Frustration

You have probably heard about Trump's tweet today about Jeff Sessions.

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance gives us his take.

My personal view is somewhat different than most. President Trump is highlighting a genuine frustration, not necessarily with Jeff Sessions per se’, but rather within the institution Jeff Sessions dutifully represents. This is, after all, what happens when citizen government runs into the bureaucracy of the institutions.

The same issues surfaced in May of 2017 (when Jeff Sessions tendered his resignation), and it’s not as big an issue as people make out. In fact, it’s rather ordinary and expected. POTUS Trump is a change-agent, a wrench in the machine. AG Sessions is a machine operator; retooling for a change in outcome, yet retaining the machine.

We are seeing nothing more than the typical frustration of a ‘results oriented president’ who, like many of us, has had enough of these seemingly endless investigations and wants the DOJ to get-on-with the indictments, arrests and prosecutions.

...The DOJ lawyers, that is to say: ‘the prosecutors President Trump wants to see activated pronto’, are already in place… and they have been for some time.

Read more here.

Blood on their hands

At The Daily Caller, Ann Coulter eviscerates Broward County's absurd policies.

When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail. In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.

...Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too. They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands.

Read more here.

Andy McCarthy is not impressed by the Schiff memo

At National Review, Andy McCarthy writes, The Schiff memo harms Democrats more than it helps them, because

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.

Read more here.

Never embarrassed by any scandal

Obama was never "embarrassed" by any of his scandals

Sorry, I got confused and watched yesterday's podcast, instead of today's. It is a good one though, with all five panelists expressing their views clearly and emphatically.

Obama says, "There were no scandals that embarrassed us." Dana Perino said, "If you are not capable of being embarrassed..."

Juan whines that it is difficult to be a liberal on Fox, because they cover all the news that needs to be discussed.

President is going to be making his first trip as president to California. He will be inspecting prototypes for the Wall.

"Natural instinctual spokeschildren."

Spontaneous and organic? Ace of Spades reveals here the lavish Hollywood connections to the Florida teens who have been organized to push for gun control.

Obama's scandal-free administration???

Andrew Klavan says Russia-gate is really Obama-gate. The corruption was invisible only because the press did not do its job. "Nobody got indicted?" Because the Justice Department was so corrupt! A Democratic president is having his top law enforcement officials spy on the opposing party's candidate for president. It is obscene and goes way beyond Watergate!

Just practicing?

Kathleen Joyce reports at Fox News that a teacher fired one shot from a gun in an empty classroom in Georgia today. Read more here.

Wages and jobs; jobs and wages!

Laura Ingraham gives Trump credit for being the first US President to stand up to China, which has become increasingly aggressive. She has Bob Lightheizer as a guest. He, as US Trade Representative, is trying to reverse a very bad trend for our workers, ranchers, and farmers: wages and jobs. Reduce the deficit!

Trump questioning Sessions through Twitter

Judson Berger reports at Fox News about Trump's impatience with the FISA investigation. Trump tweeted this morning,

Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!

Read more here, including the responses from Sessions and Gowdy.

President Trump speaks in honor of Billy Graham at the US Capitol

Transcript here.

Reversing Alzheimers

At The Daily Wire, Amanda Prestigiacomo reports on a research project in which Alzheimers Disease in mice was completely reversed. Faster please.

Ever do this?

Satanic

On Twitter Gabriel Malor tells the story of two men wrongly convicted of murder. They are now free after serving 26 years in prison waiting for the legal system to right the wrong. Read about it here.

"They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.”

The latest target of the Southern Poverty Law Center is Christina Hoff Summers. Adam Rubenstein reports in The Weekly Standard,

The Southern Poverty Law Center is at it again. In a report on “Male Supremacy,” an ideology that the group says “advocates for the subjugation of women,” it included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling her someone “who gives mainstream and respectable face to some [Men’s Rights Activist] concerns.” Sommers told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that she finds her inclusion in this report “quite surprising.”

“I completely reject that," Sommers said. "This is a group I used to admire. They once went after Klan members and Nazis and now… [they go after] people like Ben Carson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It’s absurd.” She adds that the SPLC has no evidence for the suggestion that she “gives mainstream and respectable face” to “male supremacy”:. “They’re blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.”

Read more here.

Trump's "fiancée" crashes White House gate (Yes, really)

Pawl Bazile reports at Dangerous.com,

A woman taken into custody after driving her car into a White House barricade claims President Trump is her fiancée.

Law enforcement believes the crash was purposeful, but isn’t saying whether the president or White House was targeted, reports Fox News. Secret service has explained 35-year-old Jessica Ford of La Vergene, Tennessee was the driver and is mentally unstable.

“The Secret Service has had previous encounters with the female in the vicinity of the White House resulting in numerous arrests for a variety of criminal violations,” a statement read.

Read more here.

Our competitive edge is our ingenuity

From the excellent book The Teenage Brain by Frances E. Jensen MD:

The frontal lobes make up more than 40% of the human brain's total volume...The frontal lobes are the seat of our ability to generate insight, judgment, abstraction, and planning. They are the source of self-awareness and our abilities to assess dangers and risk; so we use this area of the brain to choose a course of action wisely.

...Our competitive edge is our ingenuity, brains over brawn. This edge happens to take the longest time to develop, as the connectivity to and from the frontal lobes is the most complex and is the last to fully mature.

The connectivity of the brain slowly moves from the back of the brain to the front. The very last places to "connect" are the frontal lobes. In fact, the teen brain is only about 80% of the way to maturity. That 20%
gap, where the wiring is thinnest, is crucial, and goes a long way toward explaining why teenagers behave in such puzzling ways - their mood swings, irritability, impulsiveness, and explosiveness; their inability to focus, to follow through, and to connect with adults; and their temptations to use drugs and alcohol and to engage in other risky behavior. When we think of ourselves as civilized, intelligent adults, we really have the frontal and prefrontal parts of the cortex to thank.

"Disproportionate"

At Town Hall Dennis Prager writes,

Those old enough to remember the Cold War will remember that the left constantly called for a "nuclear freeze," including a unilateral freeze by Western countries. Likewise, the European left mounted huge demonstrations against America bringing Pershing 2 missiles into Western Europe. No matter how violent the Soviet Union was, the left always opposed a strong Western military. The left mocked then-President Ronald Reagan's call for an anti-ballistic missile defense system; it couldn't understand why Americans would think being able to protect America from incoming ballistic missiles was a good and moral idea. The left so effectively derided the idea, mockingly dubbing it "Star Wars," that few knew its real name: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

So, too, the left universally condemns Israeli attacks on those who seek not merely to defeat Israel but to exterminate it. The left around the world condemned Israel's military responses to Hamas launching missiles at Israeli civilian targets. They declared Israel's counterattacks "disproportionate" -- because more Gazans were killed than Israelis. Never mind which party was the aggressor or which party targeted civilians. Had the left been as active in the 1940s, it surely would have condemned the Allies for their bombing of Germany and Japan; after all, far more German and Japanese civilians were killed in Allied bombing raids than Allied civilians were killed in German bombing raids. Now that was really "disproportionate."

Fighting evil is the left's Achilles heel. As I have repeatedly noted, the left fights little evils, or even non-evils, rather than great evils.

With regard to fighting communism in the 20th century and today fighting radical Islamic terror and Islamist treatment of women, the Stalinist North Korean regime, the Holocaust-denying and Holocaust-planning theocracy of Iran, the Syrian mass murderers and the violent crime in America, the left is either silent or appeasing. And, of course, it works constantly to weaken the American military, the world's greatest force against evil.

But the left does direct its fighting spirit against Confederate statues, schools with the name of slave owners (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), carbon emissions, income inequality, "microaggressions," "white privilege," any limitation on abortion, Columbus Day, "Islamophobia," Israeli settlements, "Russian collusion" and the like. Against these minimal or nonexistent evils, the left is ferocious.

That is why the left opposes enabling some teachers and other adults in schools to carry arms in order to possibly stop a mass murderer: The left doesn't fight evil; it fights those who do. Just as the left hated anti-communists, hates opponents of Islamism and hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (far more than the Iranian ayatollahs), it hates those who wish to see teachers and others voluntarily armed take down the murderers of our children.

Read more here.

Jared Kushner has officially lost the ability to review sensitive classified information

Katie Pavlich reports at Town Hall,

Senior advisor to President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner -- who is also the president's son-in-law -- has officially lost the ability to review sensitive classified information after failing to obtain a permanent security clearance.

Speculation surrounding whether Kushner's permanent security clearance, in addition to temporary clearances held by dozens of White House Staffers, would come through has been swirling for weeks. Last week President Trump said it was up to Chief of Staff John Kelly to determine whether his son-in-law would continue to review classified information.

“That’ll be up to General Kelly. General Kelly respects Jared a lot and General Kelly will make that call. I won’t make that call,” Trump said last week during a press conference with the Australian Prime Minister at the White House.

Previously, Kushner had access to President Trump's daily intelligence briefings and reports. Moving forward, he will not. Ivanka Trump, married to Kusher, has also been working at the White House on a temporary clearance.

More on the background from POLITICO:

The White House’s handling of clearances came under scrutiny after reports that Kelly had been aware that former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was accused by his two ex-wives of verbal and physical abuse, did not have a full security clearance in part because of a previous protective order granted during one of his divorces.

The scandal prompted Kelly to crack down on staffers working without full clearance, more than a year into the Trump administration.

In a five-page document released last week, Kelly ordered a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering protocols.

“The American people deserve a White House staff that meets the highest standards and that has been carefully vetted — especially those who work closely with the president or handle sensitive national security information,” Kelly said in the memo. “We should — and in the future, must — do better.”

The White House argues Kushner will continue to fulfill an important role at the White House, regardless of his access level to classified information.

Wrecking a statewide sport for all the other participants

"Crumbs"

Victor Davis Hanson asks at American Greatness,

How did we ever get to a point where a progressive politician on the barricades, worth $100 million, lectures the middle class that their extra $200-300 a month are crumbs?

The progressive politician he is referring to is Nancy Pelosi.

The concept of “disparate impact” is asterisked by the disproportional “meritocracy” of the NFL or NBA. Yet meritocratic Asian admittances at UC Berkeley are seen as some sort of unnatural “overrepresentation,” and thus in the past were carefully and stealthily trimmed. (Isn’t a professional sports billet considered far more lucrative than an undergraduate slot at Berkeley?)

...politicians, celebrities and marquee athletes require well-armed bodyguards, on the premise that in their unique cases, guns really do both deter and in extremis protect the important. Do armed guards protect or provoke?

Post-Freddie Grey Baltimore has become a far more dangerous place for African-Americans and for small business owners—even as once oppressive and supposedly Neanderthal police became more socially aware and adopted enlightened reforms.

There are a few common denominators to all these paradoxes that overwhelm the daily news.

One, people are people, unique individuals, not monolithic cut-outs of classes, races, or religions.

Two, in comparative global terms, it is hard for anyone to be oppressed in a free-wheeling, rich, and leisured 21st-century America. The efforts to appear so can hinge on the embarrassing.

Three, when movements, such as the identity politics core of progressivism, rely on shared oppressions, and when the categories of the oppressed in many demographic groups outnumber the available oppressors, we should expect a confused competition of grievances.

Four, victimhood cannot serve as the basis of a viable political movement. Contemporary oppression requires a Byzantine regulatory handbook of qualifications, exceptions, and nuances to rank competing reparatory claims on society and culture. How else to account for things like multibillionaire Oprah Winfrey being “discriminated” against in a Swiss boutique on the basis of supposedly not easily being accorded a customer’s look at a $38,000 crocodile-skin handbag? And is such a luxury even permissible in the era of PETA?

...So who will police the police? Who is left to victimize the victims? Is it possible that the oppressed can oppress other oppressed?

35 minerals essential to our nation's security and prosperity

At The Visual Capitalist, Jeff Desjardins writes about the 35 minerals that are absolutely critical to the security and prosperity of our nation. For most of them, we are dependent on imports.

Broward County school shooting was an entirely predictable outcome of intentionally-followed ppolicy

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse writes about the Broward County Florida school shooting.

...the horrific event was an entirely predictable outcome of intentionally-followed policy.

In April of 2012, Jesse Jackson began to promote the principle: “We must stop suspending our students”. Three months later, in July of 2012, President Obama signed an executive order establishing the basic outline of what later came to be known in Broward County as “The Promise Program“.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder created the financial carrots. In 2013 Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and a hired Chicago transplant, School Superintendent Robert Runcie, simply formalized and executed the policy.

...Sheriff Israel and Superintendent Ruchie’s implementation of the Broward Promise Program was easy; just stop arresting students and the statistics would be great. As the statistics improve so too does the financial reward from federal grant monies.

While Sheriff Israel and Superintendent Runcie were garnering praise for the results of their program, Parkland school student Nikolas Cruz was a simultaneous benefactor as his anti-social and violent behaviors were being ignored.

This is a simple cause and effect. There are no mistakes being made here. This is entirely by design; as Mr. Cashill notes, this is not “incompetence“, it’s strategic. The fact that Nikolas Cruz was able to exit high school without a police record, then began amassing weapons, and eventually became a school shooter killing 17 students and staff; is an outcome of strategic policy, not incompetence.

While Nikolas Cruz was being ‘handled’ and not documented. The Sheriff’s police force was conducting diversity training seminars, de-escalation meetings, and sensitivity training exercises. The last active shooter training was somewhere around 2006. As a person within Broward law enforcement stated: [beginning in 2013] “major change in policy & procedure as well as dismantling of proactive enforcement units in favor of community policing squads whose sole purpose is not enforcement. We paint houses, pick up trash, conduct summer camps for kids & giveaway presents on Christmas.”

There is no actual mechanism to stop Broward county officials from carrying out their ideological objectives. Social Justice has replaced Law Enforcement. The sheriff is essentially untouchable until his next election – which he will likely again win easily; the School Superintendent is protected by the political apparatus willing to sacrifice a few dozen residents to retain the ideology; the school board and county officials are all part of the political apparatus; the mayors are appointed not elected; the district attorneys are all-in on the program; and the judges come from the ranks of the attorneys…. so, don’t expect changes.

Inside Broward County Florida schools blood can be washed away and carpets can be changed, but the political ideology and civic institutional goals are always protected.

If you think the federal government could step in to reduce the risk of violence, think again. The U.S. federal Department of Justice has an entire suite of lawyers assembled just to protect these localized regions from intervention. An activist Civil Rights Division is replete with social justice defenders, there will be no help from the DOJ.

The rapid response group within the federal government is the secretive Community Relations Service. If you think the FISA abuse scandal revealed political ideology within the DOJ National Security Division, well, the DOJ-NSD pales in comparison to the DOJ-CRS.

It’s the DOJ Community Relations Service who activates and organizes the marches on behalf of the local officials. The CRS is 100% full of social justice advocates who are trained specifically for the mission of protecting progressive community leaders from constituent backlash. As CTH met with and researched the secretive CRS in 2012 and 2013 we affectionately named them the “tamp-down/ramp-up” federal group.

The CRS exists to ‘tamp-down’ any backlash to their ideological goals, and ‘ramp-up’ antagonism against political opposition or narratives adverse to their interests.

Give it a few more days and everyone will move on. This is not my cynicism, this is the reality of my having seen -first hand- the scale of the political machine that creates and defends outcomes like the Parkland School shooting.

###

The Second Amendment

Are you upset at having to listen to traumatized teenagers screaming about gun control on the t.v. news? Don't worry, this is just one step in improving the news. Of course, you do have the option of turning off the t.v.!

Over the long term, narrative creates the atmosphere in which people think.

Andrew shows part of Brian Stelter's interview with a kid named David Hogg. Andrew's assessment of Hogg: "His arrogance is matched only by his ignorance. In other words, he is a teenager!" But the fault lies with the media, in this case CNN, for trying to use a teen to generate emotionalism.

Andrew makes this statement: "The media is owned by large corporations. All big corporations are in favor of big government." I wish to read more about that.

Michael Knowles is another person at The Daily Wire who has podcasts. He has been researching the history of gun control. He says the history of gun control is about disarming blacks. The earliest gun control measure occurred in Virginia. It was about taking guns from not only enslaved blacks, but free blacks as well. The KKK rose up only in the areas where courts did not protect Second Amendment rights of blacks. The KKK was the military wing of the Democratic Party.

Eventually gun control spread to include others whose civil rights Democrats wanted to take away, such as Italians in New York. Later it targeted jews in New York and Mexicans living in America. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect any American citizen against tyranny.

1946 The Battle of Athens in Tennessee. G.I.s returning from World War II cleaned up the town and chased the Democrats out.

The Second Amendment exists in case the government stops allowing the First Amendments and all of the other ones! Obama had the IRS silence his political enemies, he had the Justice Department spy on his political enemies, he had the State Department lie to the press to advance his Iran deal.

"It’s ironic that hate is seen as a path to virtue!".

At The American Spectator, Ron Ross writes,

A precondition to needing to virtue signal is guilt. Virtue signaling is one of the left’s package deals that typically involve two steps. Firstly, make people who have done nothing wrong feel guilty. Then, offer them ways to assuage that guilt. It’s little more than a con game but it has worked amazingly well for liberals.

...An irony is that the need to virtue signal is an insecurity about your own virtue.

Virtue signaling is, of course, closely related to political correctness. Being sensitive to PC and being quick to take offense demonstrates your virtue for all to see.

Donald Trump is the context for much of the virtue signaling we observe. It’s another two-step process. The first step is to decide that Donald Trump is a reprehensible human being. He is crude, unsophisticated, and his personality makes you cringe. The second step is making it crystal clear that you and he are polar opposites. You have absolutely nothing in common with him. You don’t need to provide details about what makes you virtuous, just the fact that you despise him is sufficient to prove you’re virtuous. He is crude, you are refined. Trump provides a backdrop for your identity. It’s ironic that hate is seen as a path to virtue.

Virtue signaling is a substitute for thinking, it is thinking avoidance. It is the latest variation of group think. When you latch on to group opinions you have no need to think for yourself.

A favorite demand of leftists on college campuses and endowment fund boards of directors is “divestment.” What is divestment? In the investment portfolios of endowment funds and retirement portfolios are stocks of companies involved in shunned activities such as producing and selling fossil fuels. In such situations activists demand that the colleges or foundations divest, i.e. sell, any stock of such despicable companies.

Divestment is possibly the most useless behavior anyone could ever imagine. How anyone thinks it will have any impact on anything real is a mystery. Because of the way capital markets work, divesting on anything but a massive scale will have no long-term impact on a company’s share price. If they manage to drive a stock’s price down, bargain hunters will drive it back up to its underlying value, relative to other stocks. Other than stoking sanctimony divestment accomplishes absolutely nothing.

...These are just a sampling of the ways virtue signaling is dictating behavior far and wide. Being aware of its many manifestations will reduce your confusion and increase your amusement. It’s a shame it’s doing so much damage.

Read more here.

Unwavering valor

Please tell us who these billionaires are who control our biased media, Chairman Nunes! No one in the mainstream media has covered the questionnaire the Intelligence Committee has sent out to top officials in the Obama administration! The final speaker at CPAC, Chairman Nunes is presented with the Defender of Freedom award from the American Conservative Union. He truly deserves it!

Advocating an enumerated constitutional right

Excerpts from Kurt Schlichter writing at Town Hall,

We’re now supposed to give up our guns because it's the 21st Century, people, and the cops will totally protect us and oh, you can’t dare criticize the FBI for failing to disarm yet another ticking time bomb and what kind of crazy nut would expect a police officer to actually confront a gunman?

...The liberal elite is using its social and cultural ties to those at the helm of big companies to essentially blacklist the NRA, and thereby the tens of millions of Americans who support gun rights. But oppression is oppression whether it’s done by a government bureaucrat or a corporate one, and our principle of non-interference in business assumes business stays out of politics. But now National, Hertz, and others are cutting ties to the NRA, and liberals are advocating banks do the same. Their intent is clear – what they can't do in politics they will simply do by not allowing the representatives of people whose politics they don't like access to the infrastructure of society. And we're not supposed to do anything about it because, you know, free enterprise and stuff. You know, our principles.

No. They are exercising political power. We have our own political power, and we need to exercise it - ruthlessly. The first step is an executive order at the federal level directing that no federal contract can go to any company that discriminates against an organization based on its advocacy or exercise of an enumerated constitutional right. We wouldn't allow a company to do business with our federal government if it discriminated on other grounds, so why should we do it discriminate on political grounds?

Next, Congress needs to pass a comprehensive non-discrimination regime designed to protect us into law and allow individuals and entities the right to sue any business that discriminates on the basis of the advocacy for exercise of any constitutional right.

...We could call it the “Civil Rights Anti-Discrimination Act” and dare the Democrats to vote against it. Now, of course, due to the filibuster, it might be tough to pass a law protecting our rights through Congress, but we own about 30 legislatures. That's 30 states that can each outlaw this kind of discrimination within their borders. So Hertz and National, welcome to a whole bunch of lawsuits in Texas and Wyoming and elsewhere. But hey, it's worth it because of the children, right?

The liberals are also pushing venues like Amazon and Roku to drop NRA News - to actively censor a news outlet because they don't like its agenda (I appear regularly on it). The difference between government censorship and corporate censorship is no difference at all. Again, the federal government and the states have the power to regulate. Once again, we must ban discrimination on the basis of advocacy for or exercise of constitutional rights, and empower individual plaintiffs to seek penalties and attorneys’ fees for violations. If these companies really believe what they're doing is right, they can hire lawyers in 30 states.

In fact, it’s clearly time to consider antitrust investigations and other legislation designed to bring to heel the massive, unaccountable, agenda-driven big Silicon Valley players.

Read more here.

Is your child's school system teaching personal finance literacy?

hat tip Visual Capitalist

The Most Valuable Brand in Each Country in 2018

What is the most valuable brand in your country? Visual Capitalist takes a look.

Jeff Desjardins reports,

After retail giant Amazon, which ranks as the world’s top brand at $150.8 billion, the next biggest brand in any other country is Samsung (South Korea) at $92.3 billion.

From there, it’s another big fall to get to the next tier, which includes China’s ICBC ($59.2 billion), Germany’s Mercedes-Benz ($43.9 billion), Japan’s Toyota ($43.7 billion), and Royal Dutch Shell ($39.4 billion).

After that, the remaining brands on the list are in the $4 billion to $25 billion range, including well-known names like Nestlé ($19.4 billion), Zara ($17.5 billion), and RBC ($13.8 billion). While small compared to Amazon, these are still mostly large international or national brands.

WHY IS AMAZON SO DOMINANT?
As Amazon continues to rapidly scale its revenue, and as the Jeff Bezos Empire expands, we are all now very familiar with the online retailer’s dominance.

That said, while Amazon appears massive on the map, it actually only just edged out Apple as the most dominant brand overall. Further, because Apple is also based in the U.S., the iconic tech company doesn’t have its logo appear on the map itself.

Here’s a look at how brand value for the top five brands has changed over time:

Brand Value Over Time

Courtesy: Brand Finance

According to Brand Finance, the value of Amazon’s brand increased by 42% between 2017 and 2018. Here’s what Brand Finance CEO, David Haigh, had to say about the future of Amazon’s brand:

The strength and value of the Amazon brand gives it stakeholder permission to extend relentlessly into new sectors and geographies. All evidence suggests that the amazing Amazon brand is going to continue growing indefinitely and exponentially.

– David Haigh, CEO of Brand Finance

Interestingly, the report authors also offer up reasons for Apple and Google getting “left behind”.

For Apple, an over-dependency on the iPhone limits the brand’s growth opportunities, while Google’s investments outside of search are unable to offer the scale, impact, or audacity demonstrated by Amazon’s ventures.

A NOTE ON BRAND VALUE
Understandably, there is often some confusion behind the definition of “brand value”.

Not to be confused with market capitalization or enterprise value, brand value is defined as a marketing-related intangible asset that generates economic benefits for a brand within a company. In other words, this is the value of the image of the brand itself, as represented in the minds of stakeholders.

The widespread ascription of irremediable moral evil to a rival political faction

Malcolm Pollack writes,

Last night CNN put on a televised “Town Hall” meeting on guns. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard my impression was that it was neither civil nor productive. (Astonishing, I know.)

Charles Cooke comments on it, here. He calls it a “disaster for our discourse”.

All comity and presumption of goodwill is rapidly boiling away in America. A glance at the history of civil wars, going all the way back to Rome, should fill any honest observer of the current scene with a dark foreboding. We are at the point now where a critical threshold is being crossed: the widespread ascription of irremediable moral evil to a rival political faction. This is a prerequisite of, and generally a precursor to, publicly sanctioned violence. I hope I am exaggerating the severity of this crisis, but I fear I am not.

P.S. Just wondering: in the aftermath of the Parkland atrocity, has anyone blamed the shooter? If so, I must have missed it.

Passed one, flunked the other

My son and I took two quizzes at The Washington Times. We got in the 85th percentile on spelling but only 34th percentile on the NFL. Try it with your kid here.

Comparing Trump and Obama

William Haupt writes in Watchdog.org,

"If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility.”

– Barack Obama

For almost a decade, America was controlled by an oligarchy of progressives who massaged every word of information that flowed from the chambers of the federal newsroom. When Donald Trump was campaigning, he openly exposed the façade of "change you can believe in" as a "change for the worse." And not a day went by that Obama’s media machine proved how hell-bent they were keeping alive the Obama "hope and change" delusion. They did not miss one chance to discredit a single word spoken by Donald Trump. They filled their presses with high octane petrol to disparage Trump's efforts to expose the factitious wonderland of Elysian Fields they had created for Obama.

“One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don't go into government.”

– Donald Trump

President Trump not only opened the doors of the White House and invited everyone in, he took his message to the streets with social media, TV, radio and to the progressive press. By opening up the cloistered press rooms of the oval office and electing to fulfill his promise of transparency in governing, he also exposed his administration to an unrelenting bombardment of public and media criticism. Yet in the first year of his govern-ship, the economy is on a free-market roll, foreign relations with our allies have been stabilized and he has given every American a tax cut. And according to the media, he is undoing all of the great things Obama did in the last decade?
Read more here.

The effect of government funding of climate science

Anthony Watts writes,

My friend Marc Morano of Climate Depot has a new book out now “The Politically Incorrect Guide® to Climate Change” which is one of many books in The Politically Incorrect Guide® series that are now available from Regnery Publishing.

I had an early review copy, and here is what I wrote about the book, listed in the beginning section of the book:

“This book covers the history of climate, from the global cooling ‘coming ice age’ scare of the 70s to the ‘we have just a few years left to save the planet’ that characterizes the current global warming scare. Written in a light reading style, virtually every page is meticulously referenced with sources for the points he makes. Love him or hate him, Morano is very effective in conveying the history and the climate flim-flammery under the guise of science that has been going on the last few decades, mostly thanks to huge government funding of climate science. It reads like a postmortem verification of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, which warned of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ but also said, ‘The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.’”

— ANTHONY WATTS, publisher of WattsUpWithThat, the world’s most viewed climate-themed website

Republican Florida legislators ask Governor Scott to suspend Broward Sheriff

Christian Datoc reports at The Daily Caller,

Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran sent a letter to Governor Rick Scott Sunday urging him to suspend Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel over his department’s handling of the Parkland shooting.

Read the story here.

Prager U.'s lawsuit against Google

Eric Lieberman writes a comprehensive article at Western Journalism about Google's censorship of Prager U. videos. Read it here.

Climatologist Dr Tim Ball Wins Epic Libel Court Battle

John O'Sullivan reports at Principia Scientific,

After 3-week trial Canadian judge dismisses all charges in the lawsuit brought against Dr. Tim Ball by British Columbia Green Party leader Andrew Weaver. Climate skeptics are hailing the verdict as a key victory over extremists promoting human-caused global warming. Not a peep from the mainstream media!

Speaking to Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, Ball explained:

“The judge ruled that Weaver was not defamed by me and dismissed the claim completely. This was after almost seven years and thousands of dollars in legal costs.” But Ball lamented, “There are no media reports and my guess is there won’t be any.”

Read more here.

The preacher's son

From Woodsterman:

Preacher's Son

An old country preacher had a teenage son, and it was getting time to
where the boy should give some thought to
choosing a profession. One day, while the boy was away at school, his
father decided to try an experiment.
He went into the boy's room and placed on his study table four objects:
1. A Bible
2. A silver dollar
3. A bottle of whiskey
4. A Playboy magazine.

"I'll just hide behind the door," the old preacher said to himself.
"When he comes
home from school today, I'll see which object he picks up and is interested in.
If it's the Bible, he's going to be a preacher like me, and what a
blessing that would be!
If he picks up the dollar, he's going to be a business man and that
would be okay, too.
But if he picks up the bottle, he's going to be a no-good drunken bum,
and, Lord, what a shame that would be.
And worst of all, if he picks up that magazine he's going to be a
skirt-chasing womanizer."

The old man waited anxiously, and soon heard his son's footsteps as he
entered the house
whistling and headed for his room. The boy tossed his books on the
bed, and as he turned to leave
the room he spotted the objects on the table. With curiosity in his
eyes, he walked over to inspect them.

Finally, he picked up the Bible and placed it under his
arm. He picked up the silver dollar and dropped it into his pocket. He
uncorked the bottle and took a big drink, all the while admiring the
magazine's centerfold.

"Lord have mercy," the old preacher breathed to himself. "He's gonna
run for Congress."

Is Primary-rigging protected by the First Amendment?

At a website called Disobedient Media, Elizabeth Vos reports that

The ongoing litigation of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit and the appeal regarding its dismissal took a stunning turn yesterday. The defendants in the case, including the DNC and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, filed a response brief that left many observers of the case at a loss for words.

The document, provided by the law offices of the Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment. Twitter users were quick to respond to the brief, expressing outrage and disgust at the claims made by representatives of the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Read more here.

Uncovering the conspiracy

"Operation Latitude"

At The Conservative Treehouse today, Sundance ties all the loose threads together on the scandal involving the FBI, DOJ, DOS, White House: Operation Latitude.

One of the most famous photos in history

73 years ago today, Marines on Iwo Jima raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi.

Semper Fidelis. pic.twitter.com/lRUTwLp9fR

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) February 23, 2018

"I just know I have a clear conscience if he takes off and starts shooting places up."

The New York Times provides this transcript of a female in Idaho calling the FBI because she felt Nikolas Cruz was going to "start shooting places up."

"Please boycott us!"

Here are the list of companies asking that we boycott them because they do not believe in 2nd Amendment, our US Constitution & American Liberty & Freedom! pic.twitter.com/yWisZNzd4l

— MichaelTetrick (@MichaelTetrick) February 24, 2018

Dreamer

BREAKING: RCSD student, illegal immigrant charged with making threat against East HS https://t.co/ODYyWFUYx6 pic.twitter.com/fWRGdZGMvs

— 13WHAM (@13WHAM) February 23, 2018

Samantha Miles reports for Fox 25 News,

Rochester, N.Y. (WHAM) — Rochester Police have arrested a 21-year-old student in the Rochester City School District after they said she made a credible threat against East High School.

Read more here

Personal Protection

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

We have already had too many infringements on our right to bear arms. The Second Amendment has, for more than two centuries, allowed people to protect themselves, their families, their homes, their communities, their lives, their rights, and even their country. It has come to be an important aspect of personal protection in far too many of our communities in the modern world. Yet, there are those who would try to deny this aspect of safety to the common citizen.

They work all manner of bureaucratic wiles to deny average American citizens access to arms and ammo. They try to limit and even restrict gun and ammo purchases. They have initiated background checks for obtaining weapons and many places deny same day purchases. Some areas require registration of weapons. But, in my opinion, one of the most heinous requirements is when a citizen is required to take a course and pay for a license to exercise their right to carry a weapon for their own safety.

Why do we have to be checked to purchase protection? Why do we have to buy a license to carry a weapon to protect ourselves? Politicians or celebrities do not have to pass background checks or buy licenses to have armed bodyguards provide them with personal protection. Why are we denied the same courtesy of simply being allowed the personal protection of guns, without having to ask permission of an overreaching government?

Oh, I know all about the argument that we do not need personal weapons for protection ‘cause we can call 911 and the police will protect us. But, if 911 is good enough for us, why is it not good enough for the politicians and celebrities? Oh yeah, ‘cause we all know how pathetic 911 response times tend to be in most communities throughout America. Not that I am blaming the police. It is simply that there is too much crime, too many citizens, communities are too large, and not enough cops.

So, while 911 serves a purpose in some cases, it is not truly a life-saving plan when it comes to muggings, assaults, rapes, home invasions, domestic violence, and acts of terror. Immediate threats and danger require immediate action and protection. A gun in the home and in the hand is certainly more security than an operator on the line and a patrol car on the way.

If personal armed protection is good enough for the politicians, celebrities, and other elites, it is good enough for the common American citizen. We may not be able to afford armed bodyguards, but we can dang sure afford to buy a gun at Cabela’s, the local pawn shop, or our favorite gun show! And, we should be allowed to do it with no more restrictive requirements than what is involved for hiring an armed bodyguard!!!

Quick, take a picture before it melts!

Shoveling snow off the deck to our golden retriever to catch and fetch.

The Scheme Team

"Lions don't care about the opinions of sheep."

So says the sheriff of Broward County Florida, whose department comes in for some strong criticism by Mark Steyn here.

Real bullying: the manipulation of those in power or who know how to game the system

At a website called Quora, Jon Davis, who is a Marine Corps weapons instructor, has some things to say about our victimhood culture and its effect on boys in particular. Remember Columbine? After Columbine, the meme that developed was that the killers, Klebold and Harris, had been victims of bullying by jocks at the school. So, anti-bullying programs proliferated.

Victimhood culture is when a culture evolves to handle slights against them through responding to each of them, not directly, but leverage third-party intervention. These third parties could be parents, school authority, police, voters, or political donors. What makes victimhood cultures dangerous was that it incentivized “victims” to catalog and broadcast every conceivable slight against them, no matter how trivial or unintentional the insult. They need to build cases and this encouraged to exaggerating or falsify harm they received to create a case against the accused satisfactory enough to warrant some desired or demanded action. That said, I sympathize with schools. To stand up to a mob and say, “You don’t have all the facts,” is hard. So I understand why schools gravitated in this direction.

But victimhood culture does something else to the character of its members. It causes them to value victimhood as a form of virtue itself. That means that those within such cultures seek to gain the short-term benefits of being perceived as a victim, such as pity or advocacy, but at the cost of long-term appreciation from the culture, as classic (and more healthy) character traits, such as self-reliance and self-respect are ignored and allowed to atrophy.

This matters to those concerned about the development of boys. The reason that victimhood culture is dangerous is because it short-circuits natural boyhood development by specifically contradicting with the nature of boys. Boys align themselves in the same way as anyone else, through dominance hierarchies. The adolescent male dominance hierarchy is one which is attempting to collectively define what being a man should look like, and it socializes its members to this archetypal masculinity identity. Every group of boys is different, but usually the character of this archetypal male is one who is self-reliant, can defend himself, is attractive to girls (women if you prefer, but we are talking about adolescents here), is trustworthy, and loyal to his friends. Likewise, they’re reactionary, and will attempt to challenge even the slightest attempts to shame themselves, their family, or other groups they are loyal to.

Victimhood culture disrupts this process and is contrary to honor cultures. Both are reactionary when slighted, but honor cultures seek to handle matters personally without intervention of third-party authority. With victimhood culture, third-party intervention is the goal. In this way, one playing by the rules of a victimhood culture can undermine the entire adolescent male dominance hierarchy, disrupting its ability to socialize males, preventing the establishment of positive male ideals, and removing a means for the boys at the bottom to rise to a healthy middle.

...To prevent “bullying” we have prevented this necessary outlet for boyhood socialization and replaced it with one where real bullying, the manipulation of those in power or who know how to game the system, continues to take place. Without the outlet, the means to settle the score, the tyrants have no means of being humbled, as the only power they respect is prevented from reaching them. By that, I mean a truly self-righteous boy. But worse, those who are their victims have literally no means of recourse… unless of course they want to tattle and increase their suffering tenfold in the days to come.

...I say this is worse because we believe we have protected the boy who is being bullied by preventing only one form of conflict - physical violence. Because we have conflated a schoolyard tussle with a school shooting, we’ve made all forms of violence evil. I’ll say this to make it clear, there is a need for the Marines to kill people. There is a need for the justice system to sometimes take a life in defense of others. Sometimes, violence is necessary, but in making the idea of violence taboo — “there’s never a reason for violence” — we’ve short-circuited that all-important understanding of the world where we teach kids what kinds of violence are acceptable, what kind is not, and what kind is necessary. Yet we tell ourselves we have prevented bullying, but if we look at all evidence, this child — the victim — is far more likely to become not just a bully, but a repressed monster. By removing the most observable conflict method, we removed from him the ability to rectify his own situation through that ancient of means, and I’ll add, the means most common and most widely respected among boys. At the same time, we interfered in socialization through friends and peers, a form of solidifying social norms which the data is clear on, is far more powerful than teachers and schools. And worst of all, we never taught him about violence, so he’s teaching himself.

You start taking influences from irrational sources and coming to dangerous conclusions. To them, it isn’t just the individual bullies who are at fault. It is all the bystanders who do nothing. It is an authority that does nothing. It is even a God who does nothing or who would be so cruel as to create a world with such suffering as theirs. We can look at the Columbine Shooters to understand that much. One of the shooters left us a great deal of evidence about what was going on in his mind before the massacre. He communicated visions of the world that was corrupted and evil, where he was a victim of a flawed creation, and his self righteousness was such that he placed himself in the role of the judge for all of that flawed creation. This meant that he had lost complete hope in the world and was justified in lashing out against not only his aggressors, but the whole system on an existential level. He wasn’t just out to punish his aggressors, but even God for creating something so terrible as creation.

He said all these things, placing himself in the position of arbiter of cosmic justice, even as he failed to correct the problems in his own life that held him back. Perhaps he wasn’t able to recognize what his own problems were. Perhaps he was told too often that he was fine just the way he was when the world communicated to him a very different message. Regardless, this kid lacked hope for climbing out of his hole, so he wanted to drag everyone and everything into his hole with him. I don’t think his story is in any way unique to just his case.

Put all this together, and I think we have a much better understanding of what makes a school shooter. They aren’t just bullied kids. Everyone faces some degree of meanness from time to time, but they are kids who absolutely cannot escape the bottom rungs of the adolescent social structure. Over a period of years they absorb abuse by other kids using them to climb their own dominance structures. They never develop strategies to deal with this, but instead, attempt and fail at other strategies which exacerbate their position, such as retreating into isolation or seeking to accentuate their own victimhood to the revulsion of everyone else around them, even adults. Given all of this, claims that they are suffering from mental disorder due to long-term sustained trauma seem warranted, however, as these symptoms are only beginning to manifest, it’s doubtful there would be much of a record for anyone to know to watch their behavior. Finally, they absorb some negative influences that begin to place a predictable set of ideas in their head about the nature of people, the nature of the universe, and their role within it. Then the final evolution is to embrace that hatred for the world, hatred for themselves, and sense of meaninglessness to the point of suicide. Many simply stop at that tragedy, but some take it even further, wanting to take as much with them before they go. Maybe they’ll use a gun, maybe arson, maybe a bomb, but those few will stop at nothing to express their resentment of Creation.

Read more here.

Gun Free Zone

Better out than in!

Trump "not afraid to walk over hot coals"

Dana Perino observes that Trump is openly looking at a number of ideas for solving the gun issue, just like he did with immigration. Jesse wonders what the Democratic policies are and asks Democrat Juan. Rather than answer, Juan criticizes Trump and the NRA. Greg tells Juan that his fixation on the NRA is Juan's way out of the debate!

Two recent speeches by Victor Davis Hanson

In the first video, VDH explains the illiberal elite. We have reduced history to cardboard caricatures. He speaks with more passion than I have seen from him previously.


In the second video he talks about California. Do you know that Google, Facebook and Apple account for half of all advertising on the internet (about $4 trillion dollars)?

Gun free zones have been the target of over 98% of mass shootings!

A lot of people are talking about problems facing our country, but CNN is offering a solution: hysteria, hate, and ignorance! For example, they have on Thomas Friedman, a New York Times "numbskull" who is worried that Trump did not overreact to the 13 indictments against Russians who tried to sow chaos in 2016 (and most likely, still are even today. Meanwhile, Trump calmly and compassionately holds listening sessions with survivors of gun violence!

CNN uses traumatized young people to sell t" heir political agenda. They organize a lynch mob against Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch for supporting the Second Amendment. Lynch mobs are why people have guns!

Sebastian Gorka is Andrew's guest."Evil exists! We need a mental health system that identifies mentally ill people and helps them! It is basically impossible to adjudicate someone as mentally deficient and institutionalize them. 72 hours is the most you can get from a court, due to a Supreme Court ruling.

Gun free zones have been the target of over 98% of mass shootings!

CNN's legal expert Jeffrey Toobin says "I want rancor, I want vitriol," then misquotes Trump.

More information on today's school shooter threat

Two of my Facebook friends offered more information about today's wannabe school shooter I referred to in this post.

Pat Sopko commented,

They said this turned out to be a fake threat. Somehow, someone managed to send this msg to hundreds of schools across the nation. A few of my local schools got the same msg.

David Simmons commented,

A school here in my county in Ohio just had the same type deal, yesterday, and the school closed, and the other two main schools were on a delay, and had sheriffs posted at the schools. I understand they have the kid who made the threat.

Update: This story in the Albuquerque Journal seems to be addressing the Santa Fe situation.

"Not compel, but convince!"

He's got his alibi all ready

My two sons attend Santa Fe High School here in New Mexico. They are home today because the superintendent of the public schools notified us that someone has made a school shooting threat on social media.

When Obama and Holder were running things in America, they wanted to do something about the incarceration rate of minorities. One of their ideas was to encourage school systems not to report criminal behavior to law enforcement. Instead, they have a "teen court," which comes up with a plan for each young person who engages in criminal behavior. Thereby, the school system gets recognition by reporting their statistics to the federal government showing very few students being arrested and entering the criminal justice system. Broward County, Florida, where 17 students were slaughtered recently, had a very similar system.

My son reposted this Snapchat message from a friend of his, supposedly also containing the school shooting threat encircled in red.

Notice the would-be shooter has his alibi all ready, portraying himself as the victim, therefore justifying what he plans to do.

Birth of the Blues

Iceland may become the first European country to outlaw male circumcision.

I read the article in The Guardian by Harriet Sherwood. Do you have an opinion on this?

The Pied Piper of New Journalism

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse, who is a resident of Florida, tells how he attempted to warn the school board about what was going on in Broward County at the time of the Trayvon Martin case. I was not a Treehouse reader then, but I sure am now. The work Sundance has done on the FISA-gate matters has been superb.

And it wasn’t just Trayvon Martin, there were hundreds of similar actions taken by conflicted School Resource Officers – totaling thousands of crimes over the course of just the first few years of these programs (2010 through 2013).

CTH contacted the Miami-Dade School District, every single school board member, and the Broward County School District – to warn them of what was taking place.

We provided thousands of pages of sworn affidavits and transcribed testimony from law enforcement. We spent several thousand dollars locating, transcribing and assembling the documents and evidence; and hundreds more hours compiling all the information. –SEE HERE– We sent all of it to both school districts and both school superintendents.

Their response: “go away”.

The school board’s in Miami-Dade and Broward County had created a disastrous scheme and it didn’t take long to see where this was going. The scheme was supported by President Obama’s federal education policy, and executive orders –SEE HERE– and people like Jesse Jackson –SEE HERE– In August of 2012 President Obama issuing an “executive order” establishing the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence.

Broward County, even went one step further. They stopped arresting students and then changed the policy of suspension.

Follow a simple timeline: ♦In 2011/2012 Broward County School administration made a policy decision to block the arrests of students in order to improve their education statistics. ♦In 2013 that same school board was warned what was happening as a result of that policy. ♦In 2015 the School doubled-down on the diversionary policies and allowed students to break the law, including physical violence, without legal consequence. ♦In January 2017 Nikolas Cruz criminally assaulted someone; again, law enforcement engagement was blocked by policy. ♦A year later in February 2018 Cruz killed seventeen students.

Read more here.

Careless demonization

"Control what other people think? That is our job!"

Giving in to terrorists

Mark Steyn writes another piece today about the Muslimization of Europe.

"For a third wife, the house would have to grow larger," says Ahmad, laughing - as well he might: Childless Germans pay for the polygamous Muslims that will supplant them - because Mutti Merkel says they're the software designers Daimler and Mercedes urgently need. I think I'll take my chance on Toyotas built by Japanese sexbots.

Read more here.

No bias on this team!

David Sivak reports at The Daily Caller,

None of the 16 publicly-confirmed lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team are registered Republicans, The Daily Caller News Foundation has found.

Voter registration records indicate that 13 of the attorneys are Democrats and three have no party affiliation. This is the first time the political affiliation of all 16 lawyers has been reported.

Read more here.

Because no one ever thought!

El Borak writes in Men of the West,

...We built a culture in which celebrity is our highest aspiration. From “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”, we have taught our kids that being rich, being famous, being glamorous is what’s important. When we cut ourselves loose from any virtue higher than others’ opinions of us, no one thought it would result in a generation of teens who eat Tide Pods for a few Youtube clicks. Because no one ever thought.

We built a culture that promotes confusion. We tore down all barriers related to morality, especially sexual morality. We started with serial monogamy and hookup culture and moved right into married gays and bent genders. Now after 12 years of sex education our kids don’t even know what sex they are. We purposely tore down every protective social wall that humanity spent the previous 5 millennia constructing. No one ever thought to ask why they were constructed in the first place. Because no one ever thought.

...So now we have raised a generation of angry, bitter, drug-addled, under-developed aspiring rappers who don’t know who they are and never learned how to deal with life’s most common setbacks. We cut them loose without support on an America that has lost its way, lost its finances, lost its vision, and lost its history. Then we are surprised at the results.

What did we think was going to happen if we did this? We didn’t think at all.

...If you’re truly serious, you can almost guarantee that while you cannot stop school shootings, at least they will not affect you and yours. And you will raise well-adjusted, decent human beings to boot.

First Step: Homeschool or die. I don’t want to hear why you can’t do it. In three decades as a homeschooling parent, I’ve heard your excuse. Either it’s important enough to you that you work through your roadblocks, or it’s not. Your choice.

Second step: turn off the damned TV. Our poisonous culture is delivered to our kids electronically, and it is parents who fund it. Hollywood has no money that regular Americans didn’t give it. It is a cesspool that is purposely corrupting your children, purposely destroying beauty and virtue and love. Everything you hold dear, it destroys. Cut it out of your life.

Get away from the city. That world is too big for kids. A high school of 3,000 students is a factory. It alienates kids. It harms them in ways that are impossible to measure and difficult to comprehend. Every school shooter you’ve heard of came out of public schools, most of them suburban. Instead find a nice small town where they can establish deep and long-lasting relationships, not only with people their age, but with older people. Find a place where they can know and be known, a place small enough that they matter. They can’t put down roots in concrete.

Build a culture of life in your home and community. Pray for and with your kids. Teach them to hunt and to garden, to train a dog and change a diaper. Teach them that decisions have eternal consequences. Teach them about the importance of sex, of marriage, of faithfulness. They will not be cool in the world’s eyes; neither will they be destroyed by the world’s coldness. Teach them that their happiness is not the highest virtue and they will be happier than any of their peers.

School shootings will not be solved because they are but a symptom of the real problem. They are the hacking cough of a man with lung cancer; cough drops, no matter how strong, will do no good. We are accelerating into a full-blown cultural meltdown. And we cannot turn it around without radical surgery, without monumental effort, without considerable sacrifice. In reality, we are probably going to ride it right through to hell, at full speed, with tens of millions of our fellow Americans cheering the whole way.

Can’t they see where this road leads? What are they thinking? They are not thinking at all.

Read more here.

Branco nails it again!

An organization that claims to stand for one thing, but actually stands for another!

Planned Parenthood claims to stand for preserving life but is actually involved in ending it. You are helping fund this organization, whether you want to or not! Planned Parenthood doesn't help people plan for parenthood, it helps people escape it! They do an abortion every 98 seconds!

According to federal law, the United States is not permitted to spend taxpayer money on abortions. But Planned Parenthood receives over $500 million dollars a year in federal funding.

250 teachers responded in 24 hours!

AWR Hawkins reports at Breitbart,

Read the story here.

"Good Guy With A Gun Saves Mother And Daughter Who Were Being Attacked" "... good thing he took that type of action."

Ryan Saavedra has the story at The Daily Wire.

Ann Althouse on trolls

"I'm particularly interested in thinking about this subject in light of the hand-wringing over Russians trolling the 2016 election. I believe the fear of trolls is dangerous to a culture of freedom of speech, and I'd like to welcome people all over the world to participate in the political debate in America, just as I want Americans to be able to talk to people in other countries about what we think about their politics. We need to build up our vigor, not become more dependent on the government to filter out things that might confuse us."
Read more here.

Satan-inspired headline?

On the day of the death of Billy Graham Jeff Bezos' Washington Post had a Billy Graham story ready to print. Although the story is a good read, the Post's headline writer couldn't resist captioning it

Divorce, drugs, drinking: Billy Graham’s children and their absent father

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse calls it "Satan inspired."

Billy has finally gone to be with his Savior

As you probably know, Billy Graham died today at the age of 99. Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse posted this video featuring Billy and two other Christians.

What 30 machines changed the world the most?

Popular Mechanics has a fascinating article on the 30 big machines that changed the world in big ways here.

Billy Graham is silent, He helped thousands come to Christ. What are our real crises in America?

Who helped thousands of people come to Jesus? Billy Graham! He died today at age 99.

Is gun ownership a crisis in America? No.

Is Russian trolling in our elections a crisis? No.

CNN has crossed over into a disgusting craziness.

What is a crisis in America? Opioids! House Republicans are taking this up today. Many Americans are miserable. In Europe, they are not even having children anymore. Same in Japan.

No pill can give you an understanding of who you are, why you were made, and where you come from. When people are told that there is no purpose to life, that they are just a bunch of chemicals, nobody made them, they have no soul, no spirit, there is no God, you have to depend on the State for everything, you are going nowhere, you take away everything of value to them. Billy Graham is silent. God is still speaking. If America stops listening to God, that will be a real crisis!

Gun control

Now CNN ambushes patriotic Americans

Ace of Spades reports,

CNN Ambushes Woman Who Put on Pro-Trump Event, Unwittingly Supported by RUSSIAN Trolls;
CNN Fails to Disclose That CNN Itself Promoted a RUSSIA-Organized Anti-Trump Event
—Ace
So, we're now ambushing law-abiding citizens who did nothing wrong?

Should we begin ambushing the CNN personnel who helped RUSSIAN propaganda trolls with their anti-Trump rally as well?

Go here to read more, especially a tweet from Buck Sexton, and watch a video of the attacking "journalist" and MSNBC's coverage of an anti-Trump gathering in New York City funded by the Russians a week after Trump was elected.

The Russian trolls said things these patriots agreed with. So the patriots cut and pasted what they agreed with on Facebook, not having any idea it was Russians sowing chaos.

Not a whiff of evidence of collusion!

FISA-gate video number two

Here is video number two explaining the crimes so far revealed in FISA-gate.

FISA-gate video number one

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse has now put some of his research in video form. Here is the first video.

Getting closer

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse informs us of a letter written today to perhaps as many as 20 members of the Obama administration, asking each to reply to a series of questions. Here are the questions.

Sundance adds,

The Obama political intelligence apparatus (DOJ, FBI, ODNI, CIA and DoS) are all fundamentally wrapped up in the political objectives behind the Clinton-Steele dossier and all the uses therein. The outlier was the NSA and Director Admiral Mike Rogers; again, more evidence of why the internal intelligence apparatus were demanding Director Rogers be fired from the administration.

...The Clinton-Steele Dossier is now exposed as the foundational document behind a fraudulent FISA surveillance warrant. As such Phase-two includes exposing everyone who is associated with the assembly, use, promotion and distribution of the Clinton-Steele Dossier.

In the original reporting (Dec ’17) Strzok and Page were removed in July/August 2017 as a result of notification from Inspector General Michael Horowitz. This is the same time-frame when DNI Dan Coats and AG Jeff Sessions announced a special DOJ-FBI task force that media ignored. It was August 2017 when Rod Rosenstein confirmed the task force was in place.

None of this appears coincidental. All of this activity is connected.

Read more here.

Andrew Klavan ep.465

Another really good Andrew Klavan show today. He also has an excellent guest in the second half of the program. D.C. McAllister writes for PJ Media and The Federalist and parents six children.

Quick! Watch this before YouTube censors it (again)

"It's amazing to me how quickly YouTube went from "Broadcast yourself" to "Stifle yourself or be terminated!" It is happening to so many people that the words YouTube and censorship now go together like Islamic and terrorism, or migrant and rape or Marxist and dictatorship!

Israel's solution to school shootings

Tzvi Lev reports in Arutz Sheva,

When terrorists attacked a school in Maalot in 1974, Israel did not declare every school a gun-free zone. It passed a law mandating armed security in schools, provided weapons training to teachers and today runs frequent active shooter drills. There have been only two school shootings since then, and both have ended with teachers killing the terrorists.

Read more here.

They are who we thought they were!

Ace links to Coach Dennis Green, who was not happy that his team lost to the Bears. Ace uses this video to explain that people like John Kasich are who we thought they were. Read more here.

"The Broward County Solution"

At the American Thinker, Jack Cashill asks,

Did the Progressive 'Broward County Solution' Cost 17 Student Lives?

It is a must read!

Triumph of the shrill

Headline at Ace of Spades today:

The Children's Crusade: CNN Continues Round-the-Clock Reportage About Teenagers Demanding Action on Gun Control
—Ace
Triumph of the Shrill.

Ace then links to an article by John Sexton at Hot Air:

The Children’s Crusade For Gun Control Marches On At CNN

"In California, civilization is speeding in reverse"

Victor Davis Hanson describes what life is like in the agricultural valley around Fresno, California.

The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding.

...In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.

Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.

The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.

Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”

...California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.

The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)

...A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.

I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.

...In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.

A Day That Shall Live in Infamy

Gleen Reynolds notes at Instapundit,

Democrats like big, dramatic civil-rights violations, as proof that they’re Doing Something about a problem.

Then, he links to a report by Sandy Iketa in the Foundation for Economic Education.

n February 19, 1942 — seventy-four years ago today — Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. With the stroke of his pen, the man who had earlier snubbed Jesse Owens after the Berlin Olympics used his executive powers to order the imprisonment of over 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry (as well as thousands of German and Italian ancestry) for the duration of World War II.

Most of the internees were natural-born American citizens, whose “crime” was having a parent or merely a grandparent with Japanese blood. It was an act of naked, aggressive racism that damaged people and families, including my own, for generations.

It happened here. With the NDAA as the law of the land, and with war-mongering and xenophobia, it could happen here again. We must oppose such collectivism and stand for freedom for all.

On a related note, if you think Apple’s current battle with the FBI over iPhone security is based on empty fears of civil-liberties violations, think again. After decades of denials, the US Census Bureau recently admitted that it provided the Treasury Department with the names and addresses of Japanese-Americans who were later tracked down and herded into concentration camps.

Calling out the biased media

Phillip Rucker wrote a piece in the Washington Post criticizing President Trump for meeting with first responders instead of grieving with families who lost loved ones. He then tweeted,

Sarah Sanders then responded,

At The Daily Caller,

Trump said of the visit:

Our entire Nation, w/one heavy heart, continues to pray for the victims & their families in Parkland, FL. To teachers, law enforcement, first responders & medical professionals who responded so bravely in the face of danger: We THANK YOU for your courage!

Read more here.