THIS Norwegian television show examines race differences with engaging and charming open-mindedness.

  THE DAILY MAIL describes the dictators and despots entertained by President Obama this week. The caption for the above photo: Pictured outside the White House waving and grinning with his wife President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s longest serving dictator after seizing power from his uncle and mentor (who used to hang regime critics from the capital’s street lights) in 1979. Since then he has won the yearly elections with 99% of the vote. Taking the lead from his uncle, he has since had shot or jailed virtually all political opponents and ruled the country with an iron fist. Despite running one of sub-Saharas biggest oil-producing countries and amassing a personal wealth in excess of an estimated $600million, he’s far from generous with his riches. The average income of his citizens is $2 a day, few live beyond 53 and 20 per cent of children die before they reach five years of age. Last year the country ranked 163 out of 177 on Transparency International. There is no freedom of the press, the country’s one television station is government-run and clean water is scarce. In 2011, the United States' Department of Justice made moves to seize more than $70 million in assets from President Obiang's son, Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue.

MAUREEN writes:

Regarding your post on the apparent athletic superiority of women, I notice similar things all the time and it drives me nuts. Whether it’s movies where women hold their own in a physical altercation with a man, or a sitcom mom besting a hapless dad in some contest, it’s blatant, sheer lunacy and I don’t understand how anyone can fall for it. Just yesterday I was helping my fiance repair a friend’s deck. He was manually screwing a big bolt into the wood with a rachet, one-handed while standing on a ladder. It was hot, he was tired, so I offered to take over for a while. He laughed. I could hardly budge that rachet an inch, using all my strength and most of my body weight as leverage. He was doing it one-handed! With no leverage! He’s above average in fitness, but not radically so and I’m 5’9′ and no petite flower.

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  CLIFF KINCAID reports at Tradition in Action: An advocate of Marxist-oriented “liberation theology” and recipient of a Lenin Peace Prize has returned to his duties as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, after a 29-year suspension. Miguel D’Escoto, who served as President of the U.N. General Assembly from September 2008 until September 2009, had been suspended from his priestly functions by Pope John Paul II in 1985. D’Escoto had joined the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua as foreign minister, after which the Soviets recognized his service by giving him the International Lenin Peace Prize.

STEVE SAILER reflects on this shoe ad. I realize it’s terribly un-cool to reject Darwinism, which makes no sense in the end and is really for nerds or simpletons who are incapable of joy, but I don’t agree with his view that the female psyche can be entirely reduced to a Darwinist competition for men (which is not to say this competition is not a factor in the female psyche) or his suggestion that women are incapable of disinterested moral objectives. Still, he makes some perceptive comments about the competition and sexual aggression feminism has unleashed.

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ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

Note that this prominent Japanese researcher who committed suicide was Haruko Obokata’s supervisor, and a co-author of her fraudulent research papers.

Obokata was  hailed as one of Japan’s top njeko, or “science girls,” before portions of her internationally acclaimed stem cell research were found to be faked.

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MARK B. writes:

Watch this television commercial carefully. It goes quickly, and see if you see what I do. In the first second after we see a group of women and perhaps one man who’s behind in the group (his head pops out), you see a wall with what looks like two men scaling it with a bunch of men waiting to help them over.

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  THE BASILICA OF SANTA Maria Maggiore is the oldest church in Rome dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The original structure was a fourth-century Roman palace. Since the 16th century, the church has also sometimes been referred to as Our Lady of the Snows. According to an ancient legend, the Mother of God caused a miraculous snowfall on the spot in the height of a Roman summer. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows. According to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira: Here you can see the beautiful role of legends. Synarchic (1) or technocratic minds do not like legends because they lack definite proof of truth. They do not understand that the legend exists to prove something superior to the concrete fact. In this story, for example, we find many things that tell us about Our Lady.  It can be disputed whether or not the snow actually fell on that day in August, but the legend reminds us that Our Lady has the power to transcend the laws of nature. There is an enormous distance between Heaven and earth. She can make nothing of this distance and appear to a Pope. Naturally speaking, it is marvelous for it to snow in the hot summer - July and August are terribly hot months in Rome - but she has the power to make this happen if she so desires. Morally speaking, we experience this truth whenever she sends us consolations in…

  THE Remnant reports on the Man-Who-Would-Be-Pope-If-He-Happened-To-Be-Catholic's recent visit to a workers' cafeteria. He's at one with the proletariat. [The heading of this entry comes from Novus Ordo Watch.]

JAMES P. writes:

The former male Commanding Officer of the USS Cowpens has been removed from duty for “fraternizing” with a female subordinate and then letting her take over the Navy guided missile cruiser when he got sick.

From The Navy Times:

The cruiser Cowpens was halfway through its Western Pacific cruise earlier this year when the commanding officer got sick.

Capt. Greg Gombert came down with flu-like symptoms in January that confined him to his cabin for about a week.

As he was recovering, he contracted something more unusual: temporary facial paralysis. The non-life threatening disorder makes it difficult to move certain facial muscles and initially can feel like a minor stroke. (more…)

  KARL D. writes: A homosexual couple who are foster parents to numerous children left a baby to die in a hot car. The tattooed, homosexual man who was responsible for looking out for the baby was sitting on his couch smoking pot, eating pizza and watching Game of Thrones while the child roasted alive. This story has it all. Drugs, homosexuality, tattoos, pizza, TV and, sadly, the death of an infant.

MATTHEW writes:

If you can spare the time, I would like to ask you a parenting question.

My cousin, B., recently became pregnant. She is not married to the baby’s father. In this day and age, that is unfortunate but not terribly unusual. What is unusual, however, is that B. is 26 years old, not nineteen. She graduated from an Ivy League college and went on to obtain her Ph.D.  She now works in her field (she is a physical therapist) at a retirement home.  The pregnancy was not planned. B. isn’t making an ideologically motivated decision to forgo marriage before motherhood, and she isn’t making a lifestyle statement.  She had been dating her current boyfriend for three to six months when she discovered that she was pregnant. To her credit, she does not want to have an abortion. But she doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with single motherhood either.

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  IN 1896, Carrie Lippincott started a seed business in Minneapolis at the age of 33. Notable for its personal and feminine touch, the company grew rapidly and became the world's largest seed supplier specializing in flowers. According to Barbara Wells Sarudy at Early American Gardens: In 1891, Carrie Lippincott began calling herself  “The Pioneer Seedswoman of America.”  Unique among seed companies, she specialized in flower seeds, & targeted female clientele.  Her greatest contribution to the seed trade industry was her gift for marketing. In the 1880’s, most seed packets from most seedhouses looked the same. The packets were printed on medium bond manilla paper with the text in black ink, perhaps with a little color on the vegetable or flower illustration. The farm-oriented catalogs appeared with big 8x10 illustrations featuring fruits & vegetables on their covers & in interior illustrations.  Lippencott's seed catalogs & advertisements revolutionized how garden seeds were sold. Her catalogs featured images of children, women & flowers giving her an edge with women customers among her competition. It's an interesting story. Sarudy features illustrations of the famous Lippincott seed packets. The blog calls Lippincott, who never married, a feminist. However, there is nothing in the post to suggest she was feminist. (One doesn't have to be a feminist to be a successful businesswoman.)

IS childhood becoming more like adulthood or is adulthood becoming more like childhood? Let’s just say, they are converging, and it ain’t pretty. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think a child can feel safe in a world run by oversized children who wear T-shirts that say,”It’s about me.”

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  HAPPY ACRES writes: Listening to a giggling NPR announceress interviewing a breathless female freelance about terrorists burying kidnap victims in the desert, together enjoying the make-believe [that] they were intrepid James Bonds but in the tittering voices of a coffee klatsch… …I had the heretical thought that women don’t belong in public life and we’ve made a monstrous mistake now almost impossible to undo.