Hiroshima Day

Gerard Vanderleun reminds us at American Digest that seventy years ago,

"On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged." - Hiroshima

"Little Boy," the aptly named 16 kiloton bomb that took out Hiroshima, was -- in comparison to the nuclear devices in the world's arsenals -- sort of a light field artillery shell. There was, at the time, a second bomb called "Fat Man." Weighing in at 21 kilotons it would put paid to Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. With the erasure of Nagasaki, the world was fresh out of nuclear weapons. It was only a temporary lapse. Today we've got about 25,000 of these little items of discipline scattered about.

Gerard has a suggestion:

I think we need to have the people of the world focus like a laser on the table stakes of going beyond these little patty-cake wars we are currently diddling around with and look, really look, at what can actually happen with one little slip.

What we need to do this is: "The Live Demo." By this I mean we need to find a small island or deserted space somewhere on the planet and sacrifice it for the greater good by setting off one, just one, low-yield thermonuclear device in the atmosphere for all the world to see.

Think of "The Live Demo" as a remedial educational moment for the entire world; a kind of slap upside the head coupled with a large shout out of: "PAY ATTENTION!"

I believe this "Live Demo" needs to be announced -- in date, time, and place -- to the entire world with something approaching the intensity of the promotion dumped on the Beijing Olympics.

I believe that we should allow any media organization that wishes to to cover this event and provide the infrastructure necessary to film and broadcast it (from a safe distance) to the entire world in all media -- live. I believe we should re-task a satellite to give us a view of the event from space.

I know that there will be an army of Environmentalists around the world that will bitch and moan about the "harm to the environment" from setting off a single nuclear device in the atmosphere. Those same people need to contemplate instead the "harm to the environment" that comes from setting off several hundred or several thousand of these devices in one very bad afternoon. They need to, for one brief and shining moment, sit down and shut up!

Then there will be those who will carp about "The Test Ban Treaty." They need to take a chill pill, lie down and think of England... or Cleveland... or Tel Aviv... or Tehran.

I can assure you that having the entire world tune in for "The Live Demo" -- and the whole world will tune in -- shall give the entire planet pause. It's not enough for humans to be told about nukes. Every so often, we need to see to believe.

Let's touch off a nuke for world peace next year on August 6. It will be a fitting memorial to Hiroshima. Nothing else we can do will have quite the same... impact.

Read more here.

First gold medal for America: A teenage girl wins for shooting!

Mary Milliken reports at Yahoo News,

Unflappable American teenager Virginia Thrasher won the first gold medal of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Saturday, holding her nerve against two Chinese Olympic champions to clinch the women's 10m air rifle event.

The 19-year-old U.S. college champion edged out China's Du Li, gold in Athens in 2004, with an Olympic-record score of 208 in the sport's new finals format. Defending Olympic champion Yi Siling, also of China, took the bronze medal.

Competing in her first Olympics, Thrasher, as the first champion of the 2016 Games, was awarded her medal by International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach and said the achievement was beyond her wildest dreams.

The youngest of the eight finalists by several years, Thrasher established an early lead after battling with the Russian shooter Daria Vdovina, who stumbled midway through the competition and finished fifth.

"About halfway through when I took the lead it kind of became clear to me that I was in contention for a medal, but I quickly pushed that thought away and focused on breathing and taking one shot at a time," Thrasher said.

Thrasher learned to love shooting while hunting deer with her grandfather when she was in eighth grade.

"I got my first deer and I liked the adrenaline of pulling the trigger," she said.

She then joined her high school air rifle team and was recruited by West Virginia University, where she became a national collegiate champion as a freshman this year.

With her non-nonsense style, Thrasher seemed unfazed by her seasoned field and consistently scored in the 10 points target area over the 20 rounds.

Afterwards, she noted that she had not attended the Olympics' opening ceremony Friday night and had instead gone to bed early for her Olympic debut.

Like all American shooters, Thrasher faced the inevitable question of what she thinks about gun control in the United States, a hot-button issue in this election year.

She responded matter of factly that the controversy over guns in America "really is just distracting from our sport, which is very different."

Ransom payments to Iran: "The president’s press conference is better understood as a confession than an explanation... The president has broken the law."

Andrew Mccarthy writes at National Review about Obama's ransom payments to Iran:

The Iranians have bragged that the astonishing cash payment was a ransom — and Obama has been telling us for months that we can trust the Iranians. The hostages were released the same day the cash arrived. One of the hostages has reported that the captives were detained an extra several hours at the airport and told they would not be allowed to leave until the arrival of another plane — inferentially, the unmarked cargo plane ferrying the cash. The reason American policy has always prohibited paying ransoms to terrorists and other abductors is that it only encourages them to take more hostages. And, as night follows day, Iran has abducted more Americans since Obama paid the cash. No matter how energetically the president tries to lawyer the ransom issue, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . .

More worth examining is why the transaction took the bizarre form that it did. To cut to the chase, I believe it was to camouflage — unsuccessfully — the commission of felony law violations.

...Obama conceded at his press conference both that these sanctions are still in effect and that they applied directly to his $400 million pay-out to our terrorist enemies. But here’s the president’s problem: While he is correct that the sanctions barred him from sending Iran a check or wire transfer, that is not all they forbid — not by a long shot. They also make it illegal to do what he did. As noted above, the sanctions prohibit transactions with Iran that touch the U.S. financial system, whether they are carried out in dollars or foreign currencies. The claim by administration officials, widely repeated in the press, that Iran had to be paid in euros and francs because dollar-transactions are forbidden is nonsense; Americans are also forbidden to engage in foreign currency transactions with Iran.

Obama had our financial system issue U.S. assets that were then converted to foreign currencies for delivery to Iran. Both steps flouted the regulations, which prohibit the clearing of currency of any kind if Iran is even minimally involved in the deal; here, Iran is the beneficiary of the deal.

Although these regulations leave no room for doubt that their point is to prevent and criminalize things like sending $400 million in cash to the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the ITSR adds another reg for good measure. Section 560.203 states: Evasions; attempts; causing violations; conspiracies: . . . Any transaction . . . that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this part is prohibited. . . . Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this part is prohibited.

By his own account, President Obama engaged in the complex cash transfer in order to end-run sanctions that prohibit the U.S. from having “a banking relationship with Iran.” The point of the sanctions is not to prevent banking with Iran; it is to prevent Iran from getting value from or through our financial system — the banking prohibition is a corollary. And the point of sanctions, if you happen to be the president of the United States sworn to execute the laws faithfully, is to follow them — not pat yourself on the back for keeping them in place while you willfully evade them. The president’s press conference is better understood as a confession than an explanation.

Oh, and there is also Section 560.701, which makes clear that willful violations of the regulations constitute serious felony offenses under federal criminal law — punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment.

...In sum, the Obama administration has provided Iran with $400 million under circumstances in which it well knows that at least some of this cash will be used for terrorism. Indeed, as the editors point out, by providing the money in cash, Obama makes it more likely that it will be used for terrorism: Iran likes to deny its complicity in jihadist acts; so now, flush with cash, it can fund atrocities without leaving a paper trail.

...The circumstances of Obama’s enormous cash transfer to our terrorist enemies raise serious questions about whether American policy against paying ransoms to terrorists has been flouted. But that should not obscure a more fundamental issue: The president has violated the law.

Read more here.

Will Paul Ryan be "Cantored" Tuesday?

Although Trump endorsed Paul Ryan, other stars of the conservative movement endorsed his Wisconsin opponent. Ann Althouse reports from Wisconsin,

As the national GOP rushes to protect Ryan from the wrath of Trump, stars from the conservative counter-establishment — former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, columnist Michelle Malkin, and author Phyllis Schlafly, among others — have continued to stoke the fury here, with the faint and fading hope that Nehlen could close the gap in the final days and score an upset similar to the one in 2014 that toppled then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

“I think Paul Ryan is soon to be ‘Cantored,’ as in Eric Cantor,” Palin predicted to CNN in May. Minutes after Trump’s endorsement of Ryan on Friday, she took to Facebook to buck up Nehlen’s base, writing, “Wisconsin, please vote for this man ‘of the people’ this Tuesday!”

Don't fall for it!

Wonder if the polls are "true representations" of the American voters? Read this and you decide.
Folks, you are being manipulated by the Killary loving media. Don't fall for it;


h/t Hugo Chavez Rey

Pundit's plan for Trump

In the Washington Post Chris Cillizza thinks he knows how Donald Trump can turn around his flailing campaign in 4 steps. Here are the four steps, and Ann Althouse's comments on each.

1. Endorse Paul Ryan...
Trump did that later in the day.
2. Stop talking so much...
I'd say what he should do is vary the setting for the talking. We see rallies or one-on-one TV interviews. We never see him relating to ordinary people in a relaxed setting. (We do see him bring an individual onto the rally stage.)
3. Find a message. And stick to it....
He's had a consistent message for over a year! It's "make America great again." I guess Cillizza thinks there are too many specifics under that heading.
4. Stop picking dumb fights...
Yeah, obviously, don't do that Khan thing again. Leave private citizens alone. Fight the powerful.

Media progress

via Happy Acres

Homelessness in San Francisco

Cinnamon Stillwell writes in SFGATE about San Francisco's incredible homelessness problem.

...San Francisco would do better to take a page from New York City, which under Mayor Rudy Giuliani successfully eliminated widespread homelessness. Giuliani took a tough-love approach, strictly enforcing laws against criminal behavior, pursuing arrest warrants and no longer allowing homeless to sleep on the streets. At the same time, he made use of the city's already plentiful shelter system for those displaced in the process. No longer were violence and drug use tolerated in shelters. Also, state regulations making work and other welfare rules conditions of residence for the able-bodied were enforced. Giuliani addressed the disparate conditions among the homeless population, including the mentally ill and, above all, he promoted self-reliance.

Giuliani's reforms were met with howls of protest from New York City's homeless advocacy community and its defenders, including then senatorial candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. But in the end, it was Giuliani's approach, and not their enabling, that actually got people off the streets. It also led to improved conditions for all city residents and today the proof is in the pudding.

Go here to read much more.

h/t Gerard

Not even remotely sorry

h/t CDR M

"Super Lice" outbreak

It is back to school time. Just in time, there is a new "Super Lice" outbreak which is 100% resistant to treatment. Maggie Maloney reports in Country Living,

The problem, according to the Today show, is that lice have mutated, making it more difficult for the chemicals in over-the-counter treatments to lock on to the lice and eliminate it.

Read more here.

Are undercover FBI agents flawless in their ability to predict when a potential terrorist is going strike?

I doubt it. TodayAce of Spades looks at the Garland, Texas terror attack and the role played by an undercover agent.

Reminder to politicians: you are entitled to your own opinions, not to your own facts!

War on women

Richard Pollock reports at Daily Caller,

Former President Bill Clinton collected $5.6 million in fees from GEMS Education, a Dubai-based company that teaches Sharia Law through its network of more than 100 schools in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

The company’s finances strictly adhere to “Sharia Finance,” which includes giving “zakat,” a religious tax of which one-eighth of the proceeds is dedicated to funding Islamic jihad.

The company also contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

...Sharia law is the Islamic religious legal system that many in the West see as intolerant of human rights and other religions, as well as violating the rights of women and gays. Sharia law is considered by Muslims to be superior to all secular authorities. Islamic jihadis regularly call for the imposition of Sharia law and want to impose it on the West.

Saudi Arabia is where Wahabism, the strictest form of Sharia, is observed. The Middle Eastern kingdom bars women from driving cars, requires women to wear the strictest form of the hijab, which covers everything but the eyes and hands. Gay men and women are persecuted in Saudi Arabia.

Read more here.

Metrosexual is dead. You may now be a spornosexual.

Are you a male? Do you desire to be desired? Do you want to be wanted for your body, not your wardrobe, and not your mind? Then you may be a spornosexual.

Read more here.

Ransom

Ian Hanchett reports at Breitbart,

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Intelligence Report with Trish Regan,” Saeed Abedini, one of the four hostages released from Iran back in January, stated that on the night he was freed, his captors told him they were waiting on another plane to arrive before letting him go.

Read more here.

The Left now sympathizes more with the Palestinians than the Israelis

Timothy Lee posts this graph at Freedom Line.

A recent Pew Research survey reveals an alarming and corrosive new reality. The political left in America for the first time sympathizes more with the Palestinians, who effectively deny Israel’s right to even exist and officially celebrate terrorist attacks in Israel, over the Israelis whom they seek to eradicate.

Hillary promises to raise taxes on the middle class!

On August 1, 2016 Hillary said in Omaha, "We're going to raise taxes on the Middle Class!"

How will a fed-up public vote?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Right Wing News,

Now, even seasoned politicos confess there are no rules that apply to Donald Trump. He just keeps shouting that things are getting worse and no one will admit it.

We live in a politically correct age in which President Obama is unable or unwilling to mention radical Islamists as the terrorists who have killed hundreds in Europe and the United States.

No one dares suggest that the more than 300 sanctuary cities in the U.S. are a rebirth of the illiberal and neo-Confederate idea of nullification of federal law. Black Lives Matter is idealized as a civil rights group despite the chants at its protests about violence toward police.

Doubling the national debt to nearly $20 trillion in just eight years is regarded as no big deal.

The public is growing tired of two realities: the one they see and hear each day, and the official version that has nothing to do with their perceptions.

Trump comes along with a ball and chain and throws it right into the elite filtering screen — and the public cheers as the fragile glass explodes.

If most politicians are going to deceive, voters apparently prefer raw and uncooked deception rather than the usual seasoned and spiced dishonesty.

Will Trump fade in August, implode in September, self-destruct in October — or win in November?

No one knows. There are no longer rules to predict how a fed-up public will vote. And there has never been a postmodern candidate like Donald J. Trump.

Read more here.

The cybersecurity broken window

At Chicago Boyz Trent Telenko writes about Hillary and FBI Director Comey's cybersecurity "broken window."

When FBI Director Comey publicly took a dive and sold out the rule of law in refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton’s Cyber-security crimes. He began a new chapter in providing evidence of the validity of “Broken Window Policing” in the field of cyber-security. For which, see the following definition:

The broken windows model of policing…focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

Hillary and the FBI Director Comey have advertised both outrageous cyber-security weakness and more importantly the breakdown of social mores of “the rule of law” in Federal Government cyber-security. If you advertise you are weak, stupid and capricious in enforcing cyber-security, it is blood in the water for cyber-criminals of all sorts.

That is the real cyber-security “broken window” Hillary and FBI Director Comey have opened. And this is the cyber-security nightmare that will be with America for decades, barring a massive and systematic purge of everyone high and low associated with such behavior by a new President or after another — likely nuclear — Pearl Harbor.

Read more here.

Free-minded free man

Ace of Spades supports Donald Trump in Trump's decision not to endorse John McCain or Kelly Ayotte in their reelection bids. Ace writes,

So I don't get people who will claim, "Oh, he should endorse them."

Why? Why would he confirm, why would he reify, their assumption that they exist in a higher caste than he does?

Anytime someone attempts to put themselves in a caste above one, one is obligated, as a free-minded free man, to reject that attempt at subordination vigorously, and even as rudely as possible -- after all, it is deeply rude to assert one's Superior Caste over someone else in the first place.

Read more here.

As night follows day...

Andrew McCarthy informs us at National Review that

When Not Spouting About Presidential Qualifications, Obama Piles $400M Cash in Crates and Ships It to Tehran as Ransom!

Yes he did do that. From the Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward. Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

...Before Obama came to power, it was longstanding American policy neither to negotiate with nor pay ransoms to terrorists because it only encourages them to seize more hostages and press for more ransoms and concessions. As I pointed out back in 2009, Obama departed from this policy shortly after taking office – for the benefit of Iran, naturally. And this was long before he traded five Taliban commanders for Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter currently facing court-martial.

As night follows day, since Obama sent the jihadist regime the $400 million ransom, the jihadist regime has taken more American hostages. As the Journal reports: Among the Americans currently being held are an energy executive named Siamak Namazi and his 80-year old father, Baqer, according to U.S. and Iranian officials. Iran’s judiciary spokesman last month confirmed Tehran had arrested the third American, believed to be a San Diego resident named Reza “Robin” Shahini. Friends and family of the Namazis believe the Iranians are seeking to increase their leverage to force another prisoner exchange or cash payment in the final six months of the Obama administration. Thank goodness we have such a highly qualified president.

Read more here.

A world turned upside down...Who is on a suicide mission: Trump, or the media?

Ann Althouse brings us information about Trump's antagonists in the media. On CNN Liz Mair says Donald Trump is a "loudmouth dick."

Also on CNN somebody named Fareed Zakaria refers to Trump as a "bullshit artist."


Althouse points out,

It almost seems that Trump is causing his antagonists to talk more roughly than he does. He could do an ad collecting all that crap they've said trying to make what he's said seem as bad as possible. And if you ever get back to his original quotes, they're going to seem tame. It's a world turned upside down.

Over at Fox News Megyn Kelly gets so exasperated about Trump, she bows her head and says "Oh my God."

Barack tells us what shaped his feminism

The President of the United States of America has written about his feminism in a piece for Glamour magazine.

So I’d like to think that I’ve been pretty aware of the unique challenges women face — it’s what has shaped my own feminism.

...Growing up without a dad, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who I was, how the world perceived me, and what kind of man I wanted to be. It’s easy to absorb all kinds of messages from society about masculinity and come to believe that there’s a right way and a wrong way to be a man. But as I got older, I realized that my ideas about being a tough guy or cool guy just weren’t me. They were a manifestation of my youth and insecurity. Life became a lot easier when I simply started being myself.

So we need to break through these limitations. We need to keep changing the attitude that raises our girls to be demure and our boys to be assertive, that criticizes our daughters for speaking out and our sons for shedding a tear. We need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs.

As a parent, helping your kids to rise above these constraints is a constant learning process. Michelle and I have raised our daughters to speak up when they see a double standard or feel unfairly judged based on their gender or race—or when they notice that happening to someone else. It’s important for them to see role models out in the world who climb to the highest levels of whatever field they choose. And yes, it’s important that their dad is a feminist, because now that’s what they expect of all men.

Read more here.

Lopsided media coverage of Clinton and Pence in Colorado today

Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton were both here in Colorado today. How did the media cover their appearances? ColoradoPeakPolitics reports,

Hillary Clinton told Coloradans today that they should support her for president because she likes fire marshals, the internet, education, and campaign donors in Aspen.

She hates guns, Donald Trump, and the media we presume, because she hasn’t held a press conference since December.

She did grant an interview to Channel 9 News, and we were ever so excited that maybe she would be asked one of the questions we posed earlier today. But alas, she was not. She was asked to comment on how mean Trump was being to her.

It wasn’t exactly a barn burner of a speech she delivered today in Commerce City, mostly just the same old tired rhetoric that manages to gloss over everything voters are really interested in, namely, will she ever go to jail?

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, spoke in Denver, we think. We weren’t there, so we looked to the Denver Post for the rundown, but found only one quote in the entire story on Pence’s speech, from Pence.

Pence told the crowd that Democrats are telling America the current economy is the best the country can do.

“It’s not the best we can do, it’s just the best they can do,” Pence said. “When Donald Trump is president of the United States we’re going to balance our budget, cut our taxes … and we’re going to make the American economy work for everybody.”

The rest of the article criticized Trump, which ironically, is what the story on Hillary’s speech did — trash Trump.

The entire article on Hillary was filled with glowing praise, no Republicans were asked to criticize her, but Democrats were given free rein to criticize Trump in the Pence piece.

The coverage was so unbalanced, we have to wonder why the Post even bothered going to the Pence speech.

Oh, right. To trash Trump.

Marine writes a letter to Mr. Kahn

The gentleman on the left is a military veteran. This is what he had to say to the gentleman on the right, Mr. Kahn:

Dear Mr. Khan,
I want to preface this letter by stating that I respect your son’s sacrifice for this great nation. By all accounts, he is a true hero that sacrificed himself in service to our country. For that I am thankful.

As a veteran, I watched your comments at the Democratic National Convention with a mixture of sadness, and anger. The United States has a military comprised of volunteers. Every single member has made the conscious choice to join the military and serve. There is not a single service member who has been forced into service.

It is important for all service members (and apparently, their families) to understand that service to this great nation does not imbue one with special privileges or rights. I found your comments troubling when you said: “Have you ever been to Arlington cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
Does it matter whether Mr. Trump has sacrificed “…nothing and no one?”…has Ms. Clinton “..sacrificed” for this nation? How about Mr. Obama? Your comment stating that Mr. Trump “…has sacrifice no one” is alarming. Are you intimating that YOU sacrificed? Sir, your son willingly sacrificed himself. As a father I cannot imagine the pain you must feel but his sacrifice is his own. He was not forced to serve.

I am troubled that you would allow a party that has little more than contempt for the US Service Member to parade you into the DNC to denounce Donald Trump. Did you watch when protesters at the DNC booed and heckled Medal of Honor recipient Capt. Florent Groberg? Did you notice your party interrupting the moment of silence for slain police officers?

Your own hypocrisy in not denouncing these acts and instead using the DNC as a platform to make a political point is disgraceful. The simple fact is that whether one served or sacrificed does not give greater power to their statements. One vote is as valuable as another. That sir, is why our Country is great. Your condemnation of one person for a statement while standing idly as your party disparages veterans and police officers is the height of hypocrisy.

To conflate the need to prevent potential terrorists from entering our country with the belief that ‘all Muslims’ should be banned is simply wrong and disingenuous. As a reminder, Mr. Trump said: ” “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”
The irony of your son’s own death at the hands of these very people in Iraq should not be ignored. I have little doubt that your son would have recognized the need to protect our country from these very people. In fact, he held is own troops back so that he could check on a suspicious car. Your son understood sacrifice and how to protect “his people”…’his soldiers’….’his fellow Americans’…

As you continue to make the media circuit and bask in the glow of affection cast upon you by a party that has little regard for your son’s own sacrifice, and veterans in general, I would ask you to consider your comments and your position more closely.

Respectfully,
Chris Mark
US Marine and Navy Veteran

Positive, purposeful intentions

Mark Sisson believes language is important.

On Primal Eating

“I should eat better because I’ll continue exacerbating my thyroid issues/diabetes/autoimmune issues/etc.”

versus

“I choose to eat better because I want to feel vibrant and energetic.”

“I should stop eating now, or it will just make me fatter.”

versus

“I’m choosing to stop eating now because I’m full and satisfied.”

“I should stop being so careless with what I grab for lunch.”

versus

“I choose to pack healthy lunches because being mindful of my food selection will help me reach my fat loss goal more quickly.”

On Getting Fit

“I should stop being so physically lazy.”

versus

“I choose to fit in some kind of exercise each day because my mood is so much lighter/I sleep better/I have more energy when I do.”

“I should start lifting weights. I know I’m weaker than I should be.”

versus

“I choose to lift heavy things three times a week because I enjoy challenging my limits and because I like feeling strong.”

On Embracing Other Elements of Primal Wellness

“I should take more breaks at work so I don’t screw up as much.”

versus

“I choose to take regular breaks at work because I’m more productive when I do.”

“I should get outside more because I know I’m missing out on vitamin D.”

versus

“I choose to spend an hour or more outside each day because I appreciate how it makes me feel relaxed and creative.”

“I should get myself to bed earlier and not deal with the chaotic mornings.”

versus

“I choose to go to bed at 10:00pm because I enjoy being rested and focused the next day.”

Do any of these examples ring true? How do they compare with the way you talk to yourself about your Primal intentions?

Whatever the area you’re working on enhancing in your life (e.g. Primal eating, fitness, weight loss, healing a health condition, stress management, etc.), the takeaway here is this: there’s force in the language we use with ourselves. Our words can determine the real mindset we bring to our goals. Do we simply agree that a good idea is another “should” that we guilt ourselves over, or do we make a personal claim for our health and well-being by saying we choose to pursue what we want for ourselves today? Our words direct our thinking, which in subtle or dramatic ways influences the action we take—not to mention the attitude we bring to that effort. In the end, we do better for ourselves and our goals by empowering our intentions.

How can you take a concern or goal you have for your health, let go of the obligation, and frame it as a positive, purposeful intention?

Read more here.

Islamic males' obsession with sex

Bookworm writes,

...young men are all about sex. There are only two things that rein them in: fear of dominant males and social norms preventing them from acting on their sexual urges.

...In the West, we’ve neutered our dominant males by insisting that masculinity is a toxic disease that must be destroyed (enter Pajama Boy, who’s handed all of his testosterone to TrigglyPuff). Also, while the West preaches the virtue of endless sexual gratification, the reality is that our average spotty male adolescents aren’t getting any of the good stuff.

Self-conscious and awkward, and dismally aware of their lack of sexual attraction, the healthy ones patiently wait to grow up. The mentally ill ones, or the ones placed in a mentally ill culture, turn to violence. That’s the stuff of the shock troops of hardcore Islam. These shock troops are joined by adult men who have passed through adolescence but who live in such a sexually segregated culture that they’re not getting any either.

...It’s one thing for a powerful male to use a powerless little catamite for sex, something that is normative in much of the Muslim Middle East. This institutionalized pedophilia doesn’t alter the fundamental power structure; men are still on top, figuratively and literally. But when two men opt not to exercise their sexual power over women or small boys in favor of sexual pleasure with each other . . . well, that cannot be countenanced.

I have been writing for years about Islam’s deadly hostility to male homosexuality. The Left has been ignoring me. The Left has also been ignoring every other tocsin from every other thoughtful, informed person about Islam’s war on gays.

While we in America are fighting over transgender potty rights and gay marriage, ISIS has been routinely tossing gays off of buildings, at least when it’s not engaged in other, even more horrible, methods of killing them. But to the Left, it’s always the Christian right (the ones who love the sinner, if not the sin) who are the bad guys that must be destroyed.

All that changed in Orlando. Despite the desperate media effort to spin Omar Mateen’s killing spree as the fault of Republicans, whites, Christians, Donald Trump, etc., as more data emerged, it became hard to ignore the fact that Mateen was not a Republican, he was not a self-loathing homosexual, and he was not someone enraged by Donald Trump. Instead, he was a garden-variety Muslim fanatic who, having a sudden need to purify himself for Paradise (home of those 72 perpetually re-virginized houris who can’t wait for a brutal Muslim man to rape them regularly for eternity), opted to hop on the fast train to heaven by taking out homosexuals.

It was an appalling thing to have happened but even appalling things can sometimes change the dynamic for the better. In the case of gays, many of them started realizing two things: One, that guns are a good thing to have when you’re trapped in a building by an armed warrior for Allah. And two, that conservatives are not crazy haters for recognizing that jihadists are targeting us and we need to take appropriate defensive steps within our border, at our border, and outside of our border.

... If the Left continues to allow its sexual libertinism to blind it to the fury Muslims feel towards a culture that threatens to destroy the Muslim world’s entire sexual command and control system, those same Leftists will very soon find that sex is a whole lot less fun when it’s not a government-approved orgy but is, instead, finding yourself sold at a sex slave market or being the next in line to be thrown off of a tall building.

...Our Western rules about refugees and immigration were never intended to cope with the unique threat that is ascendent Islam. I’m not advocating completely closed borders, rampant discriminating, concentration camps, or gas chambers. I am saying, though, that the West needs to start recognizing that Islam is, as I said, sui generis, and that we need a nuanced approach to Muslim immigration that is different from our normal open borders policies. Moreover, we need to stop fatuously repeating that “Islam is a religion of peace” and, instead, start to say that there are many peaceful Muslims, but that Islam has a militant strain that we ignore at our peril, and that we must address quickly if Western culture is to survive.

Read more here.

Producing a victim to make their argument, in order to block any response.

Ann Coulter writes about the Kahn/Trump controversy:

...a candidate for president of the United States is supposed to be prohibited from discussing a dangerous immigration program because Khan's son was one of fourteen (14!) Muslim servicemen killed by other Muslims in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why we're obligated to import yet more Muslims – including, undoubtedly, some just like the ones who killed his son. Q.E.D.!

...There were virtually no Muslims in America before Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act. Today, we admit more immigrants from Muslim countries than from Great Britain.

Are Americans allowed to have an opinion on whether that's a good idea?

So far, it's worked out great!

In addition to the sudden appearance of honor killings, clitorectomies, hijabs and massive government frauds, Muslim immigrants have given us: The most devastating terrorist attack in world history, followed by terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Times Square, Vaughan Foods in Oklahoma, San Bernardino and an Orlando nightclub, among other places.

We've admitted 2 million Muslims just since 9/11 – that’s more than had been admitted before 9/11. If we don't make it 3 million, we're monsters? May we ask how many Muslims Khan's mystery Constitution requires -- or is that out of bounds unless we had a child who died in Iraq?

...After Trump somehow got the crazy idea that a presidential candidate was allowed to discuss government policies and proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration -- which, by the way, is perfectly constitutional -- the entire media and political class erupted in a sputtering rage.

Conscience of a Nation, Speaker Paul Ryan proclaimed: "That's not who we are." Jeb! Bush made the subtle and clever argument that Trump was "unhinged." Marco Rubio called any pause in Muslim immigration "offensive." ABC News' Jonathan Karl called Trump's plan "outrageous" -- which was way better than MSNBC, where Trump was compared to white supremacists and Nazis.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Trump had "disqualifie(d)" himself from "serving as president" for suggesting any slowdown in Muslim immigration. Vice President Joe Biden -- tribune of blue-collar Americans everywhere! -- said that if Trump were the nominee, Hillary would "win in a walk."

Then it turned out Trump's Muslim ban was a huge hit with actual voters. Hillary, who promises to quadruple the number of Syrian "refugees" we bring in, is quite far from winning "in a walk."

So the media and political class had no choice: They had to produce a victim to make their argument, in order to block any response.

Read more here.

Love got us all here. Sacrifice got us all here.

At a Holy Experience Ann Voskamp reminds us that,

...life’s not about choosing a lifestyle — but a way to serve.

...Love got us all here.

Sacrifice got us all here.

You have got to sacrifice something for someone — or you will have nothing and no one. Because without sacrifice — we have nothing.

And there are 7 things that a country, relationship, or life, cannot have:

Power without principle.
Money without work.
Work without meaning.
Comfort without conscience.
Leading without character.
Love without sacrifice.

Ways without Christ.

Read more here about her new baby with the broken heart.

Death from the skies?

Do you know about Gamma Rays? This video explains them.

Can Trump's campaign recover?

NEO NEOCON writes about the Trump/Kahn thing:

I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not think grieving parents who make political speeches are above and beyond criticism. What I do think is that if you’re going to criticize them, you have to be smart about it.

You have to honor their sacrifice first. That’s just common human decency. Then you criticize them for what needs criticizing. And don’t say something offensively stupid like comparing their sacrifice of a son in wartime in the service of his country to your sacrifice of creating jobs and making a lot of money in the process.

Don’t do it. Just don’t.

Also, don’t criticize the mother for not speaking up and insinuate it’s because there’s a Muslim muzzle on her. There are so many other reasons she might have decided not to speak. She might be afraid of public speaking, and feel more comfortable supporting her husband silently. She might be too emotional about the topic of her child’s death, even all these years later; that’s what she claimed, and there is no reason whatsoever not to believe her and every reason to believe her. Don’t insult her on a level that’s so abysmally crass, based on no knowledge of the situation whatsoever.

Those were Trump’s errors, however. He did those two things. They were not just errors involving lack of political savvy, nor were they statements in which he said something true and correct but un-PC. They were not the acts of an alpha male, either. They were the statements of a weak and defensive but pugnacious person who cannot stand to be criticized in any way and who will say whatever comes to mind to retaliate without thinking first of how it sounds and whether it even makes sense (particularly the part about the jobs creation, which really sticks in my craw).

They are stupid errors that show deep character flaws in the man. And no, that doesn’t mean Hillary Clinton is better. She’s different, not better. She has her own terrible terrible flaws of character and of politics. But unfortunately that’s irrelevant to what Trump did, how it sounds to people, and how he shot himself not just in the foot but in both feet.

Can his campaign recover? Maybe. There’s a long way to go to November (it already seems very long). Can he learn from his mistakes? I’ve seen no indication of it, but it’s within the realm of possibility, and I certainly hope he does. And soon.

The Left's secret club

Simon Lomax reports at Complete Colorado,

Left-wing billionaire George Soros is getting involved in the battle for control of the Colorado state legislature. In fact, state records show the New York hedge fund manager is playing in the same five races as another out-of-state billionaire – San Francisco investor-activist Tom Steyer.

Soros and Steyer are both leading members of the Democracy Alliance, a coalition of left-wing political donors. Called “the left’s secret club” by Politico, the Democracy Alliance has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal causes since 2005. This year, according to the Washington Post, the group plans to spend tens of millions of dollars supporting Democrats in state-level races across the country.

Read more here.

Tea Party, Freedom Caucus member ousted in Kansas primary

Ace of Spades observes,

The GOP seems to be a corporate lobbying organization with some deeply insincere pro-life agitation.

Ace headlines a story about Congressman Tim Huelskamp losing a Kansas Republican primary race yesterday,

"Revenge of the Establishment:" Tea Party, Freedom Caucus Member Ousted in Primary By Establishment Figure Backed By (Get This) Agricorp Interests.

Read more here.

Is this cake baked?

Today's news from the presidential campaign is that Giuliani, Gingrich, and Priebus are plotting an intervention to help Trump avoid self-destructive reactions. Ace of Spades opines,

...gosh I can't tell you how nice it would be if Donald Trump could go three weeks without detonating a bomb in his own face.

This intervention will not work, because Trump is immune from social pressure. He grew up a rich kid that routinely skated from trouble due to his wealth; he simply never had to learn, as most of us learned and internalized at an early age, that bad behavior, and upsetting conventional (even if dumb) social wisdom, has consequences and should be avoided.

On one hand, this gives Trump a limited immunity from social pressure and a greater freedom of political motion; most of our pencil-necked, cowardly politicians are so paralyzed by social fear they can't do much more than propose alternative schemes for achieving the liberal agenda.

On the other hand, the downside of having no internal restraints because you never had to pay for your bad decisions ever before in your life, is... well, you have a megalomaniac man-child like Trump.

The only person Trump seems to respect (and then some) is Ivanka, and I would say "Maybe Ivanka can talk a little restraint into him," but she's obviously already tried (Of course she has; she's not insane) and she's already failed.

So this cake is baked.

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air reports that Gingrich has already made his concerns public this morning with an interview with Maria Bartolo at Fox Business:

Donald Trump’s behavior over the last week has been “very self-destructive” to his campaign, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday, comparing the Republican nominee to a Hall of Fame quarterback who is in the midst of an interception-throwing slump.

“Trump is still behaving like as though it was the primaries and there were 17 candidates. He has not made the transition to being the potential president of the United States, which is a much tougher league,” Gingrich said in an interview with Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria.” “People are going to watch you every single day. They’re going to take everything they can out of context, and he is not yet performing at the level that you need to.” …

...But with 97 days to go until Election Day, Gingrich pointed to “two huge advantages” in Trump’s favor: “One is the country really wants change, and the other is Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt and dishonest candidate we’ve ever had for president.”

Morrisey believes

The point about the shift from primary thinking to playing in the general-election leagues is most pertinent. The seat-of-your-pants strategy worked for Trump in large part because the other 16 candidates spent most of their time trying to beat the rest to the Not-Trump position. That allowed Trump to manipulate the media while the other Republicans dug their own graves. By the time that Ted Cruz won the Not-Trump position to himself, it was far too late, and Trump didn’t pay any price for his erratic style.

...Who could have predicted that the media would turn on its previous darling after he won the Republican nomination? John McCain and Mitt Romney, you can lower your hands now.

Do we expect to get the truth from Hillary Clinton?

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

...what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, had touted Qaddafi as a key counterterrorism ally against rabidly anti-American jihadists in eastern Libya. Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya — shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming “rebels,” who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.

As I’ve recounted, to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration — which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country’s government was not really “war” anyway) — had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi’s military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands. The regime was toppled and Qaddafi was brutally murdered — prompting Secretary Clinton’s bizarrely giddy quip, “We came, we saw, he died.” As some of us not-so-giddy types had warned would happen, Libya then became a safe haven for terrorists who turned on the American and Western forces that had cleared the path for them.

In small compass, this is the story of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador killed in the Benghazi massacre. As Business Insider’s Michael B. Kelley recounts, before becoming ambassador, Stevens was the Obama administration’s official liaison to Qaddafi’s Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaeda-linked groups. The latter included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Stevens worked directly with a top LIFG leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj.

...In the months leading up to the attack on the State Department facility, and on the even more shadowy CIA outpost a little over a mile away, jihadists in eastern Libya conducted a series of attacks against Western targets — including, on June 6, 2012, a bomb detonated just outside the State Department compound. The British government and the International Red Cross pulled their personnel out; yet the Obama administration left U.S. government personnel in, despite grossly inadequate security precautions. Why? I believe that one significant mission was the coordination of weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian jihadists.

Remember the state of play in mid 2012. Obama was locked in a tight reelection race. He was falsely claiming that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda (which was actually thriving); that he was ending American wars (which were actually intensifying as he drew troops down despite ground conditions); and that his pro-Islamist policies were helping forge democracy in places like Egypt (then under Muslim Brotherhood rule) and Libya (which had disintegrated into a failed state under domination by Islamist militias). Prior to the November election, if Obama had openly announced that his administration was arming Syrian Islamists, it would have been highly controversial. It would have spotlighted how that same policy had failed in Libya, a fact to which neither the media nor Republicans had called public attention. This, no doubt, is why reports that Obama was “launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time” (as the Times of London’s Christina Lamb put it) did not appear until immediately after Obama had won a second term.

Were Obama, Clinton, and others in the administration steering arms to Syrian jihadists before that time?

Recall that in mid 2012, Obama was also feeling heat — from the Islamist regimes he was appeasing, from Beltway Republicans, and even from some in his own administration, apparently including Secretary Clinton — for not doing enough to help the “rebels” drive Assad from power in Syria. There was a good explanation for this reluctance: Our government knew that the Syrian “rebels,” like the Libyan “rebels,” teemed with jihadists. Not only has this fact long been notorious; Judicial Watch managed to wangle from the government an August 2012 Defense Department memo that flatly states, “The Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e., al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The memo elaborates that its reference to AQI incorporates both Jaish al-Nusra (which is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in Syria) and the Islamic State (the breakaway “caliphate” spawned by AQI).

...Putting aside the administration’s recklessness in failing to keep Qaddafi’s arsenals out of jihadist hands, what are the “other things” that the State Department and the CIA were up to?

...Were U.S. personnel stationed as sitting ducks in Benghazi in order to help supply weapons to Syria, where it was inevitable they would fall into the hands of America’s enemies? Perhaps we’ll soon find out.

Read more here.

...Like it or not, this election is about degree, relative political agendas, and comparative hazard

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

Certainly, we are in the strangest campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic primary process.

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

The president of the United States, on matters from immigration to his own health-care act, often has declined to enforce federal laws — sometimes because it was felt that to do so would have been injurious to his 2012 reelection bid. The reputations of agencies such as the IRS and the VA no longer really exist; we concede that they are politicized, corrupt, or hopelessly inept. An attorney general being found in contempt of Congress raises no more of an eyebrow than that same chief law-enforcement officer referring to African Americans as “my people” or writing off Americans in general as a “nation of cowards.”

Quite a while ago, too, we entered the age of postmodern fabulism, in which representatives of the president of the United States casually admitted, in response to criticism, that large segments of Obama’s best-selling autobiography were simply “composites,” a sort of euphemism for making stuff up. From Brian Williams’s pseudo-combat reporting to Hillary Clinton’s dodging bullets in the Balkans, we are now what we say we are — without much consequence any more for flat-out lying. Does any public commentator worry much that Senator Elizabeth Warren’s entire trajectory to Harvard was predicated on her abject and comical lie that she was a rare and sought-after Native American law professor?

I am worried about Trump’s flamboyance and about his sloppy and dangerous references to NATO and U.S. foreign commitments. But from the reaction to his ad hoc and sometimes incoherent musings, one would think that the next president was inheriting a time of peace and stability — not one in which the entire Middle East has imploded, reset with Putin has become a nightmare of Russian expansionism not seen since the Soviet period, “jayvee” and “on-the-run” terrorists are insidiously destroying the calm of the entire international order, and China is creating artificial islands with commensurate “sovereign” air and sea space. If there is one region in the world that is safer and more stable than it was in 2008, would someone please identify it? Iraq? Syria? Ukraine? Libya? North Korea? France? Baton Rouge? For now I am worried about what was and is rather than what might be. Are there any traditional U.S. allies that feel more secure in their partnership with us? Israel? Japan? France?

It is a fair wager that a supposedly isolationist President Trump would be more likely to attend an anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the liberation of Auschwitz than would a supposedly internationalist President Obama — or for that matter a European unity rally after horrific terrorist bombings.

We have already seen the shoot-from-the-hip Trump back down on his idiotic idea of denying all Muslims entry into the U.S. (as opposed to those seeking to emigrate from war zones and terrorist-rife nations of the Middle East). So far, we’ve seen no impulse on the part of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to simply employ the terms jihadist, radical Islamist, or Islamic terrorist the next time dozens of Americans are blown up or mowed down by someone shouting Allahu akbar!

...Is Trump’s threatened “isolationism” worse than the present “lead from behind” or the empty step-over lines, deadlines, and red lines of the last seven years? Or than refusing to increase security at Benghazi and creating fables to hide the dereliction?

...We have gone from Democratic opposition to gay marriage in 2008 to a new normal in 2016 of slandering those who oppose the idea of transgender restrooms in primary schools. There is a degree of racial polarization not seen since the 1960s, one in which activists invited to the Oval Office include people, like Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter leaders, who either have advocated the shooting of police officers or have been affiliated with marches that have chanted such threats.

I agree that Trump is capable of reckless talk and symbolism, but heedlessness is also the new normal when the president of the United States praises the album To Pimp a Butterfly, whose cover features the corpse of an eye-less white judge, his apparently violent demise celebrated by hipsters on the White House lawn.

When the IRS is sicced on political opponents, AP journalists’ communications are tapped by the administration, and an obscure videomaker is jailed on trumped-up parole violations to cement a lying narrative about Benghazi, and all this is greeted by relative somnolence, then the currency of outrage has been drastically cheapened.

The difference between a reckless Trump, Clinton, and Obama is not necessarily one of temperament, sobriety, or judgment, but often one of delivery and assumed establishmentarianism: For some reason Ivy League accents, government résumés, and liberal fides are supposed to repackage outrageousness as a mere slip, an aberration, rather than a window into a dark soul. A much-reviled Trump eliminated his primary opponents through invective and character assassination in open debate; a much-praised sober and judicious Clinton eliminated Bernie Sanders, in part, according to WikiLeaks, through her control of a biased and corrupt Democratic National Committee.

Put “corpse-man” or a cruel joke about the Special Olympics into the mouth of Trump, and we easily would find additional proof of his ignorance and callousness; from the silver tongue of Obama they are either minor gaffes or perhaps proof of the stress he endures on our behalf. There really is a Clinton mirror-image of Trump University; but whereas Trump went through the crude motions of offering real-estate training, it is hard to know how exactly Laureate Universities’ “chancellor” Bill Clinton became the highest annually paid academic official in the history of higher education. And what exactly bothered Bill about Laureate in 2015 to cause him suddenly to surrender his chancellor duties that had not bothered him from 2011 to 2014?

...If a “transformative” and “historic” president with an Ivy League law degree, an enthralled media, and “lower the seas and cool the planet” confidence has left us with a world on fire, the veritable destruction of immigration law, $10 trillion in new debt, a wrecked health-care system, a hollowed-out military, racial conflagration, an ossified economy, and near permanent zero interest rates — to the general approval of half the country — then it is hard to get riled up that a more conservative Trump represents something uniquely dangerous.

...Like it or not, this election is about degree, relative political agendas, and comparative hazard, not about marrying ideological purity and consistency with sobriety and character — a sad fact that did not enter our politics with Donald J. Trump.

Read more here.

A political movement based on the First Amendment

How are "journalists" portraying Donald Trump? Joe Bob Briggs writes at Taki Magazine,

...Of all the words used by the press to describe Donald Trump, the million-hit (Google) wonders are these:

bully 1.4 million
self-obsessed 2.5 million
vicious 9.1 million
rude 13.3 million
cruel 13.3 million
liar 16.2 million
angry 19.3 million
And the winner—drum roll, please:
idiot 20.5 million

Notice that five of the eight are internal attributes, only one can be fact-checked, and the most popular epithet of them all is the last refuge of sputtering incoherent rage.

...Of course, as we know from the recent convocation of the Illuminati at Bohemian Grove, there are many reasons for Trump’s popularity, but they all come down to one reason, the reason given over and over again, the reason so ingrained into the consciousness of the editor of the Lotus Grove Daily Arapaho that he tells his own readers why they are all ignoramuses and deluded throwbacks.

It’s The Angry White Man.

There’s an Angry White Man abroad. This AWM is so infused with rage that he has become a ballot-box terrorist and votes for Trump. He is determined to tear down the very foundations of the American experiment and return to some sort of gun-toting western wilderness where women are chattel and homosexuals are tarred and feather-boaed. When asked to produce one of these Angry White Men, fingers are pointed at that guy, the one with the wild hair and the crazy eyes at a Trump rally in Akron—yes, that guy that looks just like Timothy McVeigh. I’m waiting on the actual interview with the Angry White Man, but in the meantime we have a list of all the reasons he’s angry.

The main reason he’s angry, detailed at great length in President Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention, is that he lost his factory job. He’s a man with a hardhat and a lunch pail and nowhere to go. I don’t know how many times the Democrats used “loss of industrial jobs” to explain why people would want Donald Trump in office, but I’ve got news for you people: The factory closed in 1974!

That guy has grandchildren who don’t even know the factory existed. That factory became a derelict building in 1980, a Superfund site in 1985, a scientific laboratory in 1990 when Rutgers University biologists discovered the pollution was creating new mutant fish species in the Hackensack River, a vacant lot with a few structural walls still standing in 2000, a federally funded “redevelopment project” in 2005, a multi-purpose retail-and-residential high-rise in 2010, and today is advertised as The Factory Lofts: Luxury Starts at a Million Dollars.

“Well then,” says the journalist explaining The Trump Phenomenon, “it’s people who hate immigrants because they think they’re taking their jobs.”

Actually the main complaint about immigrants in Texas, my native state, is that they don’t learn English and so it’s hard to order at Whataburger. You would think the only state that fought two actual wars with the Mexicans and has a sacred monument to Mexican-killing martyrs would be inclined to take a hard line on Mexican immigration, but in fact there’s been so much wandering back and forth across the Rio Grande the past 300 years that it’s more like an irksome annoyance that comes and goes. The rate of illegal immigration actually flat-lined in 2005, partly because we built all these American factories in Nuevo Laredo and Juarez and Matamoras and—my own personal favorite border town—Piedras Negras, and partly because the Mexican economy got better in general.

...If it’s not the hardhat reason and it’s not the wetback reason, then it must be the Mythical Golden Age reason. This is the idea that there are millions of people in the backwoods of the Ozarks who are upset about the integration of the schools in 1957 and wish they could drive their pickups down picturesque dirt roads and go to fiddle conventions with other white people who belong to the Eureka Springs Free Will Pentecostal Tongue-Talkin’ Church, which is full of Aryan Brotherhood gun nuts who own tattoo shops in East Tulsa. The whole “mythical golden age” reason was apparently invented by West African exchange students at the Berkeley School for Public Policy who spend way too much time watching Country Music Television.

...First, stop with the psychoanalysis. Trump doesn’t believe anything. Trump is like Luminol. Luminol is the chemical used on Forensic Files to find blood after the crime scene has already been scrubbed. You just spray Luminol all over the floor and walls, and if human blood has ever touched anything in the room, it will phosphoresce like a red-headed hobo’s nose after seven bottles of Night Train. So Donald Trump is Human Luminol. He doesn’t have any real opinions. He just seeps into an environment like a grievance-seeking gas. He finds whatever people are mad about and says “I can fix it.” He probably can’t fix it, but he’s talking about things that nobody else wants to fix. He sees the blood on the floor.

Second, it’s the very people who hate Trump the most who created Donald Trump.

...There are all kinds of ordinary people who are gonna vote for Trump, and they’re not chasing a mythical golden age, and they don’t wear hard hats, and they don’t wanna live under a dictatorship. They’re what’s referred to in the mainstream press as “working class”—a strange term implying that they’re to be feared because they’re out there working instead of doing what the other classes do. Running Silicon Valley start-up deals? Managing trust funds? I don’t know why the Democrats, especially, equate “working class” with the Angry White Man, but they do.

My point is that the Donald Trump voters have consistently told us why they’re voting for Trump, but it doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes and so it’s never mentioned. What’s the first thing out of a Trump voter’s mouth when he’s asked about it?

“I like him because he says what’s on his mind.”
“He’ll say anything.”
“He doesn’t sugar-coat it.”
“He says things no one else will say.”

It’s a political movement based on the First Amendment.

Shouldn’t we, at the very least, be looking at why 40-plus-percent of the American population would feel stifled and silenced? Shouldn’t this be what we’re examining instead of the cerebral cortex of Donald Trump’s addled ego? Wouldn’t this be the reporterly thing to do?

So why do they feel muzzled? It probably started with something minor. Their third-grade son gets sent home for calling a girl “fat” in the school yard. But it doesn’t end there. The parents are called in. The student is required to attend Soviet-style reeducation classes. When the parents complain that “you’re making a big deal out nothing,” they are reminded that their progeny may have damaged a tender young girl for life.

And so, from a very early age, their kid is taught that he has to shut up about certain things. When a guy named al-Khalifa Mustafa bin Muhammad bin Chaka Khan shoots up a synagogue in Atlanta or slits a priest’s throat in Budapest, most Americans assume that a) he’s a Muslim, b) he’s a radical terrorist, and c) he should be shot on sight and his associates should be jailed or executed. But don’t say this out loud. There are local committees—and, again, it’s likely to come from the school—imploring our communities to “assume the best about all religions” and “resist the temptation to profile.” After all, there might be radical Jews or radical Christians bursting into mosques with AK-47s.

And then there are the examples with real, immediate consequences. A private joke at work becomes a disciplinary matter and possibly a loss of employment. An allegation of “sexual harassment” based on locker-room humor turns into an article in the paper and a civil lawsuit. Your daughter goes to college, gets the female lead in Carousel, but is told the drama teacher will be rewriting the final speech because it’s considered politically incorrect. You’re constantly put in situations where you’re not sure whether to mention your church affiliation for fear of being branded a yahoo. You post some photos on Facebook of your child’s first deer hunt and you’re smothered with online abuse as a Neanderthal killer and child abuser. God forbid you say something with a racist tinge, lest “hate speech” laws send you to jail.

Most Americans don’t believe in dividing speech into “protected speech” and “hate speech.” Most Americans believe that all speech is protected, even speech that some people regard as hateful. Most Americans think it’s okay to be an old coot with unpopular opinions. Most Americans feel that the federal government should get out of their business. And many Americans blame the Supreme Court for allowing the national social norms, set in New York and Washington, to filter into their communities in Wichita Falls, Boise and Spokane. They fear Hillary because they fear that more of their speech will be taken away, and more of their local control. They don’t love Donald but they know he’ll “say whatever he wants.”

They remember a time when they could also say whatever they wanted to say, too, but that time was more than thirty years ago. Meanwhile, there’s some guy at the Daily Arapaho telling them they’re idiots for voting for Donald Trump. They remember that guy, he’s the snooty one who went to McNeese State. He’s a clueless media type. Otherwise he would know that they’re not voting for Donald Trump because he’s a swell guy, they’re voting for the restoration of their personal liberty. Fortunately for their cause, the very fact that the media opposes them means they’re even more certain that it’s the right decision.

Read more here.

The Clinton Foundaton: organized crime at its finest

Monty McCurry posted on Facebook,

Recently, Charles Krauthammer alluded that he had no doubt some of the 30k emails Hillary deleted from her private e-mail server very likely had references to the Clinton Foundation, which would be illegal and a conflict of interest.
The Clinton Foundation is "organized crime" at its finest.

Here is a good, concise summary of how the Clinton Foundation works as a tax free international money laundering scheme. It may eventually prove to be the largest political criminal enterprise in U.S. History.
This is a textbook case on how you hide foreign money sent to you and repackage it to be used for your own purposes. All tax free.

Here's how it works:
1. You create a separate foreign "charity." In this case, the Clintons set it up in Canada.

2. Foreign oligarchs and governments, then donate to this Canadian charity. In this case, over 1,000 did –contributing mega millions. I'm sure they did this out of the goodness of their hearts, and expected nothing in return. (Imagine Putin's buddies waking up one morning and just deciding to send untold millions to a Canadian charity).

3. The Canadian charity then bundles these separate donations and makes a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

4. The Clinton Foundation and the cooperating Canadian charity claim Canadian law prohibits the identification of individual donors.

5. The Clinton Foundation then "spends" some of this money for legitimate good works programs. Unfortunately, experts believe this is on the order of 10%. Much of the balance goes to enrich the Clintons, pay salaries to untold numbers of hangers on, and fund lavish travel, etc. Again, virtually tax free, which means you and I are subsidizing it.

6. The Clinton Foundation, with access to the world's best accountants, somehow fails to report much of this on their tax filings. They discover these "clerical errors" and begin the process of re-filing 5 years of tax returns.

7. Net result – foreign money goes into the Clinton 's pockets tax free and untraceable back to the original donor. This is the textbook definition of money laundering. Oh, by the way, the Canadian "charity" includes as a principal one Frank Giustra. Google him. He is the guy who was central to the formation of Uranium One, the Canadian company that somehow acquired massive U.S. Uranium interests and then sold them to an organization controlled by Russia. This transaction required U.S. State Department approval, and guess who was Secretary of State when the approval was granted.

As an aside, imagine how former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell feels. That poor schlep is in jail because he and his wife took $165,000 in gifts and loans for doing minor favors for a guy promoting a vitamin company. Not legal but not exactly putting U.S. Security at risk.

Sarcasm aside, if you're still not persuaded this was a cleverly structured way to get unidentified foreign money to the Clintons, ask yourself this: Why did these foreign interests funnel money through a Canadian charity? Why not donate directly to the Clinton Foundation? Better yet, why not donate money directly to the people, organizations and countries in need?

This is the essence of money laundering…and influence peddling. Now you know why Hillary's destruction of 30,000 e-mails was a risk she was willing to take. Bill and Hillary are devious, unprincipled, dishonest and criminal and they are Slick!

Warning: They could be back in the White House in January 2017.

Don't let it happen.

Remember, most people are not well informed. We must inform and educate them.

Hillary's story about Bill and Monica: "Bill was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.”

Ann Althouse writes a lot today about sacrifice, and the purposes people who are using that word might have in mind.

And we may very well be distracted, because there is social pressure to stop all other thinking and honor the war dead and empathize with their families. That's built into the power of the propaganda. We're getting some stern discipline this week — as Trump is pilloried for failing to perform the usual honor ritual. Never, ever, do anything but stop, honor, and empathize. Submit to the pressure or become a social outcast like Trump.

Read more here.

Ann links to a 2014 piece by Maureen Dowd:

...David Gregory asked (Rand) Paul about the comment of his wife, Kelley, in a Jason Horowitz profile of the senator in Vogue, that Bill Clinton should not be First Spouse, given his “predatory” behavior with Monica Lewinsky.

Paul backed up his wife, telling Gregory that there “is no excuse” for preying on a young intern and that it should affect history’s view of the ex-president. While he said it was “not Hillary’s fault,” he added that with the Clintons, “sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.”

Senator Claire McCaskill told Andrea Mitchell that she found Paul’s comments “infuriating,” and that he was just “grasping,” trying to show he could be tough in a bid to win the presidential nomination.

But back when McCaskill, now on Team Clinton, was trying to crush Team Clinton and get Barack Obama elected, she said this about Bill: “He’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

Paul brought that up with me, suggesting that if McCaskill were being honest and not partisan, she would still be worried about having her daughter around Bill and that maybe there’s a double standard for the famous.

“In my small town, we would disassociate, we would in some ways socially shun somebody that had an inappropriate affair with someone’s daughter or with a babysitter or something like that,” he said, adding: “There’s no reason why we should give up on having some sort of belief in social standards” and on what’s “appropriate, inappropriate, right, wrong.”

...I agree that Paul’s aim was true. He distracted from the Republicans’ abysmal war on women by pointing at an abysmal moment in feminist history, when feminists betrayed their principles to defend a president who had behaved in a regressive way with women because he had progressive policies on women.

Instead of owning up, Bill Clinton forced his humiliated wife, a feminist icon, and women in his cabinet — Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala — into the dreadful position of defending him when he was lying about his conduct.

It is not so simple to cast Hillary as a victim; she was also part of the damage-control team to vouch for her husband and undermine his mistress. White House aides and other Democrats spread the word that Monica was a troubled young woman with stalker tendencies. Sidney Blumenthal, a senior White House adviser, later testified that Hillary told him that “she was distressed that the president was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.”

Monica had to be sacrificed for the greater good of the Clintons and feminist ambitions. Hillary was furious at Bill — stories were leaked that he was sleeping on the couch — but she also had to protect her political investment. If he collapsed, she was done. And she was going up — to the Senate and eventually the Oval Office.

Read more here.

Four More Years!

Rush Limbaugh just celebrated his 28th anniversary on the radio. He thought about doing something else, but IHeartMedia persuaded him to stay on for four more years, and Rush is excited about it, especially if Russia decides to share Hillary's emails.

CNN and Politico tried to throw cold water on the announcement.
Read more here.

Will we lose our freedoms irretrievably?

Thomas Sowell writes at Town Hall,

The good news is that both political conventions are now behind us. The bad news is that the election is ahead of us.

...one candidate could win the popular vote and the other candidate win the Electoral College vote, which is what decides who goes to the White House. That could polarize us more than ever.

...With Hillary Clinton as President and Democrats in control of the Senate, she can appoint Supreme Court justices with as much contempt for the law as she has demonstrated herself, and Senate Democrats would rubber-stamp her choices.

...The Obama Department of Justice has already been looking into ways that anti-racketeering laws can be used to threaten individuals and organizations that challenge the global warming scenario that has been used to promote more government control of what fuels can be used.

The Second Amendment right to have a gun is at least as threatened as the First Amendment right to free speech would be if Hillary Clinton gets to pick Supreme Court justices. The lifetime tenure of federal judges means that whoever is in the White House for the next four years can change the course of American law for decades to come, losing our freedoms irretrievably.

Much has been made of Hillary's "experience" in politics. But it has been an experience of having proved to be wrong, time and time again. As a Senator she opposed the military "surge" in Iraq that rescued that country and defeated the terrorists.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton carried out foreign policy decisions that led to major setbacks for American interests as far as the eye can see -- whether in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea or China. This is the kind of "experience" we don't need to see repeated in the White House.

Voting for an out of control egomaniac like Donald Trump would be like playing Russian roulette with the future of this country. Voting for someone with a track record like Hillary Clinton's is like putting a shotgun to your head and pulling the trigger. And not voting at all is just giving up.

Nobody said that being a good citizen would be easy.

Read more here.

What have conservatives learned from this Trump thing?

Kurt Schlicter at Town Hall is hearing nonsense from

people horrified at Trump and, by extension, the GOP voters who nominated him fair and square. Can we really blame them for voting for the one guy who actually paid attention to what they were saying?

Did we listen about illegal immigration? Heck, illegal immigration is just wonderful for us. We get cheaper restaurant food, cheaper houses, cheaper maids, and if we own companies we get cheaper workers. So what’s not to love, right? Except maybe you didn’t go to a university and wanted to work with your hands and found that you can’t get a job because all the companies are hiring cheap illegal alien workers. Or your truck got hit by an uninsured illegal. Or your daughter got killed by an illegal who should have been deported. Well, if you have concerns about these things, clearly you’re a racist.

...we’re stunned that our voters have failed to embrace our innovative two-prong approach of ignoring their grievances while heaping abuse upon them?

...And did we listen when our base asked the establishment to show some fighting spirit? Or are we driven to effectively vote for Hillary because somebody scandalized out tender sensibilities by using the verb “schlonged?” Our base demanded someone who wouldn’t be intimidated, who would fight. Instead, the establishment was dead set on dumping a steaming pile of Jeb on our collective lawn, the same durrwood you can watch on YouTube hanging a medal around Hillary Clinton's wrinkled neck. That pompous geebo can’t even take his own damn side in a fight; why is anyone shocked that our voters saw he would never take theirs?

...“Gosh,” we tell ourselves. “These people can’t even see what’s in their own best interest.” Except maybe they don’t like what they see. Maybe it’s because they decided we aren’t worth listening to. Maybe they don’t like us conservatives. And maybe we better figure out how to fix that instead of whining.

Read more here.

How the Left decides who has absolute moral authority

Ace of Spades today posts about the unequal treatment given to Mrs. Smith as opposed to Mr. Kahn, both of whom are parents of deceased military heroes.

What I'm believing is that I should treat my liberal counterparts with the exact level of fairness, honesty, and respect with which they treat me -- and that if I show any level of fairness, honesty, and respect to them greater than what they show me, I'm not more moral or virtuous.

What I am is a damn fool and a sucker who is encouraging his own debasement.

As they say in psychiatric circles: If you're permitting your own abuse to continue, at some point, you stop being a victim, and start being a volunteer.

Khan insulted Trump. The fact that his son died twelve years ago does not grant him, in my mind, some kind of personal Grievance Privilege.

If you enter the arena, you're in the arena.

This whole idea of Special People Having Special Privileges is a leftist, progressive thing which we have aped to our dishonor and detriment by creating our own protected groups.

No, I don't think veterans should be disparaged generally, and I would object if such an honorable group were generally disparaged.

But veterans weren't being generally disparaged here - just one. And actually, no veterans at all are even involved. The father of a veteran is being insulted, after that father insulted Trump.

"You have sacrificed nothing, nothing" -- "here is the Constitution -- have you ever read it?"

Anyone going to claim those are not insults?

...For a larger and larger fraction of the American public, ginned-up twitter outrage is the only physical exercise or cardio they get.

And people that are actually smart and went to Wharton and know all the Best Words ought to know that: The true American pastime, the real American sport, is now moral grandstanding and shouting at people for their sins.

Read more here.

There is no appeasing radical Islam.

Michael Qazvini reports at The Daily Wire,

Father Jacques Hamel, the 86-year-old assistant priest at the church in St Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Normandy, met his Creator last Tuesday when two Muslim men armed with knives slit his throat while chanting the Islamic takbir. The killers claimed they were sacrificing blood to avenge the 11th century Crusades. It turns out that Fr Hamel was actually a dear friend to Islam. According to his fellow members of clergy, Fr Hamel helped put aside a plot of land near the church, where he would ultimately be murdered by Islamic jihadists, for the purposes of building a mosque to serve the Muslim community in the area.

“Church authorities facilitated the giving of land beside his church to local Muslims to build a mosque, and they were given use of the parish hall and other facilities during Ramadan,” stated Father Mark Ephrem Nolan, Prior of the Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Cross.

Despite the ongoing wave of Islamic terrorism, Christians in the Rouen community where Fr Hamel was killed have made an earnest effort to welcome Muslims with open arms and open hearts.

“Efforts have been made by the Christian community to be welcoming to Muslims,” said Fr Nolan. “The Sisters even give reading lessons to Muslim kids in tower blocks.”

Both parishioners and clergy alike all attest to the fact that Fr Hamel was a humble man who put his life’s work in building personal relationships. "He led a pure, simple life, with an emphasis on building friendships,” added Fr Nolan.

...There is no appeasing radical Islam. Fr Hamel embodied the very virtue of tolerance that is so valued in Judeo-Christian societies. And he was killed, unceremoniously, without due regard for his life’s work.

Fr Hamel was a good, decent man mercilessly stripped of life by a cruel world. It’s our job to make it right. It’s our job to create a society where Fr Hamel’s teachings can finally flourish. We don’t live in such a world today. The truth is, the only way to find peace is to take out the enemy.

She "didn't know" weapons were getting into enemy hands.

I am so impressed with Senator Rand Paul's questioning of "transparent" Hillary Clinton.



h/t Gateway Pundit, which has a story quoting Julian Assange about weapons going from Libya to ISIS, after the U.S. deposed ghaddafy.