Only in America...

A Canadian looks at us and writes:

TOP-10 "Only In America" Observations ~ by a Canadian:

1) Only in America, could politicians talk about the greed of the rich
at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.
2) Only in America, could people claim that the government still
discriminates against black Americans when they have a black
President, a black Attorney General, and roughly 18% of the federal
workforce is black while only 12% of the population is black.
3) Only in America, could they have had the two people most
responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner, the head of the
Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who once ran the Ways and Means
Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher
taxes.
4) Only in America, can they have terrorists kill people in the name
of Allah and have the msm media primarily react by fretting that
Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.
5) Only in America, would they make people who want to legally become
American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens
of thousands of dollars for the privilege while we discuss letting
anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become
American citizens.
6) Only in America, could the people who believe in balancing the
budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be thought of as
"extremists."
7) Only in America, could you need to present a driver's license to
cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.
8) Only in America, could people demand the government investigate
whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas
went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. oil company
(Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes
(Nike).
9) Only in America, could the government collect more tax dollars from
the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion
dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of $7-Million
PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.
10) Only in America, could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income
taxes - be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who
don't pay any income taxes at all.

found here.

The good 99.9%

Roger L. Simon believes that Obama has topped all of his previous lies. Obama recently claimed that 99.9% of Muslims

are looking for the same thing we’re looking for — order, peace, prosperity.

...No talk from Obama ever about all the extreme misogyny and homophobia that pervades Islam, nor of Shariah law. Nothing like this ever passes his lips — at least I’ve never heard it. To do so would be to say there is something wrong with him. So he says that 99.9% of Muslims reject the Islamists, which is literally impossible because if it were so, the Islamists wouldn’t be wreaking havoc everywhere from Sydney to Sanaa.

Read more here.

Carly Fiorini

The Republicans have a female candidate, too. It looks like Carly Fiorini will be announcing her candidacy for the 2016 presidential candidacy. Attorney Craig Silverman has a talk show on radio station KNUS here in Colorado, and he interviewed Carly today. Her answers to his questions were impressive. As the former CEO of Hewlitt-Packard, she is tough and knowledgeable. She is pro life, anti-marijuana legalization, pro-Israel, and even claims to be anti-crony capitalism! It will be fun having her in the mix.

Theater

Noah Rothman writes,

…this video was shot mere hours after the United States government confirmed that another of its citizens, Kayla Mueller, died in ISIS custody. The day that this video was shot, February 10, was also the day in which American embassy staff and security personnel abandoned Yemen amid chaos and violence…

This behavior is of a piece with last August’s callous display. Then, Obama took to a podium in Martha’s Vineyard to address the brutal beheading of American journalist James Wright Foley by ISIS militants only to dash off to a previously scheduled golf outing within minutes of his mock somber speech.

Read more here.

Questions designed to enhance a bond of intimacy

Is there someone of the opposite sex that you are attracted to...that you would like to establish a closer relationship with? Here are 36 questions posted by Chateau Heartiste. They are in increasing order of intimacy, designed to increase your bond with that person.

Set I

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

16. What do you value most in a friendship?

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

20. What does friendship mean to you?

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III

25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling … “

26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share … “

27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

Conflating memories

Manhattan Infidel has garnered another important exclusive interview with a figure in the news. This time it is Brian Williams, he of the conflated memories.

Driving without a penis

You may have heard that Bruce Jenner was recently involved in a fatal collision on the Pacific Coast Highway. As usual, Manhattan Infidel has all the details of the crash and police interviews with Ms. Jenner. This week Ms. Jenner is on 92 percent of the magazine covers at your local supermarket. Next week it will be one hundred percent.

Remember when we had phone books?

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

The success of Apple

The Wall Street Journal writes today about the most profitable company in history. With its 710 billion dollar valuation, Apple is now twice the size of Google, 2.5 times the size of Walmart, 4 times the size of Bank of America, 8 times the size of McDonalds, and 12 times the size of GM in market capitalization. Probably the most important reason for its success is that the Chinese are buying the iPhone.

The end of free speech over the internet?

Dick Morris has a new video out wherein he warns us that Obama plans an imminent takeover of the internet. Morris calls Obama's plan to regulate the internet extremely dangerous. Obama plans to do this in the name of net neutrality. He plans to do this by executive action. There is a bill wending its way through the Congress to install net neutrality, but to ban federal regulation. Morris concludes that this must become an issue in the 2016 election, or it may mean the end of free speech over the internet! Watch the Morris video here.

Poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, director, and conservative David Mamet

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Speech-making and governing are two different things

When Barack Hussein Obama announced in Springfield, Illinois on February 10, 2007 that he was a candidate for president, he gave a speech. Myra Adams goes back to that speech to read the most salient points of his announced candidacy.

The first was to "build a more perfect union" borrowing a phrase from Springfield's own Abe Lincoln. In fact, according to Gallup, the nation is fifth most polarized now that at any time since 1953.

He also complained about mounting debts. In fact, Adams points out that

it is projected that by the time he leaves office, he will have accumulated debt equal to that of all previous presidents in U.S. history combined.

Adams links to this website to provide a graphic understanding of this debt.

In his speech Obama called for an end to poverty in this generation. In fact, there are five million people in poverty now than when he gave that speech.

When President Obama first stepped into the Oval Office, there were 31,939,110 Americans receiving food stamps. Now that number exceeds 46 million.

In the speech he called for universal health care. In fact,

Americans are stuck with an Obamacare legacy of higher premiums and deductibles for all. His signature program remains highly unpopular among 64 percent of Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What Obama neglected to mention in his 2007 announcement speech was that universal health care, in any form, comes with a sickening price tag.

Equally sickening were a number of politically charged zingers in his speech that were begging to be countered, such as, Let’s be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil. So here is the rational explanation for his refusing to take action on the Keystone XL pipeline while justifying hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on Solyndra and other alternative-energy programs benefiting his political cronies.

Then Obama expresses his patriotism, saying, Most of all, let’s be the generation that never forgets what happened on that September day and confront the terrorists with everything we’ve got. Wouldn’t you love for the Pentagon to render a current opinion on that statement?

Obama ends his announcement speech saying, Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this earth. To that I say, “Kumbaya, Mr. President!” The potential for ushering in a “new birth of freedom on this earth” has never been less attainable, thanks to your avoiding the traditionally strong U.S. presidential leadership role, leaving a world power vacuum in which bad guys and turmoil have flourished.

So, happy eighth anniversary to a speech that started freshman senator Obama on his excellent adventure of over 215 golf outings (including one immediately after he had described as “appalling” the beheading of American journalist James Foley), non-stop fundraising, exotic vacations, and cavorting with celebrities.

His is a journey that will leave our next president with insurmountable problems at home and abroad.

read more here.

Praying for bravery

Ann Voskamp urges us to be brave: not

to pray for the hard thing to go away, but pray for a bravery to come that is bigger than the hard thing.

... people who are done with struggling in their own strength and are starved for some supernatural help to take some supernatural steps. You can’t do God’s Work without God’s Power.

...2 Chronicles 7:14:

“IF… IF…. If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Until there is Repentance — there will be no Difference, there will be no Deliverance, there will be no Resurgence. Nothing will change unless we change something.

What is marriage about?

Kevin D. Williamson believes that civil marriage law is about where babies come from, not

the sexual and emotional interests of adults.

...the 21st-century ethic labors to elide the differences between men and women, between what we once called marriage and what we now call marriage and what we will probably call marriage after the Supreme Court gets done with it. If gay couples want to share property, designate their partners in medical, legal, and financial matters, etc., then the law should accommodate them. If they seek blessings for their unions, there are those who would bless them, and those who — so long as the First Amendment holds — would exercise their right to choose not to. But that is not what civil-marriage law is there to do. It is not about the fulfillment or happiness of married people. It is about where babies come from. Those who believe that to be an “unreasonable” position arrive at that conclusion mainly by refusing to consider the position at all. Instead, they dismiss it as hypocritical, illogical, etc.

That’s one of the reasons why the opponents of same-sex marriage are going to lose that fight. The second reason is that even if same-sex marriages were outlawed nationally, a return to the status quo ante would represent only another kind of defeat: The regime of no-fault divorce, the normalization of nonmarital parenting, abortion on demand, and the rest, which far precedes any move toward same-sex marriage, also constitutes a model of marriage organized around the sexual and emotional interests of adults rather than around the wellbeing of children.

Read more here.

Who is on the "high horse?"

Victor Davis Hanson warns President Obama that his

Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise.

...In his unfortunate National Prayer Breakfast riff, he snarked at American Christians, advising them not to get on their “high horse,” given the moral equivalence between the millennium-old Crusades and the present epidemic of radical Islamic terrorism. Snarkers usually project, masking their own high-horse moralizing by alleging bastard forms of it in others.

...Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers.

...Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president.

Read more here.

Moral idiocy

Dennis Prager believes it is important to dissect the president's words at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence “is unique to some other place” — meaning outside the Christian West — as getting on a “high horse.”

Is this true? Of course not.

In our time, major religious violence is in fact “unique to some other place,” namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities, and other such atrocities?

The answer is, of course, none. Therefore massive violence in the name of one’s religion today is indeed “unique to some other place.” To state this is not to “get on a high horse.” It is to tell the most important truth about the world in our time.

...The president then defends his statement that religious violence is not “unique to some other place” by providing Christian examples: first the Crusades and the Inquisition and then slavery and Jim Crow.

Before addressing the specific examples, a word about the timing. The Crusades took place a thousand years ago and the Inquisition 500 years ago. Is it not telling that — even if the examples are valid (which they aren’t) — the president had to go back 500 and 1,000 years to find his primary Christian examples?

...There is a major moral crisis in one religion on earth today — Islam. To say so is not to get on a high horse. It is to identify violent Islam as the greatest evil in the world since Nazism and Communism.

Read more here.

"Random?"

Does Obama really believe it when he says the acts of terror being committed around the world are just "random" acts? Charles Krauthammer thinks Obama really believes that. Therefore, there is no need for a strategy, because it is all just random violence.

Harsh, brutal realities

Dan Caplis is a Denver lawyer who hosts a talk show on radio station KNUS. I rarely get the opportunity to listen to Dan, since his show conflicts with my work hours, but on my days off I make sure to tune in. Dan is notable for his fight against marijuana legalization, but today he is talking about Obama's stance toward the Islamic State. Dan wants a victory over the Islamic State, and he doesn't believe it will happen without hundreds of thousands of American troops on the ground.

Caplis believes that Islamic State poses an imminent threat to America. IS is raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and plans to attack us on on our own soil. Does Obama have a strategy to defeat the Islamic State? Arab nations are begging for our help. Islamic State barbarians burn an allied pilot in a cage alive, and Obama responds by telling Christians in America not to get on their high horse, because 800-900 years ago Christians conducted Crusades against jihadists who had conquered Christians.

Caplis believes that Obama is committed to enduring in his desire to make sure that the United States does not have an imbalance of power in the world. He wants to make sure America no longer has the power to exert the greatest influence on world events. He has remained steadfast in reducing American military, economic and moral influence. The vacuums left by our withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan have been filled by Islamic Jihadis. Americans lack the will to fight another war, and we do not have a president who is willing to lead us to victory.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stated that IS poses an imminent threat to our national security. Obama responded by firing Hagel. Caplis asked a caller, "How many 9-11 style attacks would it take before Americans would have the will to defeat these savages? One? Two?" Obama knows the vacuums he left in Iraq and Afghanistan would likely be taken over by jihadists, including taking our tanks and weapons we left behind.

Caplis believes eventually we will not be able to defeat IS by a volunteer army alone, and that we will have to reinstate the draft.

Corroding public trust

Charles Lipson writes,

Editors may have their own slant on which stories matter most. The left cares more about income inequality and cheating corporations; the right, more about high taxes, bad regulations, and government overreach. But whatever the stories, we expect them to be truthful.

...Brian Williams was shredding his job description when he made up false, first-person accounts of events and reported them as actual news. He should not be put on “temporary leave” and quietly eased out. He should be publicly fired for cause. The problem is not just that he harmed the “NBC brand,” though he surely did. The problem is that he violated a reporter’s basic responsibility to tell the truth. His mistake wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment one, which might be forgiven after a sincere apology. He repeated a deliberately false narrative multiple times and added newly-fabricated details as he went along. Williams’ transgression hurts all reputable news organizations because it corrodes public trust in reporting.

...When reporters forfeit their credibility by making up stories, sources, or quotes, we are right to mock them. When their violations are significant or repeated, they should be fired. That’s what happened to Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Stephen Glass at the New Republic. When the Washington Post discovered its reporter, Janet Cooke, had fabricated her most important story, she had to pick up her severance pay and return her Pulitzer Prize. Demanding honest reporting has nothing to do with the reporter's politics, personality, or personal life. It is about professional standards and our reasonable expectations. As viewers, readers, and democratic citizens, we must be able to distinguish between Walter Mitty and Walter Cronkite, between the Onion and the NBC Nightly News. It’s essential for our news organizations, and it matters for our democracy.

Read more here.

Time to "pipe up"

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

"Because it is!"

Obama: the cornered one defeated by complexity, hard calls and ambivalence

Peggy Noonan weighs in on President Obama's high horse moral equivalency comments at the National Prayer Breakfast:

“This is just the moment to dilate on Christendom’s sins, isn’t it? While Christians are being driven from the Mideast? [Obama] always says these things as if he’s the enlightened one facing the facts of the buried past instead of the cornered one defeated by complexity, hard calls and ambivalence. He is lost. His policy is listlessness punctuated by occasional booms.”

James Taranto notes that

Not surprisingly, Obama’s musings on religion in general were in the service of denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic.

...To hear the president tell it now, not only is America “irrevocably bound to a tragic past,” but so is Christianity, whose past is an order of magnitude longer than this country’s.

One reader who emailed us about yesterday’s speech complained that Christians didn’t “even get the ‘Well, those bad people weren’t really Christians anyway’ disclaimer.” Of course they didn’t. No one would take seriously the claim that the Crusaders weren’t Christian. By invoking the Crusades as an analogy for 21st-century terrorism, the president reveals the absurdity of his own claim that the Islamic State isn’t Islamic.

Read more here.

Is it too much to ask a newsman to tell the truth?

James Taranto weighs in on the Brian Williams story, saying

it isn’t too much to expect him to tell the truth.

What is the Williams story?

a self-serving lie motivated by a desire to burnish Williams’s own authority by associating himself with the military, an institution that actually does command widespread trust?

Read more here.

Follow the punks!

Lisa De Pasquale writes about some people on the right who might actually lead us to liberty.

Fortunately, there is a group of conservatives and libertarians – I call them political punks – who actually have cultural credibility. They appreciate mainstream culture for the power of the parable in furthering a message of liberty. They also understand that unlike the perpetually outraged on both sides, Americans don’t view everything through politics. They are anti-authoritarian. They are punk. They go against the liberal culture scene and the conservative political scene. These punks are our best hope for engaging new audiences on the importance of liberty.

Who are some of the people she writes about? Clint Eastwood, Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfield, and Gavin McInnes are featured in this article, and TV host Mike Rowe, musician Andrew WK, playwright David Mamet, actor James Woods, TV host Kennedy, Reason editor Nick Gillespie may be featured in a future column.

Net Neutrality = monopolistic control

Agit Pai is the sole Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Mr. Pai

inferred in a Tweet that President Barack Obama’s secret, 332-page “Net Neutrality” document is a scheme for federal micro-managing of the Internet to extract billions in new taxes from consumers and again enforce progressives’ idea of honest, equitable, and balanced content fairness.

Chriss W. Street writes,

If the Internet economy was a country, it would rank fifth, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and India. Economic activity on the Internet totals $4.2 trillion, and almost half of the earth’s 7 billion people are already connected to the Web.

...Pai also released a statement: “President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works,” he said. “The plan explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes on broadband… These new taxes will mean higher prices for consumers and more hidden fees that they have to pay.”

Pai had previously observed that he was concerned about the plan would hinder broadband investment, slow network speed and expansion, limit outgrowth to rural areas of the country, and reduce Internet service provider (ISP) competition.

Read more here.

Which is worse?

Linda Stasi asks,

Is it worse for a news anchor to lie about being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq than it is for a perennial presidential candidate to lie about ducking sniper fire — with her young daughter, yet — in Bosnia?

Both are horrible, but it’s worse for Hillary Clinton, who expects to run the country, to lie about something like this than it is for a blow-dried TV anchor to lie.

The fact that Brian Williams and Clinton (inset with daughter) thought they’d get away with their outrageous war stories despite there being living, breathing witnesses, video and now social media, is bizarrely disturbing. The hubris of the famous in believing that they can get away with lying forever because they are above it all never fails to astound. And never fails to happen.

Interesting, too, is that Clinton said she misspoke and Williams said he misremembered.

If you can’t remember or are mistaken about something as gigantic as getting shot at, how in hell can you report the news, let alone run a country?

At the time, Clinton said, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation.”

Read more here.

How much longer can Hillary stay silent?

How much longer can Hillary get away with silence? Dick Morris points out that

Her hope is that she can keep her silence long enough so that when she does speak out and move to the center in anticipation of the general election; it will be too late for the left to mount any real opposition to her candidacy.

In fact, Morris wonders if the favorite of the left, Elizabeth Warren, may actually be a decoy,

determined not to run and willing to clear the field for Hillary.

Read more here.

Homocidal intolerance

She of the Fuzzy Slippers wrote this back in September:

I see the beheadings, and I don’t feel fear. I am not cowed. I am not terrorized. Instead, I feel rage. I feel outrage. I feel motivated to stop the animals who commit these barbaric, uncivilized, unconscionable acts. And most of all, I feel closer than ever to my God, a God who eschews the violent “conversion” of followers; my God neither needs nor wants followers who are coerced at the end of a dull blade into sputtering a false belief. My God doesn’t need such indignity and would be horrified at such actions by His followers. For all the anti-Christian crap we’ve heard for years, no Christian has yet held hostage a mall and systematically slaughtered anyone who could not recite the Lord’s Prayer (the equivalent of what these godless Islamic beasts did in India, Kenya, and wherever they spread their homicidal intolerance).

Read the whole thing here.

Adulteration in the herbal supplement industry

Mary Esch of the Associated Press summarizes findings of a DNA study of what is actually in food supplements here.

Israeli Air Force decapitates Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria

Caroline Glick reports that

in one fell swoop the (Israeli) air force decapitated the Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria.

...The fact that the men were willing to risk exposure by traveling together along the border with Israel indicates how critical the front is for the regime in Tehran. It also indicates that in all likelihood, they were planning an imminent attack against Israel.

Read more here.

The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal released a statement after Obama made his comments at the National Prayer Breakfast:

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

Read more here.

I'd watch him!

This scoop discovered by the Astute Blogger

Is Belichick a genius?

Did Belichick make a brilliant decision that forced Carroll's hand with second down on the one yard line? Adam Kilgore thinks so.

Thanks to Donald Douglas

Islamic State burns to death more people

Pamela Geller reports that the Islamic State has burned alive some Iraqi citizens, including children. These acts of evil were committed Friday after prayers.
Read more here.

Why doesn't Obama want us to know the names of Muslims he met with at the White House?

The day after IS released the video of the man whom they burned to death, Obama met with Muslims at the White House. Do we the people deserve to know whom he met with?

Brian Williams: a self-aggrandizing liar or a mentally ill fantasist?

Mark Steyn sometimes writes really long sentences:

Next to the Iranian nuclear program or Putin's neo-Soviet expansionism, the question of whether NBC News "managing editor" Brian Williams is a self-aggrandizing liar or a mentally ill fantasist is a relatively minor matter, notwithstanding that he is the very embodiment of the strange antiquated assumptions of network news - that because a chap looks like a 1950s department-store mannequin he's your go-to guy for economic analysis and foreign policy.

Read more here.

Obama's stodgy multiculti relativist mush

Mark Steyn examines what the Islamic State has to offer bored people in the West:

For many of its beneficiaries, modern western life is bland, undemanding and vaguely unsatisfying. Some seek a greater cause, and turn to climate change or LGBTQWERTY rights. But others want something with a little more red meat to it. Jihad is primal in a way that the stodgy multiculti relativist mush peddled by Obama isn't. And what the Islamic State is offering is Jihad 2.0, cranking up the blood-lust and rape and sex slavery and head-chopping and depravity in ways that make Osama-era al-Qaeda look like a bunch of pantywaists.

Read more here.

The strength to conquer all that comes before me

Thanks to Mike Miles

Old MacDonald had a farm...

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Father chooses to keep baby. Mother divorces him.

This baby was born in Armenia. He has Downs Syndrome. When he was born the doctor asked the mother if she wanted to keep the baby. She said no. Then they asked the father, a native of New Zealand. He said, "Of course!" The mother then told the father that if he kept the baby she would divorce him. He did, and she did. He plans to return to his native New Zealand to raise the boy.
Read more here.

A dog who loves tennis

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Writing a novel with her left foot

She has cerebral palsy, and is writing a novel with her left foot. She has completed 60,000 words, and has two more chapters in mind. Read about her here.

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

What's cuter than a baby goat?

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Grateful conversations with God

When

a cool morning breeze, or ice water, or a smile from a child, or a door held by a stranger, becomes a grateful conversation with God.

...Take a moment in your day to sit down, open your hands upwards and look around. What do you see that is a direct gift from God?

Read more here.

Encouraging kids to stay strong

Did you know that Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson has been a hospital regular since he was drafted by the Seahawks in 2012? And, where did he go on the Tuesday after the Super Bowl? Right back to

his weekly rounds at Seattle Children's Hospital.

"I think that to be able to try to find a way to change people’s lives and to be there for them and give them a boost is really important to me,” Wilson said. “They don’t realize how much they’ve affected me."

Go here to read more and see his Instagram pictures with kids he is encouraging to stay strong.

Payback mode

Thomas Sowell takes on President Obama for denigrating the United States in a foreign country.

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a president of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

...Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

...If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is.

The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years, and look for opportunities for “payback” against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.

Both have repeatedly jumped into local law-enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men — neither of whom grew up in a ghetto — have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.

Read more here.

Drones and our future

Ryan Lovelace points out that Mexican drug smugglers

have come a long way from the days when border tunnels and small private planes were state-of-the-art. Their latest innovation: drones.

Read about them here.

On appeasement, deterrence, and the pretensions of narcissists

Victor Davis Hanson has been trying to figure out the roots of Obama's appeasement of Islamic terrorists.

The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions.

But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one.

The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.

...President Obama currently is convinced that his singular charisma and rare insight into human nature will convince the Taliban to peacefully participate in Afghan politics. Obama will supposedly also win over the Iranian theocracy and show it how nonproliferation is really to everyone’s advantage.

“Reset” diplomacy with Putin was supposed to lessen tensions — if, after the 2012 election, Putin just had more exposure to a flexible statesman of Obama’s wisdom.

Throughout history, without the vanity of the conceder, there would never have been appeasement.

Appeasement also always subordinates the interests of vulnerable third parties to the appeaser’s own inflated sense of self. When Chamberlain and the French prime minister Edouard Daladier signed the 1938 Munich Pact, they worried little about the fate of millions of Czechs who lost their country — and less about millions of Poles who were next in line for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.

Reset diplomacy with Russia in 2009 was not much concerned about the ensuing danger to Crimeans or Ukrainians. When the Taliban takes over, hundreds of thousands of reformist Afghans will die.

Obama sees a deal with Iran as a way to cement his legacy as a breakthrough statesman. In comparison, the long-term consequences of a nuclear Iran on the security of tiny Israel or on the stability of the largely Sunni Arab Middle East are future and more abstract concerns for others.

Releasing Guantanamo prisoners, or ignoring red lines to Syria, deadlines to Iran, and step-over lines to Russia, did not win over aggressors. Gestures of appeasement and empty threats only emboldened terrorists and green-lighted dictators to ratchet up nuclear enrichment, or violence against their own people — or to go into Ukraine.

In truth, appeasement, not deterrence, is the more reckless path. With serial concessions, democratic leaders convince aggressors that they must be stronger than they actually are. Those fantasies increase the likelihood that weaker dictators and terrorists will miscalculate and set off a deadly confrontation down the road.

Yet the public often prefers appeasement. Military preparedness and investment are too costly. Backing up threats seems too scary. Churchills and Reagans sound shrill. Alliances, deterrence, and balance of power sound so old-fashioned. Evil and good are derided as too simplistic. Defusing a crisis now is preferable to ensuring one down the road.

Appeasement continues not because it works, but because it serves the pretensions of narcissists.

Read more here.

Why we are all insane

Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Peter Kreeft about his new book on ourselves via the wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Lopez: How does Thomas Aquinas say the Eucharist keeps one from sin? And how is he so sure sin is the worst thing in the world?

Kreeft: The Eucharist keeps us from sin because the Eucharist is literally Christ, whose given name, “Jesus,” means “savior” — from sin. And that means not just salvation from sin’s punishment (hell) but from sin itself, i.e., He sanctifies us as well as justifying us, makes us heavenly here as well as taking us to heaven there.

He is sure that sin is the worst thing in the world, even worse than pain (which very much surprises and discombobulates nearly everyone in our culture) for the very simple reason that sin means separation from God, and God is the supreme good, joy, happiness, and fulfillment. Sin is much worse than just disobeying laws; sin is the dying of the soul, the personality, the Who, the I, the self. God is the source of all life and joy; sin cuts that umbilical cord. We’re all sinaholics. And quite insane, by the way; for we know, by experience, not just by faith, that sin and selfishness (“my will be done”) always bring us misery, in the end, and that unselfish love and faith (trusting God: “Thy will be done”) always bring us joy and peace, in the end. So the next time you’re tempted to sin, think this way: God, in giving you free will, is asking you: “Which hand will you pick? In my right hand is the key to joy, in my left hand is the key to misery. You know that every time you picked my right hand you got joy. What about this time?” And we say: “Hey, God, let’s try the left hand; maybe it will work this time.” We are quite insane.

Read more here.

Defaming America

Mona Charen notes that the modern left

cut its teeth defaming America. That included a campaign of vilification and slander against Americans who served in Vietnam. The chief spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War was none other than our secretary of state, John F. Kerry. In testimony before Congress, young Kerry claimed that American forces in Vietnam had committed atrocities “in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” He claimed that they “randomly shot at civilians . . . raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power” and so forth.

When the Naval Investigative Service looked into these allegations, it found that many of the “vets” whose testimony Kerry was vouching for had not even been in Vietnam. Some had never served in the military at all.

This story, among others, is told in Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, by B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley. It recounts how the left-leaning press relied on impostors and liars to create the myth of the “damaged” Vietnam veteran. Leftist moviemakers then spun their preferred history, portraying the war not as a mistake, but as a protracted American crime.

In time, the leftist interpretation of Vietnam became the conventional wisdom — repeated in dozens of documentaries, enshrined in songs and books, and taught to the young through textbooks. When Ronald Reagan argued defiantly in 1980 that “ours was, in truth, a noble cause” it was treated by the press as a gaffe. As Steven Hayward wrote in The Age of Reagan, the Washington Post’s TV critic observed that NBC’s tone “cast doubt on [Reagan’s] fitness as a leader, if not, by implication, on his sanity.”

In time, the Left retreated from its open hostility to soldiers, preferring to characterize them as victims of evil leaders like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney rather than the foam-flecked psychopaths Kerry had conjured. Even Jane Fonda, who famously traveled to North Vietnam and posed frolicking on an anti-aircraft gun (pointed at her countrymen), has, if not apologized, then expressed regret.

...In the aftermath of 9/11, the old-fashioned military briefly came back into fashion. Every Democratic politician made it a point to praise their service, and the press treated some individual soldiers (usually women, but sometimes men as well) as admirable. That’s when Brian Williams made his bid for faux heroism. Williams’s self-aggrandizing lie about being under fire is a tribute, of a kind, to true heroism. His deceit contains within it the recognition that the kind of terrors real soldiers face can be ennobling, not corrupting. Hillary Clinton tried to poach some glory herself, by falsely claiming to have dodged sniper fire in Bosnia.

They are both liars and deserve contempt for trying to steal some of the honor that comes with military service without actually risking more than a missed meal.

But they are also the party perpetually poised to condemn our real soldiers. The Left has been attempting to “Vietnamize” the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since Abu Ghraib. The president Clinton served and Williams doubtless voted for has hollowed out the military while declining to name the enemy. The best penance Williams and Clinton could do for their flagrant deceit would be to defend the Chris Kyles of the world against their own friends, colleagues, and donors

And if John Kerry would like to apologize to the men who sacrificed for this country in Vietnam, it’s not too late.

Read more here.

Evil

Rich Lowry wonders,

What is it about the word “evil” that so offends the Left?

It smacks of a religious worldview that makes secularists uncomfortable. It sets up a natural opposition between good and evil — what experts dissecting Bush called a “binary discourse” — that is altogether too confident in our own virtue, according to the Left. It doesn’t necessarily entail any particular policy response, but it tilts toward a total commitment to fighting the enemy, since a campaign to “degrade” evil feels inherently inadequate.

If Bush was ill-served at times by his stubbornness and certainty, it’s always worth remembering that Democrats were perfectly content to lose to al-Qaeda in Iraq when Bush was ordering the surge in 2007, and Obama’s insistence on pulling out of Iraq entirely was a priceless boon to the Islamic State.

Obama was allegedly the embodiment of a wholly different approach than Bush, much more nuanced than his predecessor and his embarrassing nomenclature of “evil.” Yet Obama’s doubts were more about the usefulness and goodness of American power than about his own purposes. He pursued the “end” of the Bush-era wars at all costs, regardless of the depravity of the forces on the ground who would benefit.

We were supposed to be beyond good versus evil, although the other side didn’t get the memo and never left the field. It’s almost as if the greatest trick evil ever played was persuading the Left not to call it by its proper name.

Read more here.

Another UN scandal

Anne Bayefsky shows how the United Nations is

Criminalizing Israel’s efforts to exercise its right of self-defense against a foe openly committed to genocide strikes at the heart of the sovereignty, well-being, and legitimacy of the Jewish state. Demonizing a democratic society that is ready, willing, and able to ensure the accountability of its armed forces is not about protecting Palestinians. It is about endangering Israelis.

Human-rights law is being perverted for anti-human-rights ends, and it is about time human-rights lawyers — and all those who care about defeating the enemies of rights and freedoms — stood up and objected.

Read more here.

No littler man has ever been president

Why were President Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast so deeply offensive? David Gelernter writes:

It wasn’t easy to say right away. We have two minds that work simultaneously, our feeling mind and our thinking mind; they nearly always reach the same conclusion, but our feeling minds often get there first by a mile — they feel instantly that something is wrong — and we are left sputtering inside, angry, in need of a few moments to say why.

...A sensitive-minded Christian has every reason to grieve over those long-ago events — and perhaps in a certain, limited sense, to feel guilt over them. But the president obviously doesn’t feel the slightest grief or guilt; he was telling us what we ought to feel. He was trivializing the barbarity of ISIS by connecting it to the fossil remains of long-extinct Western behaviors, trivializing ISIS by tying it to infamous ancient crimes that have, for the average inhabitant of the earth, no emotional significance whatsoever.

...Yet if his goal had been merely to rub out all rage and bitterness against ISIS as if it were a cigarette butt to be casually flipped to the ground and squashed by the presidential foot, he wouldn’t have achieved half the offensiveness he actually managed. For the president had no interest in claiming his own share in the guilt of the Inquisitors; his goal was to demonstrate his long heritage of victimhood and show off his moral superiority. He explained that the Inquisition had led via slavery right to Jim Crow; and where Jim Crow is concerned, he embodies all suffering victims (not that he actually has any ancestors who were slaves).

...But no one is actually standing by to denounce Islam on the basis of Christian superiority over the last two millennia, which means the president made it up out of whole cloth — or else it is a hallucination; perhaps he can’t tell the difference any more. So long as he has made his own superiority to all petty passions clear, so long as his own moral farsightedness is reaffirmed yet again, the speech is a success. No littler man has ever been president.

Read more here.

Exploiting the exalted status of grandmothers

hillary Clinton is now tweeting under this handle:

#GrandmothersKnowBest

Matthew Continneti writes:

With #GrandmothersKnowBest, the nefarious strategy becomes clear: Exploit the exalted status of grandmothers to capture women voters and the emotions of anyone who has grandparents (i.e., all of us). If you still are not horrified, I remind you that the country faces the very real prospect of up to a decade more of this mindless treacle.

...Nevertheless, joining AARP and cashing a Social Security check does not grant an individual moral authority or omniscience or membership in a protected class. Sarah Palin is a grandmother. Does Hillary think she knows best, too?

A defensible statement about grandmothers is that some of them know more than some of us on occasion. To whom that statement applies is often a matter of subjective judgment. When the grandmother we are talking about is Hillary Clinton, she actually knows a great deal less than others, in my opinion, about how to restore America’s place in the world, improve economic growth, and modernize the welfare state.

...On some level, though, I suppose it is reasonable for Clinton to adopt the posture of grandmother to the nation. The Democratic party that she leads is aging and reactionary and backward-looking and spends much of its time preserving victories it won some time ago. What better protector of a sclerotic, desultory, confused, incompetent, decrepit welfare state than a rickety 67-year-old with health problems and a tin ear?

...Life is easier when she is there to take care of us.

Just don’t get too close to grandpa.

Read more here.

What is the most common job in your state?

Here is a colorized chart that shows the changes from 1978 to 2014.

White House Terrorist Identification List

The president's equivocating radical Islam and Christianity

Goldberg has written about Obama's comparison of present day Islamic jihad with medieval Christianity. He finds it

amazing — and amazingly pathetic — that the president felt the need to chide a room full of religiously literate people about how they shouldn’t get too judgey about what the Islamic State is doing right now because Christians did bad things almost 1,000 years ago.

...How is it that the sins of Christianity are eternal but the sins of Muslim fanatics right now aren’t even Muslim? The Islamic State is enslaving people right now. America had slaves 150 years ago.

...This isn’t complicated. It’s really not. If you have to clear your throat for five minutes about the skeletons in our closet before you can feel comfortable denouncing barbarians who bury little boys alive and then go on to rape their little sisters, that’s is your hang-up, man. I’ve got my faults, all reasonable people can agree, but I don’t feel compelled to list them before I denounce rapists and murderers; “Hey man, I know, I drink too much scotch and I’m sometimes needlessly sarcastic, but you really shouldn’t rape little girls or set people on fire.”

...Nearly everything we revere about modernity and progress — education, the rule of law, charity, decency, the notion of the universal rights of man, and reason were advanced by the Church for most of the last two thousand years.

...Forget the Inquisition and the Crusades for a moment. Take slavery. It was an evil institution. It will always remain a stain on America’s honor.

But here’s the thing. America put an end to it at an enormous price. Moreover, slavery was a constant on every continent for thousands of years. Looking at America in the context of the great tide of human events, the remarkable thing isn’t that we had slaves, it’s that we ended slavery. We ended slavery because deep in the founding principles of this country were deeply Christian — or, if you prefer, Judeo-Christian — principles that eventually couldn’t be reconciled with slavery.

It’s entirely fair to argue that we shouldn’t get on a high horse with regard to how the French or the Canadians do things, no matter how much fun it may be. But the Islamic State? The Mullahs of Iran? Boko Haram? Please, we’re so much better than them by any objective moral or intellectual standard it’s insulting to be asked to make the case. That doesn’t mean we don’t have faults, but it does mean our faults are entirely irrelevant and one should not bring up such irrelevancies for fear that reasonable people will hear false equivalencies.

Read more here.

The global jihad threat to our natoinal security

The King of Jordan is talking tough. However, Andrew McCarthy writes:

While the Islamic State’s sadistic method of killing the pilot has the king and his supporters talking tough about retaliation, millions of Jordanians are Islamist in orientation and thousands have crossed into Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. There will continue to be pressure on Jordan to withdraw. Without a real American commitment to the fight, this pressure will get harder for Abdullah to resist.

Jordan has no intention of getting into a land war the king knows he cannot win without U.S. forces leading the way. But the Islamic State does not need to lure Jordan into a land war in order to destabilize the country — it is already doing plenty of that by intensifying the Syrian refugee crisis, sending Jordanians back home from Syria as trained jihadists, and trying to assassinate Abdullah.

I will close by repeating the larger point I’ve argued several times before. We know from experience that when jihadists have safe havens, they attack the United States. They now have more safe havens than they’ve ever had before — not just because of what the Islamic State has accomplished in what used to be Syria and Iraq (the map of the Middle East needs updating) but because of what al-Qaeda has done there and in North Africa, what the Taliban and al-Qaeda are doing in Afghanistan, and so on.

If we understand, as we by now should, what these safe havens portend, then we must grasp that the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the global jihad constitute a threat to American national security. That they also (and more immediately) threaten Arab Islamic countries is true, but it is not close to being our top concern. Ensuring our security is a concern that could not be responsibly delegated to other countries even if they had formidable armed forces — which the “coalition” countries do not.

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.

Read more here.

Rights? What rights?

Have you read the outrageous story of how police and child protection workers behaved when a father allowed his two children to walk home together from a park in suburban Maryland?

Here it is.

Obama's insipidly hypocritical and perverse comparison of Christianity to Islam

Jonah Goldberg believes that

The president’s comparison of Christianity to radical Islam defies logic.

...while some rationalized slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S. by invoking Christianity, it was ultimately the ideals of Christianity itself that dealt the fatal blow to those institutions. Just read any biography of Martin Luther King Jr. if you don’t believe me.

...President Obama can’t bring himself to call the Islamic State “Islamic,” but he’s happy to offer a sermon about Christianity’s alleged crimes at the beginning of the last millennium.

...We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West’s high horse, because we’ve earned the right to sit in that saddle.

Read more here.

The barbarity and depravity of militant Islam

Open Blogger at Ace of Spades writes about IS terrorists'

perfectly coherent and consistent belief system that has convinced them that non-true believers are unworthy of life and may be killed; that women are on earth to please men, and their subjugation is noble.

This is not delusion or mental illness, though the barbarity demonstrated by many of Islam's adherents would be considered exactly that by Western thought. Calling it such is the same rationale that sees Islamic terrorism as a law enforcement issue, or IS expansionism as a regional problem.

Ace of Spades commenter MWR disagrees:

There's no reason a psychopathic, anti-social personality type can't be drawn to a particular religious ideology. Why do you think so many prisoners convert to Islam? It gives them permission to do what they like to do: rape, pillage, murder. It tells them that shit's RIGHT.

Read more here.

Progressives, blazing with self-righteousness, believe themselves entitled to make their preferences a matter of law

Kevin Williamson notes how in California,

chemicals from marijuana smoke will be officially tolerable, while the same chemicals from nicotine vaporizers will be officially outlawed.

Williamson adds,

fashionable pseudoscience ranging from homeopathy to aromatherapy is — at the insistence of those same progressives — subsidized by the federal government and the states under lunatic provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which should probably be renamed the Theoretically Affordable Craptastic Insurance Policy and Pseudoscientific Mystical Horsepucky Non-Care Because We Say So Act.

...There are many conservatives who prefer organic food, who do yoga, who like trains, and who would prefer living in Brooklyn to living in Plano. De gustibus and all that. The difference is that progressives, blazing with self-righteousness, believe themselves entitled to make their preferences a matter of law.

And that’s the Left in short: A lifestyle so good, it’s mandatory.

Read more here.

Progressives are all about the science - until they aren't

The party of old ideas

No man is damned to live in the shadow of his father or his brother.

Scott Ott writes:

No more Bushes!

It’s practically a national anthem on the political Right these days. A Jeb Bush presidential candidacy is a non-starter because his Dad flip-flopped and raised taxes, or his big brother twisted conservatism to justify bigger government, or twisted “the common defense” to justify military adventurism and to breach the 4th Amendment in that Orwellian place now called “the Homeland.” Or, you can supply whatever it is that you didn’t like about 41 and 43.

However, some folks don’t oppose a Jeb candidacy on the basis of his kin’s presidential performance, but simply on the precept that the American republic has no place for political dynasties. We fought a revolution to escape that, they say.

They’re wrong.

...One of the great benefits of leaving the Old World — with its patrimony and primogeniture — and coming to America was that the second son, and the third son (and beyond) each had equal opportunity to test his mettle in the arena of commerce and ideas, and to soar has high as his industry, character, intellect and perseverance would take him.

You can hate/reject/ignore Jeb Bush for his ideas, for his track record, for his vision, for his bland personality, for his flat elocution and for his hipster horn rims, but in an American meritocracy we don’t judge a man by the “sins” of his family.

Most of all, in these United States, we have kicked down the age-old barrier of genetics, so that no man is damned to live in the shadow of his father or his brother.

Read more here.

Who raised you?

Thanks to Ruth Anderson

Obama's moral equivalence

President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said:

"Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for Obama:

The president and his advisers should be investigating why radical Islam is currently terrorizing the globe, rather than denying it entirely, hiding it by euphemisms, or excusing it by citing morally equivalent examples from the past.

Read more here.

Credibility

Do national news anchors need to have credibility? I guess we'll soon find out. When Brian Williams was a guest on David Letterman's show he told Dave this:

“We were in some helicopters. What we didn’t know was, we were north of the invasion. We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the Third Infantry could cross on them. Two of the four helicopters were hit, by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47.”

The only problem with that is it is not true. The crew members of the helicopter that was hit in Iraq say Williams was not on board, as Williams and the network have repeatedly claimed since 2003. David Zurawik reports:

The admission from Williams Wednesday that he lied about being in a Chinook helicopter that was hit by enemy fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is astonishing. And he only admitted the lie after being confronted with it by the military publication, "Stars and Stripes," which has a well-documented report and timeline showing his shifting version of events over the years.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.


...How could you expect anyone who served in the military to ever see this guy onscreen again and not feel contempt? How could you expect anyone to believe he or the broadcast he leads has any credibility?

Read more here.

Three areas where we can combat poverty

Glenn Reynolds has three ideas for combating poverty. They involve fixing problems in education, immigration, and job licensing. Read his USA Today column here.

Cease and desist!

Instapundit labels this story as pathetic. I couldn't agree with him more.

The New York State attorney general’s office accused four major retailers on Monday of selling fraudulent and potentially dangerous herbal supplements and demanded that they remove the products from their shelves.

The authorities said they had conducted tests on top-selling store brands of herbal supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Walmart — and found that four out of five of the products did not contain any of the herbs on their labels.

Read the whole thing here.

The real reason Mitt didn't run this time

Have you been wondering why Mitt Romney took himself out of the running for the 2016 Republican nomination fight? Jenny Erikson thinks she knows the reason.

Putin has Asperger's syndrome?

A study from a Pentagon think tank theorizes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has Asperger's syndrome, "an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions," according to the 2008 report obtained by USA TODAY.

Putin's "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy," wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement pattern analysis at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Studies of his movement, Connors wrote, reveal "that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality."

Read more here.

An end to the common cold?

Do you think this might possibly be newsworthy? Scientists in England have found a way to defeat the common cold! Laura Donnelly, Health Editor of the U.K. Telegraph, reports:

A scientific breakthrough could herald an end to the common cold, after researchers found a way to “jam” the genetic code and stop the virus replicating.

Experts said the discovery could allow scientists to design molecules which could “stop the virus in its tracks” - fending off colds and winter vomiting disease.

Scientists from the Universities of Leeds and York used a computer-based model to identify a code in the viral genome, which causes rhinoviruses, the most common group of viruses, and the cause of most colds.

They said the breakthrough means that in future, it could be possible to find a way to jam the messages conveyed by the molecules, stopping the virus functioning before disease even starts.

...However, that day could be some time off, with trials on animal viruses required before scientists are able to develop a drug which acts on the signals in the genetic code.

Read more here.

NBC's Brian Willaims gets caught in a huge lie

Ace of Spades is all over the lies NBC anchor Brian Williams has told about being shot down in Iraq. Read it all here.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

The theory of the “anchorman” is supposed to be that while you can’t know what’s behind all the stories you see on the news, you trust them because you trust the person who delivers them. When you are a busted, repeat, self-glorifying, stolen-valor liar like Brian Williams, well, it’s a test of that theory. Will NBC keep him on? Bear in mind that his geriatric audience is likely to have stronger feelings about this sort of lie than the 20- and 30-somethings who are writing about it tonight in industry blogs.

Read more here.

Truther Report

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

What have you observed where you live?

Chateau Heartiste publishes the Centers for Disease Control obesity rates for American women:

the obesity rate in the United States in 1960 versus the obesity rate in 2008:

Obese (BMI ≥ 30)
1960-1962: 13.4%
2007-2008: 34.3%

Extreme Obesity (BMI ≥ 40):
1960-1962: 0.9%
2007-2008: 6.0%

Christie prepares for the White House

Scott Ott has his tongue in his cheek again. He points out that Chris Christie is preparing to do all the important things a president does.

On Day One, he’ll already have a prioritized list for the Lincoln bedroom.

Ott's caption on the above photo:

Few GOP presidential hopefuls have done more to prepare themselves for the office than Gov. Chris Christie, who strives to get practical experience of how it feels to be president.

Read more here.

The JV squad ups its game

It has been a good week for the Islamic State. They have burned to death a captured Jordanian pilot in a cage, threw a gay man off a tall building, then stoned him to death when he didn't die from the fall, and beheaded a Japanese reporter. Read more here.

Meanwhile, Obama, the man who called them the JV squad, has other priorities.

I know what's best for you!

Ace of Spades has

no question that public officials routinely overstate or understate risks in order to manipulate public behavior towards a specific mode they've decided is "for the greater good."

What do you think? Can you cite some examples?
Read more here.

How to become and remain miserable

Don't you even dare to start to think there might be a sunny side of the street. Scott Ott can help you get and stay miserable in the midst of a land of opportunity and plenty.

Defending the Seahawks' decision to pass, instead of run, on second and goal

Very regularly I see conservative bloggers angry at the Vox blog. So, today I decided to go see what all the fuss is about. I saw lots of leftist-slanted articles. Then, however, I read this article on the choices the Seahawks had in the last 30 seconds of the game when they had the ball on the one yard line on second down.

Blame the Amish

Julia Belluz has the measles figures for 2014:

In 2000, the federal government declared that the United States had eliminated the disease: enough people were immunized that outbreaks were uncommon, and deaths from measles were scarcely heard of.

But in the first half of 2014 alone, there were 288 cases. And nearly all of them, the CDC researchers wrote in findings published last June, stemmed from Americans traveling abroad and returning with the disease.

"Of the 288 cases, 280 (97 percent) were associated with importations from at least 18 countries," they wrote. Many of these travelers were coming back from the Philippines, which has been dealing with a massive outbreak since fall 2013.

But all of a sudden, Amish people in Ohio started getting measles:

In the Ohio case, "patient zero" had traveled to the Philippines on a missionary trip. (In case you were wondering, he took a plane. Miller explained, "Some Amish fly. Some don't.") At the time, the Philippines happened to be facing a massive measles outbreak, with tens of thousands of cases.



When he returned to Ohio, and fell ill, a doctor misdiagnosed him with Dengue fever, so he continued to pass his disease along to friends and neighbors, many of whom had refused the vaccine out of those concerns over adverse effects.

Fletcher describes it as a "perfect storm:" an unimmunized traveler going to a place with an outbreak and bringing an infectious disease back to an unprotected community.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever discovered. In most cases, it's not deadly, but it's almost always debilitating, bringing on a weeks-long fever, rash, and painful, watery eyes. Up to forty percent of people experience serious complications, such as pneumonia and encephalitis (or swelling of the brain). One or two children in 1,000 die.

"Measles is very contagious, so once [the Ohio missionary] felt better, he went to church, and the church was in somebody's house," Fletcher says. "The majority of those first cases, we linked back to him. They had all attended church in that house."

Read more here.

Did you see anyone practicing kindness and pleasantries today?

LauraW. apparently lives in the Northeast, where she says people are afraid to be too nice to each other. She is amazed when she sees people practicing kindness and pleasantries. So am I, and I love it.

If it's not okay to be friendly, there is something very wrong with that place where you are living.
Read more here, where there are many funny comments and a few wise comments by readers of the Ace of Spades blog. For example: "If you worry about social interaction making you seem desperate....you ARE desperate."

Find the Spam

"Spam is the cement that binds our entire illusion of reality." Can you find the Spam?

Finding yourself

Ann Voskamp writes:

Sometimes covering up what you feel inside can just about kill you.

Because of my career as a child protection worker, I related Ann's words to kids who are trapped in homes where one or more of the older people in the home abuses them.

However, Ann was thinking about people who seek fame:

You get sorta desperate to tell the desperate kids taking their fame-famished selfies, who are starved to be known but are terrified to know what real vulnerability is, who dare to not cover up, as their cover up for not daring to be deeply authentic — desperate to write it across their skies: You will most deeply find yourself when you find yourself serving others and looking up into the face of God.

Read more here.

I thought about the recent Super Bowl halftime show. The crowd roared its approval when Katy Perry became elevated into the sky above the stadium, loudly singing something about being noticed. My kids were bewildered by the spectacle. So was I.

Beauty, passion, dedication, resilience and true love

Thanks to Scott Ott

Suddenly the media cares about foreign policy

Scott Walker is definitely the hottest GOP candidate who is not yet a candidate. Martha Raddatz subbed for George Stephanopolis on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, and she was gunning for him. The likely Republican presidential contender is riding high after coming out on top of an Iowa GOP poll released Saturday and garnering 47% out of a field of thirteen potential candidates in a poll conducted by the Drudge Report

Watch the Raddatz interview with Walker here.

A wake up call

Andrew McCarthy writes about a "rousing" speech given by Newt Gingrich at the Iowa Freedom Forum last week. Gingrich astutely noted that

when it comes to obfuscation about Islamic supremacist ideology, the State Department was nearly as bad under Bush as under Obama. And while Bush at least included the Taliban as a terrorist organization in a 2002 executive order, Obama spokesmen have spent this week spinning the risible yarn that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization but a purely domestic “insurgent” group.

In truth, as the former speaker asserted, we have an elite in both parties that is unwilling to tell the truth. You can’t win the war without telling the truth and without admitting it’s a war. As he put it, there is a common thread that unites the enemy, wherever on earth the enemy operates: They “hate our civilization and would impose their religion by force.”

Gingrich proclaimed:

If you are a Muslim, and you want to live in peace with your neighbors, and you have no problem with people converting in both directions, and you’d like to be allowed to have a mosque but, by the way, they can have a synagogue, a temple, or a church – I have no problem with Muslims who are prepared to live in diversity. But if you’re a Muslim who believes you are going to impose sharia by cutting off my head, I have a desire to kill you before you cut off my head.

Hearing Gingrich say those things, McCarthy asserted:

The ensuing standing ovation from Freedom Forum attendees carried a salient message for the GOP’s field of would-be presidential nominees: A Republican will not win the White House in 2016 unless national security is a major issue and one on which Republicans hold a decisive edge.

McCarthy believes that

It is again time – past time – to be bold in calling the threat against us what it is, and in understanding why it seeks to conquer us (i.e., in grasping that it is about their ideology not our flaws).

Read more here.

Islamic terror and the Obama worldview

Victor Davis Hanson is trying to figure out the Obama administration's denial of Islamic terror: strategy, appeasement, postmodern therapy, and multiculturalism. Go here to read how he develops those themes.

Needed: a Commander-in-Chief

Roger L. Simon believes that the most important aspect of choosing a candidate to run in 2016 is to select a Commander-in-Chief. He points out that

This war has been going in for nearly fourteen years in its current phase – about to triple in length World War II.

Simon goes on the enumerate three basic qualities a candidates should have:

1. Someone with a real strategy for how to win. 2. The will to carry out this strategy. 3. The communication skills to bring the country with him.

Read more here.

Money to terrorists

Dick Morris points out that Iran is now the biggest recipient of American foreign aid, since Obama has unfrozen $12 billion in Iranian assets that were frozen by Presidents Carter and Reagan. We give Israel $3 billion per year, but now we are giving Iran $6 Billion per year. Watch Dick's video here.

Abolition of the sexes

Is sex education of very young elementary school students a form of child abuse? Mark Steyn thinks so. He says it is about the reconfiguration of human identity, and it is tragic and evil.
Read more here.

Does technology make us happier, or distracted, busy, and unhappy?

Two Australian academics have written a new book in which they assert that technology should "support well-being, wisdom and human potential.”
Read more here.

He had a vision!

Patriot defensive back Malcolm Butler, a free agent from West Alabama College, told the sideline reporter after the game, "I had a vision. I thought I might make a big play." He did! The play of the year!

I agree with Chris Collinsworth that the Seahawks made a stupid decision in deciding to throw the ball from the one yard line, when they have running back Marshawn Lynch, who was showing all night that he was unstoppable in short yardage. Lynch scored more touchdowns than anyone else in the NFL this year. And, they had two cracks at it!

Another victory for Belichick and Brady. Brady's comment about every Patriot involved: "We never doubted each other." It showed.

Eh?

I am beginning to wonder if I have a hearing problem. It is halftime at the Super Bowl, and Katy Perry is singing while flying around in the stadium. She certainly has a flair. I hope she doesn't get hurt by the fireworks booming all around her.

But my problem is I can't understand a word she or anyone else is singing. Likewise, during the game I could not hear what Chris Collinsworth was saying as he was analyzing what was happening in the game. In both instances, the noise of the crowd just drowned out the words.

Sensors are not just for toilets and smartphones

Shawn DuBravac writes about:

the potential of sensors and how they could hold the key to significantly reducing the world’s hunger problem. Sensors are everywhere and in everything, at least in developed nations such as the United States. They’ve revolutionized our mobile phones, and are now powering the next wave of wearable tech devices. Sensors are the reason the automotive industry is poised to deliver a driverless car.

...Sensorized devices are multiplying across every sector of the economy. Heavy industry uses sensors to increase productivity. Airplanes employ sensors in their “fly-by-wire” systems. Physicians can prescribe digestible sensors to monitor and wirelessly transmit biometric data.

...So, what does this have to do with solving the global food crisis? There’s enough food in the world to feed every person on the earth, yet through a combination of inefficiencies, supply-chain obstacles and oppressive government regulation, hundreds of millions of people are undernourished. Indeed, many food shortages arise because of misallocation of information. Suppliers of food are unaware of shortages and unaware of market prices. I’ve heard stories of food rotting on African farms only miles away from desolate starvation.

Equipping food-supply material such as storage containers, warehouses and shelves with sensors allows us to know instantly the moment a shortage exists. And I mean instantly in the literal sense. With sensors, we don’t need to wait for a person to count hundreds of containers to realize that there won’t be enough food for the community –a time-consuming process that too often doesn’t happen anyway. Sensors help remove those layers of inefficiency, shortening data’s transmission chain, skipping potential inhibitors and triggering faster response times.

Let’s take it one step further. The rise of commercial drones removes perhaps the biggest obstacle for food supply efforts – the need to take food from point A to point B over treacherous roads. Drones are possible only because of sensors. While we are farther away from seeing the “Drone Delivery Age” than we are from equipping storage facilities with sensors, we’re closer than you might think.

Read more here.

You go, girl!

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I rarely have good things to say about the Obamas. Today, however I give them both kudos. They cut short their trip to India and made a side trip over to Saudia Arabia to pay respects after the death of King Abdullah.

Michelle Obama is getting criticism for not covering her head in that land where women must cover up and have few rights. I guess in retrospect she was not fond of the scarf she wore in Indonesia.


Oh, and one more observation: the new King Salman doesn't look all that great either. Just sayin'.

Now let's hear the Star Spangled Banner:

Never give up!

Sarah Latimer writes in the Washington Post about a cat who cheated death and clawed his way out of a shallow grave.

The plane may not fly too well, but it's got a parachute!

Nick Kirkpatrick of the Washington Post writes:

The U.S. Coast Guard captured dramatic footage on Sunday showing the a pilot of a small airplane deploying the aircraft’s parachute system before nose-diving and splashing down to the water.

The Cirrus SR22 plane, which was being delivered to Australia by an aircraft delivery company, was traveling from California to Maui when, halfway through his flight, pilot Lue Morton told the Coast Guard he was having trouble accessing an auxiliary fuel tank and that his fuel was dwindling, the Associated Press reported.

He planned to ditch the aircraft, Coast Guard Lt. Scott Carr told ABC: “He was low on fuel, felt like he had about three hours of fuel left and was probably about 900 miles away from dry land and that he would have to ditch about 230 miles northeast of Maui.”

Luckily, he was flying one of the only types of small planes that comes equipped with an aircraft parachute system to help in such situations.

With a Coast Guard plane tracking him and recording video, he deployed the chute near a cruise ship, Carr told ABC: “His engine just sort of quit. He starts gliding and at 5,000 feet he deployed his parachute, and took the ride down to the ocean.”

Deflategate: distraction or motivator?

There are many intriguing matchups in today's Super Bowl: Brady versus Wilson, Carroll versus Belichick, Sherman versus Gronkowski, obviously among them. But, as someone always interested in the psychological angles, the most interesting issue to me is the question of what will be the impact of Deflategate, which has been the biggest news story in the country for the last two weeks.

Bill Belichick has a reputation of being a superb motivator. He also has a reputation of being a cheater. Will Deflategate be an albatross around his neck and the team's neck? Or will the master motivator use it to motivate his team to play with a chip on their shoulder? Many people in America today love to portray themselves as victims, instead of taking personal responsibility for their mistakes in life. Politicians like Barack Obama are masters at convincing people they are victims, and that they must rely on him to show them the way out of their misery.

Many commentators have judged the Patriots to be guilty of purposely deflating footballs. Is that unfair? If it is true, then hiding the truth and covering their guilt may have been a huge distraction for the team, especially for the coach and quarterback. That would have the effect of getting in the way of their preparations for the Xs and Os of the game. If, on the other hand, they are innocent of wrongdoing, it may be a huge motivator for the team. Remember that old American precept: innocent until proven guilty?

Update: The answer? Motivator!