JOHN BANNON, 55, died last week of brain injuries sustained on Feb. 1, the day he was knocked to the ground in his Baton Rouge neighborhood. Two black teenagers, one 15 and the other 19 years old, have been arrested and are believed to have attacked Mr. Bannon in the course of an “attempted robbery.” They allegedly were testing which one of them could deal a more devastating blow. In other words, Mr. Bannon, who worked in a hardware store, was a victim of merciless and savage cruelty. His head hit the cement sidewalk so hard his brain immediately began to hemorrhage. He lingered on life support for several weeks.

From The Baton Rouge Advocate:

“You just want to know why, why him,” said Susan Smith, Bannon’s sister, who resides in Nashville, Tenn. on Wednesday afternoon, choking back tears. “Why him, of all people, (who) didn’t bother anybody.”

Mr. Bannon was apparently killed because he crossed the path of feral beings who were in the mood to kill. The very fact that he was unthreatening probably gave them incentive.

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IN PREPARATION for the legal introduction of same-sex “marriage” in Britain next month, government bureaucrats are rewriting a host of statutes pertaining to inheritance, royal titles, pensions, taxation and child custody to alter, redefine or remove references to husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. Redefining marriage means redefining kinship. Actually, it’s the inversion of kinship so it naturally creates a blizzard of complications, many of which cannot even be foreseen.

Some of the laws being reworked are many hundreds of years old, dating back to distant times when gay parades and wedding cakes with two grooms didn’t exist. Men will not hold the title of “Queen” or “Duchess,” according to early redrafting. And two women will probably not hold the same Duchess title. There are some weirdnesses that even British politicians cannot accept. Apparently, it will not be high treason to violate the husband of the King, which should make for some interesting threesomes. But it is unclear what the husband of the Prince of Wales will be called. Given the decadence of the House of Windsor, it’s a serious concern and should be ironed out before a man walks down the aisle of Westminster Cathedral to meet a Prince near the altar.

But who knows what will happen when the King and his husband have a child with a surrogate mother. Will she be given any title at all? Also, if she is the mother of a future King, shouldn’t her children by a husband of her own have some royal prerogatives too? After all they will be related by blood to the royal line. Ah, this is unclear. When Henry VIII made marriage a matter of personal preference, subject to the whims of adults and not the Church, little did he know where it all might lead.

According to The Telegraph:

Civil servants have drawn up a list of scores of statutes and regulations dating back as far 1285 to be amended or specifically excluded when the Government’s Same-Sex Marriage Act comes into force next month.

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KARL D. writes:

Another white Western Eloi woman has paid the ultimate tax. According to the Daily Mail, Erin Willinger, 30, was a yoga teacher and social worker from New York who went to India and soon met and married an Indian taxi driver. Within five months he stabbed her to death and then blew himself up. Feminism has yet another body on its hands.

I know this is a dumb question, but what in the world could an educated, urbane, white Western woman possibly have in common with an Indian taxi driver? Although I suppose that was his entire appeal as far as she was concerned? I could no more go down to Peru and marry some poor peasant women who still squats in a ditch than fly to the moon! She may be a perfectly decent and moral human being, but that’s where our commonalities would end! I just don’t get it.

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IN this entry from yesterday, Ian writes:

Advocates for sodomy often claim that the high rate of suicide among sodomites is due to the prejudice and bigotry shown towards them.

However, if we look at other groups who have been persecuted in the past or in the present, do we see a high rate of suicide among them?  Were the early Christians committing suicide at high rates because of Roman persecution?  Were European Jews committing suicide at high rates because of Nazi persecution? Were American blacks committing suicide at high rates because of enslavement or because of Jim Crow? Are Middle Eastern Christians committing suicide at high rates today?

While I don’t have any data on hand, somehow, I rather doubt the rate of suicide among these groups was/is as high as it is among sodomites.  And never mind the fact that the level of “persecution” sodomites experience today is nowhere near what most of these other groups suffered.

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HERE is the three-times Olympic champion Sonja Henje from Norway. I will refrain from making the obvious comparisons between the way Henje is dressed and the costume of the current gold medalist Adelina Sotnikova.

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ALAN writes:

Do you and your readers ever wish for an alternative to the indescribable evil and ugliness that surround us daily?  So do I, and so did Lawrence Auster:

“If you would like to leave the present state of things for a while and enter a world of sheer joy and delight,” he wrote in 2007, “I recommend seeing all of the Fred Astaire – Ginger Rogers movies…   I consider Astaire one of the great geniuses of our civilization…    See these movies and be lifted up by the happiness, joy, beauty, and perfection” that they convey.  [ “Astaire and Rogers,” VFR, August 6, 2007]

Mike Royko said much the same thing twenty years earlier, shortly after Fred Astaire died.  At some point in his life, he wrote, it dawned on him that Fred Astaire “was just about the sharpest guy in the world.   …I saw every movie Astaire ever made.  …What mattered was the music, written by the best composers, and Fred Astaire dancing and singing….”  [“Fred Astaire Was A Class Act To End,” Chicago Tribune,  June 23, 1987 ]

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PETE F. writes:

In “Women’s Hockey: Not So Equal After All,” Mary wrote:

“In those “old fashioned” marriages husbands have a deep respect and an abiding tenderness for their wives, not because their wives are like them but precisely because they are not: they allow men access to the other half of life, they complement them. Is all of this perfect? Of course not. And of course there are areas of overlap, but especially today young women should take care not to lose their softness or refinement, which will always be attractive to good men and will in turn refine them. Now more than ever those qualities are needed and men don’t generally have them.”

Mary, your point is very well-taken.

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BYRON YORK at The Washington Examiner writes:

The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” But under the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission is planning to send government contractors into the nation’s newsrooms to determine whether journalists are producing articles, television reports, Internet content, and commentary that meets the public’s “critical information needs.” Those “needs” will be defined by the administration, and news outlets that do not comply with the government’s standards could face an uncertain future. It’s hard to imagine a project more at odds with the First Amendment.

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THE Youth Risk Behavior Survey is administered yearly by the Centers for Disease Control. Here are a few of the questions that were addressed to high school students in 2013.

During your life, how many times have you used any form of cocaine, including powder, crack, or freebase? (The student may choose from one to 40 times with all drug-related questions.)

During your life, how many times have you sniffed glue, breathed the contents of aerosol spray cans, or inhaled any paints or sprays to get high?

During your life, how many times have you used heroin (also called smack, junk, or China White)?

During your life, how many times have you used methamphetamines (also called speed, crystal, crank, or ice)?

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ADAM writes:

An acquaintance on Facebook recently posted a link to an article by Pippa Biddle, “The Problem With Little White Girls (and Boys).”

Biddle concludes that her efforts to volunteer in Tanzania and the Dominican Republic were not particularly helpful to the local populations. She basically says that she lacked the useful skills — such as fluency in the local language and experience with construction — to be effective as a volunteer, and that it would have been more effective for her to simply have stayed home, raised money, and sent the money to charity organizations abroad. Fair enough, but I found her white guilt to be grating and posturing. How typical for a white person to say that her efforts are somehow illegitimate for the very reason of her being white:

“I don’t want a little girl in Ghana, or Sri Lanka, or Indonesia to think of me when she wakes up each morning. I don’t want her to thank me for her education or medical care or new clothes. Even if I am providing the funds to get the ball rolling, I want her to think about her teacher, community leader, or mother. I want her to have a hero who she can relate to — who looks like her, is part of her culture, speaks her language, and who she might bump into on the way to school one morning.”

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DON VINCENZO writes:

If the politics of Virginia grow increasingly unrecognizable to its residents, I can’t begin to imagine what the residents of our neighboring state of Maryland think of the actions of Governor Martin O’Malley. Since his election in 2006, O’Malley has taken that state into the outer fringes of the Far Left. There exists in embryonic form groups in the western portion (read: white) of the state that are considering secession, which may be just as zany as O’Malley’s policies.

O’Malley promoted and then signed the law allowing homosexual couples to marry despite the warnings of the then Archbishop of Baltimore, Edwin O’Brien. (more…)

SO MANY decent people have had their lives cut short by black criminals. Every one of these murders heightens the fear that reigns in American cities and causes millions of people to limit their daily activities out of fear of becoming victims too. Here are two recent examples.

Amber Long, a 26-year-old architecture student, right, was killed in January in front of her mother, left, during a purse snatching in Philadelphia. She held onto a $14 purse she had bought earlier in the day and was shot in the chest.

James Vester, a 32-year-old Iraq war veteran, was killed in December in Indianapolis while seeking to buy an iPad advertised on Craigslist. He was lured by two teenagers to a parking lot and was also shot in the chest. “Vester told cops before he died at a local hospital that the suspects took the keys to his vehicle, his cellphone, his wallet and $250 in cash…”

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MISS FOX writes:

The Daily Mail reports that homosexuals live shorter lives due to prejudice and intolerance. Much like the racial studies that purport the same idea, so too does this study suggest that people be ever more tolerant of a clearly disastrous lifestyle.

In societies such as Sweden and the Netherlands, where homosexuality is supported, homosexuals live shorter lives. Though this is no surprise.

The article is here. There is no mention of AIDS, drug abuse, or the many other physical maladies that are associated with this lifestyle. In the progressive point of view, it boasts a “How-can-you-possibly-do-this, you-evil-haters?” tone.

A good debunking of this silly study can be found here.

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MARGERY EAGAN, a columnist with The Boston Herald, offers a painfully glaring example of feminist dementia. She complains that the mayor told women to take precautions against a rapist:

After three attacks on women in East Boston, women there should stay alert and walk in pairs, police said.

After an attack on a woman in the North End, said Mayor Marty Walsh, “I’d just ask women — if you’re walking, you know, walk in pairs, don’t walk around alone, particularly at night.”

I read this advice, well-meaning and well-intentioned, no doubt. It made me nuts. (more…)

  THE Pizza-Industrial Complex has pulled a fast one on the residents of Bobtown, Pa. After a natural gas well exploded in the town, leaving one worker presumed dead and a fire that burned intensely for five days, what did Chevron give residents as an expression of concern and sympathy? Gift certificates for pizza at Bobtown Pizzeria. This is ominous --- especially for those of us in the sensitive field of Pizza Analysis and Forecasting (PAF). I'm not sure where this will lead but I foresee pizza becoming a form of currency for corporate and government "outreach" offices. For instance, one day you might get a notice in the mail saying your property, which is is good condition, has been condemned. You have one month to pack your bags and move out. Inside the envelope will be $1,000 worth of coupons for Domino's triple-stuffed, double-crust pies with bacon and green peppers (soda included). I'm sorry to report that there are a few Americans, even some with decent homes, who would consider this a great deal.

 BERT PERRY writes:

It’s worth noting that when the women’s Olympic hockey team prepares for the Olympics, they do not play women’s’ college teams.  Not quite good enough.  That said, neither do they play teams from the NHL or its minor leagues, or college teams at any level.  They are too good.

Just right? They play good boys’ high school hockey teams from northern Minnesota, but make sure that checking is not part of the game. In the same way, the best competition for elite women in running is good high school athletes.  The women’s world record in the mile run would place decently at most state meets for the boys, but would not win. Except for the fact that the jostling that happens in any high school boys’ race might not be exactly welcomed by elite women runners, of course.

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