An "on/off" switch for aging cells

Scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered an on-and-off “switch” in cells that may hold the key to healthy aging. This switch points to a way to encourage healthy cells to keep dividing and generating, for example, new lung or liver tissue, even in old age.

In our bodies, newly divided cells constantly replenish lungs, skin, liver and other organs. However, most human cells cannot divide indefinitely–with each division, a cellular timekeeper at the ends of chromosomes shortens. When this timekeeper, called a telomere, becomes too short, cells can no longer divide, causing organs and tissues to degenerate, as often happens in old age. But there is a way around this countdown: some cells produce an enzyme called telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres and allows cells to divide indefinitely.

Read more here.

Time for a correction

Attention feminists, equalists, and anti-reality delusionists

The man is 32-year old Jesse “LJ” Matthew, who was arrested September 25 in Galveston, Texas on a charge of Abduction With Intent to Defile in the case involving the still-unexplained disappearance of second-year University of Virginia student Hannah Graham.

Hannah was last seen by an eye witness walking with LJ Matthew in the early morning hours of Saturday, September 13. She appeared heavily intoxicated, the witness told me, slouched against him, not quite able to walk on her own.

Chateau Heartiste weighs in:

What was this white woman thinking? What were her immediate family, her friends, her larger family, and the culture that ensconced her thinking? That it was perfectly safe to stumble around at 1AM alone, in a drunken haze and a short skirt while the nighttime streets filled with remorseless, hungry prowlers? That “don’t blame the victim” means “don’t take any responsibility for your own well-being”? That adult women are to be handled like crying, soiling infants, coddled and pampered and indulged… and sacrificed by the dorm-load to demon butchers who didn’t get the Take Back the Night memo? That the “real danger” is the happy-go-lucky white frat bro who likes to make crude jokes? That accountability, reason, and personal responsibility are outdated virtues of a backward patriarchal past?

This is what following the Lords of Lies gets you… Death. What she needed to hear was “don’t drink until you can’t see straight”, “don’t go out alone”, “don’t pretend like the world can’t be dangerous to you”, “if you don’t want to be taken advantage of, don’t make yourself an easy target”, “don’t dress like a slut or men will treat you like a slut”, and most importantly, “if a large black man walks toward you in the middle of the night and puts his arm around you in fake friendliness, run and scream for help”.

This goes for the white college men who must have been in the area to see this American Horror Story unfold. Are you so brainwashed by equalist cant that the sight of a huge black guy confronting a drunk white girl in the dead of night doesn’t twitch your risk-assessment reflexes? I’m not saying you had to go mano-a-mandingo with the beast, but you could’ve gathered compatriots and moved in threateningly, which likely would’ve spooked the predator.

Yet even this target group’s great shame is tinged with tragicomedy. Decades of feminist filth poisons the mind, but decades of unleashed female sexual behavior, all traditional constraints on it vilified and tossed aside, hardens the heart. When generations of men witness their women degrade themselves and hook up, with cavalier disregard for any self-debasing consequences, with degenerates and monsters, the instinct to protectiveness grows numbly useless.

Feminists, equalists, and anti-reality delusionists, you have killed Hannah Graham as assuredly as LT “gentle giant” Matthew did. Your lies were his choking grip. Her blood is on your cowardly hands.

Read more here.

How many times did President Obama attend his "Daily Intelligence Briefings?"

Source

Fast and Furious, IRS, and getting out of Dodge

Dick Morris says some things are about to hit the fan, and that's why Eric Holder got out of Dodge one step ahead of the sheriff. Fast and Furious, and IRS court cases are about to explode, says Dick Morris.

Pay your taxes and shut up!

Can parents speak out at school board meetings?




Thanks to Texan99

"I discovered I can dream"

I see something in you...but I don't know what it is!

The people in my life were able to reach into the trash can and make me whole again.

Barbarians at the gate

Dennis Prager writes:

ArabianBusiness.com reports that about 100 million people in the Arab world are illiterate; and three quarters of them are between the ages of 15 and 45.

As for Arab women, the situation is even worse. Nearly half of the Arab world’s women are illiterate, and sexual attacks on women have actually increased since the Arab Spring, as have forced marriages and trafficking. And the exact number of women murdered by family members in “honor killings” is not knowable. It is only known to be large.

In Egypt, the largest Arab country, 91 percent of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF. Not to mention the number of women in the Arab world who must wear veils or even full-face and full-body coverings known as burkas. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is infamous for not allowing women to drive a car.

So, then, is there anything at which the Arab world has excelled for the past two generations? Has there been a major Arab export?

As it happens, there are two.

Hatred and violence.

Read more here.

Netanyahu's speech at the UN

If you read and watch only mainstream media, you probably are not aware that in his speech to the UN the other day Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

“The Nazis believed in a master race, militant Islamists believe in a master faith; they just disagree on who will be the master of the master faith,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its violent ambitions.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu backed up his melding of ISIS and Hamas with quotes from leaders of both jihadist groups, proving their common violent ambitions. Islamic State head al-Baghdadi said that a day will come when the world will see Islam as a master who will destroy the idol of democracy. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s political leader, said: “Our nation will sit on the throne of the world.”

Mr. Netanyahu listed in his speech the unprecedented steps that Israel took, at risk to the lives of its own troops, to minimize civilian casualties during the Gaza war. And he challenged the General Assembly audience to consider how they would react if their towns were under attack by a barrage of rockets, forcing their citizens to seek cover with only seconds to spare.

The prime minister said that the UN Human Rights Council, which he characterized as an “oxymoron,” was helping Hamas in its propaganda war. Its singular condemnation of Israel, while giving Hamas a pass on it use of civilians as human shields, earned it the title “terrorist rights council.”

The prime minister said that it was not enough for the world to focus its attention on ISIS and destroy it, as important as that goal is to achieve. The world must not lose sight of the overriding threat of a nuclear armed Iran.

Read more here.

Payback's a bitch

Fred Reed writes:

Americans don’t want the jobs that Latinos do. If a young man from El Salvador can come all the way from Central America to harvest tobacco in North Carolina or work in restaurants in Washington, so could an unemployed “teen” from Detroit or Chicago. They don’t, which leaves the jobs to…yes!...Latinos.

However,

there is grave danger that the newcomers will be corrupted by the American welfare state. Mexicans at least arrive with a strong work ethic. They take any job they can get and maybe a couple of others on the side. When have you seen fifteen members of any other ethnic group waiting outside a Seven-Eleven at five in the morning hoping for work?

But if they find that they can go on the dole and get things for free, they will. Nobody who doesn’t have to will shovel asphalt under a hot sun or stand in two inches of blood in a slaughterhouse ten hours a day. Would you? They seem to be beginning to demand things on grounds of historical mistreatment. Where have we heard this before?

Reed, who lives in Mexico, writes about Mexicans:

They, the majority of the immigrants, are sort of half European genetically, for what that’s worth, Christian, and speak a European language. In Mexico itself, they maintain a mostly modern society functioning at perhaps seventy-five percent of the declining American norm. Call it sixty, or eighty if you will. How do you measure? But it is clearly, if certainly trailingly, in the European mold of technology, semi-democracy, and ascent into the middle class.


Monument in Guadalajara to Los Niños Heroes, young cadets who died fighting the Americans in the Mexican-American War, in which America annexed the Southwest. There are at least hundreds of Niños Heroes Streets all over Mexico. This explains why Mexicans have little sympathy for complaints that they are illegally entering American territory. They don't think it is American territory. Payback's a bitch.

Ten ways to bring out talent in your employees

Bruce Kasanoff takes a look at some ways to bring out the talent in employees. He comes up with ten:

1. Believe in them
2. Demonstrate belief by listening
3. Share both your weaknesses and strengths
4. Understand your own biases
5. Be simple and clear
6. Inspire, don’t intimidate
7. Invest a lot in training
8. Praise effort, not ability
9. Spread credit fairly
10. Send your team members on to bigger and better things

Read how he expands on each of these points here.

Do angels exist?

David Warren writes:

In Christian teaching, the angels were created, as we were created; but prior to, or before us. They defeat our conceptions of space and time. But Love itself defeats our conceptions, and Faith and Hope are anchored in an Eternity that remains bottomlessly mysterious to our human minds — richly repaying contemplation, but solving no riddles. For a Mystery is not a riddle or puzzle, with a set answer waiting overleaf; and our modern attempts at this sort of reductionism all end in farce. Our own Being is anchored in Mystery, and what can we do about it?

Read more here.

Legacies of Eric Holder

Victor Davis Hanson counts them:

Eric Holder’s left many baleful legacies: being censured by the House of Representatives; withholding subpoenaed documents, proving untruthful about a failed gun-walking caper in Mexico; failing to enforce laws on the books, from immigration to the elements of the Affordable Care Act; illegally billing the government for his own private use of a government Gulfstream jet; snooping on Associated Press reporters; giving de facto exemptions to renegade IRS politicos; and trying to create civilian trials for terrorist killers like KSM, one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks. But he will be known mostly for re-teaching Americans to think of race as essential, not incidental, to our characters.

Read more here.

He's missed over half

Breitbart reports that

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI)report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

Read more here.

Where has all the gluten gone?

Now for some humor from The New Yorker:

Dear Internet Fact Checking:

Now that every product on the shelves claims to be gluten-free, I started to wonder what happened to all of that gluten that used to be in everything. Then I read on cashgab.com that someone has been buying up gluten (at bargain-basement prices) and storing it in caves in Utah, on the theory that—like eggs, which used to be considered unhealthy and now are considered O.K. to eat—gluten will someday be found to be perfectly healthy, food companies will want to put gluten back in their products, and buyers will find that one person has cornered the world’s gluten supply. Is this true?

Ravioliron, Rock Springs, Wyo.

Dear Ravioliron:

As usual, cashgab.com is, if we may put it this way, on the money. Where has all the gluten gone? Is it just a coincidence that the same question was raised (hidingstuff.com) about the eventual destination of the trans fats that so many products claimed to have rid themselves of? What about reports (photosquashed.com) that astronauts took pictures from space of quivering mountains of trans fats in the Chihuahuan Desert, and that the pictures were suppressed because of pressure from the Trilateral Commission? As if this weren’t proof enough, trucks have definitely been seen driving through Utah (eyeballer.com). Why else would trucks drive through Utah? Is it just a coincidence that Utah ranks fourteenth among the states for number of usable caves? It is hardly insignificant that when George Soros was asked whether he was trying to corner the gluten market, he said, and we quote, “What a stupid question!” (cashgab.com).

Thanks to American Digest

Intelligence reports collected dust

What's the morale like at the White House among those who brief the President on intelligence matters? One national security staffer spoke with Mail Online's David Martosko:

President Barack Obama's intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told Mail Online on Monday.

'Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president's daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,' said a national security staffer in the Obama administration who is familiar with the content of intelligence briefings.

'We were seeing specific threat assessments and many of them have panned out exactly as we were told they would.'

"Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper,' Obama said, 'has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.'

That finger-pointing, MailOnline's source said, is not sitting well in the White House.

'It's starting to affect morale around here,' he said.

'Any time you're hired by a boss to advise him about what to do in a high-stakes area, and he ignores you for a long time, it's going to gnaw at you.'

Read more here.

Bombs away!

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The problem with Obama in the Middle East is that he still does not know exactly whom he is hurting and whom he is helping with his bombing — and cannot know under a policy of blowing things up from the air and after a while leaving. He has no intention of cleaning up or sorting out the mess on the ground that such bombing aggravates, and he has no worry that either a popular or a media audit will ensue. Libya has already become ancient history. No one remembers our once strong support for the terrorist-minded Muslim Brotherhood or our schizophrenia about the present junta in Egypt. No one remembers that we once were on the verge of bombing Assad and now are de facto empowering him. No one recalls that Obama currently has some strategic latitude in his decisions because the fracking and horizontal drilling inside America — which he once strongly opposed, and currently mostly forbids in new leases for federal lands — have given the United States some immunity from the usual oil fallout from Middle East wartime chaos.

In sum, the only legitimate critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War is that the lives and treasure lost in the chaotic occupation of 2003–06 were not worth the removal of the monstrous Saddam Hussein and the ensuing establishment of a stable, consensual state in Iraq. And the only legitimate defense of Obama’s subsequent policy in the region is that, while he is bombing all sorts of groups in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, has abdicated leadership in a way that has led to mass killing and destruction in the region, has no plans to help craft postwar consensual governments, and does not quite know who his enemies are or what they are planning, he so far has not lost American lives in the process — at least until the ascendant Islamic State flexes its global muscles.

Read more here.

Obama's counterfactual worldview

Is there a more important writer than Andrew McCarthy in explaining the Islamic threat? I don't think so. He writes:

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.”

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.

For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you’ll hear from Obama’s Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is “Islamophobia,” not Muslim terrorism.

This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won’t disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The “real” jihad becomes the “internal struggle to become a better person.” The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it. But the same can be said for our enemies.

Read more here.

Internet speeds by state and country

I have seen two articles recently about internet speeds. One showed what the speeds are in each state:

This link shows speeds by countries. The United States is not the fastest. You just move your cursor across the map of the world to get the numbers for each country.

Our work doesn't have to be obtuse to be important or brave.

I like this from Seth Godin:

The sophistication of truth

A common form of complexity is the sophistication of fear.

Long words when short ones will do. Fancy clothes to keep the riffraff out and to give us a costume to hide behind. Most of all, the sneer of, "you don't understand" or, "you don't know the people I know..."

"It's complicated," we say, even when it isn't.

We invent these facades because they provide safety. Safety from the unknown, from being questioned, from being called out as a fraud. These facades lead to bad writing, lousy communication and a refuge from the things we fear.

I'm more interested in the sophistication required to deliver the truth.

Simplicity.

Awareness.

Beauty.

These take fearlessness. This is, "here it is, I made this, I know you can understand it, does it work for you?"

Our work doesn't have to be obtuse to be important or brave.

Give that dog a bone!

Instapundit links to a story about the dog pictured above. A woman heard the dog barking downstairs. When she found him, he was barking and running around in circles around a black bear, who had walked in an unlatched door and gone into a bedroom where her children were sleeping!
Read more here.

Alcohol-fueled sexual assault

One of my favorite writers is Ben Stein. Last week he chose to weigh in on alcohol and sexual assault on our college campuses:

But excessive drinking is not required to be young or to enjoy life. It is possible to have a great life without any alcohol at all in one’s veins.

I have been in the recovery community for almost 30 years now. I am far from being a young person but I see and talk to a great number of young people in recovery. I hear them talk about how miserable their lives were when they were ruled by alcohol and how happy they are that their lives are free from booze.

I see genuine miracles in the lives of college kids who substitute meditation, exercise, travel, and a carefully, patiently cultivated romance for drunken hookups.

It occurs to me that it would be enormously useful for schools to encourage students to leave alcohol out of their lives if they cannot act responsibly while under the influence. It would be a great day when the cool kids on campus were more interested in sobriety than in losing their minds and souls under the influence of beer and liquor. Sometimes, this will be accomplished by turning to a superhuman power, which is how by far the best program for sobriety, AA, does it. Perhaps sometimes it can happen in other ways. Obviously, public schools should not force any special religion on anyone. Just as obviously if inmates are encouraged to pray in federal and state prisons, it is insane to keep young people in school from prayer. Prayer works and prayer works wonders. We have strayed far too much away from it in the postwar era. Perhaps getting back to it through the recovery world will work miracles in the nation as a whole.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Alcohol changes people, especially young people, in ways that can be devastating. If the country is going to respond intelligently to sexual assault on campus, intelligent and restrained approaches to the use of alcohol, the absolute condemnation of binge drinking and idealizing blackouts is essential.

And let’s be specific: The beer companies that make drinking look so glamorous are creating a massive cost in the wreckage of lives. They make money from it and they do not pay for it. It would be a good idea if the de-romanticizing of alcohol on campus started with them. They won’t like it.

But it’s got to start somewhere.

And if we refuse to admit prayer and a higher power into our lives in the struggle against alcohol fueled sexual assault, we are shutting the door on safety, decency towards women, and health.

Read more here.

The smallest strokes add up to the greatest masterpieces

Ann Voskamp asks:

Why in the world disdain the small? It’s always the smallest strokes that add up to the greatest masterpieces.

Because the thing really is: Do we ever really know which mark we make — that will matter the most? The extraordinary things happen nowhere else but in the everyday and today can always be the beginning:

The most exquisite marks anyone makes with their life — are the marks done in secret. The mark that no one — but One — will ever see.

Dear Self, tuck this away to read again whenever you need to know it again — and promise me, you’ll laugh and sing and dance a bit today?

Read more here.

Beautiful fall colors

Bob Berwin posts this photo of aspen he took Sunday morning in the mountains near Lake Dillon, Colorado. Read more here.

I was hoping to see something like this today when I drove into the Denver mountain suburbs. Instead, I got drenched. I saw the largest hail I have ever seen. You know when you are making a snowman how you build large clumps of snow and put them together to make the snowman? That's what I saw today near Highlands Ranch, Colorado: big clumps of hail lining the highway.

For sale

Susan Greene notes that

one in three newspaper journalists in the U.S. have lost their jobs over the past decade. Circulation is half what it was ten year ago. Newspaper sales peaked at $49 billion in 2005. In 2013, sales dove to less than half that number, $22 billion.

The latest newspaper to go on the "for sale" block is the Denver Post. Greene writes:

Friday’s announcement comes as little surprise as the The Denver Post’s circulation, staff size and journalistic quality have dramatically waned. The paper’s newsroom is a skeleton of its former self, and many of its top staffers who have not been laid off in the past several years have jumped a ship they’ve felt is sinking.

Read more here.

A whole lot of devolving goin' on

Thomas Lifson writes:

Laws banning incest between brothers and sisters in Germany could be scrapped after a government ethics committee said the they were an unacceptable intrusion into the right to sexual self-determination.

“Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.”

Read more here, including some incredibly alarming statistics about consanguinity in the Muslim world.

War on women

ISIS has tortured and publicly executed this female lawyer in Iraq who dared to criticize them on Facebook.

Also,

In the nearby town of Sderat, militants broke into the home of a female candidate in the last provincial council elections, killed her and abducted her husband.

Read more here.

Is Europe for real?

This one will have you howling with laughter!

Europe is an expensive socialist fantasy, which was paid for by American capitalism for 65 years, and is now going broke anyway.

Andrew Klaven posts the funniest You Tube video I have seen in a long, long time.

Our distrustful, warring gender divide

Mark Tapson offers this advice to men:

So, “Where’s that advice to men on how to graciously accept a polite rejection?” Here it is, though it won’t go over well with predators or players or drunk losers: A woman turns you down politely? Apologize for intruding and wish her a good evening. A woman you approached turned you down because she has a husband or boyfriend? Leave it at that. Show her you’re a man who respects relationships. A woman turned you down rudely in front of her friends? Embarrassing, sure, but how is it manly behavior to spew insults at her in return? It’s not—it’s petulant and childish. So instead of confirming their low suspicion of you, deliver a gentlemanly signoff—“No worries, then. Have a good evening, ladies”—and then walk away with your dignity intact.

That’s how a man handles rejection—like a man. And maybe it will make the woman and her friends wish they had given you a chance.

Read more here.

Thank fracking

Walter Russell Mead and staff write:

President Obama’s geopolitical headaches would be raging migraines were it not for the new U.S. contributions to oil markets. And for that, this president has fracking to thank.

Go here to read how oil supply and demand affect the economies of Russia, Iran and the rest of us.

Children being used as pawns

Michelle Malkin jumps into the fray once again. She tells us about how children are being used as pawns by the teachers union in suburban Jefferson County, Colorado (where I'll be going for a dental appointment later today). Go here to read Michelle's version of what is going on.

Police use tear gas and pepper spray on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong

Beijing is "tightening the grip" on Hong Kong protesters. Hong Kong Police have been using pepper spray and tear gas on thousands of pro-democracy protesters.

The demonstrations -- which Beijing called "illegal" -- were a rare scene of disorder in the Asian financial hub, and highlighted authorities' inability to rein in the public discontent over Beijing's tightening grip on the city. The protesters reject Beijing's decision last month to rule out open nominations for candidates under proposed guidelines for the first-ever elections for Hong Kong's leader, promised for 2017.

China took control of the former British colony in 1997, agreeing to a policy of "one country, two systems" that allowed Hong Kong to keep civil liberties unseen on the mainland, while promising that the city's leader can eventually be chosen through "universal suffrage." But Beijing's insistence on screening election candidates for patriotism to China has stoked fears among democracy groups that Hong Kong will never get genuine democracy.

Read more here, where I found the story and photos.

Dude from Idaho shoots bullets into the White House: Obamas find out about it five days later.

Were you aware that on November 11, 2011 a man shot a bullet through a window in the White House? Carol D. Leonnig reports:

The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, in the dark of a November night, in a closed lane of Constitution Avenue. He pointed his semiautomatic rifle out of the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger.

A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first family’s formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and more pinged off the roof, sending bits of wood and concrete to the ground. At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House, flying some 700 yards across the South Lawn.

Secret Service officers initially rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun box. Snipers on the roof, standing just 20 feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. With little camera surveillance on the White House perimeter, it was up to the Secret Service officers on duty to figure out what was going on.

Then came an order that surprised some of the officers. “No shots have been fired. . . . Stand down,” a supervisor called over his radio. He said the noise was the backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.

By the end of that Friday night, the agency had confirmed a shooting had occurred but wrongly insisted the gunfire was never aimed at the White House. Instead, Secret Service supervisors theorized, gang members in separate cars got in a gunfight near the White House’s front lawn — an unlikely scenario in a relatively quiet, touristy part of the nation’s capital.

It took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence, a discovery that came about only because a housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor.

The shooter was Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez. He

was able to park his car on a public street, take several shots and then speed off without being detected. It was sheer luck that the shooter was identified, the result of Ortega, a troubled and jobless 21-year-old, wrecking his car seven blocks away and leaving his gun inside.

Who found the evidence of a shooting? A "housekeeper!" Five days later! She found a broken window and chunks of white concrete on the floor of the Truman balcony.

Read here about the Obamas reaction to the news, after they were finally told about it five days after the shooting. There will be a hearing Tuesday on the incident.

Does the death of a black child only matter if the murderer is a white person?

John Kass writes about the black children who are getting gunned down by black gangbangers in Chicago. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have nothing to say about these weekly murders.
Read more here.

Democrat Senate candidates getting more money than their Republican challengers

Betsy Newmark has the details of how Democrats are outspending Republicans in this year's competitive US Senate election campaigns. Then she summarizes:

Many GOP donors have been scared by IRS targeting and audits of wealthy Republicans, prosecutorial attacks like the one in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker's allies, and the Democratic demonization of GOP contributors. Not everyone has the thick skin of Charles and David Koch.

Many GOP donors try to avoid becoming political targets by writing checks to 501(c)(4)s, which don't have to disclose donor names. But under IRS rules these groups are largely limited to issue ads that don't advocate for or against a candidate. Super PACs like Mr. Reid's can say whatever they want, but 501(c)(4)s can't respond in kind on behalf of GOP challengers.

Read more here.

The Obama - Holder alliance

Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund have written a book entitled Obama's Enforcer in which they write:

Mr. Holder is the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives. He earned this dubious distinction by refusing to turn over documents related to what may be the most reckless law enforcement operation ever undertaken by the Justice Department: Operation Fast and Furious.

During his tenure, the Justice Department launched more investigations and prosecutions of leaks than all prior attorneys general combined, while studiously ignoring high-level “friendly leaks” by White House officials designed to make the president look tough in the fight against terrorism.

Mr. Holder racialized the prosecution of federal anti-discrimination laws and led an unprecedented attack on election integrity laws, thus making it easier for people to commit voter fraud.

Mr. Holder has tried to restrict pro-life protesters’ First Amendment right to speak, has prosecuted American companies (under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) for behavior that is routine among government officials, and has on numerous occasions ignored his duty to defend the law and to enforce statutes passed by Congress.

In clear violation of civil service rules, Mr. Holder filled the career ranks of the Justice Department with political allies, cronies and Democratic Party donors.

He treated Congress with contempt and did everything he could to evade its oversight responsibilities by misleading, misinforming and ignoring members of Congress and its committees.

Betsy Newmark writes this about the Obama - Holder alliance:

Their damage will be hard to eradicate since Holder hired people of similar views as career bureaucrats who will be there long after Obama has left office. Good riddance to Holder, but don't think that this is the end of his brand of politicized justice.

Progressives? They probably wish they had never gotten out of bed today.

Jim at Asylum Watch linked to this entire post from a blog entitled Spellchek. I could not do better myself:

OMG! What a disastrous day for the progressive movement. A single incident that happened today in Oklahoma squashes so many of their dreams.

Police: Woman beheaded at Oklahoma workplace – https://news.yahoo.com/police-woman-beheaded-oklahoma-workplace-144459291.html

MOORE, Okla. (AP) — A man fired from an Oklahoma food processing plant beheaded a woman with a knife and was attacking another worker when he was shot and wounded by a company official, police said Friday.

What a horrific event for the victims and their families. I won’t even attempt to imagine what they are going through. Generally when these things happen, the progressives release their canned responses immediately afterward. If they can attack Christianity, the 2nd Amendment, global warming, women’s rights, racism, whatever fits the bill, it will be capitalized upon. However, that’s not an option in this case.

We have yet another Islamist extremist committing terrorism.

The FBI is now looking into Nolen’s background after his former co-workers said he tried to convert them to Islam after recently converting himself – http://kfor.com/2014/09/25/reports-police-respond-to-possible-shooting-near-moore-grocery-store/.

The hero in this story?

Lewis said the man then stabbed Traci Johnson, 43, a number of times before being shot by Mark Vaughan, a reserve sheriff’s deputy and the company’s chief operating officer.

A company official who was packing. Saved Traci Johnson from having her head cut off and who knows how many others.

So the progressives can’t blame the tea party or Christianity or 2nd Amendment supporters or white conservative racists or republicans and their war on women or climate change or gun manufacturers. I’m sure I’ve probably missed some more. What a disaster.

The one silver lining for the left is they can claim workplace violence. I’m sure Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Eric Holder will point that out when they visit Oklahoma. Oh, that’s right, they won’t be anywhere to be found on this issue. Poor Colleen Hufford and Traci Johnson didn’t have the proper credentials to allow their plight to be capitalized on.

Rest in peace Colleen Hufford. Hope you recover well Traci Johnson. Alton Nolen? Hope you rot in hell with your virgins just tantalizing out of reach. Progressives? They probably wish they had never gotten out of bed today.

Does he have my back in a fight?

Scott Locklin writes:

The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality.

Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences.

Above all, men who have been in fights know that there is nothing good or noble about being a victim. This is a concept the modern “conservative movement,” mostly run by wimps, has lost, probably irrevocably. They’re forever tugging at my heartstrings, from No Child Left Behind to Israel’s plight to MLK’s wonders to whining that the media doesn’t play fair to the overwrought emotional appeals they use to justify dropping bombs on Muslims.

Modern “civilized” males don’t get in fistfights. They don’t play violent sports. They play video games and, at best, watch TV sports. Modern males are physical and emotional weaklings. The ideal male isn’t John Wayne or James Bond or Jimmy Stewart anymore. It’s some crying tit that goes to a therapist, a sort of agreeable lesbian with a dick who calls the police (whom he hates in theory) when there is trouble.

How did we get here? Estrogens in the food supply? Cultural Marxism’s corrosive influence? Small families? Some of the greatest badasses I’ve known had many brothers to fight with growing up. When good men who will fight are all extinct, there is no more civilization. No lantern-jawed viragos are going to save you from the barbarian hordes. No mincing nancy boys with Harvard diplomas will stand up for the common decencies: They’re a social construct, dontcha know. The conservative movement won’t save you: They’re chicken-hearted careerists petrified of offending a victim group.

Teddy Roosevelt, my ideal President, kept a lion and a bear as pets in the White House and took his daily exercise doing jiu-jitsu and boxing. He even lost vision in an eye in a friendly boxing match while he was president. Our last three glorious leaders are men who kept fluffy dogs and went jogging. I don’t trust squirrelly girly-men in any context. When confronted with difficult decisions, they don’t do what’s right or tell the truth—they’ll do what’s easy or politically expedient. Unlike the last three, Teddy Roosevelt never sent men to die in pointless wars, though he was more than happy to go himself or risk his neck wrestling with bears.

I’m no great shakes: I’m a shrimpy egghead in a suit who thinks about math all day. I don’t train for fighting anymore, and my experiences with violence are fairly limited. Nonetheless, I judge people on these sorts of things. When I first meet a man, I don’t care what kind of sheepskins or awards he has on his walls. I don’t care if he is liberal or conservative. I want to know if they have my back in a fight. That’s really the only thing that matters.

Please read more here.

Jihad factories

Are our prisons becoming jihad factories? Roger L. Simon believes we are already more than halfway there.

This makes our prisons veritable training grounds — petri dishes, if you will — for fanatic killers of the type of the Oklahoma suspect, not to mention recruitment centers for whatever murderous Islamic sect happens to be in vogue that week or month.

Banning Islam from our prisons for inciting violence might backfire in a way that would engender even more conversions. Still, jihadism in it essence advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, with which it is incompatible. Should we allow such a thing inside prison?

Read more here.

They're coming to America

Go here to find out how Obama and his cabinet are celebrating.

America owns the future!

Spies for China

You could have one spy steal ten thousand documents, or you could have 10,000 spies steal one document. China chooses the latter. Joshua Phillipp writes:

The challenge posed by China comes down to a simple fact: it has too many spies for foreign intelligence agencies to keep track of.

According to sources, the grooming process typically takes place before the students leave to study abroad. They may get approached by Chinese security officials who remind them to remain loyal to the motherland, and ask them to report back with anything that could benefit China.

For them, spying is often viewed as a matter of patriotic duty.

Williams said the approach typically works because the Chinese spy agencies don’t ask the students for much. The individual contribution, he noted, is often so minuscule that many may not even think of what they’re doing as espionage.

The spies are not only used for stealing information, however. They’re also used to keep tabs on individuals critical of the Chinese regime.

In April, the FBI started a public information campaign warning U.S. students traveling abroad to be wary of intelligence networks interested in recruiting them as spies.

As the FBI pointed out in its educational materials, students studying abroad are prime candidates for positions in government and in large companies. The intelligence agents of China and other nations target students for this reason.

Read more here.

Are we close to an outbreak of World War III?

Ann Barnhardt believes we are near to an outbreak of World War III:

Just so you know, World War 3 will be completely unlike the two previous World Wars, so don’t expect it to happen like that, because it can’t. Europe, for all intents and purposes, has no standing armies, nor could it muster men, even with conscription. The post-Christian, post-modern man will not fight to defend himself. He is psychologically emasculated and saturated with self-loathing. Further, war will never be formally declared. You will not see the U.K. (whatever is left of it), France, Germany or the U.S. declare war on anyone, ever. That’s all over. For the U.S., that ended with World War 2. You all know that the U.S. never declared war in Korea, Vietnam, or anywhere else since World War 2, right? Additionally, while World War 3 grinds its way forward through time, and as millions upon millions die, the media will continually state that THERE IS NO WAR, and anyone who says that there is a war is just a loon. And the people will nod their heads, and the body count will rise, but it won’t be WAR you understand, because everything’s fine. Kinda like how there’s no inflation. It will be like that. And the body count will far, far surpass the 70 million of World War 2, perhaps by more than an order of magnitude.

Read more here.

Great expectations

Mellisa Fay Greene writes:

Many low-income American children are suffering from a shortage of words—songs, nursery rhymes, storybooks, chitchat, everyday stuff. How can that be? All parents issue directives—“Time for your bath” or “Let’s put on your jammies.” In low-income families, where parents often have had less education and limited access to parenting guidance, that’s usually the end of it; while in wealthier families, directives are only a small part of an ongoing conversation. “Let’s put on your jammies. Your jammies are so soft! What color are these jammies? They’re yellow. And look at these little animals on your jammies. What are those? Those are ducks! ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ say the ducks!” All that babbling isn’t silliness; it’s mind- building. Words streaming from radio or television, or from parents or caregivers chatting on cell phones, are of no benefit, however—a finding that merits attention from all parents.

In many low-income families, warm and loving parents may struggle desperately to provide all the other basics, without a clue that their relative silence—and the lack of bedtime stories, picture books, and lullabies—hurts the babies.

Beginning in the 1990s, researchers at Rice and Columbia Universities reported eye-opening findings about how many more words middle-class and affluent kids hear day in and out. Using interview techniques and tracking devices including “word pedometers,” they’ve determined that well-off children hear 30 million more words in the first three years of life.

The deficit has astounding and bitter consequences. More than any other strand in the lives of poor children, the 30-million-word gap has been linked to poor school performance, a failure to learn to read, a failure to graduate from high school, and an inability to prepare for and to enjoy career success.

To break the cycle of poverty, young children need something that’s as free and abundant as air. An extraordinary program is giving it to them. Read read about it here.

Did you know you have face mites?

Torah Kachur reports on the eight-legged face mites that a new study found may be living on all adult faces!
Face mites, like this one shown in an electron microscope image, appear to live on the faces of all adult humans. (USDA Confocal Electron Microscopy Unit)

The study also found that human faces are home to two different species of the mites. The first is Demodex brevis, which burrows into our sweat glands.

"It's actually evolved the perfect shape to wiggle in the pores," Kachur said.

The other species, Demodex folliculorum, lives in hair follicles of our eyelashes, eyebrows and facial skin.

Read more here.
Thanks to American Digest.

Killing me softly

I have a job in a very busy big box store, where the majority of customers are female. That's one of the main reasons I like my job. The majority of the female customers have a comparative softness that is readily apparent and I appreciate it. If, in addition to the softness, there is also beauty, then I am just wowed.

I also find that the female customers are more likely to be patient than the male customers. The possible exception to this rule is the older male customer. The retired guys usually have a more patient and good-humored attitude than do the hard-charging middle age males. Come to think of it, the younger Millennial males are also more patient, polite, and good humored.

Living what we believe

Ann Voskamp writes that

The opposite of really living isn’t really dying — but not really caring. The opposite of really believing isn’t really believing nothing — but not really caring. The opposite of really being human isn’t really when you stop breathing — but when you stop caring.

Ann and her girls are in Amsterdam on a layover to Rwanda. They take time to visit Anne Frank's house. Ann's daughter asks,

“Nothing like this would ever happen now, right, Mom?”

Our little girl’s standing in the room of another little girl who was hunted down like an animal.

I want to tell Shalom, No —- no, the world would never close their eyes again, we would never let anything like this happen again. The lie of it burns like an ember up my throat.

All I can do is cup her face.

ISIS is going house to house in northern Iraq. Rebekah reads the text word for word from missionaries who saw it, who testify. How ISIS is calling out children. Yelling at them to recant Jesus. And if they don’t recant Jesus, their parents are forced to witness the sharp edge of a blade lift their child’s thin neck from their quaking shoulders.

Ann and girls then arrive in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in six weeks. Tthat means the daily killing rate during the Rwandan Genocide was at least 5 times that of the Nazi death camps.

Ann writes:

Whenever we demonize and dehumanize anybody, we can legitimize anything.

And whenever we want to break the bonds of prejudice and injustice and indifference, we begin by breaking a loaf of bread together.

“So the Hutus saw the Tutsis as these snakes, these cockroaches, as less than, as inferior, and the Tutsis all over the country, they ran to the churches.” He points to the pulpit we’re standing in front of.

“They thought the churches were safe places. They thought the people of the church would save them, protect them. But the churches called the Hutus to say the Tutsis are here now, come kill them.”

Read more here, and also view some incredible photos.

How the left operates

What has happened to the #StopRush movement? Well, Rush Limbaugh's staff has been investigating, and they have come up with some interesting findings.

Youthful inexperience

Many people are writing and speaking about The Atlantic article written by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who was a chief architect of the Affordable Care Act and a chief medical adviser to the Obama White House. He is 57-years-old now, and says he does not want to live past age 75. What do you want to bet he'll change his mind by the time he gets to, oh, say 75?

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Yet our present lives would be poorer had we taken away history’s 75-year-olds. The great Athenian playwright Sophocles (who wrote until his death in his 90s) would never have crafted some of Greece’s greatest tragedies. The Founding Fathers would not have had the sober wisdom of Benjamin Franklin in his later years. The late Jacques Barzun, the greatest contemporary student of Western values and history, published his masterpiece, “From Dawn to Decadence,” when he was 93. Henry Kissinger, at 91, just published a magnum opus, “World Order.”

Some of the most gripping volumes about World War II would never been written by a supposedly too old Winston Churchill. Had Ronald Reagan refused medical care and hoped to die at 75, the world would never have heard at Berlin, “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev.”

Many might suggest that a naive and clueless Emanuel in his early 50s did the nation a lot of damage by dreaming up a lousy, big-government health-care scheme. Under Obamacare, millions lost their doctors and existing health care. They have paid more for deductibles and premiums, as the nation increased its debt to only marginally cover more of the uninsured.

Most Americans can cite a grandparent’s wise advice and aggregate experience as changing their lives for the better. I was blessed that three of my grandparents lived well beyond 75 and taught me everything from riding a horse and farming to accepting setbacks with calm and dignity.

Who knows — had Dr. Emanuel been asked to help draft an Affordable Care Act in his mid-70s, we might not have had to collectively suffer from his youthful inexperience.

Read more here.

"Justice" took a holiday

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton writes about Eric Holder's resignation:

It is no coincidence that Holder’s resignation comes on the heels of another court ruling that the Justice Department must finally cough up information about how Holder’s Justice Department lied to Congress and the American people about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, for which Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives. Over the past several months, Judicial Watch also exposed how Holder’s Justice Department was implicated in the IRS scandal and how Justice Department lawyers helped defend the illegal stonewall that kept secret key material related to Benghazi.

The disgraced Holder’s exit is past due accountability for Holder’s Fast and Furious lies, and I hope it brings some solace to the family of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the hundreds of innocent Mexicans likely killed thanks to the Holder Justice Department’s scheme that armed the murderous Mexican drug cartels.

In 2009, Judicial Watch opposed Holder’s confirmation as Attorney General, noting that “Mr. Holder’s record demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.” The U.S. Senate, including many Republicans, ignored Holder’s record and confirmed a man who went on to be one of the worst Attorney Generals of the modern era.

Mr. Holder, his appointees, and his agency have lied repeatedly to Congress and the American people. He has damaged the Justice Department by putting politics, ideology, and race above the rule of law. Disturbingly, Mr. Holder refused to enforce the law in a race-neutral manner. And, when it comes to government transparency, Holder’s Justice Department became one of the worst violators of the Freedom of Information Act, manufacturing new legal excuses for government secrecy that would make Richard Nixon blush.

In Eric Holder, President Obama found his John Mitchell – an attorney general who would lie, obstruct investigations, and ignore or simply not enforce the law in order to advance his president’s unbridled will.

As the press is writing his political epitaph, I hope it is also remembered how Holder lied to Congress and how his agency assaulted Freedom of the Press by collecting the private email correspondence of reporters, seizing their phone records and tracking their movements as part of an investigation of perceived leaks.

“Justice” took a holiday during Eric Holder’s reign at the Department of Justice. The man can’t leave office soon enough.

Found here.

Immigration: what are the numbers?

Todd Beamon writes about a new study about immigration in the US.

The study revealed that nearly 300,000 people immigrated to the US from Muslim countries from 2011 to 2013.

One in every six adults living in the US in 2013 was born in a foreign country.

The report estimates that somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of the 41 million immigrants are here illegally.

Overall, however, the Middle East is only fourth among regions of the world from where people emigrate to the U.S.

The leader is south Asia, which was up 372,546, or 16 percent, to 2.7 million; east Asia, up 364,909, or 5 percent, to 7.8 million; and the Caribbean, up 223,011, or 6 percent, to more than 3.9 million immigrants.

China is No. 1 in east Asia, with 217,305 people coming from that country in the period, or 10 percent, for a total of 2.3 million last year. India is the leader in south Asia, with 254,355, or 14 percent, to more than 2 million.

In 2013 there were 3.1 million immigrants in the US from Central America. Read more here.

Robots to be fighting our wars in the future

Really? Robots are going to be fighting our wars? How will they know which humans to destroy?

Former Bush Press Secretary tweets about the moment by moment events of 9-11-2001

Ari Fleischer tweeted on 9-11-2014 a moment by moment account of the activities of George W. Bush as President Bush learned about the coordinated terrorist attack on 9-11-2001. When Air Force One took off from Florida, it climbed at an unusually steep ascent, because Captain Tillman had been given a report that a sniper was at the end of the runway. Also,
the control tower told Tillman that an unidentified plane was descending toward Air Force One. There were many false reports. There were also maddeningly difficult telephone problems connecting the President with the Vice President in the bunker under the White House. The t.v.s aboard Air Force One kept coming in and out. You can read the twitter reports by going to Ari Fleischer's Twitter account.

How Hamas kills Palestinians

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line quotes extensively from a Palestinian journalist who interviewed Palestinians who told him about how Hamas was responsible for the deaths of Palestinians during the recent war with Israel. Paul notes that there is no excuse for our mainstream media's

inability to report Hamas’ terrorism against the people of Gaza some of which surely occurred more or less in plain view.

What I wonder is, how does Hamas get elected by the people of Palestine?

What makes for a loyal customer?

Seth Godin writes:

There will always be two ends of the market. There's the race to the bottom, based on efficiency at all costs, that says, "we have what they have, but cheaper." The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.

The other end is for items that we want, regardless of how far away they come from, because the ideas they embody are worth seeking out.

I say hogwash! Walmart has a new campaign whereby customers can download an app, scan their receipt, send it to Walmart. Walmart checks the prices on the items in the receipt as advertised by competing retailers all over the Denver metro area. If someone had a lower price advertised on the date of the customer's purchase, they email the customer a gift card that can be used on their nest purchase. Customers love it! If customers realize that a business is that serious about earning their business, they will be loyal shoppers at that business.

Excuse me while I take time out from blogging. I am going over to Walmart to pick up the item they are shipping to me at no charge at their Site To Store program. I ordered a full page magnifying glass so I could read a tome by Henry Kissinger. I picked the book up at the used book sale at the library for a buck. The magnifying glass will cost me five dollars. While I'm at Walmart, I am going to check out their clearance sale, where I can possibly pick out some early Christmas gifts at 50 percent off their already marked down prices.

Elites like Seth Godin can go ahead and order their handmade leather shoes from Pakistan.

Does he need to wear a sign saying I AM A THREAT TO THE PRESIDENT?

Do you know about the news story of a man who last Friday jumped the White House fence and actually ran across the lawn and into the living quarters of the President? Did you know that

The man, 42 year-old Omar Gonzalez, had a folding knife in his pocket and had left 800 rounds of ammunition in his car not far from the White House. Gonzalez had also drawn the attention of authorities at least twice a few weeks ago — once in Virginia, when he was found with a sniper rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and a map with the White House circled on it, and a second time when he walked near the White House fence with a hatchet in his waistband.

Byron York thinks there might be something wrong with the Secret Service's ability to protect the President.

New beheading video

Ace of Spades tells us that there is news of a new beheading. This time it is in Algeria, and the victim was a French citizen named Herve Gourdel.
Watch the announcement on CNN.

An unrushed yes

Lisa TerKeurst writes about an unrushed yes:

An unrushed yes means I’ve said no to enough other things so I can say yes to the spontaneous moments of relationship.

The beautifully messy band of people I call my own needs time together. We need unscheduled moments to connect and process—pauses in our day where we have space to let the organic process of relationships happen.

But the more I choose to pause and talk and really connect, the more my soul gets filled back up.

Relationships nourish us in ways nothing else can. It’s relationships that help unrush us. It’s relationships that matter most.

Read more here on how to do it.

Ferguson, Missouri = Putin's aggression = Islamist terrorism

Obama addresses the UN, and seems to equate Ferguson, Missouri with Putin's invasion of Ukraine and Islamists' slaughter of people in the Middle East:

"In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear."

Thanks to Adrienne's Corner.

It could be worse: we could be living in the Bay area

Zombie at PJ Media does an extensive job documenting the anti-capitalist, pro-communist people behind the recent climate change events in New York and Oakland, and concludes:

The Climate Change movement, at least if Sunday’s rally is anything to judge by, is now an overtly anti-capitalist movement.

And “anti-capitalist” is of course just a euphemism for “socialist,” by which they mean “communist.”

Please go here to read and see much more.

I cannot resist reposting some of Zombie's funniest photos.




And last, but not least, this one, with Zombie's comments below.

“Fossil Fuels Cause Sea Rise, Drought+Heatwaves, Extreme Weather, Wild Fires.” Thus, if the storm clouds shown in “Extreme Weather” bring a lot of rain — that’s due to fossils fuels. On the other hand, if there’s no rain (drought) — that would be due to fossil fuels as well. If the landscape is extra dry leading to wildfires — fossil fuels. And if the landscape becomes completely submerged in water — well, that would be fossil fuels’ fault too.

I think we can safely say at this point that whatever happens, it was because of fossil fuels. Sort of a universal axiom.

Go somewhere else!

How would you like to run a restaurant in liberal San Francisco, home of Nancy Pelosi? One owner closed his restaurant out of frustration recently, and posted this sign:


A few days later he had calmed down a bit, and reopened with a sign on the front door that said: "We work hard to please everyone, but we know we can't. So if you're hard to please, please just turn around and go somewhere else. Thanks!"
Read more here.

I know how he feels. I am getting more and more frustrated with the people who bring in their cloth bags to my part-time job. The other day one woman threw her bags down on the conveyor belt, and the first words out of her mouth were: "I don't do plastic!" I then cheerfully packed her items in her cloth bags. Oh, and by the way, EVERY SINGLE THING she purchased was either wrapped in plastic or came in a plastic container. EVERY SINGLE THING!

Repudiate the victim propaganda!

Thanks to American Digest.

A rebellion of truth gathers strength

Science is showing that

there are significant and lasting biological differences between men and women that are apparent from even before birth.

Our brains are wired differently in the womb. Read more here.

The first time ever I saw your face

Bring back any memories? Joy that lasted till the end of time? Well, no, but it's a nice thought, and Roberta Flack sings it soulfully.

Camouflaging their craven betrayal of the First Amendment and academic freedom

Bruce Thornton writes:

Anything that displeases or discomforts campus special interest groups––mainly those predicated on being the alleged victims of American oppression–– must be proscribed as “slurs” or “hateful,” even if what’s said is factually true. No matter that these groups are ideologically driven and use their power to silence critics and limit speech to their own self-serving and duplicitous views, the modus operandi of every illiberal totalitarian regime in history. The spineless university caves in to their demands, incoherently camouflaging their craven betrayal of the First Amendment and academic freedom as “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.”

In the case of Islam, however, this betrayal is particularly dangerous. For we are confronting across the world a jihadist movement that grounds its violence in traditional Islamic theology, jurisprudence, and history. Ignoring those motives and their sanction by Islamic doctrine compromises our strategy and tactics in defeating the jihadists, for we cripple ourselves in the war of ideas. Worse yet, Islamic triumphalism and chauvinism–– embodied in the Koranic verse that calls Muslims “the best of nations raised up for the benefit of men” because they “enjoin the right and forbid the wrong and believe in Allah”–– is confirmed and strengthened by the way our elite institutions like universities and the federal government quickly capitulate to special interest groups who demand that we endorse only their sanitized and often false picture of Islam. Such surrender confirms the jihadist estimation of the West as the “weak horse,” as bin Laden said, a civilization with “foundations of straw” whose wealth and military power are undermined by a collective failure of nerve and loss of morale.

This process of exploiting the moral degeneration of the West has been going on now for 25 years. It begins, as does the rise of modern jihadism, with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Islamic revolution. The key event took place in February 1989, when Khomeini issued a fatwa, based on Koran 9.61, against Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed “against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran,” as Khomeini said. Across the world enraged Muslims rioted and bombed bookstores, leaving over 20 people dead. More significant in the long run was the despicable reaction of many in the West to this outrage against freedom of speech and the rule of law, perpetrated by the most important and revered political and religious leader of a major Islamic nation.

Khomeini’s fatwa and the subsequent violent reaction created what Daniel Pipes calls the “Rushdie rules,” a speech code that privileges Islam over revered Western traditions of free speech that still are operative in the case of all other religions. Muslims now will determine what counts as an “insult” or a “slur,” and their displeasure, threats, and violence will police those definitions and punish offenders. Even reporting simple facts of history or Islamic doctrine can be deemed an offense and bring down retribution on violators. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, earned the wrath of Muslims in part for her contribution to Theo van Gogh’s film Submission, which projected Koranic verses regarding women on the bodies of abused women. Van Gogh, of course, was brutally murdered in the streets of Amsterdam. And this is the most important dimension of the “Rushdie rules”: violence will follow any violation of whatever some Muslims deem to be “insulting” to Islam, even facts. In effect, Western law has been trumped by the shari’a ban on blaspheming Islam, a crime punishable by death.

Thus the government officially proscribes words like “jihad” or “Muslim terrorist” from its documents and training materials in order to avoid offending Muslims. Similarly the Muslim terrorist, a fixture in recent history since the PLO started highjacking airliners in the 60s, has nearly disappeared from television and movies, replaced by Russians, white supremacists, and brainwashed Americans. And when a Muslim terrorist does appear, his motivations and violence are rationalized as the understandable response to the grievous offenses against his faith and people committed by the U.S. and Israel. Islam is airbrushed from the plot, as in the recent series Tyrant, a dramatization of a fictional Arab Muslim state that somehow manages to ignore Islam as a political force. More seriously, universities disinvite speakers at the faintest hint of protest from Muslim organizations, even as they accept Gulf-state petrodollars to create “Middle East Studies” programs that frequently function as apologists and enablers of terrorist violence.

Read more here.

What keeps us safe?

Why has the Obama team consistently denied the dangers of radical Islam? Victor Davis Hanson writes about

an ongoing administration campaign of euphemisms among copycat bureaucrats, from “workplace violence” to “overseas contingency operations.” We see this again in the administration’s fashionable collective denial that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam — as if foreign tourists visited Mecca as freely as they do the Vatican; as if Muslim apostates picked and chose their new religions as easily and safely as do Protestants; as if beheadings and stonings were as frequent in Paris and Houston as they are in Riyadh and Teheran; as if Bibles were brought into Iran and Saudi Arabia as freely as Korans are into America; as if churches sprouted up in Turkey, Iran, and Gaza as do mosques in Britain and Michigan; and as if women and gays were as equal in the Middle East as they are in the West.

Hillary Clinton is all but running for president, boasting about her reset diplomacy while secretary of state during Obama’s first term. But it is hard to find a single example of inspired diplomacy during her tenure. Canceling missile-defense cooperation with the Czechs and Poles while resetting relations with Vladimir Putin was not wise. Nor was leading from behind in Libya (“We came, we saw, and he died”). Nor was her emphasis on climate change as a global threat or her pressure on Israel to grant concessions supposedly to ensure Middle East peace. Nor was welcoming the election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Nor was ignoring requests for beefed-up security at the consulate in Benghazi. Nor was claiming that the deaths of the four Americans in Benghazi were due to a spontaneous riot over a video (“What difference at this point does it make?”). Nor was pulling all troops out of Iraq. Nor was lifting the embargos and trade sanctions against Iran. Nor was much of anything except an impressive near million miles of traveling while secretary, an astonishing feat for someone in her sixties and often in poor health.

What then keeps us safe? Three considerations alone.

First, for all the convenient trashing of the Bush-Cheney protocols, so far the Obama administration has quietly kept most of them. It tried to square the circle of embracing what it once denounced by creating euphemisms and politically correct banalities while the drones bombed on, the renditions kept occurring, and the NSA stepped up its spying.

Second, the U.S. military, despite massive cuts and efforts to force on it proper politically correct mentalities, is still preeminent. Just as it had broken the back of the insurgencies in Iraq by 2009 and killed thousands of would-be global terrorists who flocked to Anbar Province, so too, if it is unleashed, it can probably destroy the Islamic State.

Third, so far we have been very lucky, and yet we are not out of the woods. The underwear bomber easily could have blown up nearly 300 Americans and paralyzed air travel for months. The Tsarnaev brothers could have dropped off more backpack bombs in Boston and tripled the number of casualties. Iran is probably accelerating its efforts to get a bomb before Obama leaves office. We still have no strategy to stop the onslaught of the Islamic State. Putin may soon invade a NATO-member Baltic State — just to see what the United States is going to do about it.

Read more here.

Broken dreams

Where is our country's breadbasket? Where is the most productive agricultural land in America? The central valley of California, which is suffering from an exceptional, devastating drought. Who do the farmers there believe is enemy number 1? Alan Heathcock interviewed a farmer named Jeff Yarbro, who

hammers on about who they see as enemy #1: environmentalists. As Yarbro has it, these particular environmentalists have fought to make sure whatever precious water is released from the state’s reservoirs goes first to facilitating salmon runs. The problem is that most of this water heads out into the ocean with no attempt to reuse it. “They want this valley all jackrabbits and sage brush,” he says, meaning the environmentalists. “They don’t believe we should be here. They’d like to turn the valley like it was a hundred years ago. And for us to go elsewhere.”

Andy Vidak, cherry farmer and senator for the 16th district, piggybacks Yarbro’s passion, and for the next 20 minutes goes deeply and conspiratorially political. He educates me on a long series of decisions made by a “small percentage of politicians who also hold the most power” in collaboration with radical environmentalists who have worked to destroy the farmers of the Central Valley. “This is perfect politics,” Vidak says. “The perfect war. This valley is conservative.” He contends big-city liberals are aware they can save the salmon, don the hero’s crown for environmentalists, all while eliminating conservative political opposition.

A walnut farmer named Tim Larson says his biggest concern is that nothing will change until “there’s flies on the baby.” He explains they just keep making do with less and less. Their ability to persevere and innovate is harming them, in that the politics won’t change until the farmers, like the fish, are on the endangered species list.

The depth of his passion suddenly makes sense. This battle he’s waging isn’t about water and politics, but about fighting for everything he’s ever known, not just every crop harvested, but every spoonful of ice cream. He sees it all disappearing, farmers idling and selling off land, businesses boarded over, farm workers going elsewhere. What could be more unsettling than seeing your life erased? His outrage is the fear of vanishing, the selfsame story of everyone I’ve spoken with while in the valley.

It’s hard to make people care because there’s a general mistrust of desperation, as if a desperate person has replaced logic with emotion, truth with exaggeration. Each night I’ve gone through my notes and fact-checked the farmers, doubting what they told me. Even after seeing the land and meeting the people I second-guessed their claims and statistics, only to find, time and again, they were telling the truth.

So I pray for this vanishing valley. I pray for vanishing crops, may the land flourish. I pray for vanishing groundwater, may it be replenished. I pray for vanishing smelt and salmon and bees, may they thrive. I pray for politicians and the vanishing desire to empathize, may solutions be found. I pray for the vanishing dreams of farmers who’ve already lost, and for those frightened for the future, may they find peace. I pray for vanishing field workers and the businesses closing and cities desperate for water, for all those made to feel invisible and silenced, may they be seen, may they be heard.

Read more here.
Get Victor Davis Hanson's perspective here.

September in Colorado

September is my favorite month in Colorado. Although I have not gone up to the mountains this fall, my friend and colleague Cindy Schaeffer went up recently and shared these pictures with me. The temperatures have been warm and the sky blue as the trees have changed colors.

The styrofoam salute

President Obama arrives in New York to give a speech on global climate change. He salutes a Marine with the styrofoam cup he is holding as he gets down from the helicopter. He also gave a speech on the beginning of bombing in Syria. Is this the way to show respect for our soldiers?




Read more here.
Thanks to Curt Dale.

Many have forfeited winning for whining

I liked Greg Gutfeld's comments at Fox News much better than the ones presented here. Read and watch Greg here.

Thanks to Marisa Rickerson.

Training "moderate" rebels in "moderate" Saudia Arabia

Andrew McCarthy writes:

Our government, nearly $18 trillion in debt, will expend another $500 million to school 5,000 “moderate Islamists” in military tactics that cannot win the war in Syria but could eventually be used in the jihad against the United States. Welcome to Libya . . . the Sequel.

Oh, and did I mention that the training of these “moderate” rebels will take place in “moderate” Saudi Arabia?

Read more here.

Why allies may be hesitant to join with us in a "broad coalition"

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

When Obama entered office in 2009, Iraq was mostly quiet. Both the president and Vice President Joe Biden soon announced it was secure and stable. Then they simply pulled out all U.S. troops, bragged during their re-election campaign that they had ended the war, and let our Iraqi and Kurdish allies fend for themselves against suddenly emboldened Islamic terrorists.

Read more here.

Assumptions

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Obama appears to be guided largely by a stubborn adherence to his own past political truisms, and that explains the current inability to articulate a strategy or craft a coalition.

The facts on the ground in Syria and Iraq must be massaged to reflect these beliefs.

Read the whole thing here.