JOHN WHITEHEAD writes on the rise of deadly home invasions by the police. These invasions by SWAT teams more and more seem to end in the violent deaths of innocent people. Here is an excerpt of his article:

Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders. (more…)

ED H. writes:

At the commodity level prices are depressed. However, at the supermarket level, it is astounding. A one-pound can of coffee costs $11. And everything on the shelves is insanely overpriced. The only answer is that price competition is weak. The fact that 45 million pay whatever the cost via Food Stamps is a driving force behind this. The supermarkets can charge what they want and the U.S. Government via chits of printed paper will pay. Those not on Food Stamps are being crushed and driven into the socialist camp. Why has no one done a story about this??

Usually Food Stamps would be a minor factor, but not under the Obama Regime of Planned Poverty. If you aren’t on Food Stamps, you will be starved to submit, and then you too will be utterly dependent on the government. Much like Obamacare. Everyone is utterly dependent on the State.

Open this chart to see coffee prices back three years. And ALL commodities are like that: low on the real market and insanely priced on the consumer level. The government is claiming that raw materials are too high, but food itself is low. In fact, it is the opposite. This is like Obama’s claim that “the private sector” is doing fine, the truth being that the public sector is the most catered to, spoiled, protected and flourishing.

 If this Administration says anything, the opposite is guaranteed to be the truth.

(more…)

A NEW rule should be added to John Derbyshire’s list of precautions to avoid black aggression: Do not honk at black people, especially black teenagers. Unless you have a desire to be dragged from your vehicle and mercilessly beaten, keep your hands off the horn. From Sunday’s edition of The New York Daily News:

A group of 10 black youths — one of them a 12-year-old girl — surrounded a white couple’s car in Brooklyn, viciously beating the husband and yanking the wife to the pavement by her hair as they peppered the two with racial slurs, authorities said.

“Get those crackers!” some of them screamed, according to court papers. “Get that white whore!”

The confrontation erupted about 7 p.m. Monday, as the marauding group crossed Avenue U at E. 58th St. near Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Mill Basin.

Ronald Russo, 30, and his wife, Alanna, apparently had the green light and the husband honked at the group to get out of the way. The rowdy kids started kicking the car, according to the criminal complaint. Ronald Russo got out to check on potential damage to his vehicle. (more…)

DID you think Jews would overwhelmingly resist the Islamification of America? Think again. To the liberal Jew, the Muslim is “the Other,” the noble outsider, the heroic victim. See this amazing video.

(more…)

FROM The New York Times:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey announced on Monday that his administration would drop its legal challenge to allowing gay marriage in the state, hours after same-sex couples started exchanging vows.

Mr. Christie’s decision to withdraw his appeal before the state’s Supreme Court, a reversal from his long-held position that the question of gay marriage should be decided by voters, effectively removes the last hurdle from making same-sex marriage legal in New Jersey. (more…)

JEFF W. writes:

The poem by the suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman reminded me of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth.  Gilman complains of belonging to  subject class, of being forced to stay behind, of being “kept so small.”  This reminds me of the people who complain of being taxed in The Way to Wealth.  “Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country?” they ask. “How shall we be ever able to pay them?”

A “plain clean old Man” replies, “We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness, three times as much by our Pride and four times as much by our Folly; and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an Abatement.  However let us hearken to good Advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, in his Almanack of 1733.” (more…)

KARL D. writes:

I recently came across this from a leftist posting. This is indeed how the left views us —  not as people with whom they disagree, but as evil and backward as the Taliban.

(more…)

JORGE Bergoglio, the man proclaimed as pope, spoke of the dangers last Thursday of Catholics who become “disciple[s] of ideology.” What did he mean by “ideology?” If we read his words closely and interpret them in context, it is obvious what he meant. The ideology is nothing other than Catholicism. In fact, if we read him correctly, he calls Catholicism a “serious illness.”

Imagine that. A “pope” tells Catholics they are seriously ill for being Catholic.

Vatican Radio reported:

“When we are on the street and find ourselves in front of a closed Church,” [the pope] said, “we feel that something is strange.” Sometimes, he said, “they give us reasons” as to why they are closed: They give “excuses, justifications, but the fact remains that the Church is closed and the people who pass by cannot enter.” (more…)

The Socialist and the Suffragist

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Said the Socialist to the suffragist:

“My cause is greater than yours!

You only work for a special class,

We for the gain of the general mass,

Which every good ensures!” (more…)

ALAN writes:

There was no television, no rock music, and no culture of youth worship in America when my friend Barbara was born in a small town in southwestern Indiana in 1935.  The town was surrounded by farms.  Barbara used to visit her grandparents in a white frame house with a large porch on one of those farms. There was a well for water and a drinking cup.  She would help her grandmother gather eggs in the chicken house.  Her grandmother wore a long-sleeved dress, a bonnet with a big brim, and shoes with two-inch heels.  Barbara remembers playing dominoes.  The grown-ups would play card games like Euchre. Around the player piano, the family would sing along to songs like “My Darling Clementine” and “She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” (more…)

  I HAVE a number of comments I have not been able to get to yet.

BET you didn’t know that an obscure English noblewoman was the “first computer programmer,” did you?

And do you know why there aren’t millions of female computer programmers today? It’s because girls lack “role models.” But then, boys must have lacked role models once too because at some point in scientific history there had to have been no role models at all. It’s a conundrum. But it’s a conundrum that doesn’t much disturb those who refuse to acknowledge that the vast majority of women do not want to be computer programmers no matter how many gorgeous and dubious role models are thrust in their faces.

(more…)

TIBERGE at Galliawatch reports:

It has been the one of the bizarre goals of the French Fifth Republic to devalue the heroism of the French Army in various wars, and to sing the praises of the victorious enemy, whether German, North Vietnamese, Algerian, or Mohammedan. This misplaced emotional attachment for the enemy and disdain for one’s own soldiers is a mysterious quirk of the Western mind, programmed, it would seem, to feel guilt for having attempted to save itself. We suffer guilt for winning a war, repentance for even fighting a war, and shame for having caused harm to the victorious enemy.

But usually it is a quirk of the left-wing Western mind, patriots being temperamentally more inclined to feel gratitude towards those who are willing to die defending them. If you recall the return of American soldiers from Vietnam you know that the great divide in the country in the mid-seventies would continue to split us into a so-called “cultural war”, and that this cultural war, like the fall of Saigon, has also been lost.

Before Saigon there was Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when a weakened French army suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of the fierce North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, a name we heard every day on the news in the ’70’s. From Wikipedia (accents retained): (more…)

RITA JANE writes: 

The problem with the assertion that women working grows the economy is that all labor done at home doesn’t count toward traditional GDP analysis. If you pay a teacher to educate your kids, that generates measurable economic growth; homeschooling doesn’t.

In fact, any time a commercial transaction is substituted for a non-commercial one, the economy grows. But that doesn’t mean we’re better off. Today I mended a sweater, cooked our lunch at home, cooked dinner at home and cleaned the bathroom. If instead I’d paid my tailor to repair the sweater ($5), bought lunch out ($15), bought dinner out ($25) and had a cleaning lady do the bathroom ($10), I could have grown the economy by $55. The tailor, waitress and cleaning lady would undeniably be better off then, but would I be? (more…)

BOB writes:

I am writing regarding your recent comments on divorce. Doubtlessly, modern divorce law has wreaked havoc on the culture, on the institution of marriage, and on the family. But you propose (and correct me if I misunderstood) entirely forbidding legal divorce. This, I think, is a step too far.

(more…)

JAMES N. writes:

I recently made a comment on an Internet discussion about “traditional” marriage. The use of the term “traditional marriage” by defenders of what actually exists now rubs me the wrong way. I wonder what you think of my comment:

Traditional marriage (aka real marriage, actual marriage, marriage by definition, etc.) has three elements: (more…)

  MARK STEYN suggests, in light of the National Park Service's actions during the government shutdown, that national park lands be returned to the states.