Bill Maher hosts the Annual Fall Fundamentalist Fashion Show. Warning! Do not be drinking coffee as you watch this. This is comedy as it should be.
Imagine the hysteria if I had shot this man-eating tiger today instead of 54 years ago.
In TTP yesterday (7/30), Ben Shapiro skewered the pathology of those who hate hunters more than monsters like the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, responsible for the deaths of countless human beings in his country, or the proto-hominids of Planned Parenthood.
Also yesterday, the Center for Medical Progress released its latest video. The Daily Caller has a description of it that could make you throw up.
It is more than ironic that the lion whose death has caused paroxysms of outrage was named Cecil, while the president of Planned Parenthood is named Cecile. Cecil vs. Cecile…
Last Saturday (7/25), something very appropriate happened to Zero. The president of another country told him to get lost to his face in front of the entire world…
There are at least three candidates for HFR Hero of the Week…
We’ll close with a dyad of good news.
[This is the full text of Carly Fiorina’s speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday, July 27. The video of her speech is below.]
I have always believed the role of a leader is to see the truth, speak the truth and act on the truth. I am here tonight to speak about what I see and to describe how I am prepared to act. I see a world in dire need of American leadership. I see President Obama and Secretary Clinton always speaking in terms of ambivalence and shades of gray, offering false choices and raising the shadow of doubt about our will to lead.
The next President of the United States must reestablish our leadership—she must speak with clarity, accept that some things are black and white and act with courage. She must be prepared to challenge the status quo and change the way things are –whether in Washington or around the world.
President Obama has richly rewarded the bad behavior of Cuba, Russia, Syria, Iran and China—and Mrs. Clinton has signaled her approval. It is really quite simple. When you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.
The American people deserve an honest leader. Who will own up to the difficulties of the job in front of her—and who has a track record of leadership, accomplishment, and challenging the status quo. Here is what I will do as Commander-in-Chief.
On Tuesday (7/28), the world lost its collective mind – whatever is left of it, anyway – when media discovered the identity of the killer of a Zimbabwean named Cecil.
Cecil is a lion. Cecil, a lion, was by most accounts “one of Africa’s most famous lions.” Cecil, incredibly, was famous for being a lion, not for curing cancer, although you wouldn’t know that by the media coverage.
The man who shot Cecil, a lion, to death is Dr. Walter Palmer, a dentist in Minnesota who paid $55,000 for a big game permit. Celebrities promptly grabbed their pitchforks for the now-biweekly sport of “let’s find a jackass doing something nasty somewhere on earth and ruin his life to make ourselves feel moral.”
The American media have spilled copious amounts of ink and spent enormous amounts of bandwidth ginning up the mob over the death of Cecil, a lion. Meanwhile, the major media rush to ignore the fact that Democrats now force American taxpayers to foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of murders of babies by organizations including Planned Parenthood.
I think most of those trying to stop the approval of the Iran Deal are going about it wrong.
I don’t believe you can stop this thing by going through the text and pointing out its myriad flaws, nor do I think it’s good enough to expose the many lies Obama, Kerry, Rhodes et. al. told us along the way, nor even to uncover secret deals.
Kerry and Zarif spent 27 hours alone during the negotiations, and we’re not going to get a transcript of those conversations, nor will either of them tell us what they may have agreed. And even if they did, I don’t think it would produce enough public political rage to stiffen the wobbly spines of our elected leaders.
The critics are quite right for the most part: it’s an awful agreement, the administration has behaved abominably, and the deal should be rejected. I’m just talking about the best way to do it, the best tactics to use.
Obama understands how to do it. We should do the same.
A study by the Royal Astronomical Society, published in Science Daily on July 9, concludes that solar activity will be exceptionally diminished in the decade of 2030-40 as it was during the Maunder minimum of 1645-1715, a period of sharply lower temperatures known as the "Little Ice Age."
Lower temperatures would be far more damaging than moderate global warming, because agricultural production could be greatly reduced. Note: there are many scientists who think changes in solar output, and/or changes in cloud cover can easily swamp changes in CO2 levels in affecting the earth's temperature.
New satellite data, reported in Nature Geoscience on July 20, shows that Arctic Sea ice has now bounced back to levels last seen in the 1980s when modern measurements began. At the same time, southern sea ice around the Antarctic has grown to a thirty-year high from when it first began to be measured. Climate scientists admit that their models cannot account for the rise in sea ice.
By the way, did not Al Gore tell us the Arctic Ocean would be free of sea ice by the summer of 2007?
Depending on when in history the question above is asked, it would mean something very different.
Today, we live in a time where our overall health, opportunities, and options would be considered nothing less than miraculous to our ancestors. Practical knowledge of how our choices, thoughts, and habits affect our own experience allows us to be active participants in our own happiness in ways that would have likely mystified most people through history.
The Ancient Greeks would say that we, as a culture, are incalculably lucky or blessed. I think most of us would acknowledge that, but we would also think that the creative acts of relatively free, conscious people had something to do with our blessings as well. In a way that the Ancients could not fathom, we have today the potential to more actively pursue the virtues that bring greater happiness.
I’ve spent decades – my entire adult life, in fact – studying, writing, lecturing, and counseling clients about mastering their potential for genuine happiness. I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you.
It saddens me that I need to begin this HFR with bad news. Jack Kelly, beloved by TTPers for his column and my dear friend of over 30 years, has been diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer.
I’m making this public because I am asking you to pray for him. There is power in prayer and he needs to know he’ll have that with us.
As for me, I’m an incurable optimist. The median survival time after diagnosis of bone marrow cancer is five years. To me, this means that given the rate at which medical research is learning how to cure or slow down various cancers, his form of cancer won’t be so “incurable” four or five years from now.
But right now, Jack and his wife Pam need our prayers. Let’s let him know that he has them.
Before Mohammad Youssduf Adulazeer shot up a military recruiting center in Chattanooga from a car and then sped away, another Mohammed, Abdulhakim Mujahid Mohammed did much the same thing in 2009.
Both struck military recruiting centers in the South, but the 2009 Mohammed had a message for Americans that we unfortunately failed to heed.
"This is not the first attack, and won't be the last," Mohammed warned. “I'm just one Mohammad. There are millions of Mohammeds out there. And I hope and pray the next one be more deadlier than Mohammed Atta!”
There are millions of Mohammeds out there. In a world with lots of Mohammeds, we really need to consider whether we want Mohammed becoming the most common name for a boy in America, as it already has in countries like Britain.
The murderous Mohammeds embody the values of the original Mohammed, the founder of their brutal ideology. They kill like him. They kill in his name. If we don't want Mohammedan murders, we should stop importing Mohammeds.
America does not need immigrants who view mass murderers as role models. On the list of the least desirable immigrants, Mohammed should rank somewhere below a leprous beggar, a convicted rapist with AIDS, and Piers Morgan.
As I predicted here week before last (7/10), the Iranians did not sign on to the Grand Bargain negotiated in Vienna. They don’t want to make a deal with the Great American Satan, even though they do want the American concessions, above all the huge sums of money we’ve promised them.
Now comes Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as reported by Reuters (7/18) talking as if the agreement itself is in question.
“In a speech at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel,’ Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities.
An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state, Khamenei repeatedly used the phrase ‘whether this text is approved or not,’ implying the accord has yet to win definitive backing from Iran’s factionalized political establishment.”
Concurrently, the head of the Revolutionary Guards announced that the Grand Bargain was unacceptable, and would be rejected.
I know this is dramatically counter-intuitive, since the Grand Bargain is so lopsidedly pro-Iranian. Why on earth would they even think of rejecting it? And yet, two of the most powerful tyrants in Tehran are warning they may do it. Why?
Distinguished scientist Freeman Dyson has called the 1433 decision of the emperor of China to discontinue his country's exploration of the outside world the "worst political blunder in the history of civilization."
The United States seems at this moment about to break the record for the worst political blunder of all time, with its Obama administration deal that will make a nuclear Iran virtually inevitable.
How did we get to this point -- and what, if anything, can we do now? Tragically, these are questions that few Americans seem to be asking. We are too preoccupied with our electronic devices, the antics of celebrities and politics as usual.
During the years when we confronted a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, we at least realized that we had to "think the unthinkable," as intellectual giant Herman Kahn put it. Today it seems almost as if we don't want to think about it at all.
Our politicians have kicked the can down the road -- and it is the biggest, most annihilating explosive can of all, that will be left for our children and grandchildren to try to cope with.
Russia has fallen into full-blown depression and faces a mounting fiscal crisis as oil and gas revenues plummet.
Output from country’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom has collapsed by 19% over the past year as demand shrivels in Europe, falling to levels not seen since the creation of the company at the end of the Cold War.
Gazprom alone generates a tenth of Russian GDP and a fifth of all budget revenues. It will be several years at best before the country benefits from a new pipeline deal with China.
Russia is already in dire straits right now. The economy has contracted by 4.9% over the past year and the downturn is certain to drag on as oil prices crumble after a tentative rally. Half of Russia’s tax income comes from oil and gas.
Core inflation is running at 16.7% and real incomes have fallen by 8.4% over the past year, a far deeper cut to living standards than occurred following the Lehman crisis. This time there is no recovery in sight as Western sanctions remain in place and US shale production limits any rebound in global oil prices.
What recourse does a citizen have when government employees violate the law and do harm, and then they are protected by the government? Our federal Government was created to protect person and property and ensure liberty, but it has increasingly become the abuser rather than the protector.
If the government will not act to protect the citizens from government officials, what can be done? One action is to take the government to court as organizations as do the Institute for Justice and Judicial Watch. But that is a long and costly process
So in addition to calling for help from these fine organizations, here’s a suggestion to take matters in your own hands.
Entropy is a term from physics that describes the tendency for matter to move from order to disorder. Life can be seen as deliberately working against entropy.
If you ever watched the old Get Smart TV show – or the recent movie (which was actually pretty funny) – the good guys were called “Control,” and the bad guys were “Chaos.”
For living creatures like us, that pretty well describes the situation. Chaos is where entropy draws everything naturally; control is the conscious ordering, the structure that we have to impose on ourselves and our environment in order to survive and flourish.
We train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. The habits that we practice daily, weekly and monthly are all based on neural pathways that we have established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines.
These habits – if they are good ones – help us to resist entropy and have a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. But if they are bad ones, entropy takes over our lives. Resisting entropy can be a very productive art form. Let’s see how we can do it.
