The subject was Pentecost, but the message was bullets that killed more than 40 people in a Catholic congregation in Nigeria’s relatively serene Ondo state.
The priest was just giving the benediction at the end of a mass to celebrate Pentecost Sunday when at least four shooters detonated a bomb and began spraying bullets among trapped worshippers.
The venue of the horrific attack was Saint Francis Catholic Church in Owo, a quiet town in Ondo state, approximately 170 miles west of the capital Lagos. Unidentified gunmen attacked on June 5, killing and wounding close to 50 people.
Eyewitnesses said the attackers detonated explosives inside the chapel that tore plaster off ceilings and left many severely injured.
Governor Rotimi Akeredolu told the media at the scene that the killers were foreign fighters from Mali.
“Most of those that are carrying out these attacks are foreigners who were trained in Libya,” Akeredolu said, according to multiple media reports. The governor did not explain his opinion in detail.
Just a little reminder that there are still Muslim terrorists in the world and they still enjoy killing innocent people.
The budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee would reduce mandatory spending by $11.86 trillion over 10 years while lowering nondefense discretionary spending by $3.64 trillion.
The U.S. government faces a budget deficit of $3.1 trillion. The accumulated national debt stands at $30 trillion.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on House Conservatives Float Plan to Balance Budget in 7 Years
One of the Oxford High School students who survived being shot on November 30 has filed a federal lawsuit against the school district and four top officials for failing to intervene to prevent the tragedy.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of 17-year-old Kylie Ossege, a recent Oxford High graduate, who suffered a gunshot wound to the right shoulder during the mass shooting at the high school in November. Four students were killed and seven others, including a teacher, were injured.
The lawsuit, the latest of several state and federal complaints filed against the school, alleges gross negligence and violation of the Michigan Child Protection Law in the incident and details how events leading up to the shooting should have prompted school officials to disarm the student accused in the shooting, Ethan Crumbley, then 15.
Joy Reid accuses Republicans of thriving on ‘demographic panic,’ says GOP wants no one to feel ‘safe’ I wonder how much time she spends every day straightening and lightening her hair?
The Democrats should be held accountable for last night’s attempt on the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Most notably, of course, Chuck Schumer issued a fatwa against Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch, which last night’s would-be assassin apparently attempted to execute.
But that’s not all. The GOP’s communications staff reminds us of the Democrats’ shameful history of encouraging violence against conservative Supreme Court justices.
According to the following report, the man in Berlin who deliberately drove his car into pedestrians at high speed, killing at least one of them, is an Armenian-German. His ethnicity makes it unlikely that the motive for his crime was jihad, although we’ll need to wait for definitive information on that issue.
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From the very outset of this pandemic, the topic of natural infection has been a taboo. To suggest that anyone might have been better off risking infection and thereby gaining immunity from a respiratorial virus rather than hiding under the sofa for two years was seen as outrageous and irresponsible.
My theory is that the reason has always been political. And that’s tragic.
Generations have gone by that have understood it. A life strategy to flee all pathogens is deeply dangerous. The immune system, in order to be trained to protect against severe disease, needs exposure. Not to all things, of course, but to many pathogens that are not finally debilitating or fatal. We’ve evolved with pathogens in what Sunetra Gupta calls a “dangerous dance.” This dance is unavoidable, especially for fast-mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2.
And yet from the beginning, this knowledge seemed to be lost. This is gravely embarrassing since it’s been known for 2,500 years. It was worse than just lost. As a person who wrote almost daily during the pandemic, I too was careful not to discuss this topic with too much bluntness. We all felt the political pressure to say silent or at least cloud our prose with euphemisms.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Politics of Natural Infection
Fox News host Charles Payne said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stock trade timing was “impeccable” and suggested that “maybe Nancy Pelosi knows something we do not know.”
“Representative Pelosi just bought a total of 50 out of the money calls on Apple, 150 out of the money calls on Microsoft,” Payne said on the June 6 edition of his show, Making Money. “Now, the two transactions totaled anywhere between one and a little bit over two million dollars. One would say it’s the kind of bet that one would make, uh, if they were a greedy capitalist, right? In fact, you would make a capitalist blush and then of course a professional poker player would also blush because the timing always seems to be so impeccable when it comes to Nancy Pelosi trades.”
It’s amazing that politicians who have never manifested any expertise in economics in their lives, in fact have conclusively demonstrated economic illiteracy, suddenly turn in to stock market gunslingers upon election to Congress. Makes me want to run for something….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Fox News Charles Payne Says Pelosi Stock Trade Timing ‘Would Make a Capitalist Blush’
It seems like a timely moment to review the threats of then Democratic Senate Minority Leader — now Democratic Senate Majority Leader — aimed specifically at Justices Kavanaugh et al. in a March 2020 tirade on the steps of the Supreme Court (video below). What a sinister lowlife he is.
Do you suppose anyone in the mainstream media will be asking him to take a look back today? Schumer means to preempt such inquiries. In a statement sent to Newsweek, Schumer’s team asserted that the senator has “been clear that he supports peaceful protests and is thankful law enforcement arrested this person today.”
Quotable quote: “I wanna tell you Gorsuch, I wanna tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Sounds like incitement to me. Kavanaugh ought to sue.
The late Joe Sobran famously said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” Less famous writers have often pointed out that the American Left talks like MLK but lives like the KKK. Without exception, the white people staking out fashionable positions on race do so from as far away from black people as possible. Antifascists love Portland Oregon because it is one of the least diverse cities in the county.
This was always true. Sobran made his observation about the American Left forty years ago when the country was still 85% white. Thirty million South American tourists later and the Left may be even more sensitive this reality. On the one hand, they have become violent in their racial politics, but also extremely sensitive to the reality of race in the daily lives. Forty years ago, white race hustlers actually went to the ghetto once in a while, but now they stay as far away as possible.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Cloud People Blues
The venerable office of Secretary of the Treasury goes back to Alexander Hamilton. Looking over the roster of former Secretaries, one can observe that it has rarely been held by lightweights or hacks. Janet Yellen makes a mockery of the office. She degrades the office in performing its responsibilities poorly and ranging far afield to parrot the shibboleths and follies of the Biden administration like a Stalinist apparatchik.
Considering that her previous gig was in charge of the Federal Reserve, it is no surprise that inflation is such a problem.
But despite this, Philadelphia seems to be trying to restrict one important form of defending life and liberty (and protecting property): bulletproof barriers that help shield employees from robbers or other attackers.
The just-enacted Bill 170963 would have originally banned them outright in eating and drinking establishments that seat at least 30 customers. (These restaurants are also the ones that, under Pennsylvania law, can get licenses to serve beer, though not all such large restaurants do sell beer; the law seems aimed at “beer & delis,” but apparently some local KFCs and Popeyes also have bulletproof barriers.) The bill was ultimately amended to call on the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections to “promulgate regulations to provide for the use or removal” of such barriers — but that Department seems to support broadly restricting them them; it thus seems likely that the regulations will provide for more removal than use.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Constitutional Right to Install Bulletproof Glass?
Authorities in the northwestern Italian port city of Genoa on Tuesday were executing arrest warrants on 14 Pakistani citizens linked to the man who stabbed two people in September 2020 outside the former offices in Paris of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine. The suspects are accused of criminal association with an international terror group, and are suspected of belonging to a terror cell called “Gabar Group” with direct links to the attacker, Pakistani-born Zaher Hassan Mahmood, anti-terrorism investigators said in a statement.
Yes, steel is sturdy … steel is modern … and in post-World-War II America, steel was arguably the hottest choice for materials for the home. During the war, America had ramped up tremendous capacity in steel production so that we could produce weaponry. Afterward, all the production had to find a new outlet. Where did it go? To big ‘ole American cars, but also into the American home — for appliances, home construction, and, yes, kitchen cabinets.
During Tuesday evening’s CNN Tonight, facts inadvertently slipped through during a panel discussion on Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey’s pleas for gun control at the White House earlier in the day, when liberal panelists and The Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg correctly noted children statistically have a much higher chance of dying in a car accident on the way to school than at school.
“If we’re going to start telling people that they should be scared about what is going to happen to them, we should at least put this in perspective. There are about 54 million kids in American schools who go to K through 12 in America. In the last 29 years, 170 kids have been killed in school shootings,” Goldberg accurately noted before getting shouted down by his fellow panelists.
Well, no homeschooled kid has ever been the victim of a mass shooting. Just sayin’.
It seems that Pakistani culture-enrichers in the Italian city of Genoa have become a little too frisky, prompting the anti-terrorism police to intervene and suppress their youthful enthusiasm.
An American mother from Kansas pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal district court on Tuesday to organizing and leading an all-female military battalion for the ISIS terrorist group in Syria. Allison Fluke-Ekren, a mother of five and former school teacher, admitted to training around 100 women and girls to support ISIS activities. She also plotted to carry out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced, citing court documents.
Just another little reminder that Muslim terrorists are still out there and still looking to kill people.
3D printing has revolutionized gun-making and has come a long way since the single-shot “The Liberator” pistol was available for download in 2013. Now entire semiautomatic pistol carbines can be entirely printed at home, and weapon-making appears to have graduated to rocket launchers.
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All we know thus far is that the 59-year-old Middleton – who admitted Jeffrey Epstein to the White House seven out of at least 17 times – was discovered on May 7 hanging from a tree at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville by an electrical cord, with a shotgun blast to his chest. The ranch, located 30 miles from Middleton’s home, is owned by an anti-poverty nonprofit called Heifer International.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Family of Latest Clinton-Linked Suicide Blocks Release of Shotgun Death Details
On Saturday around 10:10 p.m. in the area of the Karlsruhe Palace Park, a rainbow flag was snatched away and burned by a group of people. This apparently developed into a brawl in which there were several minor injuries. Several had their hair pulled and were forced to the ground, where they continued to be beaten and kicked. A 27-year-old was taken to hospital by ambulance as a precaution; others were examined on-site by rescue teams.
The predominant system of agriculture I am working in now has been intentionally set up against me and current and future farming generations. Today’s corporate controlled system is bad for farmers, bad for consumers, bad for rural and urban communities and economies, bad for our environment and our climate, and bad for democracy.
We are in this position because the rules (laws, policies and regulations) have been written, and lobbied and paid for by corporate special interests. We are in this position because of corporate-written, bad Farm Bills and bad trade agreements (the main drivers of our farm and food system).
We are here because many of our elected “representatives” don’t really represent us, their constituents or the vast majority of Americans. We’re here because we have a democratic process controlled by that “elephant in the room”–billion dollar multinational corporations.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Elephant in the room Is Destroying Family Farms, Rural Communities and Our Democracy
Expanded use of ethanol — enabled by President Biden’s lifting a summertime ban on fuels with a 15 percent blend — is a poor answer to high gasoline prices and a refusal to recognize the failures of the corn-based fuel additive. Reuters described the president’s action a win for the corn lobby, but all others appear to be losers.
Shortcomings of ethanol as an alternative to gasoline have been reported continually since at least 2007 when the U.S. government expanded its requirement that distributors blend ethanol with fuels to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The additive also has been touted as a way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
“There is a great danger for the right to food by the development of biofuels,” U.N. human rights advocate Jean Ziegler said at the time. “It (the price) will be paid perhaps by hundreds of thousands of people who will die from hunger,” A year later he called the diversion of food crops to fuel production a “crime against humanity.”
Nina Burleigh of Business Insider who is best known to the world for having “Offered Oral Sex to Bill Clinton to Keep Abortion Legal” found a new mission in life. This time it was focused away from presidential candle sticks to presidential stickers. Specifically, the highly popular “I Did That!” Joe Biden stickers that have appeared pointing at rising prices of gasoline on station pumps during the past year.
…
Her meme hunt for the heinous creator was inspired by Burleigh’s extreme rage at many for blaming poor Joe Biden for the rise in gasoline prices in particular and for inflation in general.
Perhaps she will have a stroke and die. That would be … appropriate.
A homeschool portfolio is a visual record chronicling a child’s entire homeschool year. There are basically two types of portfolios. The first, an academic-focused portfolio, serves as part of an annual assessment per your state homeschool law, and its primary purpose is to show that academic progress has been achieved. The second is meant to be a personal keepsake.
There are several benefits to creating homeschool portfolios. They can be powerful motivators and self-esteem boosters for your child. The simple act of seeing how far he or she has come in a single year can encourage your child to persevere, work harder, or consider setting more challenging goals next year. Invite your kids to join you in the assembly process and have fun reminiscing together as you look back over the school year.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Creating a Homeschool Portfolio
Thank you, Bill Clinton. (And George H.W. Bush, who fumbled the ball so badly.)
Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed.
This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal government directly made the loans to students. More specifically, the federal government pays the universities/colleges up front, and the student then owes the government that money.
This represented a large shift in the alignment of incentives. When the loans come from the federal gov, there’s much less pressure on schools to compete on price. This is especially true since “increasing max student loan size => making college more accessible to everyone” is a political argument that both major parties benefit from in terms of optics.
Researchers have crystallized the enzyme that makes the natural product stevia taste 200 times as sweet as sugar. The enzyme is a uridine diphosphate–dependent glucosyltransferase, UGT76G1, and it catalyzes the addition of branched glucosides to compounds in stevia.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
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Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:
The headquarters of Google, one of the richest corporations in the world. A third-rate 1500s merchant would be ashamed to live anywhere as bare.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Whither Tartaria?
Kyle Rittenhouse confirmed in an interview that he is readying to file lawsuits in a bid to “make the media pay”—months after he was acquitted on several murder charges in connection to the August 2020 shooting during a Wisconsin Black Lives Matter protest and riot.
“We’re going to make the media pay for what they did to me,” Rittenhouse told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Monday. “They made it hard for me to live a normal life. … I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work or get a job because I’m afraid an employer may not hire me.”
Abortion activists firebombed a pro-life pregnancy center outside Buffalo, N.Y., the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The pro-life organization CompassCare reported that early Tuesday morning, activists smashed windows and set fires in the group’s Amherst, N.Y., medical office. The assailants graffitied the phrase “Jane Was Here” on the building, a tagline associated with a group called Jane’s Revenge that has claimed responsibility for attacks on pro-life institutions across the country.
If the DHS is worried about ‘domestic terrorism’, this would be a prime candidate. They’ll ignore it, of course.
At any dinner party conversation, the refrain is practically the same.
“It’s the immigrants,” someone will say.
“It’s the refugees.”
“There are too many.”
“Too many.”
“They are trying to change our culture.”
“This is my country – my beautiful country. They don’t belong here.”
They sound like the dialogues you’d hear among white supremacists in America or Marine Le Pen supporters at the best restaurants of Paris. But they are among Turkey’s liberal, secular intelligentsia, unapologetically concerned about a growing Islamization of their country.
“If this makes me racist, then I’m a racist,” one woman told me.
Imagine you are an advisor to a politician facing a difficult re-election campaign in the fall and you are tasked with planning a campaign strategy. If you are a rational person, you would first start with the polling. What are the big issues on the minds of the voters and how do they rank your guy on those items. The best way to get back in good standing with the voters is to show them you care about their issues and most important, you agree with them on those issues.
Now, this is easier said than done. If the top issue with voters is energy prices and your guy has spent his career talking about the need to ratchet up energy costs in order to please Gaia, then you have a problem. The voters are stupid, but there are limits and your guy is a true believer. In fact, you worship Gaia as well, so the idea of speaking against the climate cult is a bridge too far. Still, you have to figure out a way to convince people that Gaia cares about gas prices too.
This is the problem with impractical politics. When public policy is about putting two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot, politicians are free to acknowledge error and change gears to chase the voters. In happier times, politicians were the guys chasing the parade, hoping to get to the front so they could pretend to be the parade leaders come election time. That can only work when the only thing you believe in is being on the good side of the voters.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Friends and Enemies
