extremist leanings," the SITE monitoring group said.

Read more here.

When the weapon becomes the warrior

Norway is one of many countries developing weapons that can operate without human control or surveillance.

The technology raises moral questions, such as what happens when the human is removed from the battle field and machines are left to do the job? Or who will be responsible if the weapon makes mistakes or performs attacks violating international law?

Read more here.

Russian military provocations increasing

Russian military provocations have increased so much over the seven months since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine that Washington and its allies are scrambling defense assets on a nearly daily basis in response to air, sea and land incursions by Vladimir Putin’s forces.

Not only is Moscow continuing to foment unrest in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials and regional security experts say Russian fighter jets are testing U.S. reaction times over Alaska and Japan’s ability to scramble planes over its northern islands — all while haunting Sweden’s navy and antagonizing Estonia’s tiny national security force.

Read more here.

Should you buy or sell?

Amazon is getting some bad publicity. For the seventh time in nine quarters the company missed expectations. It seems Jeff Bezos has been investing in new endeavors:

The company has made a recent string of investments that stand to affect the company's growth for years to come. These include Amazon Fresh, the same-day delivery service competing with the likes of Fresh Direct, and the nearly $1 billion acquisition of Twitch.

Read more here.

Fighting to learn the truth

Judicial Watch (JW) has become an irreplaceably valuable instrument in the giht for the salvation of our republic. Today they reveal what they have learned from documents they received after filing a lawsuit to try to learn the truth about the Fast and Furious coverup.

Practically lost in the 1,000-plus pages of records is an index that shows Jarrett was brought in to manage the fact that Holder lied to Congress after the story about the disastrous gun-running operation broke in the media. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ran the once-secret program that allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

The files received by JW include three electronic mails between Holder and Jarrett and one from former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke to Jarrett. The e-mails with Holder are all from October 4, 2011, a significant date because, on the evening of October 3rd, Sheryl Attkisson (then at CBS news) released documents showing that Holder had been sent a briefing paper on Operation Fast and Furious on June 5, 2010. The paper was from the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center, Michael Walther.

This directly contradicted Holder’s May 3, 2011 testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, during which he stated that he, “probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” The October 4, 2011 date may also be significant because it came shortly after the August 30, 2011 resignation of U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke and reassignment of acting ATF director Kenneth Melson to the position of “senior forensics advisor” at DOJ.

Read more here.

Playing Russian roulette with your mental health

One has to go to the UK newspapers to to learn the truth about marijuana:

A definitive 20-year study into the effects of long-term cannabis use has demolished the argument that the drug is safe.

Cannabis is highly addictive, causes mental health problems and opens the door to hard drugs, the study found.

The paper by Professor Wayne Hall, a drugs advisor to the World Health Organisation, builds a compelling case against those who deny the devastation cannabis wreaks on the brain. Professor Hall found:

One in six teenagers who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it,
Cannabis doubles the risk of developing psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia,
Cannabis users do worse at school. Heavy use in adolescence appears to impair intellectual development
One in ten adults who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it and those who use it are more likely to go on to use harder drugs,
Driving after smoking cannabis doubles the risk of a car crash, a risk which increases substantially if the driver has also had a drink,
Smoking it while pregnant reduces the baby’s birth weight.

Last night Professor Hall, a professor of addiction policy at King’s College London, dismissed the views of those who say that cannabis is harmless.

‘If cannabis is not addictive then neither is heroin or alcohol,’ he said.

‘It is often harder to get people who are dependent on cannabis through withdrawal than for heroin – we just don’t know how to do it.’

Those who try to stop taking cannabis often suffer anxiety, insomnia, appetite disturbance and depression, he found. Even after treatment, less than half can stay off the drug for six months.

The paper states that teenagers and young adults are now as likely to take cannabis as they are to smoke cigarettes.

Mark Winstanley, of the charity Rethink Mental Illness, said: ‘Too often cannabis is wrongly seen as a safe drug, but as this review shows, there is a clear link with psychosis and schizophrenia, especially for teenagers.

‘The common view that smoking cannabis is nothing to get worked up about needs to be challenged more effectively. Instead of classifying and re-classifying, government time and money would be much better spent on educating young people about how smoking cannabis is essentially playing a very real game of Russian roulette with your mental health.’

Read more here.

Our Halloween nightmare

This is the kind of crap Colorado parents and children have to deal with this Halloween, because the drug dealers have taken over this state.

The Michael Brown case

AP feels the heat, changes headlines

Ace of Spades documents how AP changes its headlines in line with social media reaction to stories. Yesterday a Palestinian Hamas supporter terrorized people in Israel by driving his car into a group of people near a Jerusalem train station, killing a three-month-old baby. Israeli police shot the man as he fled the scene. The first AP headline was Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem. Outrage started to build on social media. The second headline was Car slams into east Jerusalem train station. Ace comments:

Um... the car didn't slam into the station of its own accord. It was driven by a terrorist attempting to kill Jews.

Incidentally, notice that while the world media took notice of the Ottawa shooting, the world media pretty much ignored this terrorist attack in Israel. In fact, AP originally tried to portray it as a story of Israelis shooting "a man" in Jerusalem.

As outrage ballooned on social media, the AP finally gave the story the headline it deserved all along:

Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station.

Read more here.

A One-piece life

Ann Voskamp returns with her daughters from a trip to Rwanda.

And then we are only home a handful of days when some news headline bursts all pluming proud that Facebook and Apple were going to pony up to pay for the freezing of any female employee’s eggs.

And then they blare that some lovely actress, Renee Zellweger, maybe felt she had to freeze her beautiful face with a bit of Botox to find her way in a youth-obsessed culture?

When did someone start shilling that women need to be freed from the confines of their own God-fashioned biology … as if our God-formed state of growing children and growing older, is somehow wrong, as if we need to freeze the parts of us that makes us female and human and made in the image of God so we can hold some imaginary clock at 25 years of age?

Women aren’t burdened because we may birth children some decades or that we may wear the astonishing gift of growing older other decades — there is nothing inherently flawed with the way our Father formed us.

In our callings and vocations — Women aren’t called to suppress their femininity, their motherhood, or their age. Women are called to beautifully express it.

Instead of freezing eggs and faces, what if there was cultural support for family and ministry and vocation as fluid, and mothers could be with their daughters and sons, and daughters and sons could be with their mothers and witness this holistic modelling of a fluid One-Piece Life, could witness what our ministry and our service and our daily work look like, woven together, and that it wrinkles us and grows us and it is hard and it is wrenchingly beautiful — and it is not to be missed.

Women need to be free to mature beautifully and serve vocationally and mother fluidly.

Sure — Fight the cultural expectations of aging — but don’t ever fight the beauty of maturing.

Read much more here.

Leavin' on a jet plane

Then there is news about three teens from a suburb of Denver who were on their way to Syria. They were stopped in Germany and put back on a plane to Denver. Their parents and F.B.I. agents met them at the Denver International Airport. Two of the girls are sisters, ages 15 and 17. The third is 16. The two sisters are of Somali descent, while the third girl is of Sudanese descent. Police in Frankfort, Germany detained the girls, then put them on the plane back to D.I.A. Read more here.

Busy day for terrorists in Canada

Robert Spencer reports that there have now been three confirmed shooting scenes in today's coordinated terror attacks in Ottawa. The third was at a mall. Read more here.

Where have all my Yard Signs Gone?

Guest post
By Curt Dale

A couple of serious questions! Are Democrats largely just inherently thieves, grifters, liars, scammers, nere-do-wells, and rioters, all without any regard for the rights of others? Where have all my Yard Signs gone? Due to damaged knees, I really can’t knock doors for my candidates and pass out handbills. So, my effort in political campaigns has been to obtain and give out political care window stickers and put out yard signs, particularly at key intersections in Parker Colorado. Am I being petty? Not at all! It’s a reflection of the lowdown ethic of the Democrat Party. I will justify my reason for concluding that.

I put out dozens of signs for Cory Gardner for Senate, Bob Beauprez for Governor, Chris Holbert, David Weaver, Tony Spurlock and other Republicans. They got jerked up by some larcenous Democrat and wee replaced by Guv Hookinlipper and Sen. Uterus signs at intersection after intersection. In some cases, mine were just jerked up and taken. No, it wasn’t the wind that blew them away and it wasn’t Republicans getting them to install in their own yards. I think I can lay down the accusation that they were stolen and deep-sixed by Democrats to make it look like nobody is interested in Gardner and suggest that The Dems are so popular in Douglas County. Fat chance!

Am I saying that all Democrats are that dishonest and want to shut down my freedom of speech? Well, I don’t know that I want to defend my position on that, one way or the other. The fact remains that somebody cleaned out the GOP signs for key races, and nobody has cleaned out the Dem ones. So, I I’m just say that Democrats are responsible for stealing my signs, and nobody seems to be stealing theirs. Just calling it like it is!

It’s not so much about the value of the signs, really! Or is it? Good Republican people contributed their hard earned money to buy those signs. So, every one stolen robs some Republican of the money they contributed to purchase them since the sign can’t do the job it was purchased to do. It’s definitely about the incredible disregard for my freedom of speech and expression of my political views. They want to take away my 2nd Amendment rights and have been successful to a degree in doing that. Certainly they are now taking away my freedom of speech. That started with Obama as he was elected, even before he was inaugurated. I was writing op eds for over 20 different newspapers weekly until October of 2007, and suddenly, I found myself persona non grata in the newspapers of 3 separate publishers across Colorado and across the country. Ultimately, one admitted that they’d gotten “the word” that if they wanted to remain solvent, they would have to stop publishing things critical of Obama’s administration as it came into power. ZAP! My freedom of speech was shot, and Freedom of the Press was clearly no longer a fact.

Now, these petty little Democrat thieves are methodically even stealing what I work hard to erect in support of my candidates. Am I supposed to tread softly in making such accusations? Well, if I’m supposed to walk softy and just accept impositions on my freedoms, then I won’t do what I’m supposed to do. Democrats seem to be thieves if they are in office, and their supporters as also thieves. That’s how I have to look at it. I take these “thefts” very personally on several fronts. They rob me of my time, my effort as a person with a walking disability, and rob me of my freedom of speech. And don’t come back at me and say, “Well, it happens on both sides!” If that’s the case, why is my town of Parker plastered with the Democrat signs and devoid of Republican signs? At least here, Democrats steal them. I don’t figure there are any other political parties out there stealing them. Purely a matter of deduction and logic! They steal! Oh, they don’t? How many Republicans do you figure were looting the stores in Ferguson, MO, a few weeks back? Not very likely! Obama sent Holder from the DOJ to ostensibly settle down the Obama Supporters who were tearing up the sheets there. Anytime the Democrat supporters get irritated, the first response seems to be looting. Oh, they’ll chant, march, threaten, cry and such, but the operative thing happening is getting more free stuff for nothing, cleaning off the shelves of the stores they raid. Looting is the same as stealing, but somewhat more violence is involved in looting in most cases.

So, in the future, I don’t think I’ll even bother with yard signs, except in my own lawn. I will keep them well in sight of the front windows and keep it well lit all night—hoping to discourage sneaking Democrats from stealing them right out of my yard. I will concentrate on influencing people to put stickers in their cars. Are they tacky? Maybe so, but they are my freedom of speech. Politics is a nasty thing to be involved in, but I don’t try to raise myself above it. I stay right in the middle of the mess as much as I can. Therefore, I am well informed. It bothers me when supposedly highly intelligent citizens tell me they really don’t know what is going on, who is running and what the issues are. That is intentional blindness to what is going on about us.

Anyway, I have some 11 political stickers on my van. It is a moving billboard for my candidates. Do I worry about somebody bashing or keying my car? Not one whit! If they do, I’ll wear it as a badge of honor. Thus far, I’ve only gotten good feedback and people asking me for signs.

So, where are my yard signs? Probably thrown over some hill, in some dumpster or in a ditch, put there by a cowardly Democrat!

Colonel Curtis D. Dale, PhD, USAF (Ret)

Illegal entry

The girl pictured above was charged with illegal entry when she got stuck in a chimney, trying to break into a house lived in by a man she met online. Her name is Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa, 28.

Rescue workers had to tear down part of the chimney with jackhammers and oil Nunez-Figueroa up with dish soap to get her out.

Read more here.

Who benefits from racial divisiveness?

Victor Davis Hanson points out that

In an ever more racially diverse society where intermarriage is routine and assimilation often rapid, we have no discernible rules for what determines one’s race.

The charlatan Ward Churchill, a noted activist, tried — and succeeded in — fabricating a Native American identity to land a job at the University of Colorado. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren invented a Native American pedigree and so became Harvard Law School’s first recognized Native American professor. When other elites hyphenate their last names and accentuate first names, they remind us that without such IDs, one might not otherwise learn — or care about — their particular racial pedigree.

But even if some can prove ethnically pure heritages, who gets an edge in racially mixed-up America and who does not — and why?

Will the tens of thousands of Central American children who recently crossed illegally into America soon be eligible for affirmative action? If so, on what grounds? That America welcomed, fed, clothed, and schooled those who were all but driven out from their oppressive Central American governments?

Will these newcomers soon be eligible for special consideration in a way that Syrian refugees who are scheduled to arrive legally to the United States will not?

In truth, the criterion for affirmative action is not superficial appearance. (Syrians are perhaps as much non-white in appearance as Central Americans.) It is not past discrimination. (Central American dictators have been as unkind as Syrian dictators.) Nor is it present prejudice. (Both groups are new to the United States and not past victims of American discrimination.)

Why continue with divisive racial self-identification?

Too many of our ethnic aristocrats and politicians benefit from a fossilized system of a past century that is now largely irrelevant in 21st-century America.

Read more here.

The lobbyist-laden, crony-socialist Obama administration

Remember when Solyndra waited until the day after the 2010 midterm election to announce its layoff of employees? Guess who was the political fixer who arranged for that timing? Ron Klain, the man whom Obama just appointed to be the ebola czar. Andrew McCarthy has all the relevant details here.

Victim of the century

"Poor me. I was the first person to have her reputation destroyed world-wide via the internet. If only I could collect some royalties. The F.B.I. threatened me with 27 years in prison. Anxiety, depression, sense of failure, and shame: I came close to disintegrating. Every day in 1998 I felt like I was being punched hard in the gut. I was shattered. It's hard to wrap your mind around where the humiliation ends. There are no borders. It feels like the whole world is laughing at you. My mantra: I wanted to die.

I was also victimized when I was younger, when my brother read my diary, and my seventh grade crush shared the love letter I had written him with everyone he knew.

I cringed, I yelled, I sobbed, and the mantra continued. Submerged in shame and public humiliation.

Online we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis. To mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing."

Monica Lewinsky speaks out.


Update: Stacey McCain has written a powerful piece about Ms. Lewinsky here.

Update two: Don't miss what Scott Ott has to say here.

Advanced stages of collapse

David Warren writes:

Pope Paul was dead right in Humanae Vitae; that if we did not draw the line at contraception, we would be on the “slippery slope” to real, murderous barbarism.

Moreover, every Christian denomination that has abandoned that front line — on sexual morality — is now in advanced stages of collapse, from one thing that led to another.

Read more here.

Hold off on the rockets for a while

Reuters is reporting that

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A daughter of the leader of Hamas in Gaza was admitted to an Israeli hospital for emergency medical treatment this month after she suffered complications from a routine procedure, two sources familiar with the case said.

Israeli media has reported that one of Haniyeh's granddaughters was treated in an Israeli hospital last November, while his mother-in-law sought treatment in a Jerusalem hospital in June.

Read more here.

Implantable technologies

Mike Edelhart writes about the next big frontier in technology: implantable technology inside our bodies. Perhaps the most interesting one tome is smart dust.



Edelhart explains:

Perhaps the most startling of current implantable innovations is smart dust, arrays of full computers with antennas, each much smaller than a grain of sand, that can organize themselves inside the body into as-needed networks to power a whole range of complex internal processes.

Imagine swarms of these nano-devices, called motes, attacking early cancer or bringing pain relief to a wound or even storing critical personal information in a manner that is deeply encrypted and hard to hack.

With smart dust, doctors will be able to act inside your body without opening you up, and information could be stored inside you, deeply encrypted, until you unlocked it from your very personal nano network.

Go here to read and view the other technologies featured in Edelhart's article.

Accelerating the aging process

Do you want to accelerate the aging process?

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco used a sample of 5300 healthy adults. Dr. Elissa Epel worked on the study for 5 years.

“We think we can get away with drinking lots of soda as long as we are not gaining weight, but this suggests that there is an invisible pathway that leads to accelerated aging, regardless of weight,” said Dr. Epel.

Epel’s team discovered that in people who drank more sugar-sweetened beverages, the ends of their chromosomes, known as telomeres, were shorter.

The shorter the telomere, the less a cell can regenerate thus aging the body, and raising the risk of disease and early death.

“This finding is alarming because it suggest that soda may be aging us, in ways we are not even aware of,” said Dr. Epel.

Researchers found no link in cell aging, however, when drinking diet sodas and fruit juices.

REad more here.

Number 509 for Peyton Manning

Peyton Manning made Denver Broncos fans very happy tonight, breaking Brett Favre's all time NFL passing record with his 509th touchdown pass here.

A five-year-old Monet or Renoir?

the artist who painted this is five years old. Read about her here.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Play ball!

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Who's killing whom?

Found here.

Man plays national anthem with his gun

Thanks to Dave Barry's blog.

Einstein's view of intelligent design

What was Albert Einstein's view of intelligent design?

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

The scientists’ religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

- Albert Einstein

As quoted in Real Science.

What was taught in the mosque attended by the Okahoma beheader

He names the two guys who went shooting with him. Won't they identify him?

Blame the victim

Joran van der Sloot to marry pregnant girlfriend in prison

Any ideas how to fix this?

What is your position on quarantine? Scott Alexander writes:

One day I woke up and they had politicized Ebola.

Which tribe do you belong to: the blue tribe, or the red tribe? Alexander reports that the red tribe has been supporting quarantine, while the blue tribe opposes it. Then he goes on to discus how the two political tribes reacted to recent news items: Ebola, ISIS, the Rotherham scandal, Ferguson, nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, and global warming.

The Rotherham scandal was an incident in an English town where criminal gangs had been grooming and blackmailing thousands of young girls, then using them as sex slaves. This had been going on for at least ten years with minimal intervention by the police. An investigation was duly launched, which discovered that the police had been keeping quiet about the problem because the gangs were mostly Pakistani and the victims mostly white, and the police didn’t want to seem racist by cracking down too heavily. Researchers and officials who demanded that the abuse should be publicized or fought more vigorously were ordered to attend “diversity training” to learn why their demands were offensive. The police department couldn’t keep it under wraps forever, and eventually it broke and was a huge scandal.

The Left then proceeded to totally ignore it, and the Right proceeded to never shut up about it for like an entire month, and every article about it had to include the “diversity training” aspect, so that if you type “rotherham d…” into Google, your two first options are “Rotherham Daily Mail” and “Rotherham diversity training”.

I don’t find this surprising at all. The Rotherham incident ties in perfectly to the Red Tribe narrative – scary foreigners trying to hurt us, politically correct traitors trying to prevent us from noticing. It doesn’t do anything for the Blue Tribe narrative, and indeed actively contradicts it at some points. So the Red Tribe wants to trumpet it to the world, and the Blue Tribe wants to stay quiet and distract.

John Durant did an interesting analysis of media coverage of the Rotherham scandal versus the “someone posted nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence” scandal.

He found left-leaning news website Slate had one story on the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, but four stories on nude Jennifer Lawrence.

He also found that feminist website Jezebel had only one story on the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, but six stories on nude Jennifer Lawrence.

This doesn’t surprise me much. Yes, you would think that the systematic rape of thousands of women with police taking no action might be a feminist issue. Or that it might outrage some people on Tumblr, a site which has many flaws but which has never been accused of being slow to outrage. But the goal here isn’t to push some kind of Platonic ideal of what’s important, it’s to support a certain narrative that ties into the Blue Tribe narrative. Rotherham does the opposite of that. The Jennifer Lawrence nudes, which center around how hackers (read: creepy internet nerds) shared nude pictures of a beloved celebrity on Reddit (read: creepy internet nerds) and 4Chan (read: creepy internet nerds) – and #Gamergate which does the same – are exactly the narrative they want to push, so they become the Stories Of The Century.

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe have different narratives, which they use to tie together everything that happens into reasons why their tribe is good and the other tribe is bad.

Sometimes this results in them seizing upon different sides of an apparently nonpolitical issue when these support their narrative; for example, Republicans generally supporting a quarantine against Ebola, Democrats generally opposing it. Other times it results in a side trying to gain publicity for stories that support their narrative while sinking their opponents’ preferred stories – Rotherham for some Reds; Ferguson for some Blues.

This can sort of be prevented by not turning everything into a referendum on how great your tribe is and how stupid the opposing tribe is, or by trying to frame an issue in a way that respects or appeals to an out-group’s narrative.

Daily Kos or someone has a little label saying “supports liberal ideas”, but actually their incentive is to make liberals want to click on their pages and ads. If the quickest way to do that is by writing story after satisfying story of how dumb Republicans are, and what wonderful taste they have for being members of the Blue Tribe instead of evil mutants, then they’ll do that even if the effect on the entire system is to make Republicans hate them and by extension everything they stand for.

I don’t know how to fix this.

Read more here.

"I can break these cuffs!"

Schooling the world's petrotyrants

IBD editorializes that:

the petrotyranny model of using oil as a weapon against smaller neighbors and the U.S. is effectively dead. Over the past decade, all of the states that have staked their futures on the power of oil have effectively burned their bridges to other models for building their economies.

The editorial shows how Iran, Russia, and Venezuela

share one thing in common: a strategy of high oil prices and low production, plus a willingness to interfere with markets to make them into power games.

But as it turns out, that strategy was another kind of dependency. And the Saudis, egged on by the shale revolution, have just ended it.

Market manipulation is peculiar. In 1998, the Saudis tried to cut output to keep crude prices from falling further. It didn't work. From that, they learned a valuable right lesson: Nothing is bigger than market forces.

Now, the world's remaining petrotyrants are about to be schooled as well.

Read more here.

How to restrain a woman

Thanks to Ace of Spades.

Overplaying their hand

Have the Democrats overplayed their hand on the "war on women?" Ellen Carmichael believes that in the Colorado Senate race they have. She writes:

we are learning there’s an expiration date on the “war on women.” Democrats are in real danger of overplaying this hand, and if the left-of-center Colorado press is berating Udall for his birth-control mania, imagine how the voters must see him. That doesn’t mean conservatives shouldn’t remain on guard, but they can take heart that perhaps the country has been all Lena Dunham’ed out and wants to talk about bigger issues. You know, like our $17 trillion national debt.

Read more here.

Will it all backfire?

One of my favorite blogs is Betsy's Page. Today she comments on

controversial decisions and actions that the Democrats have put off for after the election.

She mentions

Obamacare rate increases, Keystone Pipeline, immigration action, and the report on Bowe Bergdahl's desertion.

Then she links to a piece by Tom Bevan, entitled "Is Democrats' Kick-the-Can Strategy Backfiring?" Bevan writes:

The number of significant issues they have attempted to kick down the road and dodge until after the midterms is substantial -- and growing by the day.

The Keystone XL pipeline, having already been punted by the president in two previous elections, remains in limbo, buried deep within the bowels of the State Department.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would delay issuing a regulation forcing new power plants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions until after the midterm elections.

In September, President Obama, at the behest of vulnerable Senate Democrats -- and to the chagrin of many Latinos -- decided to delay taking executive action on immigration until after November.

This week we learned that Obama acquiesced to another request by Senate Democrats: to delay naming a new attorney general until after the election for fear that a “controversial nominee” might harm their 2014 midterm chances.

Read more of Betsy here.
Read more of Tom here.

Turned upside down

The other day from 9 a.m. to noon there were no less than four incidents in which four separate children went on non-stop screaming rampages in our store. Three of them were with moms, but one was with a big, muscular man.

Thomas K. Lindsay asks:

Why might today's parents fail to exercise the leadership necessary to enforce the discipline necessary to their children's maturation? How have the relations between the young and old been turned upside down, with the older, more experienced generation now fearing to offend the younger, less-experienced generation, rather than vice versa?

Are the benefits of our aimless "niceness" toward our children worth the price? If not, then for their sake, as well as ours, we adults might consider acting again like grown-ups.

Read more here.

Party of the rich

Which is the party of the rich? Timothy Carney says Republicans and Democrats are both the party of the rich. Nevertheless, seven of the ten richest Congressional districts are represented by Democrats. Read the whole thing here.

Micturating

Kevin Williamson has an excellent piece at National Review about the differences in being a governor and of being a Senator in the party not in power. Read it here.

Infecting people at an exponential rate

Ace of Spades continues to have excellent analysis of the ebola crisis. He summarizes:

We have a serious public health crisis. We have known since March that ebola was back, and in subsequent months the disease infected people at an exponential rate. As full-blown epidemics do.

They suffered a 70% death rate for ebola infections in West Africa. (Here in the States, supposedly we will only have a 50% death rate-- but I'm not confident that the "experts" are right about that.)

Now, given the fact that ebola is raging across West Africa, killing thousands of people, would anyone who is serious about epidemic containment think, back in, say, June, "Well, we sent out a memo and posted an instructional video. Our work here is done."

No. Back in June, the CDC should have offered hospitals a major crash course in ebola containment. They should not have relied upon their previous memos. They should have actually checked and followed up with hospitals to ensure that people knew at least the basics of containment.

And when Duncan was diagnosed with ebola, they should have sent out a team of experts to oversee the hospital's handling of the matter or simply taken over treatment of Duncan themselves.

After disaster has already struck -- and after six months of the disease spreading exponentially -- the Commander in Golf Togs finally announces:


President Obama said that the U.S. would become more aggressive in coordinating the national response to Ebola, including sending a CDC team to any hospital with a confirmed Ebola case.

Congratulations on doing on October 15th what you should have done on March 25th.

Read much more here.

Ebola

From ABC:

West Africa could face up to 10,000 new Ebola cases a week within two months, the World Health Organization warned Tuesday, adding that the death rate in the current outbreak has risen to 70 percent.

Read more here.
Ace of Spades has lots of analysis on the ebola crisis.

"Swarm intelligence"

From the Smithsonian.com:

his August, on the James River in Virginia, the U.S. Navy staged the kind of scene you’d expect to see at the beginning of a James Bond movie. As a large ship moved through the water, a helicopter overhead spotted an unidentified boat approaching and sent a warning to a small fleet of escort boats. Some were armed with loudspeakers, others with flashing lights, another with a .50 caliber machine gun.

Once the fleet zeroed in on the threatening vessel with radar and infrared sensors, some of the escort boats broke away and quickly encircled it. They flashed lights and blasted warnings through loudspeakers. Threat resolved.

All of the escort boats were unmanned—and yet they moved together as a group, thanks to what’s known as “swarm intelligence.”

Read more here.

Who at CDC told her it would be okay to fly?

Ace of Spades has a late post tonight, telling us that CBS News is reporting that nurse Amber Vinson called the CDC several times to tell them she has a fever, and they still okayed her to fly from Dallas to Cleveland.

I am wondering: who at CDC gave her the okay?

It becomes most alive after being the most still

Ann Voskamp writes:

the world says you are what you do. But the Word says you are Whose you are. And what we do ultimately flows out of who & Whose we are.
So our Being must have precedence over our Doing — because it’s our Being that will ultimately express itself in our Doing.

But there’s this Present Christianity, simply being present to Christ, that makes our life unfold like a gift back — a gift that far surpasses any of the work willed out of Performance Christianity.

Because Present Christianity is fuelled by giving Love — and Performance Christianity is fuelled by getting accepted.

I once told that boy of ours: Any dead fish can go with the flow — you have to be intentionally alive to swim against the current.

After that flicker bird at the top of the oldest apple tree in the orchard sits still for what seems like hours…

… after we eat the last of the pie crumbs, and watch from the window, watch the flicker rest amongst the yellowing leaves, you can see it —

how, when it’s time, the flicker flashes and unfolds and unfurls and takes to the sky—

how it becomes the most alive only after being the most still.

The right to be left alone

Depressed? Exercise!

A new research study helps explain why exercise helps to protect our brains from depression. Read about it here.

A lot of pies

This photo by Rebecca Rosenberg is of a 2058 pound pumpkin. I don't know who picked it up and put it on the scale. Not very orange, is it?


Found here.

The miracle of 3-D printing

There is a really interesting story over at Wired about the use of 3-D printing to make body parts.

It wasn't easy

What happened to Christ's Apostles? Go here to find out how each one died, and where their remains are today.

689

David Feith explains how the number 689 has huge significance in the popular political upheaval happening in Hong Kong. Read about it here.

Build the base!

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

The Republican party has a distinctive problem with female voters, but it is one that it cannot and does not need to solve.

Polling has for many years consistently found that women are more supportive than men of social-welfare spending, economic regulation, and gun control, and less supportive of military action. In August, for example, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that the gender gap on raising the minimum wage was in the double digits, with women more supportive. These issues provide an alternative explanation of why the gender gap opened up around 1980: The parties became more divided on size-of-government questions then, too.

The Colorado Senate race between Udall and Gardner, where contraception has become one of the top issues, could be the most important one this fall. It will be a test of whether the Republican party can compete in states that went twice for Obama. (Most of the competitive Senate races this year are in states that reliably vote for Republican presidential candidates.) Its rising Hispanic population makes it an important sign about the future, too. And if Republicans win there after renewed Democratic accusations that they are waging a “war on women,” perhaps they will be a little less spooked by the gender gap — and more focused on doing what it takes to build their baseline level of support among men and women alike.

Read more here.

Coming for your pastor

Houston has a new non-discrimination ordinance that passed in June. It allows men to use women's bathrooms and women to use men's bathrooms. Some pastors have been speaking out against this ordinance. The mayor and city council have issued subpoenas requesting copies of sermons.

Todd Starnes reports:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.

However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.

After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.

The pastors were not part of the lawsuit. However, they were part of a coalition of some 400 Houston-area churches that opposed the ordinance. The churches represent a number of faith groups – from Southern Baptist to non-denominational.

Read more here.

"Thank you for coming down here and explaining the unconstitutional policies on campus"

From Campus Reform:University officials threatened to call the police and disciplinary action against students who were passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution at Southern Oregon University (SOU) last week.

A group of four students at SOU handed out copies of the Constitution on campus Tuesday while collecting signatures to end the university’s restrictive speech policies, which limit free speech to an area that totals less than one percent of campus. While doing so, the students were approached multiple times by school administrators and campus police who all asked the students to move to a different area of campus.

How's that workin' out for ya?

Have you figured out on what Obama's Middle East strategy is based? Neither have I, but Victor Davis Hanson has:

Obama’s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions:

(1) a special relationship with Turkey;

(2) distancing the U.S. from Israel;

(3) empathy for Islamist governments as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;

(4) a sort of non-aggression agreement with Iran;

(5) expecting his own multicultural fides to resonate in the region;

(6) pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, how did that work out?

Obama’s special relationship with Recep Erdogan proved disastrous from the get-go, as Erdogan immediately began to provoke Israel and promote Islamist revolutionaries.

Israel has nothing to do with the slaughter in Libya or Syria or Iraq, but it is a constant reminder that the United States is indifferent to its friends while it courts its enemies. As Obama’s new policy against ISIS is shaping up, Iran is emerging as more of an ally in his eyes than is Israel.

Our once-close relationship with Egypt is ruined.

Obama kept quiet when a million Iranian protesters hit the streets in 2009 to show their disgust with theocratic corruption.

Ending the tough sanctions has brought nothing but delight to the ayatollahs. In the view of Iraq and Syria, somehow the U.S. has become a de facto ally of the greatest enemy to peace in the region.

There were no Americans dying in Iraq when Barack Obama pulled the remaining troops out in order to win a reelection talking point. Iraq was a functioning state, saved by the successful U.S. surge.

We should forget the “peace process” and recognize that Hamas is an existential enemy of America and almost all our friends, and instead encourage an alignment of Egypt, the Kurds, Jordan, Israel, and a few of the saner Gulf States against both ISIS and the new and soon-to-be-nuclear Iranian Axis.

Read more here.

The importance of winning over women

The Daily Show
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Doing Hillary's dirty work

Dick Morris has released a video in which he charges that Leon Panetta, a Clinton loyalist, is doing Hillary's dirty work for her. Hillary is trying to distance herself from Obama's foreign policy mistakes, and Panetta is critical of Obama's foreign policy, but does not even mention Hillary in connection to Benghazi. Watch the video here.

Time for a registry?

Found here, where CH says it is time for a False Rape Accuser Registry.

Gratitude

Here is David Warren's take on Canadian Thanksgiving:

Farmers: God love them. There was once a time when four in five of our Canadian workforce were farmers or fishermen; now they are perhaps one in fifty. Those still in the trade grow older; the median age of farmers in Canada is now fifty-six, and so retirements are accelerating. There are far fewer farms than a century ago; but much, much larger. The industrialization of agriculture, and the persistent growth of government regulation, has changed the nature of farming; and methods of distribution have been centralized to the point where I know country people who drive into the big city, specifically to buy fresher food. The transfer of population from rural to urban locations likewise changes consumer attitudes, including those towards politics. City folk tend to have no clew what is involved in food production; contemporary “environmentalism” depends upon this profound ignorance. We think there are “solutions,” that can be legislated.

The farmer had time to read, and make his own music; to enjoy his family, and make real friends; to attend to the requirements of God, and of his neighbour. He could afford to be “idle” in this way. Paradoxically, our sloth now dictates that we participate in a rat race, mostly on terms resembling those of old-fashioned indentured labour. It is not that we work as hard as old farmers; but our exhaustion, at the end of the day, is a spiritual exhaustion, that leaves room only for passive entertainment. It blights the lives of employees and employers, alike.

Notwithstanding, the sense of gratitude, for life and the means of sustaining it, seems innate. Even in the heart of the city, we want to thank someone. We live, necessarily, in a state of confusion. And yet the clock still hasn’t run out on us. If only we knew Whom to thank.

Read more here.

Online courtships versus in the flesh

Online courting? No, Chateau Heartiste prefers

meeting and seducing women in the flesh, where the pleasant discomfort of the moment can’t be escaped, our stats can’t be aridly collated and perused, my probing hands can’t be evaded, my warm smirk can’t be missed, my wordless entendres can’t be mistaken. The incitement and sustenance of a woman’s romantic attraction demands a… personal touch.

Read more here.

Thanksgiving in Canada

They are celebrating Thanksgiving up in Canada at Ann Voskamp's house.

When thanksgiving is your default — the enemy gets his defeat.

You defeat your dark when thanksgiving is your default.

“Praise is the beauty of a Christian.

What wings are to a bird, what fruit is to the tree, what the rose is to the thorn, that is praise to a child of God.”

~ Spurgeon

Unlimited well of creativity

Immediate payback.



Thanks to April Kellman

Settled Science

found here.

He's got a point

found here.

Thorough analysis of current events

Tom Maguire has been doing yeoman's work reporting on the Islamic State, Turkey, Syrian Kurds, Ebola, and the EnterovirusD68 here.

The alphabet soup of scandals

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The lasting legacy of Obama will be that he has largely discredited the idea of big government, of which he was so passionate an advocate. Almost every major agency of the federal government, many of them with a hallowed tradition of bipartisan competence, have now been rendered either dysfunctional or politicized — or both — largely because of politically driven appointments of unqualified people, or ideological agendas that were incompatible with the agency’s mission.

He notes that the Border Patrol

is now the Border-Crossing Enabling Service, whose chief task is facilitating the illegal entry of thousands from Latin America and Mexico, largely to further the political agenda of the Obama administration, contrary to the law, the will of Congress, and the wishes of the majority of the American people.

Consider the policy of restricting flights to and from foreign countries because of national-security concerns. During the controversial Gaza War, the FAA ordered U.S. airlines to suspend flights to Ben Gurion Airport — the best protected airport in the world — supposedly because of a rocket that exploded in the general proximity of the facility. Hamas claimed the step as a psychological victory and proof of the efficacy of its strategy of targeting Israeli civilian centers, and as further evidence of growing U.S. anger at Israeli war conduct. In contrast, the FAA has not shut down flights to and from African countries in which Ebola has reached pandemic status. Which threat — a deadly virus or a stray rocket — posed the greatest danger to the American public? Perhaps if infected Liberian nationals send their child to Sidwell Friends, radical changes in FAA policy will follow; or, in contrast, if Israel had been gripped by an Ebola pandemic, then Americans might have been allowed to fly in and out of Ben Gurion.

The agency that relies on voluntary tax compliance now holds taxpayers to standards of transparency, record-keeping, and honesty that it cannot itself meet. That too will be a lasting legacy of the Obama administration.

Eric Holder has politicized the Justice Department in a way not seen since the scandals of Nixon appointee John Mitchell.

The Secret Service used to be unimpeachable. Not now. Agents have been caught patronizing prostitutes while on assignment in Latin America. They have allowed an armed former felon to enter an elevator with the president. They had no clue that gunshots may well have hit the White House. They allowed an unhinged and armed intruder to not just enter the White House grounds, but make his way into the White House itself — and the agency then tried to cover up its laxity. Its reputation is now in shreds. One day a confused White House expresses full confidence in the Secret Service’s incompetent director, and the next gladly accepts her resignation.

VDH goes on and on through the "alphabet soup of scandals:" the V.A., GSA junketeering, Obama's scapegoating the intelligence agencies, Janet Napolitano's Homeland Security absurdities, the tarnishing of the State Department because of Benghazi, Labor, EPA, NASA, Obamacare, Energy, and he finishes with this conclusion:

Obama has set the standard that the purpose of government is to facilitate his version of social change, regardless of protocols, laws, or traditions. And the result is a scandal-ridden administration that exceeds that of Warren G. Harding — one that has now convinced the public that their government agencies are not lawful, competent, or to be trusted.

Read the whole thing here.

Obama: master of political expediency

In his weekly newletter, The G File, Jonah Goldberg comments on a variety of items in the news. For example, he notes that Jimmy Carter is turning on Obama. Here is the headline from Time Magazine:

Jimmy Carter: Obama Dropped the Ball on ISIS Threat

Jonah then offers this humorous analogy:

First of all, having Jimmy Carter out-hawk you is like having Joe Biden attack you for being verbally undisciplined.

Jonah has

no confidence that Obama will stick with his war on the Islamic State one minute longer than the polls and political expediency require.

I liked this quote from Jonah:

But at the end of the day, division is what democracy is about. It’s about disagreement not agreement. Arguments are democratic. Unity for its own sake is fascistic.

And this one:

For decades, the best working definition of an evil wedge issue was any issue that is politically disadvantageous for Democrats to talk about. It’s of a piece with the mindset that exalted the phrase “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” under Bush and immediately downgraded dissent to the lowest form of racism under Obama.

Obama’s whole approach to politics has been to whip up issues — real and fake — that divide the American people.

Read more here.

Benghazi hearing

I am glad to see that Andrew McCarthy is raising questions about the Benghazi hearings. McCarthy credited Chairman Gowdy, who

pointed out that security for high-threat facilities was supposed to be personally approved by the secretary of state, not a subordinate — a problem given that, under Secretary Clinton, security in Benghazi was decreased despite attacks, threats, and expert assessments that clearly signaled an intensifying threat.

In the midst of Libya’s civil war, the United States government decided to switch sides — we went from support for the Qaddafi regime that had been regarded as a key counterterrorism ally to support for “rebels” who very much included the anti-American jihadists Qaddafi had been helping us track. That was not just an Obama-administration policy preference; it had strong support from prominent senior Republicans in Congress. The toppling of Qaddafi that resulted enabled jihadists to raid the regime’s arsenal. That has greatly benefitted both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorists currently rampaging in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and much of northern Africa.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, again with significant Republican support, decided to aid and abet Syrian “rebels” who, as in Libya, very much included anti-American jihadists. There is colorable suspicion that this assistance included the gathering up of arms in Libya for shipment to Syrian “rebels.” Abdelhakim Belhadj, the al-Qaeda operative who was Ambassador Stevens’s “rebel” point-man in Benghazi, was clearly involved in at least one major shipment of weapons that went to Syrian “rebels” — including to some of the jihadist groups the United States is now bombing. That shipment was coordinated by Turkey, a country with which Ambassador Stevens, Secretary Clinton, and President Obama worked closely — a country whose ambassador was the last diplomat Stevens met with in Benghazi before being killed.

There will be no accountability for the Benghazi massacre absent a full public airing of what the United States government was doing in that most dangerous of places: Setting up shop among anti-American jihadists and staying there like sitting ducks even as other countries and international organizations pulled out. What was the benefit? Trying to limit the damage caused by switching sides in Libya? Fueling a new jihadist threat in Syria and Iraq — the very one we are now struggling to quell?

In Washington, there seem to be a lot of people resistant to a full public airing of the policy. They may not all be Democrats.

Read more here.

Announcing we are at war, then going fundraising

Xharles Krauthammer notes that like Stalin at Warsaw,

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is offering a determined echo by ordering Turkish tanks massed on the Syrian border, within sight of the besieged Syrian town of Kobani, to sit and do nothing.

For almost a month, Kobani Kurds have been trying to hold off Islamic State fighters. Outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded on three sides, the defending Kurds have begged Turkey to allow weapons and reinforcements through the border. Erdogan has refused even that, let alone intervening directly. Infuriated Kurds have launched demonstrations throughout Turkey protesting Erdogan’s deadly callousness. At least 21 demonstrators have been killed.

Moreover, Erdogan entertains a larger vision: making Turkey the hegemonic power over the Sunni Arabs, as in Ottoman times. The Islamic State is too radical and uncontrollable to be an ally in that mission. But it is Sunni. And it fights Shiites, Alawites, and Kurds. Erdogan’s main regional adversary is the Shiite-dominated rule of Syria’s Bashar Assad. Erdogan demands that the U.S. take the fight to Assad before Turkey will join the fight against the Islamic State.

On the day after the Islamic State entered Kobani, we launched five airstrikes. Result? We hit three vehicles, one artillery piece, and one military “unit.” And damaged a tank. This, against perhaps 9,000 heavily armed Islamic State fighters. If this were not so tragic, it would be farcical.

Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun — and perhaps annihilated — would be a major blow.

The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama’s previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign.

The Iraqis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.