Pundits agonize over President Obama's resistance to calling Islamist terror "Islamist terror." How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence?

How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they-secularized Christians and non-observant Jews-know Islam's character better than Moslems themselves?

It's easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.  Just as Obama's ideological predecessors could never criticize Stalin, so their successors today can never cricize Mohammed.

[Note: My morning teleclass is now closed, the evening one is still available; see below.]

Years ago, somebody asked Nathaniel Branden how you know when you love somebody. His answer was something to the effect that, "When they enter a room, for you, the room gets a little brighter, like the lights had been turned up a notch." 

What is it that makes love matter; that brings that glow, that brightness from another fellow human being? Love is too rich and complex to boil down to some single facet or data point - and I wouldn't want to do it if I could; but one of the elements that goes into feeling love for somebody, is the experience of being seen.

It's not easy to achieve, but it's the key to being loved.  Here's how to do it.

The Chicoms intend to use the 2008 Beijing Olympics as did the Nazis in the 1936 Berlin Olympics - as a glorification of their rule and a demand that the world provide it with the prestige it so desperately craves.  That's their dream.

Last May in Chinese Wishes, we discussed how the Chicoms' dearest dream may turn out to be a nightmare of protests and boycotts, a human rights debacle of Olympian proportions.

It looks like Taiwan is going to make this nightmare a lot worse.  And the Chicoms won't be able to do a thing about it.

The European Parliament voted last week (1/13) to let countries decide their own policies on growing genetically modified crops.

The vote allows countries such as Britain to press ahead because of hard evidence that such crops are good for the environment, good for consumers and good for farmers; and let countries such as Austria continue to ban the things despite such evidence.

It's a strange-bedfellow  alliance of the rational with the superstitious against the bureaucratic.

Indeed, the untold story is that it was a triumph of subtle diplomacy by Owen Paterson - the Euroskeptic former UK environment minister who knows how to work the Brussels system.

Last year he denounced what he called The Green Blob - "the network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape."

It was the Green Blob that suffered defeat in Brussels last week.