Are you taking photos this summer?

“A fly lands on the head of a vine snake in the Choco of Colombia.” (Photo by Robin Moore)

“Masters of disguise. The Eastern Screech Owl is seen here doing what they do best. You better have a sharp eye to spot these little birds of prey.” (Photo by Graham McGeorge)

“A very hungry humming bird drinking from the mouth of a person in Wyoming during an extreme drought in 2012.” ( Photo by Sundell Larsen)

The photos above are just 3 0f 22 photos selected by National Geographic in a travel contest. See the rest here.

Lower wage does not translate into better work performance

Last night I met a woman who "cleans toilets for a living." She told me that she is being continually under-bid for jobs by illegals. However, she also told me that after trying the under-bidders once, the next time customers invariably call her and re-contract with her.

Mr. Virtual President...

Why should the government have anything to say about marriage?

Found here

This is what we are dealing with.

Found here

Indistinguishable from Nazism

"Once again we see thousands of Islamic nutcases take time out from beating up their wives to show their sensitive sides. How? By smashing up the towns they live in, egged on by clerical ignoramuses whose motives are even lower than the literacy levels of their followers."

"We will not be told what we can and cannot say. Not by you, not by anybody, not now, not ever.

found here

Telling the truth about the immigration debate

This is not immigration. This is Mexicans looking for work! They are not here to stay. They are here to work, and then go home. But the politicians want them here for their votes. Are we sovereign? Or, not?

Canada works. Mexico is one dysfunctional, corrupt socialist dictatorship after another. The Mexican border is between a functional Northern European protestant civilization and a dysfunctional southern European Catholic civilization.

The crime of exposing crooks

James O'Keefe is near the top of my list of favorite journalists.

PJ Media has obtained documents demonstrating that the New Hampshire attorney general was in discussions with Eric Holder’s Department of Justice regarding filing criminal charges against journalist James O’Keefe after he exposed vulnerabilities in New Hampshire’s electoral system in the January 10, 2012, presidential primary.

In his hidden-camera investigation, O’Keefe demonstrated how the lack of a photo-voter identification law in New Hampshire facilitated voter fraud by allowing impersonation of dead voters. Worse, O’Keefe captured video showing that election officials like Ryk Bullock were oblivious to this vulnerability.

Read more here.

Britain bans Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

Ow!

I think I have posted this before, but it is so good, I don't care.

Does indulgence in vice make you special?

JDZ writes at Never Yet Melted,

If membership in a culture best noted for offering oral sexual services to strangers in public lavatories entitles you to have the government invent a parody version of marriage just for you, why shouldn’t fishing pals, business associates, bowling team members, bridge partnerships, drinking buddies, and people who counterfeit money or rob banks together not also receive federal benefits? If sodomy is worthy of federal recognition, approval, and protection, why not polygamy, bestiality, and incest? There are doubtless people in California who want group marriages and others who want to marry objects of public infrastructure and redwood trees. On what logical basis can they now possibly be denied?

If indulgence in vice makes you special and gives you status and privileges, why are only sodomites being so favored? Alcoholism is commonly considered to be an inheritable infirmity. Like the homosexual, the boozehound has no choice about his inclinations. Clearly, Anthony Kennedy ought to sit down and find some appellate case to which he can arrange cert, and start drafting his opinion that rumdums are equal, too, and cannot be denied their rights to employment or to driving vehicles.

On doomed alliances with evil. And, on our psychic disease: hastiness and superficiality

Gerard Vanderleun posts a link to a 1978 address given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard.

Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

A Decline in Courage

may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

Legalistic Life:

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

The Direction of Freedom:

In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.

Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.

The Direction of the Press:

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

A Fashion in Thinking

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.

Not A Model

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.

Shortsightedness:

But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

Loss of Willpower:

To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.

Humanism and its Consequences:

a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

An Unexpected Kinship:

Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

He concludes:

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.

It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

Pseudo-democracies

Do you prefer to be ruled by an omnipotent politician or a faceless machine? Those are the choices we face, according to Mencius Moldbug, who writes that

the 20th-century pseudo-democratic regimes can be separated into two broad categories: oligarchical (communist, impersonal) and despotic (fascist, personal).

It's not just that the Commucaust was ten times bigger than the Holocaust. It's that both are best understood as epiphenomena of the democratic era. Which isn't over yet! At least not when we classify pseudo-democracies among the consequences of democracy. And why wouldn't we? Hitler's Berlin, FDR's Washington, and Stalin's Moscow are each pretending, each in its own way, to be a "genuine democracy." Without the ideal, how could we have the pretense?

Of these three ruthless regimes, the crimes of the first are rigorously investigated and permanently famous; those of the last have been sporadically looked into, a little; and our own in the middle, emerging victorious, remains well cloaked in the usual golden froth of a hagiographic personality cult with a locked archive. Indeed, until the American, British and Soviet archives are fully opened and the inevitable gaps charted, no intelligence-quality history of the 20th century can be written - which means no history worth reading, and certainly none worth believing in.

So, don't believe! You can stop any time, really. Hey, man, it's a new century.

Alas, dear Americans - "progressives," ie, communists, and "constitutionalists," ie, fascists - the both of you, this is your pathetic condition. And you're worried that someone is grepping your emails?

This is what "democracy" means to you: government by permanent civil servants. As for your elected officials, you could dismiss them all tomorrow, and not elect more, and your experience of government would not change in the slightest.

And this is how you come to live in a world where there are these two separate concepts, "politics" and "democracy," with opposite emotional valence. Calling anything "political" is a harsh condemnation. But if it is "democratic," it is good and sweet and true. But what is democracy without politics?

Nothing more than the American system of government - communism, ie, rule by the party of civil service. As Americans, we can at least be thankful that communism has done less damage here than elsewhere. It's great to be an exporter, especially when your product is dioxin. It gives you the comforts you need to worry that someone is grepping your emails.

For a man or for a community of men, the right to rule is a function of the might to rule. If the sound competent Midwest can get itself euchred out of its democratic right to rule by a bunch of slick Harvard men, the sound competent Midwest cannot maintain its authority and will get euchred by someone someday. If it's not Harvard today it'll be Yale tomorrow.

Contest

Are Obama and Putin contesting Edward Snowden's fate? I wonder who will win?

Thanks to American Digest for posting the photos

Rare bird killed by wind turbine as bird enthusiasts watched

From Mail Online:

There had been only eight recorded sightings of the white-throated needletail in the UK since 1846. So when one popped up again on British shores this week, twitchers were understandably excited.

A group of 40 enthusiasts dashed to the Hebrides to catch a glimpse of the brown, black and blue bird, which breeds in Asia and winters in Australasia.

But instead of being treated to a wildlife spectacle they were left with a horror show when it flew into a wind turbine and was killed.

‘It was really beautiful when it was flying around, graceful and with such speed. To suddenly see it fly into a turbine and fall out the sky was terrible.’

Thanks to Ann Althouse

Caught cheating

Found here

Protests and violence in Egypt against Islamic rulers

There are protests in Egypt leading up to what is expected to be a huge protest Sunday against the Islamists who are in power there. Sunday will be the one year anniversary of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power. Ace has much more here.

The anti-Islamic rulers protesters are not fond of Obama, who is keeping quiet.

Are you going to become American now?

Please understand that when I excerpt a post from another writer, it is because I believe they have something worthwhile to say. You still should go to go to their website, because I am only excerpting.

Sarah Hoyt writes about immigration and amnesty here.

Our president misunderstood the resentment abroad. He thought the prosperity of the US was holding other people down. This is Marxism, which is a mystical religion with zero contact points with the real world. In fact, the rest of the world resented us because we were enabling them to be semi-prosperous and not giving them the kick in the fundament they so sorely needed, and also because they knew they depended on us. They were in fact like forty year olds (still) living in their father’s basement, and resenting the father with every fiber of their being. Worse, I think the US is more of a mother, since we tend to be all soft and cooing and supporting. Part of the resentment he encountered in Europe on this tour is that people are starting to realize he’s removed the pole from the tent of world economy. They’re still not admitting to it, consciously, but subconsciously they know it.) The hard landing might hit us anyway.

Because the crash is coming whether amnesty comes or not. To that it’s irrelevant, save for maybe hurrying it.

Sarah is, you see, an immigrant herself. She knows first hand that

to acculturate is to die a little. I’ve mentioned before my regrets, my soul-ache at the idea that I had to leave behind my family in Portugal and everything I shared with them. You might not understand that this means more than just “I can’t spend much time with them.” In a way I had to die a little. I had to disconnect myself from the person I was, back there. It’s now visible to me only through a veil. I can sort of remember why I did things, but I can’t always understand them. When I go back, the body language, the interactions, everything is strange to me, and it hurts with the duality of knowing I was once of them – I once belonged there.

You have to want to be American, and be willing to lop off parts of you that don’t fit. This is why some number of immigrants either go back, or they come to resent the host country. They want to do this and can’t, and blame the host country for “requiring” it. This is a fallacy. America doesn’t require it. It requires it less than any other country.

And that’s problem one of the idea that legalizing illegal aliens will make them American.

Let’s start with who they are and why they’re here. Most them are here through dire economic need (which is why I don’t hold breaking the law against them.) And most of them came here by land, and can go home in less than a day. Most of them have been living at the edges, viewing the US as an alien body on which they feed.

They bring their culture with them. They come here in big groups, speak their language, behave in the ways that were appropriate back in the home country. Have to. Attempts at integrating and “acting American” will be punished by their community (trust me on this, this was true even among exchange students.)

“Oh, you are just saying that. You realize that Italians, Irish, Germans, Jews, all of those also came here in big groups; many came in illegally; they lived at the margins and held the old line, but they all have integrated.”

The difference is this: back then we expected immigrants to integrate. There was no “Push one for Spanish, push two for Serb-Croat, push fifty for Cantonese.” Because it was assumed culture was not genetic (look, it isn’t. Truly. If it were, you’d all be living like people in the fertile crescent. Okay, even accounting for evolution and genetic drift, not very far off) it was not cruel to require people to learn English to transact official business. Nor was it considered evil to say you should leave your public/political culture behind, or that frankly we don’t much care what race you think you are, you should become American now.

Survival skills

Sarah Hoyt writes about the people who do, those who believe in American exceptionalism. She also writes about our elites:

They were eased through life. They never met real challenge. They’re not the most creative people around.

So… they’re carefully trying to close off every avenue of creativity and prosperity that individuals can create. But they’re not us. They don’t really “get” us. They’re like the aristocrats of the ancient regime, very good at the life of Versailles, but ignorant of how the real world works. I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them never MET a working class person in their lives. Not to talk to. They’ve perhaps had short conversations with working class people in the service professions when handing in dry cleaning or ordering an espresso. That’s it.

She urges us to learn something new:

First, because, if things get really, really, really bad – and if the immigration bill does make it through the house, they will and fast – the more skills you have, the more likely it is that you can find something you can do that will allow you to survive.

Second, because the more you know, the more you allow the fields of knowledge to cross-pollinate, the more likely you’ll come up with something startling that open new ways of life and totally circumvents what our would be Lords and Masters plan for us.

I have this theory that the more things you know, the more things you try, the more you are ready for every contingency, the more you become the contingency. You put yourself in a knowledge and action rich environment and suddenly the discovery happens. You flap your wings, you’re the butterfly, and the world changes in ways no one could have predicted or prevented.

We have this over the forces of Luddites and statists. We can DO. They can only try to control those who do.

Will we be too poor to afford the madness of Marxism?

Do you want the crash to come? Sarah Hoyt writes about it here.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think “Marxism is a computer virus for taking civilization apart.” It unleashes envy, hatred and all unkindness onto society and treats them as virtues. It separates into opposing groups people who would otherwise be allies.

If we crash, will we defeat it? Will it be eliminated?

I don’t think so. What you have to understand is that like other viruses it might have become part of our DNA. Fairness was a brilliant idea in a small hominid band. Now? Not so much. Can’t be achieved. But envy, going under the name of fairness, can destroy all.

But I think we’re going to be too poor to afford the madness of Marxism.

Accept nothing at face value

Now we know the identity of Ambulance Driver. His name is Kelly Grayson. His karma ran over your dogma, as he writes about medical knowledge here.

"Half of what is taught in medical school is wrong, but nobody knows which half." ~ Lucy Hornstein, MD

And you know, dogma may sometimes serve a greater good. The dictionary also defines dogma as "a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church."

Grayson quotes noted philosopher Hub McCann from the movie Second Hand Lions

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most; that people are basically good, that honor, courage and virtue mean everything, that power and money… money and power… mean nothing, that good always triumphs over evil, and that true love never dies . Doesn't matter if it's true or not. A man should believe in those things… because those are the things worth believing in."

The problem, Grayson explains, is that we sometimes place

more value on the wording of our moral code than on its intent.

And when that happens, it's time to abandon the dogma – medical or religious.

If I have another heart attack, I want someone like Grayson to be driving that ambulance. He lists things that he was taught that did not turn out to be valid. However, his professors did do one thing right:

But the most useful thing they passed along to me in training was what they didn't do. They didn't discourage me from questioning them, and they didn't require one specific approach to a problem. They taught me that as our knowledge expands, the more we realize how little knowledge we actually have.

In short, they let me keep a flexible mind. That alone has served me better in my career than anything written in a textbook. It allowed me to become a medic with twenty years of experience instead of a medic with one year of experience, repeated twenty times.

Accept nothing we have been taught at face value, most especially those things that we feel to be true. If our profession is to advance, we need to identify the things we do well, the things we don't do well, and recognize the lies we have been telling ourselves.

It's not necessary to completely abandon our faith in EMS.

But it is our professional obligation to question it.

"Not just a burglar. He's violent."

I found this at Ambulance Driver, who writes,

Here’s the problem with capitulation and non-escalation: the criminal is the one who gets to decide how far it goes. The criminal is the one who gets to decide whether to be satisfied with your wallet and your flat-screen television, or your life.

Sorry, but if he’s already committed to the threat of violence to unlawfully relieve me of my property, especially in my own home, I’m not placing any faith in his goodwill or sense of restraint.

I’m going to shoot until slide lock, and then I’m going to reload and be ready to shoot some more.

If the law allowed me to hang his corpse outside as a warning to other would-be criminals, I’d do that, too.

The only way to care for the disadvantaged is to disadvantage yourself

Ann Voskamp writes about her trip to Africa in today's post at A Holy Experience.

The only way to care for the disadvantaged – is to disadvantage yourself – which is guaranteed to turn out for your advantage.

Waking to Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army stealing over 60,000 children from these red roads right here, hacking off limbs in the middle of the night, making daughters into pleasuring-slaves.

I watch a woman drag a bundle of wood, shoes tied to her ankles, each step slapping the earth – because her own feet are malformed backwards.

I’m slapped awake now.

And this is what Anna's family had for dinner, because Anna caught them near her burning candle at night.

Eastwood looks smarter every day

Found here

Okay, whatever you say

found here

Wait, would you run that by me again?

Found here

Do you have your Hillary 2016 campaign gear?

found here

Obamas in Africa

This has to have been the most absurd magazine cover in history.

Michelle Obama's Mirror covers the Obamas' Africa trip, and their remarkable ability to capitalize on white guilt.

Did you hear about the Obama administration scandal?

No, not that one!

Things would have been different

The Virginian has a long list of things that would been done differently if sarah Palin had become president.

Abandon the government plantation

Control disguised as charity. He's finished with it. Self-initiative and self-reliance have been sacrificed in allegiance to masters. He wants to be free from government dependence and government control. Free at last. Thank God Almighty!

found here

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Success in academics does not predict success in problem solving

Google has figured out that academic performance in college is not of much use in predicting how well an employee at Google will perform on the job.

You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Read more here.

NSA and IRS abuses don't compare with having your baby taken away

It was on April 24 when Alex and Anna Nikolayev took their young child, Sammy, to Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, Calif., with flu-like symptoms. Baby Sammy was born with a heart condition, and they knew he would need surgery eventually.

While he was there, the Nikolayevs witnessed a nurse giving him antibiotics – something doctors later confirmed should not have happened.

Shortly afterward, they were told Sammy needed immediate open-heart surgery. Already questioning the treatment their son was receiving, they decided to seek a second opinion before putting their child through such a risky procedure.

They were told, “You can leave the hospital, but your baby cannot.”

The Nikolayevs decided to take Sammy to another hospital, despite the hospital saying they could not do so. Police and CPS agents showed up at the second hospital under the belief that Sammy was in danger. After seeing that the mother was pursuing medical care for her son, they concluded that the child was not in danger.

But that would not be the last the Nikolayevs heard of CPS.

The next day, Child Protective Services showed up at the Nikolayev home with five armed police officers. The mother, a German immigrant, was skeptical of government and captured the incident on video.

One officer can be heard saying, “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist, and don’t fight me, okay?”

found here

He's well again!

We can stop those prayers. He's well again!

Found here

Servants, or masters?

Invasive and excessive demands. Willful acts of discrimination. Servants, or masters? This woman wants to preserve and protect the America she grew up in, and she is terrified that it is slipping away.

found here

Leaders of the world?

You gotta be kidding me, right? This is photoshopped, right? If not, we are doomed! Doomed!

Found here.

What do you think?

Scott Ott says this is a video of Republicans caught making a backroom deal on comprehensive immigration reform. However, it may just be twins, one alpha male and one beta male, discussing Supreme Court decisions.

Analysis of Obama's Berlin speech

As of today there are only 1230 days left in the Obama presidency. Recently he went to Berlin to give a pointless speech. Although the speech was restricted to invited guests only, he spoke behind a plexiglass wall that magnified the heat, even though it was only 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

He didn't have his teleprompter, and many are saying the speech wasn't very good, especially compared with those of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, who did not need plexiglass walls to speak behind. Read more here.

How peer review has hurt science

The most exciting period in science was, arguably, 1895-1945. It was marked by discoveries that changed the foundations of modern science: X-rays, quantum mechanics, superconductivity, relativity theory and nuclear energy. Then, compare this with the next 50 years in science. Incomparable. Nothing of that scale or impact. Yes, technology has advanced, but fundamental science – has come to a crawl.

Why?

the scientific community has been consumed by cronyism. Parts of it are rotten to the core.

The problem? Peer review. Read how it works here.

How to destroy the environment

Today President Obama declares War on Coal. Want to read how environmental organizations are destroying the environment? Willis Eschenbach writes at Watt's Up With That,

Now, given that poverty is the greatest threat to the global environment, the inescapable conclusion is that the only way the global environment stands a chance is if poor countries can develop economically.

And that is why the anti-development, pro-expensive energy stance of the large environmental NGOs is one of the great environmental tragedies of our times.

True believers' war on affordable energy

On this day of Obama's speech about carbon and climate change Daniel Greenfield writes about true believers and failed ideologies:

Even as Obama exploits Global Warming to launch a War on Affordable Energy, the doomsday environmentalists look as foolish as any other group that set a date for the end of the world, only for the world to stubbornly go on existing.

True believers in Gore would say that's the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don't follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?

It's fashionable to mock religious leaders for hypocrisy, but there isn't a peep when the Vice President turned Prophet of Gaia lectures on watching our carbon footprint and then flies on jet fueled carbon wings to another concert on behalf of the planet.

The shell game

Daniel Greenfield must have an I.Q. somewhere up in the thousands. Here are excerpts from a post he wrote this week on economics.

By indebting everyone from the individual to the government, everyone is forced to maintain a bankrupt and broken system. Debts are obligations. Obligating everyone to the same system forces everyone to comply with the system.

Interlinked economies are more unstable and require more regulation. Interlinked national economies become regional economies with common regional regulations imposed on multiple countries. And regional economies link in to a global economy which requires universal global economic regulation of all actors from the lemonade stand to the multinational bank to maintain centrally planned targets.

Growing instability is met with tighter regulation leading to the increased power of oligarchies who regulate the system and the diminishing freedom of individuals. Every action taken to create greater security and stability for the oligarchy has the net effect of subtracting from the economic freedom of all smaller actors.

Irresponsible spending is promoted from the top down and captured from the bottom to the top so that larger entities promote irresponsible economic behavior and by accepting the consequences of that behavior take on the political and economic power of that assumption until the global economy is one great totalitarian welfare state built on subsidies and debt.

Responsibility is traded for freedom, but individuals, institutions and governments, who give up freedom of action in exchange for being able to pass their responsibilities up the ladder, are participating in a shell game.

Responsibility is being passed up the ladder, but accountability isn't.

Protecting the sources of failure is a primary goal of those who benefit from institutionalizing and universalizing failure. If the failure sources are addressed, isolated and treated then smaller systems and actors will reclaim economic responsibility robbing larger systems of their regulatory power. Creating entire sectors dedicated to economic irresponsibility in the name of greed and idealism is a means of weakening smaller systems and individuals in order to subsume them into a global failure economy.

The more debt is assumed, the more authority is assumed. Maximizing debt also maximizes and centralizes control over spending. Central planning reduces economic flexibility and diversity in order to meet target goals which can never be met because the very system created to meet them is incompatible with the efficiency and productivity necessary to achieve them.

When failure comes it is never attributed to the ideology or to the entire structure, rather to a failure of comprehensive control. Each attempt at deepening control expands the system that is the cause of the problem and deepens the level of failure in areas affected by the system. The more the ideal is pursued, the more the real declines until the entire system implodes with devastating consequences.

The economics of planned global failure threaten to repeat the consequences of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union on a global scale. While such a system is never likely to successfully come into being, it has been the long term progressive aim throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. It is now closer to coming into being than at any time before. The distillation of free market economics into the crony capitalist corporation which looks to the government to take care of the messes It makes even as it campaigns for a borderless world is tipping the globe closer into the black hole of a planned global economy where universal debt leads to universal power and universal failure.

Is Hillary Ready for us?

Daniel Greenfield calls our attention to a new PAC entitled Ready for Hillary. It is meant to imply that the nation, after giving Obama a try, is now ready for Hillary. It does not imply that Hillary was not ready in 2008.

Hillary is never unready. Hillary never makes any mistakes. Not even when four Americans end up dead.

It's not Hillary who wasn't ready in 2008. It was the country that wasn't ready for Hillary. And now she will graciously give the nation of fools and ignoramuses another chance to vote for her. It's a noblesse oblige that should touch even the coldest Alaskan heart.

Greenfield's analysis is spot on brilliant.

There's a cynical posturing victimhood underlying all this. It's always someone else's fault. Hillary tried her best, but they just weren't ready to let her do the job. So the only answer is to give her the biggest job in the land based on eight years in the Senate and a brief term as Secretary of State that she wants credit, but not responsibility for.

So, what do Hillary's supporters base their support on?

Hillary's supporters sometimes identify with her, but they don't really believe in her. The identification is based on that sense of inevitable doom. The expectation that Hillary will get close enough to the big prize that she really wants only to have it unfairly snatched away from her grasp. It's not Hillary the diplomat, the senator or the liberal activist who inspires them, it's their own sense that they can never get as far ahead as they deserve without being slapped down.

They're not ready for Hillary to win. They're ready for her to lose. They want to see her continue on, even through the setbacks the way that they continue on through their setbacks. It's not Hillary the winner that they want, but Hillary the survivor. Hillary Clinton has come to occupy the cultural space of a country song and she can't seem to figure out how to break the cycle.

In the Sultan Knish comments section DenisO wrote,

The "feminists" need Hillary to punish men. I'm sure it's subconscious, but it's there. Don't you feel it?

Commenter IgorR added,

Ted Cruz is the real deal. I didn't know much his race in Texas but after the first few comments he made on the national scene I knew he wasn't faking it. The Rove machine missed one. Just like I knew Rubio was a wake from the first time I saw him speak. I don't get everything right but I don't make mistakes about who is real and who is faking it. Rand Paul is a sincere person in the sense that he stands for something, but he is still a frequent liar for his cause.

I believe Cruz will be able to overcome the "born in Canada" problem.

An anonymous commenter reminded us that

the future belongs to the youth and they have been conditioned since birth to want a tyrannical dictator to rule over their lives as long as the dictator approves of promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality and irresponsible behavior which they know the Democrats do.

Abortion: a one-sided suicide pact

Andrew Klaven links to a post quoting Hillary Clinton as saying,

From the stage at the recent Women Deliver conference, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea revealed that her much-admired maternal grandmother was the child of unwed teenage parents who “did not have access to services that are so crucial that Planned Parenthood helps provide.”

Chelsea’s grandmother was born of an unintended pregnancy.

Klaven responds,

Abortion is a one-sided suicide pact — a bad deal that gives women of the future the ability to end their pregnancies at will in exchange for never being born themselves! Chelsea Clinton doesn’t really wish her great grandparents had had the right to prevent her life from occurring. Why then should she wish non-existence on the Chelseas we don’t yet know?

Be sure to look over the bagger's shoulder

A bag for fish, a bag for produce, a bag for meat, a bag for your dog to rest on in the car; never wash any of them. Way to go, liberals!

Are they "rebels," or jihad warriors?

Andy McCarthy writes,

in Libya, and now in Syria, we have turned a blind eye to the fact that terrorism is used by the jihadists our government has chosen to side with. We try to obscure this fact by referring to the opposition forces as “rebels,” the better to avoid noticing that they consider themselves mujahideen (jihad warriors), and by pretending we favor only the “secular” “moderates,” though it is laughable to suggest there are enough of them to topple the regimes in question without allying with the more numerous and formidable Islamic-supremacists factions.

Now, no matter how much government officials deny it, our government is endorsing what we went to war to defeat. Our government is materially supporting terrorists – the very conduct it prosecutes and imprisons American citizens for committing.

McCarthy urges Congress to assert their authority.

Paula Deen canned

The Food Network has canned Paula Deen for allegedly making racist comments in private. Will Dr. Oz be the next to fall?

Chris Queen writes about Paula here.

Getting society back in balance

Barbara Oakley writes in praise of Helen Smith's new book,

As Dr. Helen Smith lays clear in this dramatic and revelatory new book, the status of men in modern American society is the new elephant in the room: obvious, of major importance, yet often almost deliberately ignored, discounted, or downplayed.

Oakley has some ideas about the victimization game being played by feminists.

I was once invited to speak to a class of feminists about life as a female engineering professor. I looked at these bright, intelligent young women and couldn’t resist. “What the hell are you doing in here studying feminist theory?” I asked. “Why aren’t you over in the School of Engineering, studying with me and getting yourself out of victimization by getting a fascinating, empowering, and high paying job as engineer? My generation of women’s rights activists fought for you to have that opportunity, and you’re acting as if we’d done nothing.” The students sat staring at me, open-mouthed.

Why Equador?

Jaime Darenblum and Bridget Johnson have written posts at PJ Media that help us understand why Equador is offering to harbor people like Snowden and Assange.

Why the President of the United States saves his best invective for Americans

Victor Davis Hanson muses, if only our foreign enemies were Republicans! Hanson cites many examples of how this concept might apply to the intolerant Saudis and their Wahabi madrassas, to the Palestinians, to Assad in Syria, to Morsi in Egypt, to the Libyans who will not turn over to us the killers of our people in Benghazi, to the Greeks, who have "gotten a little soft," to the Islamists in Nigeria who are slaughtering Christians, to his NASA chief to praise Christians for their contributions to civilization, to the Chinese, who have the dirtiest air and water on the planet, to a hostile Vladimer Putin Obama might remind him that he did not build his personal wealth without the help of the state. Maybe he could enlist Michelle to lecture the Europeans, or the IRS to audit Hezbollah? Maybe Obama could scold Erdogan in Turkey for airing Valley of the Wolves, an anti-semetic and anti-American film that has been shown throughout the Middle East.

American politics is historically a rough-and-tumble business, characterized by invective and slurs. What is different with the Obama administration is not that it goes after its critics, but rather that it does so in an extreme fashion that it does not employ for those abroad who oppose the United States at almost every turn. Diplomacy is one thing, but being far harsher with domestic than foreign critics is a peculiarity we have not seen since the Nixon era, when an “enemies list” did not reference Red China or Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia as much as those who worked for the Washington Post.

The end of privacy in the United States

Michael Ledeen has been reading up on hackers.

To be sure, I’m amazed so many people seem not to understand how thorough and irresistible is the end of privacy in the U.S. And it isn’t only the increasingly intrusive and manipulative State. Hackers abound, and they can find out most anything they desire about you and your activities. Did you know that a skilled snooper can use your computer or your “smart” phone to listen to you and — through the camera in one of those boxes — even watch you any time? It doesn’t matter if your machine is on or off, by the way, or even if you remove the battery.

I’ve been doing research on hackers of late, and it’s an amazing world. There’s a group of (apparently) Russian cybercriminals that will design a special cyberbomb just for you to use against a target of your choice, like a company or a government agency. They will rent the bomb to you for a fee, for a limited period of time, and when time’s up it self-destructs, kinda like the old fashioned audio tapes in the Mission Impossible television series. Scary, very scary…but that’s our world. So we must all assume that we don’t have any secrets from “them” and “they” are not easily defined, politically, ideologically, nationally, or religiously.

Get used to it.

Why aid the Syrian opposition?

Michael Ledeen writes that Rouhani was not the first choice of Allatollah Khomenei. So, now what?

The country’s struggling to keep its collective head above the sanctions-driven waves, but the regime doesn’t care if the people are miserable and nothing this side of fierce action is going to end the nuclear program. So the regime will continue to repress, the West will pretend it will eventually do something serious, and the Iranian opposition will continue to act. Eventually, either the regime will catch the key leaders, or the opposition will catch top regime figures. We’ll see. But the most important thing for the survival of the regime is the outcome of the battle in Syria. Even the Economist said this week that there are many good reasons to aid the Syrian opposition, but the defeat and possible downfall of the Iranian regime is the most important.

Don’t hold your breath, OK?

Oops!

Passed on to me by Curt Dale

Preserving Liberty

J. Christian Adams writes at PJ Media that the recent Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder

is one of the most important decisions in decades.

Why?

the Court asserted the core function of our federal system — to preserve liberty:

The Court wrote that the federal balance “is not just an end in itself: Rather, federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.”

When Obama is most eloquent

In analyzing President Obama's speech to a "small crowd of Berliners," Victor Davis Hanson notes that

Obama is most eloquent when warning us of a government modeled after himself.

I’m sure the small crowd of Berliners agreed with most of what was said in the speech, and remain largely supportive of Obama, and share the latter’s critiques of the pre-Obama U.S. Yet their leaders might appreciate the irony of it all: Europe and Germany got what they wanted, and now they will have to live with it: an increasingly statist, chronic $1 trillion annual deficit; a U.S. whose economy may not pull anyone out of recession; an administration that can do almost anything it wishes because there is no longer an American adversarial press; a U.S. that is a supporter of Erdogan’s Turkey and Morsi’s Egypt; an increasingly hollow NATO, led from behind by a U.S. that is facing big defense cuts; and a president who really is not into the whole idea of a unique West and its exceptional history or culture — much less any special relationship with Europe, past or present.

But on the other hand, the Europeans are probably not much into their unique past or culture either.

Subversion

Victor Davis Hanson shows how Obama and his team have subverted our government through lies. He cites IRS malfeasance, Attorney General Eric Holder's lies to Congress, ditto for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, newly appointed National Security Advisor Susan Rice's Benghazi lies, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's lie about the administration changing the Benghazi talking points, and former EPA Director Lisa Jackson's creation of a false persona.

Deception is now institutionalized in the Obama administration. It infects almost every corner of the executive branch, eroding the trust necessary for the IRS, the Department of Justice, our security agencies, and the president’s official spokesman — sabotaging the public trust required for democracy itself.

How did this happen? Hanson cites the fact that there is no longer an adversarial media in Washington, and,

There is also utopian arrogance in Washington that justifies any means necessary to achieve exalted ends of supposed fairness and egalitarianism. If one has to tell a lie to stop the Tea Party or Fox News, then it is not seen by this administration as a lie.

Barack Obama swept up an entire nation in 2008 with his hope-and-change promises of a new honesty and transparency. That dream is now in shambles, destroyed by the most untruthful cast since Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, and John Dean left Washington in disgrace almost 40 years ago — after likewise subverting the very government they had pledged to serve.

The immigration bill: the beginning of another long chapter

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the immigration bill at National Review Online. Citing Obamacare, the $831 billion stimulus bill, the President's expansionary budget policies, five deadlines for Iran to cease and desist its nuclear program, the red line that cannot be crossed in Syria, the likelihood is that the immigration bill is also being sold on false promises.

Next, Hanson cites the administration's "fluid" interpretation of laws, citing the Black Panther non-prosecution in Philadelphia, the Defense of Marriage Act, marijuana laws, No Child Left Behind, Hanson expects Obama to decide to ignore enforcement of any aspects of the new law that he deems politically unsavory.

In short, the immigration bill is not the end of the problem of massive illegal immigration, but rather the beginning of yet another long chapter in the subversion of federal law for patently partisan political purposes coupled with economic exploitation.

Illegal and illiberal immigration exists and will continue to expand because too many special interests are invested in it. It is one of those rare anomalies — the farm bill is another — that crosses political party lines and instead unites disparate elites through their diverse but shared self-interests: live-and-let-live profits for some and raw political power for others. For corporate employers, millions of poor foreign nationals ensure cheap labor, with the state picking up the eventual social costs. For Democratic politicos, illegal immigration translates into continued expansion of favorable political demography in the American Southwest. For ethnic activists, huge annual influxes of unassimilated minorities subvert the odious melting pot and mean continuance of their own self-appointed guardianship of salad-bowl multiculturalism. Meanwhile, the upper middle classes in coastal cocoons enjoy the aristocratic privileges of having plenty of cheap household help, while having enough wealth not to worry about the social costs of illegal immigration in terms of higher taxes or the problems in public education, law enforcement, and entitlements.

Pleasant memories from a very different Hollywood era

Over at the Theo Sparks blog, I found this gem from yesteryear. I didn't remember Bob Hope being such a great dancer, did you?

Sacrificial lamb

Manhatten Infidel traveled to Ireland for an exclusive interview with Michelle Obama. It didn't go well.

About to enjoy a summer picnic by a little stream?

found here

A letter-to-the editor from a cousin of one who was murdered in Benghazi

LETTER IN THE DUBUQUE TOWN CRIER: FROM CYNTHIA LEE MEYERS (COUSIN OF ONE OF THE MEN KILLED IN BENGHAZI)

Cynthia Lee Meyers (cousin of one man who was killed in Benghazi)

"Here is my story. A week out the Embassy in Tripoli began receiving multiple tips about an Al Queda cell in the area planning an attack on 9/11 in response to the killing of Bin Laden. For the next several days, the state dept and WH were asked for a security force and were denied at least six times. Ambassador Stevens and his team were given the all clear that The Consulate in Benghazi was safe and there was no need for a security force other than his 3 personal guards (One being my cousin) and a few Libyans who were not armed.

Then the attack and murders occurred. Immediately the WH claimed it was a protest gone bad over a “you tube” video. Obama made a quick speech in the Rose Garden on Sept.12 before catching a plane to Vegas to campaign. He made a generic statement at the end of his speech after placing the blame on an overheated protest over the video. He said "No act of terror will shake the resolve of America.

Later that day and over the next 2 days, the liberal media began saying Ambassador Stevens and the other 3 men died of smoke inhalation. This was not the case. Out of respect for my cousin, I'm not going to be specific about his murder. However Ambassador Stevens was brutally murdered. His genitals were cut off, he was sodomized and beaten and cut and stabbed and burned. He was drug thru the streets and left for dead. This is eyewitness testimony of a local Dr. who found the Ambassador in a ditch and tried to save his life. He had no idea who he was.

The other 3 men, including my cousin, met similar fates. And deaths due to smoke inhalation is a 100% fabricated LIE. The next week I drove my aunt and Uncle and 2 others to DC to receive his body. We met with Hillary, Panetta, and Susan Rice. ALL of whom apologized and said it was a protest gone bad over a video and exited the area. Next Obama entered with the same story and didn't apologize and wasn't sympathetic.

My aunt cried to this man (Obama) and all he did was hand her flowers and walk away.

I tried to get his attention, but didn't. I got upset and yelled "liar" to him, he kept walking. Then a secret service agent grabbed my arm and led me to a room where I was held till the proceedings were over. America, I saw firsthand how cold this man is.

What kind of liar he is. Most of you haven't a clue about this tyrant and yet you support him. And act like every word he says is Gospel. These murders and the fast and furious cover-ups make Watergate look like a kid who told his bff's secret to the class. We must stop this man, and please pass this story along."

Found here

A farmer/rancher's love for the land

Jeffro at The Poor Farm blog writes beautifully about how his father taught him a love for the land:

At any rate, what he taught me was a love for the land and the knowledge that we are connected to the land and it's occupants intimately. That we need to pay attention to what we see, and how we react, if we wish to profit and even to survive here. And that it is truly beautiful - the birds singing in the mornings and evenings, the deer frolicking, cottontails playing, calves kicking up their heels with their grumpy mothers watching closely. The hawks patrolling the skies looking for their next kill. Cocky pheasants strutting their stuff within rock throwing range (until hunting season - then the wily suckers hide out). Mourning doves and their lonely calls. The coyotes howling their songs in their native tongue. The marvelous, dangerous beauty of thunderheads growing malevolently in the sky. The many hued sunsets - beautiful apterif for a long hot day. Grabbing a handful of freshly worked soil, still slightly loamy with the smell of future growth. Oh yes, these things I learned from my father. Not my mother, who was a city girl at heart.

Senators to vote tomorrow on bill they haven't read

Dan Collins reports that tomorrow the U.S. Senate is scheduled to vote on the 1200 page Corker-Hoeven amendment to the Gang of Eight immigration bill.

All of the Senators voting on the thing will spend their weekends closely conning every provision, after the entire word-colossus was beautifully re-drafted in the dignified and precise language of the King James Bible by a team of several thousand ideologically neutral, non-Democrat-aligned hamsters over several hours yesterday afternoon, in an open session broadcast on C-SPAN 1 and hosted by Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and their sweet newborn baby girl, El Norte.

"Unauthorized" aliens get tax refunds

CNS News is reportingthat

The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46,378,040 to “unauthorized” alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-sent-46378040-refunds-23994-unauthorized-aliens-1-atlanta-address#sthash.QiD91kHU.dpuf

Russia and China stick it to Obama

Both Russia and China have held high level talks with the Obama administration in recent weeks. Since then, both Russia and China have stuck it to Obama on the snowden case. Dan Collins reports that Snowden is en route to Cuba, on the way to a final destination to Equador, carrying four laptops.

I have not seen that report confirmed yet on any other blog I have read today.

U.S. "the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood"

From John Rossomando:

An Egyptian magazine claims that six American Islamist activists who work with the Obama administration are Muslim Brotherhood operatives who enjoy strong influence over U.S. policy.

The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.

Burn energy to create energy!

Gretchen Rubin reminds us that

Research shows that when people move faster, their metabolism speeds up. Also, because the way we act influences the way we feel (to an almost uncanny degree), acting with energy will make you feel more energetic.

Twinkies coming back next month

Hostess has announced that Twinkies are coming back to our shelves in July. They will be non-union. I suppose conservatives are going to be thrilled at this news.

I have lost weight, and feel healthier than ever, going from 214 pounds to 170. How? By saying no to sugar-infested products like Twinkies.

When will Americans wake up and decide to honor and take care of the bodies their Creator has given them?

Riot Control Training

Riot Control Training: A group of soldiers are preparing at Fort Hood for their deployment to Egypt. American soldiers are being sent to Egypt to help the Muslim Brotherhood put down protests.

U.S. arms to Syrian rebels were put aboard a merchant ship which split in half and sank in the Indian Ocean

'A large fleet container ship named the "Mol Comfort" was carrying weapons from the U.S. to the FSA Rebels in Syria when it suddenly split in half in the Indian Ocean and sank, as it was making its way from Singapore to Jeddah. On board were 4,500 containers loaded with U.S. arms for the Syrian rebels.' The cause for this sudden accident is still being reported publicly as "unknown."

Update Gateway Pundit is questioning the accuracy of the report which stated that the ship was carrying weapons for Syrian rebels.

Being cavalier about security

Andy McCarthy writes,

if people no longer think national defense secrets are important, or that honoring oaths is less virtuous than indiscriminate “truthtelling,” it is going to be impossible to have security. Senator Paul makes “security” seem like a frivolous concern when he uses it in the context of Clapper’s false statement (and juxtaposed to Snowden’s devotion to “privacy”). But we can only afford to be cavalier about security because we have it.

Liberalize immigration and Hispanics will love you, right? Who are Latinos, anyway?

Carlos Lozada writes in the Washington Post,

Latinos have become coveted, exciting, DREAMy. In the 2012 election, the Hispanic vote helped propel President Obama (71 percent) over Mitt Romney (27 percent). When politicians ride Hispanic ancestry to presidential short lists and convention keynote slots, when a stalemated Congress has a shot at immigration reform because Democrats need to keep us and Republicans need to woo us, and when Univision beats NBC in prime-time ratings, you know that America’s 51 million Latinos are officially marketable, clickable, unignorable. And if you’ve written a dissertation arguing that we’re dumber than white Americans, you’ll lose your job. Even at the Heritage Foundation, no se puede.

But it’s a story with an odd plot twist: It’s not evident what being Latino — or Hispanic or hispano, take your pick — truly means, and most Hispanics, it turns out, don’t even identify with the term. According to a 2012 Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to cite their family’s country of origin, while one-fifth say they use “American.” (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as American.)

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a single group.”

The absence of a unifying culture makes even more sense as the Latino community evolves and spreads. The days when Hispanics could be broken down largely as Mexican American migrant workers in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in New York and Cuban Americans in South Florida are vanishing. Salvadorans are catching up with Cubans as the third-largest Latino group in the nation, for instance. And guess the four states where the Hispanic population grew fastest over the past decade: South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and Minnesota.

Even the Spanish language is losing its power as a cultural marker for this community. About 80 percent of U.S. Hispanics say they read or speak Spanish “very well” or “pretty well,” according to Pew, but only 38 percent claim it as their primary language, while another 38 percent say they are bilingual, and 24 percent say English is their dominant tongue. By the third generation, nearly seven in 10 Latinos say they are English-dominant. Little surprise that the latest battleground for Hispanic media companies is over the English-speaking Latino market.

However,

the anti-Latino sentiment that has emerged in some quarters of American politics is self-defeating. It fosters unity among the otherwise disparate peoples it targets. It strengthens, even creates, the very identity it seeks to dislodge.

House votes for nationwide ban on abortions!

Did you know that

In early evening on June 18, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 228 to 196 for a nationwide ban on abortions after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy?

Republican representatives voted 222 to 6 for the late-term ban, Democrats 190 to 6 against it. Many Democrats who represent socially conservative heartland districts felt compelled by some combination of party loyalty and ideological purity to cast this vote. Now, facing independent advertising expenditures being prepared by several pro-life and social-conservative groups, they will find themselves asked to explain why they favor a right to abort viable babies — including in the ninth month of pregnancy — in Gosnell-like surroundings. Judging from attempts within the last few days at such explanations by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Colorado representative Diana DeGette, co-chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, even the most sophisticated pro-abortion Democrats are utterly unprepared to answer such questions.

In this latest surprise a social-conservative movement that has been on the defensive — with elite opinion universally declaring its irrelevance and some in the Republican establishment calling for the removal of these issues from the party’s self-definition — has suddenly been presented with a recorded vote that could put its foes in the position of defending a practice that most American voters find indefensible.

Of course, the bill stands no chance of getting anywhere in the U.S. Senate or with President Obama.

"But, we're for equality, too!"

Stacy McCain and Bob Belvedere are writing about the corrosive effects of feminism. Stacy writes,

Because conservatives have surrendered to the culture of androgyny, they were ill-equipped to combat the absurd “war on women” theme that emerged in last year’s presidential campaign. Rather than interrogate the fundamental assumptions of this liberal madness (i.e., that taxpayer-funded contraception is the essence of “women’s rights”), the best that Republicans could do was to answer, “But we’re for equality, too!”

Bob adds,

Feminism is merely one of the jump-off points for the offensive against the Family. It has helped rip it asunder. It is, by it’s core nature, anti-Family, believing as it does that the real differences between men and women and the key role those differences play in civilizing the Society, can be wished [and legislated away], as if they never existed. Once again we are confronted with the foolish belief that Human Beings can be re-engineered. Human Beings can be taught to defy aspects of their Nature, but they cannot be made to wipe their Natures from existence [this is why the Left ends-up engaging in mass murder].

Where we learned to root for the underdog

Found here

Didn't wash with this judge

Here's a new one: a Canadian man was caught speeding (110 mph). His explanation? He had just washed his car, and he was trying to dry it off! The judge fined him 800 dollars and suspended his driving license for 45 days.

found here.

The bizarre ideas of progressivism

Jonah Goldberg writes at Town Hall,

In the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and today’s North Korea, they tried to move toward the ideal communist system. Combined, they killed about 100 million of their own people. That’s a hefty moral distinction right there: When freedom-lovers move society toward their ideal, mistakes may be made, but people tend to flourish. When the hard left is given free reign, millions are murdered and enslaved. Which ideal would you like to move toward? - See more at: http://theatheistconservative.com/#sthash.5HD7m4hP.dpuf

The Atheist Conservative adds,

How statism/collectivism ever came to be an ideal is puzzling enough, but that there are millions who still want it after those calamitous experiments Jonah Goldberg names, remains to us a mystery beyond all comprehension.

Goldberg shows how progressivism is really regression to the past.

It’s a little bizarre how the left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers – be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos or wonkish bureaucrats – are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia.

Will Syria lead to World War III?

Is there a rising possibility of war among major powers?

China and Russia on the side of the Shias, Britain and France and the US – which is to say NATO – on the side of the Sunnis. And the West cannot allow Russia and China to become dominant powers on the edge of the Mediterranean.

I want some of this!

Oh, this is nice to know. The women in Paradise are pure, unblemished, menstruation-free, free of urine, feces, children! Moreover, they are not jealous, angry, or hateful!

And, this may be the best part: In Paradise, a man gets the strength of 100 men when it comes to eating, drinking, passion, and sex!

Found here.

It's fishing season

Found here.

Will the GOP rescue us?

Is the Republican Party the place where people can find someone who will stand up to the advancing power of Islamic terrorism? Not in Florida! A professor at Central Florida was disinvited to speak at a

Republican Party event in Pinellas County earlier this month because the topic of his speech, “which was to focus on the Islamic threat to America”, was considered by Republican Party members to be too “sensitive”.

What happened to cause him to be disinvited? CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) got to the Republicans. Read about it here.

More intact families?

Daniel Greenfield questions Jeb Bush's recent statement that immigrants "have more intact families." Greenfield links to a post by Rachel Sheffield at The Foundry on Latino American families:

Among Latinos, unmarried parent families are roughly three times as likely to be poor as married families. Tragically, over half of Latino children born today are born outside of marriage. The rate has increased from less than 40 percent in the 1990s to more than half—nearly 53 percent—today.

Greenfield asserts that it is the broken family that

links upscale liberals and their minority clients to their dependency on the state.

Moreover,

You can’t fill a hole with a hole. Importing large numbers of people who are going to be more welfare dependent than the native population not only fixes nothing, it will force deeper cuts to medical services for the native elderly to fund the welfare state for the newcomers.

Egypt's dictator appoints terrorist to be governor of Luxor

The child in the photo above was one of the people massacred in Luxor, Egypt. One of the members of The Islamic Group who killed this little girl and other women and children has now been appointed by Morsi as Governor of Luxor!

Christians in grave danger in Syria

Will Christians be eliminated from Syria? Daniel Greenfield writes that

the Christians of Aleppo and Homs, the only innocent parties in a religious war between a Shiite government and Sunni terrorist groups, are in far more danger from the Islamist Sunni terrorists that Obama is proposing to arm.

The Free Syrian Army’s Farouq Brigades went door to door expelling Christians in Homs. Of the 160,000 Christians in the city, there are now barely a 1,000.

The 10,000 Christians of Qseir were ordered to leave the city by loudspeakers on mosques. If Obama’s intervention helps the Islamist militias retake Qseir; there will soon be no Christians left in the city at all. And the same goes for Homs and Aleppo.

The script has already been written and it’s the same script that saw airtime in Libya. Claim an imminent threat to civilians that is actually a threat to the terrorists. Carve out a No Fly Zone. Arm the terrorists. And then sit back and wait for the next Benghazi.

To invade Libya, Obama lied and told the American people that the residents of Benghazi were about to suffer a massacre that would stain “the conscience of the world.” No such massacre had taken place or was ever going to take place. The only innocent people who wound up massacred in Benghazi were the Americans sent there by Hillary Clinton.

Will Obama attempt to save the Christians?

Obama won’t be supplying the Christians with any weapons. Those are reserved for the bearded young Allah-shouters.

Intervention in support of the Islamist militias in Syria is nothing more than a Christian ethnic cleansing project. And those supporting it should be treated like any other advocates of ethnic cleansing.

Obama’s intervention in Libya turned Benghazi over to Islamist militias who have persecuted Christians. His intervention in Syria will ethnically cleanse Christians while rewarding the Muslim Brotherhood with another building block for their caliphate plans.

Syria is not America’s war. It is the Muslim Brotherhood’s war. Instead of nation-building at home, Obama is caliphate-building abroad.