Lying takes a huge toll on our relationships, our physical health, and our mental health. But sometimes we’re not so clear about what it means to be honest. Does it mean we say everything that we think or feel?
There are very strong benefits to honesty; and also some common sense guidelines as to what’s appropriate to express.
Let’s start with outright lying. Americans lie an average of...
There are none so blind as those who will not see, and hardly anyone wants to see Iran for what it is: an evil regime bound and determined to dominate and destroy us, our friends and our allies.
The evidence is luminously clear, but most all of our attention has focused, as usual, on the nuclear issue. Did the Iranians promise to stop enriching uranium or "dismantle" some of the components of their nuclear program? How many Western sanctions are being eased or lifted in exchange? And on and on...
We can expect the Iranians to prolong and exploit this period to their advantage and our peril. They've already begun. The Iranian regime is expanding its regional and global power, killing its domestic enemies, and subverting and intimidating Middle Eastern nations that are reluctant to bend to its will. These matters require serious Western attention, but they aren't getting much. For us, it's all about nukes and sanctions.
Just take a few of their major actions:
We all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes let other people down, or hurt them. What's the best way to deal with the people we've disappointed or hurt?
It matters how you apologize, and Heidi Grant Halverson, author of Focus, has some great advice about this. It's personally useful, but can also help us understand a dynamic that affects political differences with friends and neighbors.
The most important thing to remember is that when you have let somebody down, or done them harm, they don't care very much about how this affected you. When you start by explaining why you did or didn't do the act that you're apologizing for, you're telling them about yourself, and not addressing the effect you've had on them.
The best way to apologize is to start with the other person in mind, based on realizing that person will have different expectations depending on your relationship with them. Here's how.
This TTP Intel Bulletin comes at the personal request of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).
Dana is asking as many TTPers as are able to call their Congressman immediately and request they vote NO on HR 1249, the "America Invents Act."
The reason for the urgency is that the bill may be voted on tomorrow (6/22).
HR 1249's ostensible purpose is to "harmonize" US patent law with patent laws in other places in the world - like China. Yes, that's crazy. Who would want American inventors to be ripped off by Chicoms and their phony laws?
Today (5/08), memorial services will be held at Washington's National Cathedral for a great American, Jack Kemp, who succumbed to cancer six days ago at age 73.
Arguably, without Jack Kemp, the Reagan supply-side, high-growth economic revolution would never have occurred. Mr. Kemp, a young congressman from Buffalo, N.Y., convinced Ronald Reagan and much of the nation of the wisdom of sharply cutting tax rates on labor and capital.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he wisely endorsed a bill - the Kemp-Roth Act - to cut income tax rates 30 percent across the board. It was a radical idea, but it worked so well that not even the current president is proposing a return to the 70 percent marginal tax rate that existed in 1980.
In previous articles we have learned that there is hazard in taking privacy for granted on the internet. Doing so is at your own peril.
As we enter deeper into this Orwellian world it becomes more apparent each passing day that privacy, in many aspects of our lives, is a luxury of the past.
An ordinary cell phone can steal your privacy, without your knowledge, in some instances. Here is how.
Flexispy
As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, it was John McCain who launched the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Those investigations provided the springboard for the incredible media frenzy of the "Abramoff lobbying scandals." The Washington Post, for example, ran over 50 above-the-fold front page headline stories on Abramoff to feed the frenzy.
Jack Abramoff is in jail today because of John McCain. Now it's payback time. Abramoff will be setting off a bombshell timed to do maximum damage to his nemesis right before the election.
And in so doing, he will be ripping the lid off and exposing the dirtiest secret of how Washington really works. The way it works is like this.
It seems as if computer product marketing takes two distinct tacks these days. Students of the "new and improved" school label upgrades and new hardware models as the latest and greatest, placing the tag "upgraded" upon products that have been reworked in the lab.
Which leads one to wonder: Why were they trying to pawn off a piece of "old and unimproved" junk on consumers before?
The corollary principle is one in which customers, happy with version 1.x of a product, protest that there was nothing wrong with the original formula and that the "new and improved" item is actually "bloatware," where manufacturers heap on features and options that are supposed to enhance performance.
Instead, the "improvements" make the product unwieldy and harder to use, thus erasing - or reversing - any potential benefit to the user.
In the computer industry, the new/improved-vs.-bloat concept is generally applied to software applications, but in a few cases it applies to hardware as well - such as with USB flash drives that feature the U3 software platform.
They spent most of the siesta, the Spaniards' period of rest after the mid-day meal, having fun turning Spanish words into Nahuatl. Malinali was having so much fun it made her forgetful. She shook her head. "I must leave," she told them. "Our Mesheeka guests have come for their daily ceremony of complaining to Captain Cortez, and I must be there, for it is through me that they address their complaints."
"Have fun," Aguilar joked. Malinali sighed. "Our talking - that was fun. But ‘fun' and ‘Mesheeka' are two words that don't go together - in Spanish or Nahuatl."
Today is the nineteenth day here in Tlaxcala, she thought as she walked to Cortez's quarters, and for every one of those days, the Mesheeka emissaries who had accompanied them from Xocotlan had come to complain to Cortez about what terrible people the Tlaxcalans were, how they were all traitors and thieves and poor and wicked and not fit even to be slaves. It was so tiresome to hear and translate, and how Cortez could pretend to always be courteous and polite, or even stay awake, during the daily moaning, she didn't know.
When she saw the crowd of soldiers in front of Cortez's quarters, she realized something was different.
Another positive aspect of Xers that I have found is their no fear attitude toward starting businesses. I believe they will go down as the most entrepreneurial generation in USA history.
In what is probably the silliest comment on climate since Harry Reid blamed global warming on the Koch brothers, a green journalist opined of the refugees currently dying in the Mediterranean: "This is what climate crisis looks like . . . We know there is evidence that the violence triggered by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 were in part fuelled by protests over soaring food prices."
The soaring prices were actually exacerbated (as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN confirmed) by the diversion of much of the world's farmland into making motor fuel, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, for the rich to salve their green consciences. Greenie climate policies were a far greater contributor to the Arab Spring than climate change itself.
Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light.
As the International Energy Agency recently put it in a recent report, "increasing access to modern forms of energy is crucial to unlocking faster economic and social development in sub-Saharan Africa". Africa is awash with fossil fuels - but not the capital to build plants to turn them into electricity.
Greenie activists and politicians in the West -- what I call the Green Taliban -- are determined to deny them that capital. Why?
How would you feel if you had to have bodyguards anytime you moved about — not because you were a voluntary celebrity, such as a presidential candidate or movie star, but merely because you exercised your free speech right by publishing cartoons that some found offensive?
Danish journalist Flemming Rose published cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten back in 2006, which led to many violent riots by Moslems around the world. He has written a book, “The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech” (the English edition was just published by the Cato Institute Press).
Mr. Rose, rather than hiding, even though a fatwa has been leveled against him calling for his death, has traveled and spoken widely in his unrelenting advocacy of free speech and against the tyranny of silence. He has argued that “the lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The time is now to shut down Islamic Terrorism's financial network.
[Note: No one but a masochist would have voluntarily watched the JOTUS - Jerk/Joke, take your pick - give his SOTN - State of the Narcissist - speech last night. But Iowa Senator Joni Ernst gave a GOP response that spoke directly to normal Americans, with whom her words will resonate. The text and video of her speech are below.]
I'm Joni Ernst. As a mother, a soldier, and a newly elected senator from the great State of Iowa, I am proud to speak with you tonight.
A few moments ago, we heard the President lay out his vision for the year to come. Even if we may not always agree, it's important to hear different points of view in this great country. We appreciate the President sharing his.
Tonight though, rather than respond to a speech, I'd like to talk about your priorities. I'd like to have a conversation about the new Republican Congress you just elected, and how we plan to make Washington focus on your concerns again.
We heard the message you sent in November - loud and clear. And now we're getting to work to change the direction Washington has been taking our country.
The new Republican Congress also understands how difficult these past six years have been. For many of us, the sting of the economy and the frustration with Washington's dysfunction, weren't things we had to read about. We felt them every day.
We felt them in Red Oak - the little town in southwestern Iowa where I grew up, and am still proud to call home today.
Asking you not to read this is like telling you not to think of a pink elephant. Of course I want you to read this - or else why am I writing it? - but I want to enjoy Christmas first.
Christmas is one week from today (12/18). This is a time to set problems aside - personal, national, global - and simply bask in the blessings of our family, our loved ones, our friends, and of the life with which Providence has gifted us.
It sure isn't a time to wallow in the mire of what's coming - but if not now, when? After Christmas, we're looking forward to celebrating a happy new year. No, it's best to get this over with quickly.
For we have to brace ourselves: the next two years are going to be the longest two years of our lives. They will get continually worse as our country descends into the Hell that a satanic president wants America to be.
Zero is not Lucifer incarnate, let's be clear, but it's obvious now that he is literally "satantic" in the sense of being fiendishly and maliciously intent on damaging America's culture, society, and founding institutions as much as possible.
So what do we do? Here are five options.
From the time of the Ancient Greeks, this time of year has been known as the "dog days," when the heat and humidity caused "the seas to boil, wine to turn sour, dogs to go mad, and men subject to burning fevers, hysterics, and frenzies."
Much of the US is certainly not experiencing such climate misery this week, with record low summer temps from Arkansas to Minnesota. But in terms of what is happening to our country politically, economically, culturally and morally, these are indeed the Dog Days of America.
And there doesn't seem to be any relief in sight. Zero, rather than backing off in the midst of his growing unpopularity and unending scandals is "just getting started," according to Bryan Preston. He's "going Soviet."
Yet, the illegal, tyrannical, and unconstitutional acts of Zero's Imperial Presidency are not the cause of America's current crisis - they are the culmination of it. The Reign of Zero is simply the apotheosis of a crisis that's been building since the 1880s.
The crisis we face now is a cancer that has been growing slowly and steadily for 126 years, until finally under Zero it has metastasized perilously close to terminal stage. Which means that if Zero were to vanish tomorrow, the cancer would still be there.
We need radical surgery to cure it, a Revolution. It can certainly be peaceful - by no means need it be violent. For the Revolution We Need is a legal one that attacks the crisis at its foundation.
So - what is the target of the Revolution We Need? It is not Zero. It is what makes him and his Imperial Presidency possible. It is what is destroying any basis for Constitutional Government. Indeed, it is eating our Constitution alive. It is a medieval atavism in modern guise. It is...
