Scores of Baltimore-area religious leaders held an interfaith prayer vigil for unaccompanied children who arrived in Maryland after fleeing violence in their home countries.
Dozens of religious leaders and supporters marched along Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Wednesday to draw attention to the influx of immigrant children into the United States, and specifically into Maryland and Baltimore. In the first seven months of 2014, 2,205 unaccompanied immigrant children have settled in Maryland. Most of those children have been reunited with family members or placed in the homes of sponsors.
What the story failed to mention is that these “religious leaders” included federal contractors who provide refugee services. (more…)
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For your readers who enjoy movies from pre-Revolutionary times (i.e., before the 1960s), I would like to recommend one made by MGM in 1951. Angels in the Outfield is a black-and-white movie about the manager of a baseball team and an orphan. It is not primarily about baseball but about good and evil, self-control and its absence. It is not a great movie. It does not pretend to be. But it is charming and thoroughly satisfying to anyone who remembers American culture and baseball in the 1950s.
The story involves the influence of the orphan and a newspaper reporter on the manager and his bad habits. It features excellent performances by Paul Douglas as the manager, Janet Leigh as the reporter, Donna Corcoran as the eight-year-old orphan, and Keenan Wynn as an obnoxious sports announcer. Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, and songwriter Harry Ruby appear as themselves in brief scenes.
The movie is a time capsule from 1951. There is no “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” There are no “messages.” There is a degree of orderliness in the behavior of the people in this movie that was common in 1951 and for some years after but would be astonishing to see in any public place today. Shakespeare is quoted on a baseball field. We get to see streetcars and scenes on the streets of Pittsburgh, where parts of the movie were filmed. Baseball teams traveled by train, and one scene takes place in a dining car.
Inside a Catholic orphanage we see immaculate rooms, hallways, wooden staircases, and the quiet dignity that Catholic nuns enforced. All those scenes are true to life: That moral code and orderliness were always there in the red-brick parochial school building I attended in the 1950s and in other such places.
This photo of Kassim Alhimidi, weeping over his wife’s body, appeared with the Times’s initial story on the murder of Shaima Alawadi. None of the subsequent stories featured a photo of him under arrest or in court.
HERE is a classic case of twisted reporting to make white Americans appear to be hateful, racist, bigots who have not been welcoming to the people of the world even though they have accepted, and been friendly to, nonwhite foreign immigrants everywhere.
In March, 2012, Shaima Alawadi was murdered in suburban El Cajon, California. Shortly before she was killed, according to her relatives, a note was found taped to the family’s front door that said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” A similar note was found next to the Iraqi Muslim woman’s body when she was discovered stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. The New York Times promptly ran a long piece on the murder that appeared on March 27, 2012 in the A-section of the newspaper. Two reporters worked on the story. Ian Lovett and Will Carless wrote:
Whatever the police eventually determine, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that many Muslim women in the area were worried that Ms. Alawadi had been targeted because she wore a headscarf in public, as many observant Muslim women do.
TOO soft to stand by and resist kidnappers, European diplomats have caused the Al Qaeda kidnapping business to explode. Rukmini Callimachi writes in The New York Times: While European governments deny paying ransoms, an investigation by The New York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year. In news releases and statements, the United States Treasury Department has cited ransom amounts that, taken together, put the total at around $165 million over the same period.
A 16th-century depiction of Norse gods by Olaus Magnus; from left to right, Frigg, Thor, and Odin
NEO-PAGANISM is super cool among some traditionalist intellectual types who believe Christianity is effeminate and Norse warriors are real men. Here’s a 2010 discussion at VFR on the phenomenon.
In that entry, the commenter Daniel S. writes: “The past that neo-paganism longs to return to is a[s] mythical and non-existent as the gods of German mythology.”
A MICHIGAN dairy co-op was forced to throw out 248 gallons of milk, 100 dozen eggs, and “an undisclosed amount of fresh cream, butter and cheese.” The co-op was selling food without a license, according to the Michigan Department of Agriculture, which ordered the farm to dispose of the food. The Organic Prepper has the story.
THE Argentine bomber is at it again. Friends, this man is not Catholic. It's as simple as that. How can a person be the Pope when he is not even Catholic? Imagine if Christ had followed Rule No. 1 ("Live and let live") or No. 9's "the worst that can happen is religious proselytism, which paralyzes."
There’s a quite tasty, upscale restaurant in a major shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand which presents Westerners with a Thai-language bill, and Thais with an English-language bill, on the theory that the Westerners likely can’t read Thai at all and the Thais likely can’t read English, or do so quite poorly. Of course, there are extra items that the restaurant patrons didn’t actually order or receive added to the bill.
I know this is true because I observed it happening firsthand. When the bill came – in Thai – I handed it to my Thai dining companion, who proceeded to ream out the waiter because of the extra items added to the bill, causing him to lose face and amusing several Thais sitting at nearby tables.
Here’s an article about a similar practice at a Chinese restaurant. In several Asian countries, foreigners pay a significantly higher fee than locals when they visit tourist parks and historic sites which charge for access, attend sporting events, etc. Usually, these dual-pricing schemes are out on the open; there’s no attempt to conceal them.
Has anyone heard of a ‘reveal’ party? I heard about this about a year and a half ago. A pregnant woman gets together with friends and family and the sex of the child is revealed. There’s usually a cake, door prizes, etc. Of course, this phenomenon may not last long because of gender confusion.
Apiece in The New York Timesabout the surrogate motherhood industry focuses on an agency that was “unregulated.” In truth, no regulations or level of accountability can correct the abuses of gestational trafficking and the very existence of this business, which would be illegal in many countries, is a crime. Notice the sense of entitlement by those who pay for surrogacy:
Jonathan C. Dailey, a lawyer in Washington, wired Planet Hospital $37,000 in December 2013, the first installment on a contract for a single mother in Mexico to carry his child. He and his fiancée flew to Cancún to leave a sperm deposit at the clinic that would create the embryo and to visit the downtown house where their surrogate would live while pregnant. They picked a “premium” egg donor from the agency Planet Hospital sent them to. But nothing happened.
“It was just outright fraud,” said Mr. Dailey. “It’s like we paid money to buy a condo, they took the money, and there was no condo. But it’s worse, because it’s about having a baby.”
The emerging Planet Hospital story, which Mr. Rupak characterized as one of mismanagement rather than fraud, stands as a cautionary tale about the proliferation of unregulated surrogacy agencies, their lack of accountability and their ability to prey on vulnerable clients who want a baby so badly that they do not notice all the red flags.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Saturday overturned the city’s total ban on residents being allowing to carry firearms outside their home in a landmark decision for gun-rights activists.
Judge Frederick Scullin Jr. wrote in his ruling in Palmer v. District of Columbia that the right to bear arms extends outside the home, therefore gun-control laws in the nation’s capital are “unconstitutional.”
ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes: I wouldn't be surprised if the hospital where he worked tries to dismiss this heroic doctor, who quite literally saved lives by using his firearm. My guess is that the doctor knew that the hospital staff were in danger from mentally unstable patients (including this specific patient with a history of violence against hospital personnel), knew that the hospital security staff were not likely to be able to provide adequate protection for the psychiatric staff, and made a conscious decision to defy the hospital's stupid and dangerous policy in order to ensure that he and others would have a fighting chance when, not if, one of their disturbed patients went on a homicidal rampage.
ONCE again, we encounter the sheer insanity of putting men and women together on naval vessels, as if it is possible to remake human nature and prevent them from interacting, as well as the farce of a woman commanding a warship. FromThe Daily Mail:
The first female commander of a Royal Navy warship has been sent home after allegedly having an affair with another officer.
Commander Sarah West, 42, took charge of the frigate HMS Portland in May 2012, but has been sent home from duty after claims she was having a relationship with a male officer on the same ship.
This would breach the Armed Forces’ Code of Social Conduct, which prohibits personnel from having relationships with subordinates if they compromise ‘operational effectiveness’.
