The harvest awaits you.

At A Holy Experience, Jeff Manion writes,

...Tragedy strikes.

Conversely, goodness rarely “strikes.” It arrives on the stage with little drama.

...As I reflect on my own life, I recognize the formative impact of both jarring tragedy and steady love.

The snail’s pace at which goodness travels will require extreme devotion to the journey.

...Goodness demands staying power. The question is whether we will summon the requisite endurance for a slow, faithful, consistent outpouring of love.

I believe this is why the apostle Paul urged an early community of Jesus’ followers:

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. (Galatians 6:9)

Paul addresses the issue of weariness because a life of goodness can be tedious and redundant.

...We will reap a harvest, if we do not give up.

...Because you can’t rush a harvest. You plow, you plant, and you wait.

...Goodness grows slowly.

It arrives through the repeated kindness of the diligent faithful.

It arrives quietly, traveling the slow path of devoted love.

Dream Big but Think Small.

Day by day, one loving act of kindness after another, you have an opportunity to grow a life of greatness.

So keep showing up. Keep planting.

Do not grow weary in doing good. The harvest awaits you.

Read more here.

Who left the most debt?

The Congressional Budget Office has produced a graph showing how much debt as a percentage of GDP each American president accumulated while in office. You can see it at the Washington Examiner.

Who is the authoritarian?

David French points out that so far Trump is way less authoritarian than was Obama. Some examples, relinquishing

federal authority over gender-identity policy in the nation’s federally funded schools and colleges; Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument against executive-branch overreach. Education activists are terrified that Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual assault tribunals. Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.

Read more here.

"The law of the United States is back to being the law of the United States."

Andrew McCarthy reports at PJ Media,

On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:

Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.
That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this -- and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement -- owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).

McCarthy explains the ways Obama abused those doctrines here.

The International Women’s Strike on March 8

At the New York Post Kyle Smith reports that the next women's march will have a convicted terrorist as one of its leaders. March 8 is the date, and organizers are calling for women to spend their day

“blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also, every woman is supposed to wear red in solidarity.

...Anti-Trump activism seems to have little to do with the political arts required to win elections — finding common ground, forging alliances, making friends. Instead, all of these demonstrations are about denouncing enemies and making yourself feel better about the November defeat by gathering publicly with those who share your rage. This sort of thinking leads to such self-defeating acts as interrupting traffic in places like New York City (where Trump got 18 percent of the vote) or San Francisco (9 percent).

If you want to persuade working-class Trump voters in Wisconsin to join your cause, annoying rich liberal Democrats trying to get to work a thousand miles away is a strange way to go about it.

...In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist. Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods. However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator.

...You can see why she’s a hero to the left. Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a grass-roots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near them.

Wahhabi Islam

Bookworm has before and after pictures of women around the world; before Wahhabi Islam came to their countries, and after it came.

...a vile, criminal, Stone Age belief is taking over much of the world while the weak leaders of the Western World say we have to respect it . . . because it is a religion.

See the photos here.

What if?

Bookworm reminds us of the 1970s days of rage. She links to this post by David Zhines at a blog called Status 451.

Zhines recently read the book in the photo above.

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

...A reminder: during this period Weatherman is being hunted by the FBI. So how are they staying fed, sheltered, alive? Part of it is fake I.D.s. The other part of Weatherman staying alive and free is: they are being funded and supported by the National Lawyers’ Guild.

I just want to emphasize this: radical lawyers are literally giving fugitive domestic terrorists who are still bombing money and support.

And it’s harder for hippies to sneak bombs into places. What’s great cover? Parents with children. Weatherman used radical lawyers’ kids. Dohrn actually convinced a radical lawyer’s wife to leave her husband and take the kids and go under with the Weather Underground.

Weatherman bombed the Pentagon in ’72, but by 1974, they’re fighting among themselves, arguing about feminism (hence their name change to Weather Underground). And this is where Weather Underground becomes incredibly relevant to 2016 again: because they decided to re-enter mainstream politics. To do this, they decided, they would take over the radical left, and use that as wedge/entry point to change society.

...Everything goes smoothly in Weather’s plan until the PFOC conference happens, which looks stunningly like what we’re seeing emerge in today’s Democratic party politics. The white leftist elites (Weather) are stunned to discover that the diverse radicals (black, American Indian, Puerto Rican) they’ve imagined leading actually have opinions of their own, and perfectly rational desires for their own power, and no desire to be ruled by Weather’s upper-crust radicals.

...Institutions are one of two major assets that the Left has and the Right lacks. The other is Shock Troops.


...What if fanatics made a serious and nearly successful attempt on the life of the President of the United States?

What if those fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session?

What if those fanatics conducted bombing sprees, for years, in multiple American cities?

And what if people really did do every one of those things, and you’d never heard of them? That’s the story of Puerto Rican separatists.

...FALN had an amazing set-up in the hard left. Not only were they trained in bomb-making by Weather Underground, they had possibly the best Institution any radical group has ever had: the Episcopal Church.

...Puerto Rican terrorists were being paid thousands of dollars by the Episcopal Church. Like cannibalizing and repurposing a nonprofit. It may be the greatest Institution in American radical history. FALN was literally using a charity run by the Episcopal Church as a front.

...Their bombmaker returned to them, FALN embarked on a new campaign of robberies, bombing, and interfering with elections.

Wait, what? Yeah. In 1980, the FALN attacked the NYC campaign HQ of George H.W. Bush in an effort to destroy voter-registration lists. Another team smashed up the Carter-Mondale HQ in Chicago. The FALN even threatened delegates to the party conventions. Nobody remembers!

Let me ask you a question: how the hell did I not know this story? Forget the presidential assassination attempt. Forget the mass shooting in the Congressional chamber. Just look at the FALN stuff: a years-long bombing campaign in multiple American cities, by perpetrators trained and initiated by a foreign power. A terrorist organization that parasitized a church so effectively, it got the church infrastructure to act on its behalf. A stunning escape from custody almost too astounding to believe.

Why is this not a movie? Why is this not two or three movies? This story is amazing! And it’s just totally memory-holed. Here’s how memory-holed it is: I didn’t even know that, in 1999, seeking Puerto Rican voter support in New York for HRC’s senate run, President Clinton offered clemency to 16 imprisoned FALN. 14 accepted. Congress condemned it at the time. But people remember the Mark Rich pardon. Not FALN.

...That’s everything I want to cover from Days of Rage. There’s more in it. Buy the book; read it; you won’t regret it. It’s amazing history.

But it’s the implications of Bryan Burrough’s book that scare the willies out of me.

I am afraid that the United States is in for political violence in 2017. It could be as bad as or worse than the 1970s. I have some ideas as to what some of it may look like. It really isn’t pleasant to think about.

...Let’s not mince words: the United States of America is currently engaged in a cold Civil War.

(I have heard Dennis Prager say the same thing).

In North Carolina, the Republican governor lost re-election, so the Republican legislature convened a special session to limit powers of the post. Democrats nationwide howled with justified outrage; as we all know, legislators who dislike a governor should flee the state to block quorum, facilitate occupation of government buildings by mobs, and have allies execute secret raids on homes on the governor’s supporters. All of those are things that the Democrats did to oppose a Republican governor in Wisconsin, and the Democrats were pretty cool with it.

...The mental model we have for domestic terrorism in 2017 is shaped by what scares us: mass shooters and jihad. ’70s radicals were different. ’70s radicals wanted to get away with their crimes. They wanted to avoid detection, they didn’t want to get arrested, and they didn’t want to die. Most ’70s bombers had no moral objection to killing people, but they also didn’t go to any great lengths to maximize body count. That’s pretty different from 21st-century mass shooters (who tend suicidal) & jihadists (for whom a high body count is part of the message).

...The way I see it, domestic conflict in the United States could operate in basically four stages:

cold Civil War
targeted political violence, mostly short of murder
political violence with murder as the default
Civil War II
The United States should start seriously talking about National Divorce before we get to stage 3.

...The truth: the Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than the Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of it.

...Imagine an abortion clinic bomber getting a comfortable job at an elite university.

Outrageous, right? No way the Right could get away with that. But the Left does! And the press gives them cover.

...How extremists really get mainstreamed: because the extremists have organization, logistics, and manpower that the mainstream finds useful.

...Mainstream Lefties happily go to protests they favor that are organized by the literal Stalinists of ANSWER & the Worker’s World Party. Why? The commies are really good at getting people signs and making sure there are enough port-a-potties. When you’re great at organizing signs & port-a-potties, Lefties overlook that you’re into an ideology that murdered a hundred million people.

So how far would this go? Would mainstream Nazi-hating Righties be ok w/ literal Nazis on the street fighting squads that keep them safe?

... any righty organization designed from the ground up to be violent is doomed to fail.

What this means: hard Left violence will be coordinated. Hard Right violence will be distributed.

...If you notice who Lefties really tend to go after, it’s two kinds of people:

Righties who might be growing in popularity and/or influence, to make them radioactive and make others afraid to associate with them
regular people, who have employment and social fragility, to make them scared to admit WrongThink.

...So Lefties will target more people on top and on bottom, status-wise. Righties will target more in the middle, go for the Lefty NCO corps. That’s because the biggest impact the Right can make at this stage of conflict is to destroy, damage, or neutralize Lefty Institutions. But Lefty Institutions are massive cultural power centers. Universities, Media, Bureaucracies, Organizations/Foundations, Cities.

The Right is not big enough or organized enough to really destroy Lefty Institutions. Like the Left, they’ll be looking to intimidate people out of the game and take away enemy tools. Example: Institutional and media bias means radical Leftist tactics are accepted, which means radical Leftist tactics become normalized. Ergo, the only way the Right can delegitimize Lefty tactics is to use them, at which point they’ll become The Worst Things Ever Done By Man. My guess is the Right will start using Leftist tactics against members of Leftist Institutions: “This is what you ordered. Eat it.”

...Let’s recap and wind up:

The Left wants to disrupt the Right’s power, organizations, celebrations.

The Right is sick of Leftist disruption and wants to punish it with force.

The hard Left has an effective infrastructure. The hard Right is looking to build one.

The hard Left will use the tactics it’s already using.

The hard Right will use Leftist tactics, at which point the Press will become very interested in denormalizing those tactics.

Read more here.

Efforts to end the Trump presidency

Victor Davis Hanson warns in National Review,

...Currently, the political and media opponents of Donald Trump are seeking to subvert his presidency in a manner unprecedented in the recent history of American politics. The so-called resistance among EPA federal employees is trying to disrupt Trump administration reform; immigration activists promise to flood the judiciary to render executive orders inoperative.

I will excerpt his essay, but do go to the link and read the whole thing. Every paragraph is filled with important information.

Intelligence agencies had earlier leaked fake news briefings about the purported escapades of President-elect Trump in Moscow — stories that were quickly exposed as politically driven concoctions. Nearly one-third of House Democrats boycotted the Inauguration. Celebrities such as Ashley Judd and Madonna shouted obscenities to crowds of protesters; Madonna voiced her dreams of Trump’s death by saying she’d been thinking a lot about blowing up the White House.

But all that pushback was merely the clownish preliminary to the full-fledged assault in mid February. Career intelligence officers leaked their own transcripts of a phone call that National Security Advisor–designate Michael Flynn had made to a Russian official. The media charge against Flynn was that he had nefariously talked to higher-ups in Russia before he took office. Obama-administration officials did much the same, before Inauguration Day 2009, and spoke with Syrian, Iranian, and Russian counterparts. But they faced no interference from the outgoing Bush administration.

No doubt the designated security officials of most incoming administrations do not wait until being sworn in to sound out foreign officials. Most plan to reset the policies of their predecessors. The question, then, arises: Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate (and Trump himself?) and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press? For what purpose?

Indeed, Trump’s own proposed outreach to Russia so far is not quite of the magnitude of Obama’s in 2009, when the State Department staged the red-reset-button event to appease Putin; at the time, Russia was getting set to swallow the Crimea and all but absorb Eastern Ukraine. Trump certainly did not approve the sale of some 20 percent of North American uranium holdings to Russian interests, in the quid pro quo fashion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did, apparently in concert with Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation — and to general indifference of both the press and the intelligence community.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that career intelligence officers have decided to withhold information from the president, on the apparent premise that he is unfit, in their view, to receive it. If true, that disclosure would mean that elements of the federal government are now actively opposing the duly elected president of the United States. That chilling assessment gains credence from the likelihood that the president’s private calls to Mexican and Australian heads of state were likewise recorded, and selected segments were leaked to suggest that Trump was either trigger-happy or a buffoon.

Oddly, in early January, Senator Charles Schumer had essentially warned Trump that he would pay for his criticism of career intelligence officials. In an astounding shot across his bow, which was followed up by an onslaught in February, Schumer said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. . . . So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” Schumer was evidently not disturbed about rogue intelligence agencies conspiring to destroy a shared political enemy — the president of the United States. What surprised him was how naïve Trump was in not assessing the anti-constitutional forces arrayed against him.

...What has the often boisterous Trump done in his first month to earn calls for his death, forced removal, or resignation?

The stock market is reaching all-time highs. Polls show business optimism rising. The Rasmussen poll puts Trump’s approval rating at 55 percent. Compared with Obama in 2009, at the same point in his young administration, Trump has issued about the same number of executive orders. For all his war on the press, Trump has so far not ordered wiretaps on any reporter on the grounds that he is a “criminal co-conspirator,” nor has he gone after the phone records of the Associated Press — Barack Obama’s Justice Department did both, to little notice in the media.

Trump’s edicts are mostly common-sense and non-controversial: green-lighting the Keystone and Dakota pipelines, freezing federal hiring, resuming work on a previously approved wall along the Mexican border, prohibiting retiring federal officials from lobbying activity for five years, and pruning away regulations.

...ending Trump one way or another is apparently the tortured pathway his critics are taking to exit their self-created labyrinth of irrelevance.

Read the whole thing here.

"The chickens have come home to roost!"

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes,

...The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit -- even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.

This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack Obama -- all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776.

Read more here.

The shadow knows

Gerard Vanderleun is sad that so many people are seeing Trump everywhere, and still refusing to get professional help.

Thomas Perez new chairman of Democrat National Committee

Diogenes' Middle Finger updates us on the new chairman of the Democrat National Committee here.

Radical Leftist lawyer Thomas Perez

No clean escape

ABC 13 reports,

A north Texas man made anything but a clean escape after allegedly breaking into a home, taking a shower and changing into the homeowner's Betty Boop pajamas.

According to a Facebook post from the Wichita Falls Police Department, officers responded to a reported burglary in process just after 5:00pm on Feb. 19. Homeowners told police that they heard someone showering in their bathroom and noticed signs of forced entry on an exterior door.

Inside the home, police say they found 37-year-old Brad Vaughan in the bedroom wearing nothing but the Betty Boop pajamas.

Vaughan has been charged with burglary of a habitation and is currently being held on $10,000 bond.

hat tip Dave Barry, who writes, "HE WON'T GET FAR WITHOUT PINK FURRY SLIPPERS!"

A big mousse-take

This image, which has begun circulating on social media on Tuesday, shows a mystery woman, believed to be from Eastern Europe, who mixed up hair mousse with builders' foam and ended up in hospital

hat tip Daily Mail

CNN anchor purchases pirated copy of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s prepared remarks

The Hard Times reports,

CNN anchor Don Lemon was spotted earlier today just outside the White House gates purchasing a pirated copy of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s prepared remarks from notorious D.C. contraband merchant Vincent “The Eel” Heller, according to witnesses.

“Well, you see, I ain’t namin’ names,” said Heller, “but I got a man comin’ up on me in desperate need of an audio recording of the President’s happenings. I hooked him up with a cassette of the briefing, a bottle of cologne, and some Spanx for his lady.”

Lemon, who was unexpectedly barred from a press gaggle, had to get creative to access information about the leader of the free world. “The President goes off about the press during his CPAC speech, and now, I can’t get into the room to hear about it! I’m not a proponent of piracy, but they gave me little recourse,” he said. “Also, I got Billy Joel tickets from Eel before. He’s a solid guy.”

The New York Times, Politico, and other banned outlets quickly caught wind of the recordings and tried to track Heller down at his usual spot in the Washington Highlands area of the nation’s capital. “They must be pretty desperate to come around to this part of town,” said resident Damien Dawkins. “I mean, we get the occasional congressman down here lookin for a pick me up, but damn!”

“I wouldn’t normally go to the inner-city without a cameraman and audio guy,” said Huffington Post reporter Allie Nelson nervously. “But the first amendment is as stake here, and I’ll do whatever it takes to find this Eel guy.”

“Excuse me, sir! Do you know a Mr. Eel?” she then shouted after a passerby.

Several of the banned outlets reportedly reached out to The Eel to try to get tickets to the next briefing. “Nah, man. Town’s dry,” Eel reportedly said. “But I got 2017 Global Prayer Gathering passes if you’re interested. Comes with mini-bluetooth speaker. $50 and it’s yours.”

When reached for comment, The Eel was unsure why so many reporters were interested in the tapes.

“I don’t get why these folks even want this junk,” the cloaked shadow of a man said. “It’s just some guy named Sean stuttering and saying ‘literally’ and ‘the President has made very clear’ over and over again. I thought my player was busted at first, but my hookup at Breitbart says, ‘Nope, that’s just how he talks.’”

What's the matter with this parking area? Don't you have any green grass?

Just kidding, neighbor!

hat tip Misanthropic Humanitarian

That's the way it is at our house!

hat tip Misanthropic Humanitarian

“But as soon as one of these companies stops making the world a shittier place,” Steven says, “three others start.”

At Foreign Policy, Michael Hobbes writes,

...In the early days, the ‘90s, when advocacy organizations were chasing down Nike in Indonesia and Shell in Nigeria, the relationship between NGOs and multinational corporations was adversarial, zero-sum, ranks of cavalry lined up waiting to charge.

Globalization was still new — in 1992, half the clothing sold in the United States was made there; by 1999, just 12 percent of it was1 — and Western consumers were still capable of being shocked by the conditions under which their shoes and their cars and their Coke were produced.

1For example, in 1992, nearly half (49 percent) of all retail apparel sold in the United States was made in the US, but by 1999, just seven years later, the proportion of domestically produced retail apparel had fallen to 12 percent (Rabon 2001 cf. UNIDO Report 2003:7). By 2003, developing countries accounted for nearly three quarters of the export flows in apparel which constituted more that half (57%) of the $408 billion in global textile and apparel trade that year.

Source: The Role of Price And Cost Competitiveness in Apparel Exports, Post-MFA: A Review, Meenu Tewari, November 2005

So NGOs told them. The boycott campaigns and protest signs almost wrote themselves. Just juxtapose a company’s gleaming marketing message — Just Do It, Can’t Beat The Real Thing, Have You Had Your Break Today? — with images of the stone-faced workers suffering behind it.

“It’s not the wrongdoing,” your old boss used to say. “It’s the hypocrisy.”

As the campaigns piled up, the corporations started doing what the protesters demanded. Clothing companies adopted codes of conduct, oil companies trained their managers, beverage brands inspected their farms. They looked for things like child labor and human trafficking in their supply chains and, when they found them, made their contractors prove that they wouldn’t happen again. Entire sectors started implementing the same environmental standards in Cambodia that they followed in Cleveland.

After a decade of this, an industry formed to help the growing number of companies making human rights commitments. Fair trade certifications, “socially responsible investment” criteria, human rights impact assessments — all of a sudden, it was easy to feel like companies and NGOs were playing for the same team. Local activists started receiving invitations to audit factories. Charities brokered meetings between corporations and their own workers. The researchers who used to investigate companies were hired by them, paid to provide them with an inside look at their own weaknesses.

...You are part of this ecosystem, a consultant at a think tank dedicated to preventing the private sector from violating human rights. Companies come to you and they tell you that their suppliers won’t stop hiring children, that government inspectors have been asking for bribes, that their factory managers slap employees for showing up late. You sign a non-disclosure agreement. You bill them 18 months of your salary for a 4-page memo telling them how to fix it.

...Across from you is the head of sustainability for the company with its name on the building. His suit fits him perfectly. You reach for the croissants before he does.

You are here to tell him about all issues he should care about — forced labor in his factories, corruption in his suppliers, HIV in his dormitories. As you speak, you watch him separate them into two categories: Breaking the Law, and We Should Look Into That.

We’ve received reports that workers in your factories may be inhaling chemicals, you tell him. Without masks and respiratory tests, they might be subject to health problems five, ten years down the line. He nods sympathetically, his pen untouched next to his glass of fizzy water. You can almost mouth the words along with him: “We should look into that.”

We’ve also heard reports, you tell him, that workers at your Vietnamese factories are regularly working up to 60 hours a week without overtime pay. He reaches for his pen; he knows where you’re going with this. According to Vietnamese law, employees can’t work more than 48 hours per week without overtime pay. Plus, Vietnamese law requires a 24-hour rest period between shifts.

He looks up from writing: “So you’re saying that’s a compliance issue,” he says. Compliance is the polite way of saying that his company might be breaking the law. You nod solemnly, victory yours.

None of the old tactics work anymore. Consumers have heard the sweatshop story too many times to find it galvanizing of much more than a few Facebook shares. Supply chains have stretched too far, with too many zig-zags, to trace transgressions back to a single company. The worst violations — slavery, human trafficking — are too intertwined with the economies and the policies of the places where they happen to find a villain behind them. You have stopped demanding changes because you do not know what to demand anymore.

Take child labor. Solving it sounds simple, as straightforward as the catchphrase on one of your advocacy campaigns: Stop hiring children. In reality, however, it is a process that can take years. Employees show up with forged birth certificates. Suppliers lie about how many sites they have. Auditors sign off on factories without visiting them. Even when a company finds 15-year-olds working at its conveyor belts, what is it supposed to do, fire them? A lot of those kids are from rural areas, districts where there’s no school past eighth grade. Pushing them out of that factory means, in practice, sending them back to a place where there is nothing else for them to do.

...The way companies do it is, they create a department in charge of “sustainability” — or human rights, or corporate citizenship, or social responsibility, pick your buzzword — whose job is to keep the NGOs at bay. That’s who hires you, asks you for help, sends you to their factories in dictatorships. The 15 other departments of the company, meanwhile, do exactly what they always did. Only now, they’ve got a guy whose job is to dress it all up as “sustainability” and sell it to consumers.

Steven does something for the U.N., you’re not quite sure, and he’s answering the question you just asked him, the one you’re asking everyone: Are we winning?

“We don’t have the information,” he says. “Are there fewer sweatshops now than 15 years ago? Are there more land grabs by mining companies? Nobody has any idea.”

There are only two kinds of U.N. employees: Kool-Aid Drinkers, and Get Me Outta Heres. Steven appears to be one of the latter. He added you on LinkedIn three days ago, about 15 minutes after you met him.

“Without information,” he says, “we resort to narratives. There’s the hopeful narrative and there’s the cynical one.”

“Give me hopeful first,” you say.

“Since the Industrial Revolution,” he says, “companies have been held responsible for an expanding circle of impacts. Child labor, worker housing, environmental pollution, health and safety, overseas corruption, they’re all things that companies used to say weren’t their problem. And now they are.”

The circle keeps expanding. Soda companies are the target of campaigns to tax their products and pay for anti-obesity programs. Apparel companies, now that they’ve started auditing their factories and reporting their supply chains, are under pressure to buy cotton from countries without child labor. Jewelry companies and cellphone manufacturers have to certify that their raw materials don’t come from conflict zones. Yesterday you traded business cards with a guy who works for a big pension fund in Northern Europe. His job is to check their investments to make sure they’re “climate-sensitive.”

“Every time the circle expands,” Steven says, “the world gets a little bit better.”

“What’s the cynical narrative?”

“But as soon as one of these companies stops making the world a shittier place,” Steven says, “three others start.”

...“The biggest companies now,” Steven says, “are based in Brazil or China or South Africa. And there’s nothing we can do about them.”

Maher defends pedophilia

Here is a jackass defending pedophilia. He's the same jackass who proudly claims credit for the downfall of Milo Yiannopoulos.

They got him

The New York Post reports on this lovely man named Oscar Hernandez.

The man suspected of taking a 6-year-old Connecticut girl prompting an Amber Alert on Friday had previously been deported, federal immigration officials said.

Oscar Hernandez was taken into custody on Friday following a high-speed car chase and crash on Interstate 99 in Benner Township, Pennsylvania. State police said he had refused to pull over when a state trooper spotted the car, which had been the subject of an Amber Alert.

Federal immigration officials said Hernandez is a citizen of El Salvador and had been previously deported on Nov. 27, 2013. He has prior felony convictions including assault and threatening. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, an agency spokesman said in a statement.

Hernandez is accused of taking his 6-year-old daughter Aylin Sofia Hernandez from her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Police issued a public alert about the girl at about 2:45 a.m. Friday.

Officers had gone to the girl’s Bridgeport home and found her mother, Nadia Gonzalez, fatally stabbed.

Another woman in the home also was stabbed multiple times and was hospitalized. Police said she’s expected to survive.

Police said the little girl suffered minor injuries in in the crash. . Two state troopers also suffered minor injuries.

Benner Township is about 300 miles from Bridgeport.

Hernandez was being held as a fugitive from justice in Pennsylvania and couldn’t be reached for comment. Bridgeport police have a warrant for his arrest.