Why Do Christians Love Israel? What I Learned.

Bible

Catholic Church

Christianity

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Israel

Jerusalem

Jesus Christ

Jews

Judaism

There may be no such thing as a new idea, to paraphrase Mark Twain, but there are new insights into old ideas. 
Enter Dennis Prager&#8217;s, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Bible-Exodus-Dennis-Prager/dp/1621577724" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Rational Bible: Exodus</a>, the inaugural work of what will be his five volumes of commentary on the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
While Genesis precedes Exodus, Prager began with the second book because, as he notes in his introduction, &#8220;Exodus contains the Ten Commandments, the most important moral code in world history.&#8221;
And if the Torah wants its readers to know one thing, it is that &#8220;God&#8217;s essence is goodness.&#8221; More than anything He wants from us moral behavior. Prager cites Exodus 33:18, when Moses asks God to &#8220;let me behold Your Presence.&#8221; God responds, &#8220;I will make all My goodness pass before you.&#8221;
&#8220;That God chooses to define Himself as good constitutes one of the most important statements in the entire Bible,&#8221; Prager writes, adding an idea that may not sit well among many believers and non-believers alike. &#8220;God does not say, &#8216;I will make my love pass before you.&#8217; In fact, the expression, &#8216;God is love,&#8217; is not to be found in the Hebrew Bible.&#8221; 
Most fans know Prager through his five-minute PragerU videos, his nationally-syndicated radio show, his appearances on CNN and Fox News, and his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Serious-Problem-Nature-Repair/dp/0060987359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1529001751&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=happiness+is+a+serious+problem+by+dennis+prager" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Happiness Is a Serious Problem</a>. (Full disclosure: I worked for Dennis as a writer for PragerU, and before that as an intern for his radio show in college. I&#8217;m grateful to count him as a friend and teacher.)
Before Prager became a household name, he was known around Los Angeles for Religion on the Line, a popular radio show where he invited on clergy of different faiths to discuss the Big Questions for three hours on Saturday evenings and five hours on Sunday evenings. He also ran the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, American Jewish University&#8217;s educational retreat outside Los Angeles.
But Prager&#8217;s fundamental ability to understand and explain the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, comes from his childhood. Growing up in Brooklyn, Prager was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and studied full-time in a yeshiva (a Jewish seminary for boys) until college. He&#8217;s fluent in Biblical Hebrew, an invaluable asset in unlocking profound Torah wisdoms that one can only find by reading it in its original language.
An example: the Sixth Commandment, &#8220;You shall not murder,&#8221; is widely mistranslated as &#8220;You shall not kill&#8221; &#8212; which, if accurate, would directly contradict the Torah&#8217;s command, in the very same section, to execute murderers. It would also mean that God, who killed every firstborn son in Egypt, drowned the Egyptian army, and directly intervened in battle for the Jews on multiple occasions, violated his own commands. 
&#8220;Hebrew, like English,&#8221; Prager explains, &#8220;has two words for taking a life: harog (&#8216;kill&#8217;) and ratzach (&#8216;murder&#8217;). The Sixth Commandment uses ratzach.&#8221;
Americans have been so influenced by the Bible historically that even the political left, which tends to not appeal to the Bible&#8217;s moral authority, will sometimes use a mistranslation if it advances an agenda. Thus one can find people at anti-capital punishment rallies holding &#8220;Thou shalt not kill&#8221; signs.
Prager&#8217;s agenda in writing this commentary is, he says, for &#8220;as many people as possible to take the Torah seriously, to entertain the possibility it is God-given, or, at the very least, to understand why so many rational people do.&#8221; 
Over the years I&#8217;ve heard Dennis say publicly that if one had to summarize the mission of his life&#8217;s work, it is to explain to as many people as possible that the goodness and the greatness of America and the West flows from its foundational embrace of Biblical thought and its belief in ethical monotheism &#8212; the belief that there is one God whose primary desire is for people to treat each other morally. 
America&#8217;s, and especially Europe&#8217;s, increasing secularization, then, will diminish what has made the West exceptionally free, prosperous, and decent. 
&#8220;The lack of wisdom&#8212;certainly in America and the rest of the West&#8212;is directly related to the decline in biblical literacy,&#8221; Prager writes. &#8220;In the American past, virtually every home, no matter how poor, owned a Bible. It was the primary vehicle by which parents passed wisdom on to their children.&#8221;
This wisdom, which most people take for granted, was in fact introduced to the world by the Torah three millennia ago. Its moral assertions were &#8220;revolutionary and transformative&#8221; at the time. As Prager notes, &#8220;It is revolutionary in its removal of all sexuality from God and from religion; in its removal of all sexuality from the family (in contrast to Egypt, where Egyptian royalty preferred and practiced incest); in its demand to love one&#8217;s neighbor as oneself; in demanding repeatedly that we love and safeguard the stranger who resides among us; and in forbidding the rape of women during wartime.&#8221;
The irony of secular humanism is that it asserts that human rights are universal and valid without God, even though universal human rights are a Biblical invention. After all, if humans aren&#8217;t created in God&#8217;s image and thus fundamentally equal, and if God doesn&#8217;t command us to treat each other well, the call to universal human rights has no more logical validity than &#8220;might makes right.&#8221;
A central implication of The Rational Bible is this: It&#8217;s the Bible&#8217;s world. We&#8217;re just living in it.
While Prager&#8217;s intended audience may be Biblical skeptics &#8212; and for them I couldn&#8217;t more highly recommend The Rational Bible &#8212; believers will find ideas they&#8217;ve never seen; ideas original to Prager and drawn from some of Prager&#8217;s influences, including Biblical scholars Nahum Sarna, Everett Fox, and Jewish philosophical giants like Maimonides.
On Exodus 1:8: &#8220;A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph,&#8221; Prager notes, &#8220;Given that Joseph&#8217;s role in Egyptian history was so profound, the words &#8216;who did not know Joseph&#8217; are extraordinary.&#8221;
Pharaoh forgot that Joseph&#8217;s foresight and ingenuity saved Egypt from famine and starvation. Pharaoh was ungrateful because he was forgetful. 
Citing writer Bruce Feller, Prager writes: &#8220;Moses&#8217;s goal is to build a counter-Egypt . . . to construct a society that offers an alternative to ignorance and unknowingness. He must devise a community that remembers.&#8221;
Memory has been a central theme of Jewish practice since Sinai. On Passover and in daily prayers Jews remember that God took them out of Egypt; on Rosh Hashanah Jews remember that God created the world; on Shavuot Jews remember that God gave them the Torah.
On Exodus 1:17: &#8220;The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live,&#8221; Prager writes: &#8220;Fear of God is a liberating emotion, freeing one from a disabling fear of evil, powerful people. This needs to be emphasized because many people see fear of God as onerous rather than liberating.&#8221;
What most draws people to Prager, in my view, is that he simplifies the complex. In an age where Smart People like college professors get tenure for complicating the simple, this is no small thing. 
I&#8217;ve found that many commentaries on the Torah, while excellent if you&#8217;re looking for an intense, deep dive exploration of an idea, too often skip past its simplest and in some ways most profound messages. The ones that laid the groundwork for the world we live in.
The Torah stigmatizes slavery &#8212; a pre-Biblical universal norm &#8212; but does not ban it outright. Detractors of the Bible see this as a gotcha!, but miss the point: they have the luxury of being born into a culture that takes it for granted that slavery is evil only because the Torah condemned it over 3,300 years ago.
&#8220;In general, though not always, the moral precedes the legal,&#8221; Prager writes. &#8220;First you teach people what is right and wrong, then they eventually put the teaching into law.&#8221;
Readers of The Rational Bible will also notice that Prager addresses sections from the Torah that, to be honest, can make the eyes glaze over. The sacrifices, the construction of the Tabernacle, and other ritual items that are easy to dismiss as odd or even objectionable.
But, he adds, &#8220;It is essential to remember the Torah, while eternal in its values, first had to be intelligible and create a moral revolution in the late Bronze Age.&#8221;
On sacrifices, Prager, citing Sarna, writes that sacrificing Egypt&#8217;s gods is &#8220;analogous to people in totalitarian states gathering to publicly smash statues of the dictator.&#8221;
On the detailed instructions of building the tabernacle, Prager writes, citing Rabbi Saul Berman, &#8220;By listing the precise specifications for the Tabernacle in a document accessible to every person, the officials couldn&#8217;t later claim more material was required than was recorded.&#8221;
On the placing of the Ten Commandments in the ark, the holiest part of the Tabernacle, Prager observes, &#8220;It is a physical representation of a major Torah teaching: the holy protects the ethical.&#8221; A truth reflected in the <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">well-documented</a> deterioration of the Conservative and Reform denominations of Judaism, which, unlike Orthodox Judaism, de-emphasize Jewish ritual law.
And then there are the ideas found in The Rational Bible that are simply beautiful, and tragic. Why, Prager asks, are Moses&#8217; sons paid scant attention to by the Torah? Far less attention than Aaron&#8217;s sons, Nadab and Abihu?
Prager believes the Torah is commenting on the price of being the child of a great man, one of which is that, to quote Rabbi Harold Kushner, &#8220;It takes so much of a man&#8217;s [the father&#8217;s] time and energy to be a great man&#8212;great in some ways but not in all&#8212;that he has too little time left to be a father.&#8221;
The Rational Bible is a standout addition to the Bible commentary market, which, one would think, has plumbed the depths.
Prager&#8217;s exploration of the Bible&#8217;s surface shows that we have no idea how deep God&#8217;s word goes.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Rational Bible’, by Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager

Egypt

United States

Marco Rubio, James Comey, the White House Correspondents&#8217; Association.
These are but a few of the people and institutions who, in trying to discredit Donald Trump, have managed only to disgrace themselves. 
It&#8217;s one of the most striking phenomena of the Trump era: not only do attacks on him not stick, they rebound on the attacker. 
Call it the <a href="http://politicaldictionary.com/words/teflon-coated-presidency/">Teflon</a> boomerang presidency.
Donald Trump has &#8220;small hands,&#8221; Rubio quipped at a February 2016 rally. &#8220;And you know what they say about men with small hands.&#8221; 
Two weeks later Rubio conceded defeat, and exited the race.
Trump&#8217;s face is &#8220;slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles,&#8221; wrote Comey, who was the previous head of the FBI, in his tell-all high school memoir.
&#8220;Donald Trump is contagious,&#8221; The Washington Post&#8217;s Karen Tumulty correctly observed. &#8220;He turns everyone he touches into Donald Trump. Now he has done it to James B. Comey.&#8221;
&#8220;Like a porn star says when about to have sex with Trump: let&#8217;s get this over with,&#8221; said comedian Michelle Wolf as she opened her performance at the White House Correspondents&#8217; dinner on April 28.
Two days later, a news headline in The New York Times read, &#8220;Did Michelle Wolf Kill the White House Correspondents&#8217; Dinner?&#8221;
So, how has Donald Trump managed to withstand relentless attacks from the most accomplished and capable Democrats, Republicans, journalists, comedians &#8212; everyone?
There&#8217;s likely more than one answer.
With Rubio, the senator disgraced himself in the purest sense of the word. Here was a polite, well-spoken, honorable senator, who decided to speak like a rude, crass, boorish reality TV star. In dissing Trump, Rubio violated the public image of himself that he himself had constructed. 
Trump has no such problem because the image he has crafted is one of a rude, crass, boorish reality TV star. It&#8217;s what we expect, so we&#8217;re not surprised, or even particularly unsettled when he acts in character.
Anti-Trump news coverage at outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, has, I believe, also had a Rubio effect. These mainstream outlets have long told Americans that they are objective, neutral, and just interested in the facts &#8212; character claims that they&#8217;ve violated in their undeniable <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/09/12/study-91-percent-of-recent-network-trump-coverage-has-been-negative/">zeal</a> to discredit the president.
Comey, like Rubio, violated the public image of himself that he built over decades. A G-Man with integrity of the highest order cannot imitate Donald Trump and still have integrity. Pick one.
But what about the cases of Steve Bannon, Jeff Flake, and the NFL? None of them, in their showdowns with Trump, lost because of a dissonance between their actions and their carefully constructed public image. 
Before Bannon told &#8220;journalist&#8221; Michael Wolff, &#8220;They&#8217;re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,&#8221; the public already saw him as a calculating, even conniving, political operative.
And yet, we&#8217;ve barely heard from Bannon since. One reason, particular to Bannon, is that his notoriety was directly related to having Trump&#8217;s ear. No ear, no PR. Also, Bannon drew first blood. This gave Trump, in the public&#8217;s mind, full rights to hit back. And hit back he did.
Trump&#8217;s <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/trump-statement-steve-bannon/index.html">counter-attack</a> was devastating, savage, and final. He is a schoolyard brawler, and he knows how to cripple his opponents, how to strike where it hurts most.
Which is what he did to the NFL. Trump picked a fight with one of the richest and most beloved institutions in America, and he <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2018/05/23/nfl-national-anthem-policy-kneeling-protest/637050002/">won</a> because he dictated the terms: the American flag, something most Americans and most NFL fans care about even more than football.
It was a winning issue.
Finally, there&#8217;s the Jeff Flake strategy. There may be no more vocal Republican critic of the president in Congress. But his outspokenness is his weakness, and that of so many of the Defenders Of Democracy&#8482; crew &#8212; Democrats and #NeverTrump conservatives alike. 
They just sound so . . . breathless, even whiny. 
&#8220;It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,&#8221; Flake said on the Senate floor in January, referring to Trump tweeting that the &#8220;FAKE NEWS&#8221; New York Times, NBC, ABC, CNN, and CBS are &#8220;the enemy of the American people.&#8221;
Flake&#8217;s hyperbolic speech ended with a hymn from Mormon missionary John Jacques:
<blockquote>
Then say, what is truth? &#8216;Tis the last and the first,
For the limits of time it steps o&#8217;er.
Tho the heavens depart and the earth&#8217;s fountains burst.
Truth, the sum of existence, will weather the worst,
Eternal&#8230; unchanged&#8230; evermore.
</blockquote>
Eye-roll. With enemies like this, Trump doesn&#8217;t need allies.
So, if fighting dirty backfired on Rubio and the press, if <a href="https://resistancehole.clickhole.com/">waxing philosophical</a> makes the public ignore the #Resistance and #NeverTrump, if the president preemptively strikes vulnerable targets and, when attacked first, has the public&#8217;s green light to counterstrike, who can win a cage fight against Donald Trump?
Donald Trump.
He is his only consistently successful opponent. 
His crass <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/trump-attacks-mccain-i-like-people-who-werent-captured-120317">joke</a> about John McCain during the campaign, his <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-keeps-up-attacks-on-judge-gonzalo-curiel-1464911442">saying</a> Judge Gonzalo Curiel&#8217;s &#8220;Mexican heritage&#8221; presented a conflict, his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/us/politics/donald-trump-khizr-khan-wife-ghazala.html">criticism</a> of Khizr Khan. These hurt Trump.
Americans like a fighter. But they don&#8217;t like a bully. And Trump looks like one when he picks the wrong target or punches too hard, or both.
The president&#8217;s opponents would do well to follow the advice Corey Lewandowski gave to Republicans: 
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Let-Trump-Be-Inside-Presidency/dp/1546083308">Let Trump be Trump</a>. 
It&#8217;s how he keeps winning. If his story ends as a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/04/30/donald-trump-tragic-hero/">tragic hero&#8217;s</a> would, it&#8217;s also how he&#8217;ll lose.

SICHEL: Can Anyone Other Than Donald Trump Defeat Donald Trump?

Corey Lewandowski

Fake News

Fox News

James Comey

Jeff Flake

The Department of Veteran Affairs isn&#8217;t just in need of more doctors, nurses, and medical personnel. Someone over there needs to call an exterminator &#8212; right now.
The best example of U.K.-style, government-run healthcare on this side of the pond has humiliated itself again, as CBS Los Angeles investigative reporter David Goldstein <a href="https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/05/01/va-hospital-flies-surgeries/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">revealed</a> Tuesday. Goldstein reported that the VA West Los Angeles Medical Center has cancelled or postponed dozens of surgeries due to a fly infestation. That&#8217;s right: a fly infestation in a hospital.
From November 2016 to this February, operating rooms were closed for 22 days, which led to 83 cancelled or delayed surgeries.
Goldstein&#8217;s secret cameras inside the hospital showed that what may look like green decorative lights in the halls and operating rooms are actually fly traps. He said there are more than 200 such fly traps throughout the facility.
Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the LA Museum of Natural History, said the Phorid flies &#8220;are attracted to open wounds for the fluids that they need to sustain themselves and also to keep from drying out.
&#8220;They could also lay eggs on the open wounds,&#8221; Brown said.
Dr. Christian Head, a head and neck surgeon at the VA West Los Angeles Medical Center, told Goldstein that some of the veterans whose surgeries have been cancelled &#8220;may have been waiting four, five weeks, or sometimes longer.&#8221;
&#8220;This is a continuation of delayed care for veterans,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe there&#8217;s any hospital in this country that would find it acceptable to have flies on a routine basis.&#8221;
Well, there&#8217;s at least one.

The VA Hospital In L.A. Has Cancelled 83 Surgeries Due To A Fly Infestation In Operating Rooms

Department of Veterans Affairs

Health Care

Veterans

Veterans Affairs (VA)

Philadelphia was home to two of the past week&#8217;s biggest stories, two utterly contrasting events that illustrate how America is at once reactionary and hysterical even as ordinary Americans remain stirringly brave.
First, at a Starbucks last Thursday, police <a href="https://twitter.com/missydepino/status/984539713016094721">arrested</a> two black men who were occupying a table but &#8212; the store manager told a 911 operator &#8212; hadn&#8217;t made a purchase. The men <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/29621/two-black-men-arrested-philly-starbucks-break-james-barrett">said</a> they were waiting for a friend to discuss a potential real estate deal. That part of their story appears to add up, and it&#8217;s possible that, even if the men were technically trespassing according to that store&#8217;s policy, the manager overreacted by calling 911. 
And yet, businesses have the right to enforce reasonable rules, particularly when non-paying customers may be taking a table where paying customers would sit. Plus, the men themselves said on Good Morning America that they refused to make a purchase even when the manager said they need to buy something or leave. So, it&#8217;s not as simple a situation as Twitter makes it out to be.
Not surprisingly, the video of the arrest went viral, and #BoycottStarbucks trended.
The company&#8217;s executive team then flew from Seattle to Philadelphia for a damage-control tour.
CEO Kevin Johnson said that he has &#8220;no doubt&#8221; that the store manager who called 911 did so because the two men are black. On Tuesday he announced that on May 29 Starbucks would close all of its 8,000 nationwide company-owned locations and subject 175,000 employees to &#8220;racial-bias education,&#8221; a euphemism for &#8220;sensitivity training,&#8221; a euphemism for &#8220;how to not say or do anything that may get us sued.&#8221;
Executive Chairman Howard Schultz said that &#8220;what occurred was reprehensible at every single level.&#8221; He <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c-af13iE06JDKO9jaDvW6z83srLq_i8gSm1K1aNNCUM/edit">told</a> CBS News&#8217; Gayle King, &#8220;I was sick to my stomach,&#8221; adding that &#8220;the level of unconscious bias that exists in America&#8221; is &#8220;systemic.&#8221;
And, to ensure that no one misses how woke he is, Schultz acknowledged guilt for an incident he played no part in and that we still don&#8217;t fully understand (still no statement from the manager &#8212; who&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/29557/philadelphia-starbucks-customer-supposedly-racist-ben-shapiro">apparently a progressive</a> &#8212; and no surveillance footage).
&#8220;I personally am responsible,&#8221; a grovelling Schultz confessed pathetically. 
Of course, not responsible enough to leave the company, as the manager has done, &#8220;pending an investigation by Starbucks,&#8221; a spokesperson <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/starbucks-arrests-ceo-apology-philadelphia-protests-kevin-johnson-20180416.html">told</a> The Philadelphia Inquirer.
On the same day as Schultz&#8217;s and Johnson&#8217;s mea culpa, 32,500 feet in the skies above Pennsylvania, not far from the Starbucks at 18th and Spruce, a story about the other America &#8212; the courageous, steady, and grounded America &#8212; was about to unfold.
Southwest Flight 1380 was about 40 minutes into its four-hour flight from La Guardia to Dallas-Love. New Yorkers and Texans and Americans from all over were doing what people on airplanes do &#8212; napping, reading, watching movies, looking at the sky, the clouds, and the miniature-looking homes and roads and rivers below.
But as flight attendants walked down the aisle taking drink orders, everything went wrong. A blast came from the plane&#8217;s left wing. An engine had exploded. 
The plane lurched downward. Smoke poured through the ventilation system. Passengers scrambled to put oxygen masks on themselves and their children.
Flying shrapnel blew out the window next to passenger Jennifer Riordan, a wife, a mother of two, and an executive at Wells Fargo in Albuquerque. 
Riordan was sucked partially out of the window before passengers Andrew Needum, a firefighter from Celina, Texas, and Tim McGinty, a ranch hand from Brandon, Texas who was wearing his cowboy hat on the flight, rushed from their seats to help pull her back in. 
They laid her across a row of seats as Peggy Phillips, a retired nurse from Dallas, performed CPR on Riordan to try to keep her alive. It was too late. The blunt trauma she had suffered from the shrapnel was too devastating for anyone to survive.
But there were still 143 passengers and five crew members on Flight 1380 whose lives remained in the balance. The blown-out window could have sucked out nearby passengers. The blown-out engine put the entire aircraft in danger. 
For the next 20 minutes, as the cabin was a tornado-like scene of debris, every passenger prepared for what they thought may be their final moments. Prayers to God, frantic texts to loved ones, a <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/04/18/southwest-airlines-passenger-paid-wifi-facebook-live-crash/527387002/">Facebook Live</a>.
In an attempt to seal the window, a man positioned his body in front of it, subjecting his back to &#8220;<a href="https://www.ctpost.com/technology/businessinsider/article/southwest-airlines-pilot-arrest-TSA-gun-6413122.php">severe pressure</a>.&#8221; His clothes became <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/business/southwest-airlines/2018/04/17/plane-dropped-sky-frantic-passengers-tried-send-final-messages-loved-ones">covered in blood</a>.
Meanwhile, in the cockpit, the pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, calmly informed traffic control that her plane&#8217;s engine blew out and that she&#8217;d be making an emergency landing.
To listen to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkVTdvcghHc">audio</a> of her conversation is to hear what &#8220;nerves of steel&#8221; &#8212; as one passenger described Shults &#8212; sounds like. Vital information clearly communicated. No wasted words. Professionalism epitomized.
Shults: &#8220;Southwest 1380 has an engine fire. Descending.&#8221;
Air traffic control: &#8220;Southwest 1380 &#8212; you&#8217;re descending right now?&#8221;
Shults: &#8220;Yes sir, we&#8217;re single-engine descending, have a fire in number one.&#8221;
Air traffic control: &#8220;Southwest 1380, okay, where would you like to go to? Which airport?
Shults: &#8220;Give us a vector for your closest. Philadelphia.&#8221;
Shults, a former F/A-18 Hornet pilot for the Navy&#8217;s Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron, was the first woman to fly F-18s. A religious Christian, she has said that captaining planes gives her &#8220;the opportunity to witness for Christ on almost every flight.&#8221; 
In high school, Shults said she was turned away from an aviation career fair because she was a girl. The Air Force would not let her take an entrance test for the same reason. The Navy, though, was willing to consider her.
On Tuesday, as Shults guided her plane to within visual range of Philadelphia International Airport, she confirmed with air traffic control if there would be medical personnel on hand to treat injured passengers.
As The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/us/southwest-plane-engine-failure.html">reported</a>:
<blockquote>
About two minutes before they landed, Matt Tranchin&#8217;s phone got reception, so he called his wife and told her they were about to hit the ground. He figured they had a 50-50 chance of surviving.
Over the intercom, the crew sternly told passengers to put their heads down and brace themselves. Ms. Sears held onto her friend in the seat next to her and wondered, &#8220;Will it stop? Will it crash? Will it explode?&#8221;
It landed.
</blockquote>
Relieved passengers joyously applauded, texting and calling their family to let them know they were fine.
&#8220;Thank you, we are going to stop right here by the fire trucks,&#8221; Shults told air traffic control. &#8220;Thank you, guys, for the help.&#8221; 
She then stepped out of the cockpit, walking through the cabin to hug grateful passengers.
A few hours later, she <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2018/04/18/texas-pilot-tammie-jo-shults-landed-southwest-plane-lauded-calm-courage">texted</a> a pilot friend of hers, &#8220;God is good.&#8221;
It&#8217;s hard to not marvel at how superficially similar yet substantially dissimilar the Starbucks and Southwest stories are. 
Philadelphia and Philadelphia. Tuesday and Tuesday. Schultz and Shults. 
But two pictures tell the actual story. 
One, of a Black Lives Matter activist at the Philadelphia Starbucks <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/philadelphia-starbucks-protest-photo-meme-twitter-black-men-arrest-20180417.html">sticking a bullhorn</a> in a stoic-looking barista&#8217;s face. The other, of Tammie Jo Shults <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/us/southwest-plane-engine-failure.html">holding the hand</a> of one of her passengers, Pastor Timothy Bourman, as his face exudes gratitude. I think this photo is closer to the real America, the one that news cameras only capture in times of true crisis.
The men who lead Starbucks, Kevin Johnson and Howard Schultz, hurt us as a nation this week. They abetted Hysteria, Inc. They threw us into another breathless frenzy. Not one Starbucks should be closing on May 29.
What a waste of energy it all is.
In the meantime, I&#8217;m looking forward to the movie about Southwest Flight 1380 and the grace and coolness of Tammie Jo Shults. 
She deserves it.
And we need it.

In Philadelphia, Two Americas

Black Lives Matter

NAACP

Philadelphia

Race

Southwest Airlines

Starbucks

I was a student for 18.5 consecutive years. There was an extra one early on, between kindergarten and first grade. I was told it&#8217;s because I was special. The half year at the end was because I wanted a masters degree. Also, I didn&#8217;t sufficiently fear debt. As I said, special.
Over the past five-and-a-half years, fully out of the academic fog, I&#8217;ve managed to unlearn some patently false clichés that are articles of faith among too many teachers, administrators, and guidance counselors. And by&#8221; too many,&#8221; I mean &#8220;not zero.&#8221;
These platitudes range from misleading to outright harmful, and they all &#8212; at least all the ones from elementary school &#8212; have their roots in the self-esteem movement, a racket that tells you to be proud of yourself because, well, you&#8217;re you!
I&#8217;d like to wage a war on these clichés, and save our children from the plague of stupid. Help me out. If I missed any other gems, let me know.
1. &#8220;There&#8217;s no such thing as a stupid question.&#8221;
This is the stupid answer to the stupid question of, &#8220;Are there stupid questions?&#8221; 
There are many. In fact, the pool of all possible questions includes far more stupid ones than smart ones. 
Maybe I should give teachers who say this a break. After all, there are some children whose inclination may be to think before they speak, to go over a question in their head before they take the class&#8217;s time with it. To first try to answer it themselves, because, after all, who wants to be known as the kid who asked in what year did Nicolas Cage write the Declaration of Independence? 
I guess we should be teaching those children that they&#8217;ll get farther in life by blurting out whatever question pops into their undeveloped brains. And while they&#8217;re at it, they should share with the world more than just their questions. If there are no stupid questions, after all, there are also no dumb thoughts or opinions.
2. &#8220;You can be anything you set your mind to.&#8221;
You just can&#8217;t. Most people have the potential to do only a few things well, at most. That potential is talent. You&#8217;re born with it.
Many people, but probably not most, can actually do one or two things really well. That&#8217;s skill, and it&#8217;s talent plus experience. It&#8217;s when ability meets time and repetition. 
Developing nothing into a skill takes naiveté. It doesn&#8217;t happen. I learned that the hard way in college when I spent well over a hundred hours (real-life hours, not credit hours) pursuing a geology major, and bashing my head against igneous rocks in frustration, before my mineralogy professor told me a very mean thing: maybe it&#8217;s not for you.
I was actually sort of taken aback. That&#8217;s how deep the &#8220;You can be anything you set your mind to&#8221; rubbish was lodged in my head. I later realized that the guy did me a big favor. He saved me time and energy by telling me nicely to get out.
That&#8217;s the world I want to live in. One where adults don&#8217;t lie to kids and tell them they can be great at things they&#8217;re not even average at.
3. &#8220;I don&#8217;t care who started it.&#8221;
Tell that to Poland in 1939.
Who started it is often the only thing. 
Who started it? The bully who turns the peaceful status quo into war. The brat who hits a kid at the playground and then cries to teacher when that kid hits back.
By all means, children who are bullied: hit back. Don&#8217;t run to teacher. Don&#8217;t try to appease. Hit back. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCTGuyKqXlE">Twice as hard</a>. It&#8217;s the only language bullies understand.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t care who started it&#8221; are the words of unwitting accomplices. It&#8217;s a childish, amoral phrase that bullies love to hear come out of the mouths of adults.
4. &#8220;Do your best.&#8221;
But what if your best isn&#8217;t very good? What if your best could be better? What if what you think of as &#8220;your best&#8221; is no more than a paper ceiling that would crumple if you tried to do better than &#8220;your best&#8221;?
On its face, &#8220;Do your best&#8221; can sound motivational: Always give it your all. Don&#8217;t leave anything out there on the field.
But it also sounds like a hand-wrapped excuse for not achieving a goal: If you give it everything you have, then it&#8217;s not your fault when things don&#8217;t turn out right.
If your kid&#8217;s room looks like a bombed-out toy factory even after he &#8220;cleaned&#8221; it, he may say he did his best, but that is impossible. Or &#8212; maybe that is his best, but it would get better if he tried to make his room look clean instead of trying to do his &#8220;best&#8221; to make his room look clean.
If a student shows up late to second period for the hundredth time, she may say she&#8217;s doing her best, but that is impossible. Maybe it&#8217;s hard for her to prioritize timeliness over whatever is keeping her late, but that&#8217;s a choice. Maybe being on time requires her doing better than her best.
Growth, by definition, is what happens when you do better than your best. 
5. &#8220;Be yourself.&#8221;
Well, unless you repeatedly find yourself in detention or time out. Because in those cases, &#8220;yourself&#8221; is obviously not what you should be, as evidenced by your being in detention or time-out, possibly by taking to heart what some adult told you about being &#8220;yourself.&#8221;
This is sometimes good advice when the intended audience is an adult, but to a child&#8217;s ears, &#8220;Be yourself&#8221; can have an awfully similar impact as &#8220;Do your best.&#8221;
&#8220;Be yourself&#8221; says to a child that they are great just the way they are, and they should feel good about themselves even if they routinely act in an unsatisfactory way.
In addition, &#8220;Be yourself&#8221; and &#8220;Do your best&#8221; diminish in children&#8217;s lives the role of role models &#8212; people who children aspire to imitate because they are better than they. People who inspire in children the idea that they can be a better version of themselves, which is different than &#8220;Be yourself.&#8221;
&#8220;Be yourself&#8221; can be sound advice when it comes to some adult social situations, like dating for marriage.
Assuming you&#8217;re a well-adjusted and decent human being without too many strange idiosyncrasies, you really do want a spouse who loves you for you, and who, at most, wants you to improve (who wouldn&#8217;t?), not to transform. 
But save for the small percentage of children who are mature beyond their years, &#8220;Be yourself&#8221; is stupid speak for &#8220;remain a child.&#8221;
6. &#8220;There are no wrong answers.&#8221;
This is unambiguously preposterous.
It&#8217;s even more obviously false than &#8220;There&#8217;s no such thing as a stupid question.&#8221; 
It&#8217;s measurable and objective, which means &#8220;There are no wrong answers&#8221; isn&#8217;t even a little true. There are definitely at least some wrong answers.
Just to give one example, &#8220;What is two plus two?&#8221; provides an infinite array of wrong answers. Or, &#8220;Who&#8217;s more easily offended than the gender nonconforming Queer Musicology major who runs your local university&#8217;s club chapter of Feminists For Environmental Justice?&#8221; So many wrong answers. 
In some contexts, &#8220;There are no wrong answers&#8221; may be appropriate. Like, &#8220;What&#8217;s your favorite breakfast food?&#8221; Or &#8220;Which Amy Schumer Netflix special will you not be watching this weekend?&#8221; Sometimes, there really are no wrong answers.
But usually &#8212; as in, any situation in which there actually are wrong answers &#8212; &#8220;There is no wrong answers&#8221; is a bad thing to tell children who need to understand that there is a definite reality that exists outside of themselves. A reality that does not change based on the answer they give. A reality with right and wrong answers.
7. &#8220;It&#8217;s who you are on the inside that counts.&#8221;
It&#8217;s really not. 
What counts &#8212; if &#8220;counts&#8221; is a synonym for &#8220;is important&#8221; &#8212; are actions and words. What counts is what&#8217;s on the outside, how you treat others, whether you behave with honor and integrity.
What&#8217;s on the inside isn&#8217;t irrelevant. Inner peace, happiness, and intentions are all important things. But they don&#8217;t &#8220;count&#8221; the way your impact on other people does. If we&#8217;re talking about the moral bank account, heaven and hell, and the whole eternal judgment thing, your actions are what go on the scoreboard.
You may be familiar with the idea that we shouldn&#8217;t judge people, only actions. Or how about this: you and what you do are two different things. I don&#8217;t think they are. I think you are what you do.
Adults should be in the business of helping children become grown-ups. But &#8220;It&#8217;s what&#8217;s on the inside that counts&#8221; is a childish idea. Much of successful adulting requires impulse control. It requires understanding that what you want to do is less important than what you should do or need to do. It means acting in accordance with what is good, not with that makes you feel good.
Children and immature adults have trouble with this concept. Because, after all, &#8220;It&#8217;s what&#8217;s on the inside that counts.&#8221;
8. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t have anything nice to say, don&#8217;t say anything at all.&#8221;
I want to say horrible, horrible things about the professional sensitivity trainer who came up with this doozy. It&#8217;s dumb wrapped in stupid multiplied by moronic.
Taken literally, it means, &#8220;The only things you say should be nice things.&#8221; That&#8217;s impossible, as it would mean even politely neutral requests like, &#8220;Would you please pass the salad?&#8221; would not be nice enough to utter aloud. 
Taken as the purveyor likely intended, it&#8217;s wildly impractical. There are many things that need saying that not only don&#8217;t sound nice, but sound harsh or even mean.
Things like, &#8220;Jonny, maybe you&#8217;d have more friends if you stopped picking your nose at the lunch table.&#8221;
Or, &#8220;If you heat up fish in the office microwave one more time, we&#8217;re going to have to let you go.&#8221;
And finally, &#8220;Maybe you wouldn&#8217;t be single if you stopped taking your dates to Taco Bell and offering to split the bill.&#8221;
9. &#8220;It&#8217;s who you know.&#8221;
This career advice entered my field of hearing in high school or college. It struck me then as obviously true &#8212; professional advancement definitely is impacted by the people who you know and, more importantly, who know you. But it&#8217;s also simplistic, imprecise, and inaccurately categorical.
It is not just who you know. You need to have ability and competence. And you need to be reliable. Otherwise the people who you know won&#8217;t do much for you.
It&#8217;s also not the &#8220;knowing&#8221; that matters. It&#8217;s the actual relationships. The pursuit of &#8220;knowing&#8221; people, of building the Rolodex, produces business card swapping, a useless activity unless you follow up, make phone calls, get coffee, talk regularly; you know, develop relationships.
It&#8217;s not about who you know. It&#8217;s about who knows you, and likes you.
10. &#8220;That&#8217;s a first-world problem.&#8221;
This was a not uncommon phrase on my college campus. Because after all, nearly every college-related problem is definitionally a first-world problem. 
Sometimes, &#8220;That&#8217;s a first-world problem&#8221; is meant in jest, in which case I&#8217;m all for it if it gets a laugh. 
But other times, &#8220;That&#8217;s a first-world problem&#8221; is another way of saying, &#8220;Stop complaining, there are starving kids in Africa.&#8221; 
My objection is that if those starving kids moved to the United States and became Americans, pretty soon they&#8217;d also have first-world problems. After some time, those first-world problems may even bug them as much as they bug me.
&#8220;First-world problems&#8221; are the problems that humans face when the problems endemic to impoverished countries are absent. In other words, &#8220;first-world problems&#8221; are just problems. 
If the tire on my car blows out, is that not a problem because, hey, I should be grateful to even have a car? I am grateful to have a car, but the flat tire is still a problem. And because I also have food and a roof over my head, the flat tire may be the biggest problem I face until I need to change the filter on my water cooler in a few weeks.
Westerners should be grateful that many of our problems are &#8220;first-world problems,&#8221; but deriding those problems feels, on some level, like an expression of contempt for the society that produces &#8220;first-world problems.&#8221;
That contempt should be reserved for the people who whine that Starbucks put too little soy milk in the tall, half-caff, soy latte at 120 degrees. That&#8217;s not a first-world problem. It&#8217;s just not a problem. And the barista didn&#8217;t make a mistake. She just doesn&#8217;t like you.

‘There’s No Such Thing As A Stupid Question’, And Nine Other Dumb Things I Learned In School

Children

In the midst of the NFL&#8217;s Anthem-kneeling controversy last October, ESPN The Magazine <a href="http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/21170410/gaffes-tv-ratings-concerns-dominated-nfl-players-forged-anthem-peace-league-meetings">reported</a> that Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said during a league-wide owners meeting, &#8220;We can&#8217;t have the inmates running the prison.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZZdB5hqbTw">Condemnation</a> was swift. Most Texans players kneeled during the subsequent game&#8217;s National Anthem in protest of McNair, two players left practice, and then-Texan Duane Brown sharply criticized McNair in public.
McNair likely was thinking of the well-known idiom, &#8220;the inmates are running the asylum&#8221; &#8212; which means that the people least capable of running the organization are running the organization. It has nothing to do with race, but, nonetheless, substituting &#8220;prison&#8221; for &#8220;asylum,&#8221; even in a private meeting, was a mistake that was bound to be misconstrued &#8212; and it was, quite wildly and breathlessly.
McNair issued a public apology &#8220;to anyone who was offended,&#8221; clarifying that he &#8220;never meant to offend anyone&#8221; and &#8220;was not referring to our players.&#8221;
&#8220;I regret that I used that expression,&#8221; McNair said at the time. &#8220;I used a figure of speech that was never intended to be taken literally. I would never characterize our players or our league that way.&#8221;
Now, it turns out that what McNair most regrets is issuing an apology in the first place.
&#8220;The main thing I regret is apologizing,&#8221; McNair told The Wall Street Journal in a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/texans-owner-bob-mcnair-recalculates-his-apology-for-inmates-remark-1522941584">story</a> published Friday. &#8220;I really didn&#8217;t have anything to apologize for.&#8221;
He said the &#8220;inmates&#8221; he was referring to in the October meeting were league executives who had too much control over key business decisions.
&#8220;We were talking about a number of things, but we were also washing our dirty linen, which you do internally. You don&#8217;t do that publicly. That&#8217;s what I was addressing: The relationship of owners and the league office,&#8221; McNair said.
Asked about players who kneel for the National Anthem, McNair said that players who don&#8217;t want to stand should remain in the locker room.
&#8220;If they&#8217;re going to be out there, we need to respect the anthem and our flag,&#8221; he said, intimating that the league should revise its policy to make it mandatory for players on the field to stand for the National Anthem. &#8220;As employers, we set conditions for all of our employees.&#8221;

SORRY, NOT SORRY: ‘The Main Thing I Regret Is Apologizing,’ Says Pro-Anthem Houston Texans Owner Bob McNair About His ‘Inmates Running The Prison’ Comment

Colin Kaepernick

Houston

Patriotism

Thirty-six percent of college students are going hungry. 
That&#8217;s the message of a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/03/the-hidden-crisis-on-college-campuses-36-percent-of-students-dont-have-enough-to-eat/?utm_term=.2d9b53c7107f" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">story</a> in yesterday&#8217;s Washington Post that&#8217;s making the rounds. If it&#8217;s anything like the &#8220;1 in 5 college girls are sexually assaulted&#8221; fiction that <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/joe-biden-speaks-bluntly-about-rape-college-campus-n751956" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Joe Biden</a> popularized in 2015, this faux-statistic may soon become <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/us/a-third-of-college-women-experience-unwanted-sexual-contact-study-finds.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">conventional wisdom</a>, too.
The &#8220;<a href="http://wihopelab.com/publications/Wisconsin-HOPE-Lab-Still-Hungry-and-Homeless.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Still Hungry and Homeless In College</a>&#8221; report, authored by researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, says that 36% of college students it surveyed are experiencing &#8220;food insecurity.&#8221;
This report, like the <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/In-Making-Campuses-Safe-for/127766" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">infamous</a> Justice Department sexual assault <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">survey</a> from 2007 &#8212; and like <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ccsvsftr.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">other</a> <a href="https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/AAU-Files/Key-Issues/Campus-Safety/AAU-Campus-Climate-Survey-FINAL-10-20-17.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">similar surveys</a>, is fatally flawed: its methodology and scope <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/14/campus-rape-uva-crisis-rolling-stone-politics-column/20397277/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">precludes</a> its data from being nationally representative, or even scientifically representative of the handful of institutions being surveyed.
The report itself notes that &#8220;obtaining the necessary data to create an &#8220;institutionally-or-nationally-representative sample was not possible,&#8221; and that the results &#8220;may not be generalizable on either the institutional or national levels.&#8221;
And yet the authors don&#8217;t hesitate to propose policy measures of a national scope; policies that would include tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of taxpayer funds.
Predictably, the Post&#8217;s reporter, Caitlyn Dewey, merely concedes that &#8220;measuring college hunger and homelessness is difficult,&#8221; but that the report&#8217;s lead author, Temple professor Sarah Goldrick-Rab, thinks her report understates the 36% figure; and that &#8220;several education policy analysts not involved with the survey said they believe this is the best national estimate.&#8221;
Perhaps, but there are no good national estimates of hunger and homelessness among college students, because, as the report admits, there&#8217;s no simple way to measure the data in a nationally-representative fashion.
Take, for example, how Goldrick-Rab&#8217;s team collected data: by asking 66 two-year and four-year colleges and universities to invite nearly 600,000 students to complete an e-survey. Of the 600,000 students emailed, 43,000 students, 7.3%, participated. 
Because the study was unscientific by design, one doesn&#8217;t need a graduate degree in statistics to know that the institutions selected and the students who participated may or may not provide any generalizable data about the nature of hunger among college students.
Furthermore, none of these responses, none of the data, is verifiable. I&#8217;m inclined to assume that most of the e-surveys were filled out honestly, but an actual scientific study wouldn&#8217;t require the reader to invest that type of faith in basic human decency.
Also, the terms and definitions with which the report measures hunger are questionable. First, &#8220;hunger&#8221; in no way means starvation. It doesn&#8217;t even necessarily mean &#8220;hungry.&#8221; It hasn&#8217;t for a long time, ever since &#8220;food insecurity&#8221; entered the cultural lexicon &#8212; a deceptive term the report defines as &#8220;the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or the ability to acquire such foods in a socially acceptable manner.&#8221;
Certainly, there are a small percentage of Americans who are not starving but who, for economic reasons, are eating less food than they should, or more unhealthy food than they should. But there are very, very few truly hungry people in the United States, or in any Western, liberal, capitalist democracy.
In the U.S. Department of Agriculture&#8217;s 2009 <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/44776/7024_err108_1_.pdf?v=41056">report</a> on hunger in America, 98.5% of adults said their children were never hungry at any point that year due to lack of money. And 95.4% of adults said they themselves were never hungry that year due to lack of money.
Mind you, this was during the recession. 
&#8220;Food insecurity,&#8221; though, means a number of things, some of which, like in Temple&#8217;s and HOPE&#8217;s report, include not being able to afford &#8220;balanced&#8221; meals, and being &#8220;worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more.&#8221; 
These are both not good things. But they don&#8217;t constitute hunger. And to suggest they do, as both the report and The Washington Post does, ranges between disingenuous and intentionally misleading.
It&#8217;s difficult to believe that, while a very small percentage of Americans were hungry at any point during the recession, today, in the midst of the strongest U.S. economy in a generation, 36% of college students &#8220;don&#8217;t have enough to eat,&#8221; as The Washington Post headline claims.
In regard to hunger generally in America, it seems somewhat paradoxical that low-income Americans simultaneously suffer from an obesity crisis and a hunger crisis &#8212; opposite results stemming from the same cause, poverty. I suppose it&#8217;s possible, but it seems more likely that activists with a cause are simply attacking from different angles.
Academic reports like &#8220;Still Hungry and Homeless in College&#8221; that are authored by organizations and professors with agendas aren&#8217;t new, or even troublesome. 
The phrase &#8220;lies, damned lies, and statistics&#8221; was, after all, coined in the 19th century.
The trouble is that media outlets like The Washington Post tell us that 36% of college students don&#8217;t have enough to eat &#8212; a damned lie.

The Washington Post Reports That 36% Of College Students Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat. That’s A Lie.

Hunger

Leftism

Liberalism

Progressivism

Washington Post

I&#8217;ve been going to the movies frequently of late. More times since January than in the preceding five years, I think. Thanks to MoviePass, I can now go to films that I&#8217;d be willing to pay, say, $7 to see, but not $17. 
I love movie theaters &#8212; the chairs, the screen, the sound, the darkness. It&#8217;s designed as a distraction-free setting in which you can experience the film as the director intended. 
When it all goes right, it&#8217;s a moment to relish. You leave feeling refreshed. Maybe, on occasion, even changed. 
But more and more, I&#8217;ve found, it has become harder and harder to get the movie theater experience at movie theaters.
And it&#8217;s because of the one variable aside from the film itself: the people. The one or two people who treat movie theaters like it&#8217;s their living room. They&#8217;ve graciously invited you into their home to watch a movie, so they&#8217;ll do as they damn well please. 
Talk, text, tap their feet, kick the back of the seat in front them, &#8220;whisper&#8221; when there&#8217;s no dialogue on screen &#8212; as if the actors&#8217; lines are the only important thing in a film.
I estimate that a member of this degenerate 1% has appeared at nearly half the movies I&#8217;ve gone to in the past year. I&#8217;m surprised when I go to the movies and there isn&#8217;t a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">barbarian</a>, an adult who&#8217;s mucking it up for the 99%.
Not to sound sentimental, but it feels like it&#8217;s gotten worse over time. Ten or fifteen years ago, I recall the norm being that not one, single, grown human would dare disturb the people around them. Sure, there were exceptions, and yes, maybe a guy would continue his conversation as the previews spilled into the intro credits, but then someone would shush him and he&#8217;d slink down in shame.
Not anymore.
Last fall, at a theater in not the best part of Los Angeles, I saw The Foreigner, a fun action thriller with Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan. It was an early evening screening during the week, so attendance was sparse.
But not sparse enough. 
About ten rows below me was a young couple with two or three young kids. The kids were acting like little kids, so my quarrel is not with them. It&#8217;s with the adults, who were also acting like little kids. 
Who brings young children to a R-rated movie with plenty of violence and cursing? These parents were hurting not only their kids, but everyone in the theater. They made us suffer a G-rated audience in a R-rated movie.
The man was also talking to his significant other and the kids at near full-volume for much of the film, even after I shushed him. He also felt the need to exclaim his approval whenever Jackie Chan did things that Jackie Chan does in Jackie Chan movies, which was many times.
A few months later I saw <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27778/hostiles-great-unknown-film-2017-jared-sichel" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hostiles</a>, an excellent Western starring Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike. I went to a Sunday evening showing at a fancy theater in Santa Monica. One with those thick reclining seats.
Behind me was a middle-aged couple, possibly married. For the first 30 minutes of the film, the man would regularly &#8220;whisper&#8221; loudly to his wife; but only, mind you, when there was no dialogue in the film. Unfortunately for me and anyone else within earshot, this mindless bumpkin was ruining the beautiful film score and the dramatic tension that the absence of dialogue serves to heighten.
Finally, at the same exact moment, I and a woman two seats over simultaneously turned around and told this idiot to shut his trap. It was a thing of beauty. 
He of course didn&#8217;t look embarrassed, because if he had any shame in the first place he never would&#8217;ve put himself in a situation in which other people might shame him.
But his wife looked mortified. She told him &#8212; too nicely in my opinion &#8212; to not talk. But why did she let him blabber for 30 minutes? Isn&#8217;t she embarrassed to be seen with him? Why is she even dating or married to him? Repeated rejection by women is one of the most effective socializers of anti-social men. Which means this guy is screwed.
Last weekend I saw Death Wish, a vigilante action film starring Bruce Willis. A few seats to my left were a middle-aged couple who would not infrequently talk to each other in Spanish. I think it was related to the movie, but it&#8217;s not like the plot of Death Wish is exactly Inception. Nothing in the film really needs explanation. It&#8217;s a visceral revenge-thriller that hangs, quite well, on its action scenes. 
When I shushed the couple and gave them the &#8220;We&#8217;re watching a movie here&#8221; hand motion, the woman looked at me as if I had pulled a chewed piece of gum off the bottom of my shoe and popped it in my mouth. Which is exactly how a narcissist like her would react. &#8220;How dare you?!&#8221;
She gave me dirty looks for the rest of the movie, and at one point she started tapping her feet so loudly that I&#8217;m convinced it was to provoke a reaction. Instead, I held onto my anger for four days until I was ready to write this piece. 
If my anecdotal experience in movie theaters is representative, I think there are a few possible explanations.
America&#8217;s narcissism &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Narcissism-Epidemic-Living-Age-Entitlement/dp/1416575995">epidemic</a>&#8221; is an obvious one. More and more people are increasingly obsessed with themselves, which means they&#8217;re less and less aware of how their actions impact others. And some people who are aware just don&#8217;t care.
Another is that fewer and fewer moviegoers have the bare minimum amount of courage needed to tell someone to quiet down. I&#8217;m no hero for wanting to enjoy the movie I&#8217;ve committed two hours of my evening too. What kind of society is it when a slim minority can ruin it for the majority only because everyone is too afraid to engage in two mildly uncomfortable seconds of confrontation?
A third is that we are so used to the inmates running the asylum that we&#8217;ve dumbed down our expectations and have conditioned ourselves to be less bothered by disruptive behavior.
A fourth and most depressing explanation is that MoviePass is doing to the theaters what cheap airline tickets have done to the airlines &#8212; opened them to everyone, including people whose poor social tact previously made it difficult for them to hold down a job long enough so that they could earn enough money to regularly fly or go to the theaters.
These movie theater monsters aren&#8217;t going anywhere. Theater staff will never remove them except in extreme cases. It&#8217;s sad that they even need to play the &#8220;Don&#8217;t Talk Or Text&#8221; announcement before the movie starts. 
It&#8217;s on us decent human beings to grow a pair and bring back a useful little tool that helps a society civilize its barbarians: shame.

Dear People Who Won’t Shut Up In Movie Theaters: You’re The Worst.

The parents of a 16-year-old Iraqi girl, Maarib Al Hishmawi, were arrested Friday for allegedly beating, choking, and burning their daughter after she refused to agree to a forced marriage. 
This happened not in Baghdad or Mosul or Basra, but in San Antonio, Texas.
The Bexar County Sheriff&#8217;s Office reported that Abdulah Fahmi Kala Al Hishmawi, 34, and Hamdiyah Sabah Al Hishmawai, 33, beat their daughter with broomsticks, threw hot oil on her, and choked her &#8220;<a href="https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/BCSO-Runaway-local-teen-was-abused-with-hot-oil-12777938.php">almost to the point of unconsciousness</a>&#8221; when she resisted the marriage, which apparently would have paid the parents $20,000.
Sheriff Javier Salazar said that, beginning in 2017, Maarib&#8217;s parents were engaged in marriage talks with an adult man from another city. 
The beatings continued for as long as Maarib refused her parents&#8217; demand. In order to stop the violence, she <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/25/a-teen-said-no-to-an-arranged-marriage-investigators-say-her-parents-threw-hot-oil-on-her/?utm_term=.37e6a7f61317">reportedly</a> told her parents she would marry the man.
But in January, as the marriage date neared, Maarib ran away and was cared for by an anonymous organization. She, along with her five younger siblings, is now in the custody of child protective services.
Sheriff Javier Salazar said that the Hishmawi parents are being charged with at least one felony count of continuous family violence. He added that the would-have-been-groom will also likely be charged, and that the FBI may add their own charges.
The San Antonio Express-News reported that as the parents were being led away in handcuffs, the father &#8220;could be heard shouting to media, blaming the daughter for the situation.&#8221;
The Hishmawis have reportedly been in the U.S. for two years on a visa. 
As usual, most media reports called this an &#8220;arranged&#8221; marriage, even though it had never been arranged with the to-be bride. 
Women&#8217;s March leader Linda Sarsour could not be reached for comment.

Muslim Parents Arrested In Texas For Beating, Burning, Choking Their 16-Year-Old Daughter After She Refused A Forced Marriage

Islam

Linda Sarsour

Media

Muslims

San Antonio

Sexual Abuse

Texas

Cardi B for president?
On Instagram Thursday night, the rapper and celebrity, whose name is Belcalis Almanzar, yelled about something that many Americans wonder every tax season:
&#8220;Uncle Sam, I want to know what you&#8217;re f***ing doing with my motherf***ing money!&#8221; demanded Almanzar, who has over 20 million Instagram followers.
Almanzar&#8217;s Insta-rant has over 4.5 million plays and 35,000 comments, many of them positive. 
&#8220;So you know the government is taking 40 percent of my taxes,&#8221; Almanzar said. &#8220;I want to know what you&#8217;re doing with my f***ing tax money, because I&#8217;m from New York and the streets is always dirty, we was voted the dirtiest city in America.&#8221;
Almanzar&#8217;s federal income taxes alone are just under 40 percent. Adding New York&#8217;s <a href="https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator#9Hzaeut2gQ">state and city taxes</a> brings it to well north of that.
She&#8217;s correct that New York was recently named the dirtiest city in America. Using litter and pest data, the BusyBee cleaning service <a href="https://www.bbcleaningservice.com/images/dirtiest-cities-united-states.jpg">ranked</a> New York tops in the country, ahead of Los Angeles.
There&#8217;s no indication that Cardi B is interested in politics, but if she decides to run for office, she has a ready-made campaign slogan from this video:
&#8220;What is y&#8217;all n****** doing with my f***ng money?&#8221;
Or&#8230;not.
Read the full transcript here and watch the video below: 
<blockquote>
Aight, so you know the government is taking 40 percent of my taxes, and Uncle Sam, I want to know what you&#8217;re doing with my f****** tax money, because you know what I&#8217;m sayin&#8217;, like, when you donate, like, when you donate to a kid from a foreign country, they give you updates of what they doing with your donation. 
I want to know what you&#8217;re doing with my f****** tax money, because I&#8217;m from New York and the streets is always dirty, we was voted the dirtiest city in America. 
What is y&#8217;all doing? 
There&#8217;s still rats on the damn trains. I know y&#8217;all not spending it in no damn prison, because y&#8217;all be giving n***** like two underwears, one jumpsuit, for like five months, so what is y&#8217;all n****** doing with my f****** money? What is y&#8217;all doing with my f****** money? I want to know! I want receipts! I want everything! I want to know what y&#8217;all n****** doing with my f****** money! What is y&#8217;all n****** doing with my f****** money? Uncle Sam I want to know what you&#8217;re f****** doing with my motherf****** money.
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BgpdxsABrUn/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">I want to fucking know WHAT YA DOING WITH MY FUCKING MONEY !!!!!</a>
A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/iamcardib/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Cardi B Official IG</a> (@iamcardib) on Mar 22, 2018 at 6:52pm PDT
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WATCH: Celebrity Rapper Cardi B’s Epic Instagram Rant Against Income Taxes

New York

New York City

Taxes

How many homicides are committed annually in the United States by illegal aliens, people who are unlawfully present? 
Nobody knows.
How many rapes are committed annually by people who are unlawfully present?
Nobody knows.
How many assaults, burglaries, and car thefts are committed annually by people who are unlawfully present? 
Nobody knows. 
Nobody knows because few, if any, state governments track the immigration or citizenship status of inmates in state and local detention facilities.
Which means that an unknown number of illegal immigrants are committing an unknown number of crimes on American soil. 
And thus voters, lawmakers, and law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ICE, have no actual idea how many crimes are committed by people who shouldn&#8217;t be here in the first place.
The dearth of data is particularly notable given that the issue of illegal immigration has been center stage since the rise of Donald Trump. He infamously said in his June 2015 kickoff <a href="http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">speech</a> that Mexico is not &#8220;sending their best&#8221; to the United States.
&#8220;They&#8217;re sending people that have lots of problems,&#8221; Trump said. &#8220;They&#8217;re bringing crime.&#8221;
But not one member of Trump&#8217;s White House or executive branch can say how many people or how much crime. 
Even the best studies available of people known as &#8220;criminal aliens&#8221; are, at best, educated guesstimates derived from various databases across federal, state, and local records. A criminal alien is defined as an immigrant, whether legal or illegal, incarcerated in a federal, state, or local prison or jail. 
That&#8217;s particularly striking given how much data about how many less important things the government meticulously tracks. Endangered gnatcatchers, exercising mudskipper fish, the gambling habits of monkeys. The government has data on all those things. 
The number of homicides committed by Mexican nationals illegally in the United States in 2016? Not so much.
&#8220;You can find out from the federal government how many Finnish prisoners in Minnesota jails have herring for lunch, but you can&#8217;t find out how many illegal aliens are in jail,&#8221; quipped Peter Kirsanow, an attorney and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR).
Years ago, Kirsanow said, he asked the USCCR to investigate the impact of illegal immigration on black unemployment and wage levels. He said he found &#8220;that a lot of the conventional wisdom was flat-out false.&#8221;
&#8220;There would be figures that were thrown out with respect to the effect of illegal immigration on employment levels, wage levels and even crime rates,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Having seen that that kind of calculation or that kind of statement as applied to the employment sector was inaccurate, I was curious as to whether or not it was accurate as it related to matters of crime.&#8221;
It was not. 
Kirsanow ran into the same problem that anyone trying to find criminal alien data runs into: it&#8217;s not there. 
&#8220;It&#8217;s just a gaping hole in our databases,&#8221; Kirsanow said. &#8220;We get data from all kinds of sources about all manners of things, but this one big ticket item is not tracked.&#8221;
Even the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional agency, struggled to find reliable data in their <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/320/316959.pdf">study</a> from 2011 &#8212; their most recent &#8212; on criminal alien statistics.
But what they did find is not encouraging.
Deriving data from a Department of Homeland Security program called the <a href="https://www.bja.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?Program_ID=86">State Criminal Alien Assistance Program</a> (SCAAP), the GAO found that, in fiscal year 2009 (July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009), there were at least 296,000 unlawfully present inmates in state and local detention in the United States &#8212; and almost certainly many more.
SCAAP provides federal taxpayer funds to states and localities for incarcerating &#8220;undocumented criminal aliens&#8221; who have at least one felony or two misdemeanor violations of state or local law. It&#8217;s a sort of national reimbursement program for the costs that state and county governments (even ones with &#8220;sanctuary&#8221; laws) incur due to illegal immigration. 
The GAO study of SCAAP&#8217;s data revealed that in FY 2009, 70% of SCAAP criminal aliens were born in Mexico.
In the five states that GAO studied closely &#8212; California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Arizona &#8212; there were at least 5,400 illegal aliens imprisoned for homicide-related offenses.
In California &#8212; which led the nation with 27,000 SCAAP incarcerations &#8212; 60% of incarcerations were for drugs, assault, sex offenses, and homicide, in that order. 
In New York, which had 5,000 SCAAP incarcerations, 27% were for homicide, 23% for drugs, 12% for robbery, and 11% for sex offenses.
In Texas, which had 10,000 SCAAP incarcerations, 20% were for drugs, 18% for sex offenses, and 12% for assault. 
Although the GAO study allows Americans, as Kirsanow said, to &#8220;get a sense&#8221; of criminal alien data, the data is from nearly a decade ago, and because it&#8217;s indirect, it&#8217;s imprecise &#8212; derived from something else, in this case federal reimbursements.
Ron Martinelli, a forensic criminologist and retired San Jose detective, believes that reducing the amount of crime committed by illegal aliens first requires knowing how many illegal aliens are committing how many crimes. 
&#8220;We need to know who&#8217;s committing crimes. We need to have the analytics,&#8221; Martinelli said. &#8220;We let no one know. We don&#8217;t let our citizens know, we don&#8217;t let our politicians know what law enforcement knows, and that is: we have a certain segment of this population that is illegal that is committing violent crimes.&#8221;
Gathering the data, knowing precisely how big that segment of the population is, would not be particularly difficult, according to Kirsanow.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not complex,&#8221; Kirsanow said. &#8220;One way of doing it is everybody who is incarcerated, there&#8217;s a box that&#8217;s checked for them. Do they have a passport? What is their visa status? Do they have any kind of documentation that certifies whether they are lawfully present in the United States? That&#8217;s not a heavy lift.&#8221;
Could the federal government mandate this for state and local detention centers?
Yes, Kirsanow said, either legislatively or by executive carrot and stick: the Department of Justice could add a reporting requirement as a condition of receiving certain funds. The FBI could then include the data in its annual &#8220;<a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-publications">Crime in the United States</a>&#8221; report, which includes a wealth of statistics on &#8220;violent and property crime offenses&#8221; throughout the nation.
In fact, on January 25, Trump signed <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united-states/">Executive Order 13768: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States</a>. Among other things, it directs the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice &#8220;to collect relevant data and provide quarterly reports on &#8230; the immigration status of all convicted aliens incarcerated in state prisons and local detention centers throughout the United States.&#8221;
The <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/departments-justice-and-homeland-security-release-data-incarcerated-aliens-94-percent-all">most recent report</a>, from the end of 2017, includes data on the 58,766 <a href="https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.jsp">inmates in federal custody</a> who are &#8220;known or suspected&#8221; aliens. Of that group, 35,334 people are known to be unlawfully present.
The government continues to investigate the &#8220;alienage&#8221; of the remaining 21,209 inmates, but the vast majority are likely also unlawfully present. This is a reasonable assumption given that 92% of confirmed aliens in Federal Bureau of Prisons custody are known illegals and 97% of confirmed aliens in U.S. Marshals Service custody are known illegals.
The report doesn&#8217;t even mention what is perhaps the most striking point about unlawfully present criminal aliens in federal custody: they comprise at least one-fifth of the federal inmate population, and in all likelihood closer to one-third.
The report notes that &#8220;state and local facilities do not routinely provide DHS or DOJ with comprehensive information about their inmates and detainees&#8221; &#8212; a glaring gap given that &#8220;state and local facilities account for approximately 90% of the total U.S. incarcerated population.&#8221;
With over 2 million state and county prison and jail inmates (according to 2015 <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=kfa">data</a>), there are almost certainly more illegal immigrants in detention centers than the 296,000 figure identified by the 2009 SCAAP data. Perhaps hundreds of thousands more.
The report notes that the &#8220;DHS and DOJ are working to develop a reliable methodology for estimating the status of state and local incarcerated populations.&#8221;
A Department of Justice spokesman told The Daily Wire that the next quarterly report &#8220;will have additional information pursuant to that section,&#8221; and that the Department of Justice &#8220;continues to work with state and local agencies&#8221; to determine the immigration status of unlawfully present inmates.
But absent a reporting requirement placed upon states and localities, it&#8217;s unlikely that the Trump administration or the American people will know much more than they do now about the nature of illegal immigrant crime in the United States.
This all begs the question: why? Why is there no direct data of criminality among illegal immigrants? It would not be difficult to collect and there is clear national interest in knowing, say, how many homicides are committed every year by people who, by law, should not be in the United States.
The most likely, if not cynical, answer, is obvious: lawmakers who do not oppose illegal immigration &#8220;do not want American citizens to know the nature and the amount and the significance of crimes that are being committed by illegal aliens,&#8221; Martinelli said.
Or as Kirsanow put it, &#8220;There were political imperatives at work that made it better to not know what the crime rates were.&#8221;

How Many Illegal Immigrants Have Committed Violent Felonies? That’s One Statistic Our Government Doesn’t Track.

Department of Homeland Security

Department of Justice

Illegal Immigration

Immigrants

Immigration

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Republican Party

This has been one doggone awful week for United Airlines. 
On Monday, a French bulldog died in an overhead bin on a United flight after a flight attendant told its owners to put it there.
The next day, passenger Kara Swindle went to collect her family&#8217;s German Shepherd, Irgo, at a United cargo facility in Kansas City. Her family, she said, was completing their move from Oregon to Wichita.
But Irgo wasn&#8217;t there. 
Irgo was in Japan.
Because United accidentally put him on a flight to Tokyo. 
In the pup&#8217;s place was a Great Dane that United was supposed to have sent to Japan.
Swindle said that she didn&#8217;t find out until 2:30 a.m. where Irgo was. That&#8217;s when his flight landed in Japan.
&#8220;This has just all been a whirlwind,&#8221; Swindle told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/us/united-flight-dog-mix-up/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CNN</a>.
She added that Irgo hadn&#8217;t eaten or drank anything for the duration of the 16-plus hours flight, and that he missed three days worth of medication for an ear infection. Presumably the medication won&#8217;t be available until he gets home.
United released a statement apologizing for the mix-up, explaining that it occurred when the two dogs were being placed on connecting flights in Denver.
&#8220;We have notified our customers that their pets have arrived safely and will arrange to return the pets to them as soon as possible. We apologize for this mistake and are following up with the vendor kennel where they were kept overnight to understand what happened,&#8221; United&#8217;s statement read in part. 
On Thursday, United was set to fly Irgo on a private charter from Tokyo to Wichita. Maybe this dog will have its day, after all.

NOT AGAIN! United Airlines Mistakenly Flies Kansas-Bound German Shepherd to Japan

Dogs

Japan

Kansas

Oregon

United Airlines

Saudi Arabia&#8217;s heir to the throne has some fighting words for Iran&#8217;s Supreme Leader: If you get a nuclear bomb, so will we. 
Oh, and you&#8217;re Hitler.
In an <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-iran-nuclear-bomb-saudi-arabia/">interview</a> with &#8220;60 Minutes&#8221; set to air Sunday, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, said Iran&#8217;s Ayatollah Ali Khameini &#8220;wants to create his own project in the Middle East, very much like Hitler.&#8221;
&#8220;Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realize how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened. I don&#8217;t want to see the same events happening in the Middle East,&#8221; Mohammed told Norah O&#8217;Donnell.
Asked whether Saudi Arabia needs nuclear weapons to counter Iran, Mohammed said that if Iran develops a nuclear bomb, Saudi Arabia will &#8220;without a doubt &#8230; follow suit as soon as possible.&#8221; 
Iran&#8217;s pursuit of nuclear weapons has been, at best, <a href="http://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/175921/">delayed</a> for 10 to 15 years by a 2015 nuclear agreement that President Obama said &#8220;permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.&#8221;
President Trump has repeatedly bashed the deal and indicated that he may unilaterally withdraw the United States from it.
&#8220;The deal allows Iran to continue developing certain elements of its nuclear program. And importantly, in just a few years, as key restrictions disappear, Iran can sprint towards a rapid nuclear weapons breakout,&#8221; Trump <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/10/13/557622096/transcript-trump-s-remarks-on-iran-nuclear-deal">said</a> in October. &#8220;What is the purpose of a deal that, at best, only delays Iran&#8217;s nuclear capability for a short period of time?&#8221;
On Tuesday, Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and nominated CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him. Tillerson departed from Trump&#8217;s line on Iran, arguing that Iran was complying with the letter of the deal, but not with its spirit.
But Pompeo has long been a hawk on Iran, calling it &#8220;a thuggish police state&#8221; and a &#8220;despotic theocracy.&#8221;
&#8220;They&#8217;re the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East,&#8221; he said in October.

Saudi Crown Prince To Iran’s Supreme Leader: If You Get Nukes, So Will We. Oh, And You’re Hitler.

Iran

Mike Pompeo

Nuclear Weapons

Rex Tillerson

Saudi Arabia

State Department

Time is up for &#8220;Clock Boy&#8221; Ahmed Mohamed and his father Mohamed&#8217;s desperate, attention-seeking, discrimination lawsuit against the city of Irving, Texas, and its school district.
On Tuesday, United States District Judge Sam Lindsay <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/irving/2018/03/14/clockboy-ahmed-mohamed-lawsuit-irving-isd-city-dismissed" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dismissed</a> the Mohameds&#8217; lawsuit &#8220;with prejudice,&#8221; meaning the case is over and done with.
Not 10 months ago, in May 2017, Judge Lindsay dismissed a similar discrimination suit by the family. 
He ruled that no Irving city or school official &#8220;intentionally discriminated against A.M. based on his race or religion&#8221; when, in September 2015, officials questioned and arrested Ahmed for bringing to school what looked like a bomb.
But at the time of that ruling the judge left the door open to the Mohameds amending and refiling their lawsuit, which they did a few days later.
On September 14, 2015, Ahmed, then 14, brought a reassembled digital clock to school to show his teachers.
But the clock looked more like a bomb. So his teacher, acting as any responsible teacher would when confronted with something that looks like a bomb, confiscated it and reported the incident to the school&#8217;s principal, who decided the potential of a threat was plausible enough to call the police. 
When police came to the school, they questioned Ahmed and were able to determine that the device was not a bomb. But they arrested him under the suspicion that it may have been a &#8220;hoax bomb,&#8221; and brought him to the police station so as to be able to further clarify the boy&#8217;s intentions. 
Police later released Ahmed to his parents, and did not charge him, determining that he had no malicious intent.
Ahmed became an overnight cause célèbre among progressives, who pointed to the school&#8217;s reaction to Ahmed&#8217;s clock that looked like a bomb as an example of racism and Islamophobia. 
President Obama <a href="https://twitter.com/potus44/status/644193755814342656?lang=en">tweeted</a>, &#8220;Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?&#8221; Hillary Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and Twitter also extended their support.
Four days after the incident, Ahmed&#8217;s father said his son would be withdrawing from the school. The next month the family moved to Qatar, where Ahmed reportedly received an education scholarship from the Qatar Foundation.
In November 2015, Ahmed&#8217;s family threatened Irving and the school district with a lawsuit if they did not pay the laughable sum of $15 million &#8212; plus offer a public apology. Irving refused.
The following year the Mohameds filed multiple lawsuits. One was the discrimination against Irving and the school district, which called for unspecified damages. 
Judge Lindsay <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/irving/2017/05/19/judge-dismisses-clock-boy-ahmed-mohameds-suit-irving-isd">dismissed</a> it, explaining that Principal Daniel Cummings was &#8220;responsible for the safety of students and others on campus&#8221; and made a reasonable decision given the limited information he had available, and the perceived risk of the device actually being a bomb.
The other lawsuit was a defamation suit against several media outlets and commentators, including Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck. That was quickly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/13100/implosion-clock-boy-lawsuit-against-shapiro-ben-shapiro">thrown out</a> as well, with legal fees and court costs awarded to the defendants.
Yesterday&#8217;s one-paragraph dismissal by Judge Lindsay brings Clock Boy&#8217;s record in court to 0-3. 
<div> </div>

GO AWAY: Federal Judge Again Dismisses ‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Mohamed’s Cuckoo Discrimination Lawsuit.

Ahmed Mohamed

Clock Boy

Qatar

(Here be spoilers. Many, many spoilers . . . )
I won&#8217;t be watching the Academy Awards this weekend. They bore me and have become insufferably political.
But I do wish that more recognition &#8212; at least, say, one nomination &#8212; had been given to what may have been last year&#8217;s strongest, and most surprising, film: <a href="https://www.fandango.com/hostiles-205214/movie-overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hostiles</a>.
Written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass), Hostiles is of a type that you can rarely find in modern cinema. It&#8217;s a film that explores with maturity one of America&#8217;s most controversial eras: its westward expansion; what that expansion did not just to the Indians, but to America&#8217;s settlers and soldiers; and what the Indians did to them.
Hostiles, set in 1892, is so not your typical, simplistic, un-nuanced, tsk-tsk-tsk finger-wag at Americans of the past.
This is clear from the movie&#8217;s opening, even though it features a quote from English novelist D.H. Lawrence that would sit well with many an American Studies professor: &#8220;The essential American is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.&#8221;
But in the first scene, a band of war-whooping Comanches, whose faces are covered in red paint, attacks the home of Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike). 
The Quaids are Americans who settled down for a new, quiet, life on the frontier. 
The Comanches scalp and execute Rosalie&#8217;s husband, and, as she tries to escape into the forest with her three daughters, the Indians shoot and kill all three. Her infant bleeds out in her arms. 
They pursue Rosalie into the woods, but she hides under a rock. The Comanches whoop back to the cabin, burn it down, and steal the horses.
The sequence feels like a response to Lawrence&#8217;s quip about the &#8220;hard, isolate, stoic&#8230;killer&#8221; American: Yeah, well, the Comanches will do that to you.
His &#8220;essential American,&#8221; who we meet in the next scene, is the film&#8217;s protagonist, Army Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale). 
The Army sent Blocker to New Mexico presumably to help quash what was left of Indians&#8217; violent resistance. 
Blocker has seen his share of Indian brutality, but he&#8217;s no angel himself. He&#8217;s killed many Indians, and he defends his past actions by saying he was just doing his job. 
It&#8217;s hard not to cringe as Blocker sits atop his horse and watches a captured Indian warrior tied to a rope, dragged on the desert ground by horseback to nearby Fort Winslow. All the while Blocker is chewing on a piece of fruit. Just another day&#8217;s work on the frontier.
But, we&#8217;re reminded, while that type of warfare may be hostile to our modern eyes, it was the norm then and there. On the frontier, violence and death always lurked nearby.
Blocker was shaped more by his encounters with Indian warriors&#8217; savagery than by any type of racial prejudice. As shown by his touching relationship with black Corporal Henry Woodsen (Jonathan Majors), he has none.
Hostiles goes out of its way to warn viewers against impulsively judging Blocker, who is the archetypical frontier American &#8212; strong, brave, fierce, honorable.
He&#8217;s a thinker, too. He&#8217;s reading Caesar&#8217;s autobiography in the original Latin, and he can speak the Cheyennes&#8217; language better than any soldier on the frontier.
But Blocker is thrust into a strange world when he&#8217;s called into a surprise, early-morning meeting with the fort&#8217;s top official, Colonel Abraham Biggs (Stephen Lang). 
With the colonel is Jeremiah Wilks (Bill Camp), an urban, smug, judgmental, East Coast journalist visiting from Harper&#8217;s Weekly. 
Biggs, with his finger to the wind, welcomed Wilks as part of a public relations stunt. As Americans&#8217; sympathy for the Indians was growing, public support for the military&#8217;s campaign was waning. Biggs wants Wilks to write a favorable story that will go over well with readers in New York.
Wilks appears in only two scenes, but he&#8217;s the film&#8217;s poster boy for insufferable judgmentalism. 
He is the columnist who sits in his comfortable Manhattan office while judging the men who fight our distant wars. He is short, overweight, and well-dressed &#8212; the opposite of Blocker. He is neither interested in nor capable of doing the dirty work of building America, as Blocker is. He is the judge from on high. Tough men like Blocker repulse him, but also shame him. 
Biggs wants Wilks to be in the room when he gives the soon-to-retire Blocker his final major assignment: to execute an order from President Benjamin Harrison. 
The President instructed Biggs to release the cancer-ridden Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family, so that the chief could return to his ancestral land in Montana before he dies.
Biggs orders Blocker to lead a company to escort the Cheyennes through the hostile terrain.
Blocker, who harbors a deep hatred of Yellow Hawk, refuses.
&#8220;Do you have any idea what he&#8217;s done?,&#8221; an incredulous Blocker asks Biggs. &#8220;He&#8217;s a butcher.&#8221;
&#8220;Then the two of you ought to get along just fine,&#8221; Wilks interjects, smirking.
Blocker, furious, but controlled, steps to within inches of Wilks.
&#8220;I saw what happened to the 4th [Cavalry Regiment] when Yellow Hawk and his dog soldiers got done with them,&#8221; Blocker says, looking down at Wilks, who for the first time looks that he knows not of what he speaks. &#8220;There wasn&#8217;t enough left of those poor men to fill a slop pale.&#8221;
&#8220;When we lay our heads down out here,&#8221; Blocker says. &#8220;We&#8217;re all prisoners.&#8221; Such was the price of civilizing a lawless land. 
Blocker grudgingly accepts the mission after Biggs threatens to court martial him, which would endanger his pension.
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1M5cj4UmscE" width="560"></iframe></div>
As soon as Blocker&#8217;s company and Yellow Hawk&#8217;s family leave the compound, out of Biggs&#8217;s sight, Blocker orders Yellow Hawk chained. 
Soon thereafter they come across the burned out house of the Quaid family. Blocker finds Rosalie, in shock, sitting on a bed with her dead children around her. 
Now we see how gentle Blocker can be. He takes Rosalie in to his company, cares for her, and protects her. She, like Blocker, is quiet and strong, and, like Blocker, has a visceral fear and hatred of Indians because of what they did to her. And she becomes hysterical when she sees that in Blocker&#8217;s company are Cheyenne Indians.
The film, though, clearly tells us that Indians are not a monolith. 
Rosalie soon comes to love Yellow Hawk&#8217;s family, who treat her with love. 
And after a Comanche attack on the company, Yellow Hawk &#8212; who says the Comanches are not right in the head &#8212; persuades Blocker that he must unchain him if they&#8217;ll have any chance at survival. 
&#8220;Remove the binds,&#8221; Yellow Hawk implores Blocker. &#8220;We can be of great help.&#8221;
Over the course of their horseback journey, Blocker&#8217;s company &#8212; which soon becomes a unified group of Americans and Indians &#8212; confronts not just Comanches, but white outlaw robbers who kidnap Rosalie and Yellow Hawk&#8217;s daughter, and white frontier settlers who see Blocker and the government as hostiles. 
Blocker fights them all, losing many of his own men. 
The journey is redemptive for both Blocker and Yellow Hawk &#8212; the essential American and the essential Indian. Their hatred was based on experience, on what happened &#8212; the only thing that could have happened &#8212; when two peoples with radically different cultures struggled over one land.
But when their experience brought them together, when they had the shared goal of defeating the hostiles who stood between them and Montana, their animosity vanished.
&#8220;I lost many friends and you have lost many as well,&#8221; Blocker tells Yellow Hawk in his native tongue, reconciling with his former enemy before the cancer takes him.
&#8220;They are a great loss for us both,&#8221; Yellow Hawk responds.
Hostiles beautifully explores Blocker&#8217;s &#8220;essential American&#8221; character by showing us what it is not. It also, as Cooper said, plumbs &#8220;the depths of the darkened psyche&#8221; of both perpetrators and victims of violence and war.
Blocker&#8217;s close friend, Master Sgt. Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane) is strong, brave, and has killed his share of Indians. But he is consumed by his guilt. It ruins him. He, unlike Blocker, can&#8217;t come to terms with what he needed to do as a soldier on the frontier. 
&#8220;I&#8217;ve killed everything that&#8217;s walked or crawled,&#8221; Metz tells West Point graduate Lt. Rudy Kidder (Jesse Plemons). &#8220;If you do it enough, you get used to it.&#8221;
&#8220;That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m afraid of,&#8221; Kidder responds meekly. 
Kidder is a kind soul, and knows how to fight, but he&#8217;s a kid. He doesn&#8217;t want to see himself as a killer &#8212; a weakness when hostiles are hunting you.
His naivete ultimately does him in when he unchains disgraced Sgt. Charles Wills (Ben Foster). Wills joined the company when they briefly stopped at an Army fort in Colorado. 
Lt. Col. Ross McCowan asked Blocker to take Wills to a court martial along the way to Montana. Wills had murdered a group of Indians with an axe. He was likely facing the gallows. 
Wills is Blocker without a conscience. Strong, deadened to the horrors of war, and evil. 
They had fought Indians side-by-side in the past, and Wills doesn&#8217;t hesitate to remind Blocker that he has done some terrible things, too; that it could just as likely be him in chains instead of Wills.
Naturally, then, Blocker despises Wills. So much, in fact, that he refuses to bury him after coming across his dead body the day after he murdered Kidder and escaped.
To do so would be to honor a bad man. 
And Blocker, the essential American, is not a bad man. Rosalie Quaid, a beautiful, gentle, strong, woman, would not admire a bad man.
If you want to see a profoundly grown-up retrospective on America, on civilization versus barbarity, on good versus evil, on how the American character was forged, go see Hostiles while it&#8217;s still in theaters.

‘Hostiles’: The Great, Unknown Film Of 2017

Christian Bale

Colorado

Hollywood

Montana

New Mexico

U.S. Army

To the student leaders of <a href="https://www.marchforourlives.com/">March For Our Lives</a>:
I want to want to be on your side.
I want to want to support you.
If only for the reason that you&#8217;re trying to move your life forward while carrying this horrific experience. 
I want you &#8212; with all the attention and influence you suddenly have &#8212; to extract something good from the evil you experienced. 
But you&#8217;re making it hard.
You&#8217;re antagonizing the very Americans whose support you need. And by doing so, you&#8217;re going to make an awful situation worse, and you won&#8217;t be any closer to accomplishing your goals.
So, here&#8217;s some advice. 
If your primary aim is, as your <a href="https://www.marchforourlives.com/mission-statement">mission statement</a> says, to eliminate school shootings, you may find some of it helpful.
1) If You Want Adults To Take You Seriously, Speak Like Adults
Last week&#8217;s CNN town hall, in addition to being angry, chaotic, and divisive, was, above all else, childish. 
It reminded me of arguments I was party to in elementary, middle, and high school. It was where logic and reason went to die. 
One of you <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo52BObqCds">told</a> a sitting U.S. senator, a man 29 years his senior, &#8220;It&#8217;s hard to look at you and not look down the barrel on an AR-15 and not look at [the school shooter].&#8221;
Most of America does not appreciate its children humiliating its adults, even those in Congress.
Another <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AtOU0dDXv8">told</a> a spokeswoman for gun rights that she and her friends &#8220;will support your children in a way that you will not.&#8221;
That&#8217;s a sick thing to tell a mother simply because she doesn&#8217;t share your politics. 
It was even sicker when some of you <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27443/watch-dana-loesch-called-murderer-cnn-gun-control-james-barrett">screamed</a> &#8220;murderer&#8221; at her.
One of you <a href="https://twitter.com/Emma4Change/status/968305291115859969">tweeted</a> about Senate Republicans, &#8220;They are Actively rooting for our deaths now.&#8221; In a few years, or a few decades, you&#8217;ll be ashamed of that tweet &#8212; hopefully.
Your victim status does not excuse you from basic decency nor does it immunize you from criticism.
If you choose to be on the public stage, if you want to be part of a decades-long debate concerning fundamental constitutional rights, talk like grown ups.
2) There Are Good People On The Other Side Of The Debate. And No, They Don&#8217;t Have Bad Motives.
I remember when I, like you, felt so sure in my beliefs that, in my mind, there was no other side. No legitimate opposition. I&#8217;ve since matured.
Maybe one day, when the intense, paralyzing, grief of this moment has waned, you&#8217;ll see that there are legitimate arguments on both sides of the gun control debate. Maybe more laws would help. Or maybe more laws would hurt. It&#8217;s complicated.
I believe your side has some good points. I also believe gun ownership is both a natural right &#8212; to protect one&#8217;s life &#8212; and a societal necessity, to guard our freedom. 
I didn&#8217;t make that up. 
The Founders believed in it so strongly that they put it in the Bill of Rights. And they weren&#8217;t even in the NRA&#8217;s pockets. That must mean they really meant it.
Also consider that most supporters of the Second Amendment aren&#8217;t members of the NRA, not that it would matter if every single one was. They are as sincere in their beliefs as you are in yours.
Furthermore, the millions of Americans whom you&#8217;ve decided are your opponents are as equally opposed to getting shot as you are. 
And they especially don&#8217;t want their kids to get shot. 
Doesn&#8217;t that mean their motives are likely as pure as yours?
3) Using Your Victim Status As A Weapon Won&#8217;t Get You Far
Although I have thankfully never suffered the terror of what you suffered, for the purposes of public policy, that doesn&#8217;t actually matter. 
When it comes to coping with severe trauma, you have credibility. 
But as for debating the merits and demerits of firearm policy, you have none. 
Being a victim or survivor of gun violence does not change that. 
To illustrate, my brother died of cancer. Does that mean I get extra credibility points to argue for more government funding for his specific cancer? No.
When victim status is used as a political weapon, it is only to delegitimize the other side&#8217;s right to have a different opinion. It is to end the argument before reason gets a word in.
That could work, but it probably won&#8217;t. It has been the Democratic Party&#8217;s default, failed strategy after every mass shooting. Americans don&#8217;t buy it.
4) There Are Things Other Than More Gun Laws That Would Make Schools Safer. Talk About Them.
Why are you only talking about more gun laws? 
The <a href="http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013/">link</a> between gun laws, gun ownership rates, and gun violence is <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf">complex</a>.
But what is not complex is that the Broward County Sheriff&#8217;s Office had more than enough laws at its disposal to prevent the shooter from ever being able to carry out the attack.
So why are you only attacking the NRA?
For God&#8217;s sake, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27539/watch-broward-county-sheriff-gives-embarrassing-emily-zanotti">Dunce-in-Chief</a> Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel is practically begging to be America&#8217;s village idiot. This <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27547/bombshell-sheriff-admits-he-heard-deputy-didnt-ryan-saavedra">dishonest</a> charlatan&#8217;s deflection and politicking gets more absurd by the day.
His team received dozens of warnings about the shooter &#8212; even one from the shooter himself &#8212; and did <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/the-left-ignores-law-enforcements-failures-in-parkland/">nothing</a>.
Once the massacre began, at least one armed deputy waited outside the building, and waited . . . and waited. 
And one first responder <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27610/parkland-first-responder-says-he-was-given-stand-amanda-prestigiacomo">said</a> he was given orders to stand down and not enter the building, even though doing so could have saved the lives of some of the wounded students and teachers who were bleeding out.
And yet one of you, when asked about the conduct of the Broward County Sheriff&#8217;s Office, shielded Scott Israel, instead <a href="https://ijr.com/the-declaration/2018/02/1070224-david-hogg-claims-that-rick-scott-should-held-accountable-for-broward-sheriffs-failure/">blaming</a> Florida&#8217;s Republican Governor, Rick Scott.
&#8220;He [Rick Scott] can&#8217;t just blame this on the bureaucracy and expect to get re-elected,&#8221; you said.
And then there&#8217;s the FBI, which was warned twice about the shooter. They, too, <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article200598934.html">did nothing</a>, and they don&#8217;t even have the excuse of being led by Scott Israel.
But instead of blaming the FBI, you blamed Donald Trump, because &#8220;the president is the boss of the FBI.&#8221;
It sometimes sounds like you&#8217;re more concerned with defeating Republicans in 2018 and 2020 than in holding accountable our law enforcement authorities who could have stopped or mitigated the massacre. I hope I&#8217;m wrong about that.
***
If your strategy for stopping school shootings is to stop bad people from getting guns in the first place (a good goal), there is no simple solution. And it&#8217;s unlikely that you&#8217;ve stumbled upon it in the last five minutes.
In a nation of over 300 million people &#8212; and nearly as many guns &#8212; anything short of a giant gun vacuum cleaner will, at best, tinker at the margins, and, at worst, increase the relative strength of bad guys.
But there are simple things we can do that would make school shootings virtually disappear. The first is radically improving school security. If your aim is school safety, you should want every school to have metal detectors and well-trained, professional, visible, armed guards. 
Mass shooters may be evil, but most aren&#8217;t dumb. They tend to be meticulous planners. Most of them, if they knew that they&#8217;d be shot within seconds of opening fire, would choose a different target. 
That&#8217;s called deterrence. 
The few that wouldn&#8217;t choose a different target would be shot within seconds of opening fire. 
That&#8217;s called security.
Our society has an unhealthy obsession with protecting our children from even the smallest, most unlikely, dangers. And yet our school buses have no seatbelts and our schools have no security. 
What gives?
5) Don&#8217;t Become Social Justice Warriors
Some of you became Twitter superstars over night. You&#8217;re famous . . . for at least a few more weeks. 
What will you do with your fame?
Fight to make schools safer? Or join the chorus of social justice warrior activists that America has pressed mute on?
If the latter, you&#8217;re going to co-opt your own mission into irrelevance. 
An example. One of you <a href="https://twitter.com/davidhogg111/status/968119169848922112">tweeted</a>, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a radical idea, how about we don&#8217;t spend money on arming teachers we spend it educating students in S.T.E.M. so&#8230;.we&#8217;ll be able to create jobs in renewable, clean and independent American energy like wind and solar.&#8221;
Maybe arming teachers is a bad idea. But unlike wind and solar energy, it is related to school safety. 
Stay on message. I&#8217;m saying that as someone who thinks your ideas won&#8217;t make schools safer.
***
Everything that you say or write in the next several weeks will live forever online.
As you grow older and wiser, you will want to be proud of how the high school version of yourself responded to this great evil that befell you, how you carried yourself around people who disagreed with you.
I admit, I&#8217;m skeptical you&#8217;ll listen to any of my advice if you happen to read it. There are so many celebrities and politicians and journalists who are using you for their political and ideological ends. Who are telling you that you&#8217;re doing a great job, and keep speaking truth to power, and don&#8217;t let up the pressure one bit.
I mean, Oprah and Spielberg and Clooney are donating tons of money to your cause! That&#8217;s pretty cool.
And I can only imagine the rush, even given these horrible circumstances, of being suddenly thrust into the national spotlight.
I hope you can pull something good out of what happened. But unless you start trying to catch more flies with honey, I suspect you won&#8217;t.

SICHEL: Dear Student Activists Of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High: Your Behavior Makes It Hard For Us To Be On Your Side

Dana Loesch

Florida

Guns

Jake Tapper

Marco Rubio

MSNBC

National Rifle Association (NRA)

What is wrong with this guy?
Fresh off lecturing a young woman to say &#8220;peoplekind&#8221; instead of &#8220;mankind,&#8221; Canada&#8217;s pretty boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped in it again, this time insulting the entire nation of India during his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/22/india-to-justin-trudeau-stop-trying-so-hard/?utm_term=.656287dfaa2b">boondoggle</a> of an eight-day family workcation.
Twitter lit into Trudeau, 46, this week, for wearing over-the-top, traditional Indian attire that appeared at once desperate and condescending. Sherwanis; kurta shirts; an awkward outfit straight out of central casting for a Bollywood bridegroom. 
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Is it just me or is this choreographed cuteness all just a bit much now? Also FYI we Indians don&#8217;t dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood. <a href="https://t.co/xqAqfPnRoZ">pic.twitter.com/xqAqfPnRoZ</a>
&#8212; Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) <a href="https://twitter.com/OmarAbdullah/status/966218016286441472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;It&#8217;s a kind of reverse colonialism to want to mimic the &#8216;native&#8217;. Doing a kurta number as a salute to a culture is one thing, but Justin Trudeau&#8217;s display of trousseau like repertoire of multi-coloured kurtas has begun to grate,&#8221; <a href="https://theprint.in/2018/02/22/talkpoint-is-justin-trudeaus-fashion-diplomacy-working-in-india/#1">wrote</a> Indian political consultant Dilip Cherian.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Justin Trudeau&#8217;s trip to India has been like that Diwali episode of The Office.
&#8212; FlyingSam (@Naa_Cheese) <a href="https://twitter.com/Naa_Cheese/status/966542274271334400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;Offending garments include Trudeau&#8217;s long, multicolored sherwanis, usually worn on special occasions such as weddings or in Bollywood movies,&#8221; wrote The Washington Post&#8217;s New Delhi correspondent, Vidhi Doshi. &#8220;Trudeau wore a sparkling gold one to a meeting with Bollywood&#8217;s top brass while the film stars wore muted black suits. Add to that the Canadian first family&#8217;s posey, soap-opera style namastes, and it&#8217;s enough to keep social media here buzzing with memes and jokes.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Pretty girl, Justin Trudeau comes all the way from Canada to do Bhangra in India. <a href="https://t.co/r8tihEvPsv">pic.twitter.com/r8tihEvPsv</a>
&#8212; Sonam Mahajan (@AsYouNotWish) <a href="https://twitter.com/AsYouNotWish/status/966760579439394817?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Hilariously, when Trudeau met with Bollywood stars in Mumbai, they wore black suits. He, well, did not. 
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
Even the bollywood stars would be thinking, &#8220;why is this man dressed up like PC Sarkar?&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/pS1XYX8nQ0">pic.twitter.com/pS1XYX8nQ0</a>
&#8212; Jaikar (@MSJaikar) <a href="https://twitter.com/MSJaikar/status/966294929608757249?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Trudeau, ever one to have his finger on Twitter&#8217;s pulse, looked the part of a Prime Minister on Thursday, donning a suit.
One wonders whether the Canadian leader, on his next visit to Washington, D.C., will play the part of George Washington, and wear a blue wool coat and breeches.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Justin Trudeau spotted with Bollywood titans SRK, Farhan Akhtar and more<a href="https://t.co/R3fdof8Juy">https</a><a href="https://t.co/R3fdof8Juy">://t.co/R3fdof8Juy</a> <a href="https://t.co/km6juRV8n0">pic.twitter.com/km6juRV8n0</a>
&#8212; The Express Tribune (@etribune) <a href="https://twitter.com/etribune/status/966204724222529539?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 21, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div> </div>

Justin Trudeau Makes A Fool Of Himself Again, Insults Entire Nation Of India With Condescending, Ethnic Attire

Canada

India

Justin Trudeau

When I read Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson&#8217;s new book, &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0345816021" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos</a>,&#8221; last fall, it read like a bestseller-to-be. Well-written, insightful, and best of all, practical.
Since its release in January, it has sat atop the Amazon bestseller chart. And thank God. 
Peterson&#8217;s book occupied my mind for weeks after I finished it. His points, or &#8220;rules,&#8221; of personal conduct &#8212; surround yourself with people who want the best for you; pursue meaning, not expedience; speak precisely and deliberately &#8212; are universally invaluable. 
It re-entered my consciousness following the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students, teachers, coaches &#8212; murdered. Fourteen others wounded &#8212; a word that insufficiently captures the horror of a bullet fired out of a rifle pulverizing whatever tissue or bone or organ it strikes.
All because of one loser who this publication will, appropriately, not name. One 19-year-old nothing who, in seven minutes, destroyed 17 worlds and permanently damaged countless more. 
He, like every one of America&#8217;s other young, school shooters since Columbine, is male. And like many, he grew up without a father present, is not socialized, is a loner, is not religious, sees himself as a victim, is angry and depressed, wants to get even, is attracted to violence, and meticulously planned his final, redemptive, act of chaos.
Peterson shows how the prototypical school shooter&#8217;s contempt of existence itself &#8212; and thus, logically, of humans &#8212; is illustrated well by Cain. The firstborn man was so angry at God for not accepting his sacrifice, so resentful toward Abel for receiving God&#8217;s favor, that he murdered his own brother and sneered at God: &#8220;Am I my brother&#8217;s keeper?&#8221;
The Parkland killer, just like the one at Columbine and Newtown and Virginia Tech, and Cain, is not a coward. A villain, yes. Evil, certainly. But not a coward. 
&#8220;He was a powerful, consistent, fearless actor,&#8221; Peterson writes of Carl Panzram, an early 20th century serial killer and rapist who was institutionalized and brutalized as a delinquent juvenile. &#8220;He had the courage of his convictions. How could someone like him be expected to forgive and forget, given what had happened to him?&#8221;
Peterson recounts how author Leo Tolstoy, at the apex of his career, questioned &#8220;the value of human existence.&#8221; 
In Tolstoy&#8217;s mind, life was too painful to justify rationally. And faith, which can justify suffering, denied reason. 
&#8220;The people in this category know that death is better than life,&#8221; Tolstoy said, discussing suicide. &#8220;Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner.&#8221;
But, of course, if death is better than life, murder, mass murder, is even better than suicide. In the mass killer&#8217;s world, bad is good.
&#8220;Everyone says, &#8216;We don&#8217;t understand,&#8217;&#8221; Peterson writes. &#8220;How can we still pretend that? Tolstoy understood, more than a century ago. The ancient authors of the biblical story of Cain and Abel understood, as well, more than twenty centuries ago &#8230; murder done consciously to spite the creator of the universe. Today&#8217;s killers tell us the same thing, in their own words.&#8221;
Of course we understand why the Parkland killer did it. Man&#8217;s heart is filled with evil. And this man didn&#8217;t have a conscience standing in evil&#8217;s way.
***
America is in the midst of a well-documented <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/02/18/desperate-cry-americas-boys.html">crisis</a> of young males.
Many, especially those without a father present, feel lost, aimless, isolated. For some, this can lead to envy and resentment. Hopelessness and depression can follow. Maybe it stops there. Or maybe not. Maybe desperation and anger come next, with fantasies of violence and revenge. And then, well . . . 
Most lost and angry men don&#8217;t become criminals, or murderers, or school shooters. But most criminals, murderers, and school shooters are lost and angry men. So, anything that can make lost and angry men less lost and angry is a good thing. 
Enter Peterson&#8217;s &#8220;antidote to chaos.&#8221;
His cerebral, sober, and darkly humorous style has struck a chord with his growing audience. Many of his fans are, like me, young men. Many of his fans, like me, appreciate his paternal qualities in a culture with few male public figures who are also admirable role models. 
Peterson&#8217;s advice, if acted upon, will save some young readers from the &#8220;chaos&#8221; of the &#8220;underworld,&#8221; where everything is &#8220;uncertain, anxiety-provoking, hopeless and depressing,&#8221; Peterson writes. 
Everyone has been to the underworld at some point. Some live in it.
How to avoid it? How to live with &#8220;one foot in what you have mastered and understood&#8221; &#8212; order &#8212; &#8220;and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering&#8221; &#8212; chaos?
First, have something to aim at. All forward movement comes from having a target. Growth is the pursuit of that target, whether or not it is reached. 
&#8220;Ask yourself: Is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or your situation that you could, and would, set straight?&#8221; Peterson writes. &#8220;Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result?&#8221; 
And the aim of your life, Peterson argues, should not be happiness. 
He does not belittle it as a worthy pursuit among many, but &#8220;in a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual.&#8221;
Instead, he says, be more concerned with &#8220;developing character in the face of suffering.&#8221; A feat that, no doubt, would improve the odds of personal happiness, anyways. 
But how to develop character?
&#8220;Toughen up, you weasel.&#8221;
&#8220;Clean up your life.&#8221;
&#8220;Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.&#8221;
&#8220;Don&#8217;t waste time questioning how you know that what you&#8217;re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.&#8221;
Recognize and explore your own resentments, which, if left unattended, will devour you, and maybe those around you, too. Maybe violently, especially if you&#8217;re male, which means you have &#8220;the capacity for mayhem and destruction&#8221; and &#8220;the seeds of evil and monstrosity&#8221; that can transform resentment &#8220;into the most destructive of wishes.&#8221;
&#8220;If you think tough men are dangerous,&#8221; Peterson warns, &#8220;Wait until you see what weak men are capable of.&#8221;
***
&#8220;Boys are suffering in the modern world,&#8221; Peterson writes. 
Competition, disobedience, disagreeableness, pushing limits. When harnessed and integrated, these traits are to our benefit. See Elon Musk. 
But to those who control the language of our culture, these distinctly male traits are to our detriment. 
Thus &#8220;toxic masculinity.&#8221; 
&#8220;When softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues,&#8221; Peterson says, &#8220;hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination.&#8221;
One of his rules, &#8220;Do not bother children when they are skateboarding,&#8221; is as much parenting advice as a note of caution. 
Do not make boys ashamed of their masculinity.
Do not push them to feminize, lest they push back and become machismo.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding, or else . . .
&#8220;When the boys were spinning donuts, they were also testing the limits of their cars, their ability as drivers, and their capacity for control, in an out-of-control situation,&#8221; Peterson recounts of his childhood in rural, frigid, Fairview, Alberta. &#8220;When they told off the teachers, they were pushing against authority, to see if there was any real authority there &#8212; the kind that could be relied on, in principle, in a crisis.&#8221;
But what should adults do when boys cross the line? Surely there is a limit to &#8220;let boys be boys.&#8221;
It&#8217;s called parenting. 
&#8220;Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them,&#8221; reads Peterson&#8217;s fifth rule.
Because if you dislike them, just imagine how much strangers &#8212; who don&#8217;t love your children &#8212; will dislike them. How much society will punish their misbehavior.
&#8220;The vital process of socialization prevents much harm and fosters much good,&#8221; Peterson writes. &#8220;Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive.&#8221;
Socialization begins in the home. Children act, and by observing their parents reactions, learn which behaviors are desirable, and which are unacceptable. 
Parents who properly employ discipline act as loving &#8220;proxies for the real world.&#8221;
They &#8220;use threat and punishment when necessary to eliminate behaviors that will lead to misery and failure.&#8221;
But not too much threat and punishment. Limit the rules, Peterson says, and use &#8220;minimum necessary force.&#8221; 
This is tricky business. Many parents, therefore, neglect it. Easier, they believe, naively, to give their child full autonomy, absent consequences &#8212; a false reality that vanishes when their little monster walks out the front door.
&#8220;Modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason,&#8221; Peterson says. &#8220;They want their children&#8217;s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it. This is not good. A child will have many friends, but only two parents&#8212;if that.&#8221;
***
The combination of a toxic culture and broken homes has produced millions of anxious, confused, and even angry, teenage and young adult males.
A miniscule, statistically-near-zero percentage of these men are responsible for Columbine and Newtown and Parkland. 
Maybe would-be mass shooters can&#8217;t be helped. Or maybe some can. Maybe all we can do is deter them, or remove them from society, or make guns so hard to obtain that these young men&#8217;s violent outbursts would have limited consequences. Or maybe we should have more armed security.
There isn&#8217;t one answer. It&#8217;s complex. 
But for all the lost, young men who can be helped &#8212; and that&#8217;s most of them &#8212; &#8220;12 Rules for Life&#8221; is a handy compass.

SICHEL: Jordan Peterson’s ‘12 Rules for Life’ And The Parkland Massacre

Jordan Peterson

Mental Illness

Shooting

What in the bloody hell are we celebrating on Presidents’ Day? And why? Does anyone know?
Nothing. The answer is: Nothing.
Americans used to celebrate George Washington on February 22 of every year. Following the first president’s death in 1799, the nation honored his memory with parades, parties, and various festivities.
In 1879 Congress and President Rutherford B. Hayes established Washington’s Birthday as an official federal holiday.
This was appropriate considering that the United States may very well never have existed if not for George Washington, at least, not long enough to avoid being snuffed out by the British shortly after declaring independence.
But nearly a century after Hayes signed Washington’s Birthday into law, Lyndon Johnson and the 90th Congress killed our Founding Father, the hero of American heroes.
On June 28, 1968, the heavily Democratic Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which went into effect on January 1, 1971. It ensured that Washington&#8217;s Birthday would never again be on Washington&#8217;s birthday.
This act made Columbus Day a federal holiday, and moved four existing federal holidays to Mondays: Memorial Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day*, and Washington’s Birthday, the name of which is still officially Washington’s Birthday, although it has been known colloquially as Presidents’ Day for decades.
The idea behind H.R. 15951 was that Democrats don’t like work, three-day weekends are the cat’s meow, and since most of what the government does is unnecessary, anyway, no one would notice if it shut down for half a week.
And in the spirit of asininity being bipartisan, Rep. Robert McClory, a Republican from Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” <a href="https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/winter/gw-birthday-1.html">shepherded</a> the bill through the House Judiciary Committee. He also tried and failed to officially rename Washington’s Birthday, “Presidents’ Day.” Virginia’s representatives wouldn’t have it.
So, the last Monday in May is Memorial Day, the first Monday in September is Labor Day, the second Monday in October is Columbus Day, and the third Monday in February is Washington’s Birthday, which means it can fall anywhere from February 15 to February 21. Those dates, conveniently for McClory, fall in between the birthdays of Washington and Abraham Lincoln (February 12), a major reason for Americans&#8217; confusion about who and what Presidents&#8217; Day is honoring.
This would all be fine if George Washington weren’t born on one day in 1732 — not a range of seven days. And definitely not a range of seven days that doesn’t include his actual birthday, February 22.
What a joke.
Because, unlike Memorial Day or Labor Day or Columbus Day, there is only one date that gives Washington’s Birthday any meaning . . . the day he was born!
Divorce the birthday from the holiday, and you get a forgotten man and a holiday honoring 20% off TV stands at Crate &amp; Barrel.
Speaking of which, these days we know Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day thanks mostly to advertisers, who saw they could boost sales with three-day deals that honor the memories, or something, of Washington and Lincoln.
Many state governments also officially renamed Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day, or President’s Day, or Presidents Day, or Washington and Lincoln Day, or <a href="http://www.archives.alabama.gov/intro/holidays.html">Birthdays of George Washington/Thomas Jefferson</a>, or some other nonsense.
So, leave it to Congress to place in George Washington’s stead a day with less meaning than even the half-birthday. A day that honors equal parts Abraham Lincoln and James Buchanan, John Adams and Jimmy Carter, George Bush and George Washington. In other words, a very dumb day.
The price of Congress’s stupidity is national amnesia.
Most Americans older than, say, 55, know Washington’s birthday. And they know about Washington the man only because they honored his birthday every year when they were growing up.
National rituals like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day and, in the past, Washington’s Birthday, exist in order to educate Americans about the ideas that define America.
Ours is not a tribal or ethnic or racial nation, like every other. America is the only nation founded on an idea: the idea that God created man to be free, and that our freedom is best achieved through a limited government and a religious populace.
That idea is the only thing that meaningfully binds Americans together. Our national days of honor and remembrance honor that idea. They refresh our memories of what it means to be American.
That’s why it actually does matter when Thanksgiving is nothing more than football and turkey, or when Memorial Day is about doorbuster deals, or when Presidents’ Day is about nothing.
Because just as a person who loses his memory has died, in a sense, so has a nation that has <a href="http://prageru.dreamhosters.com/4th-of-July-Declaration.pdf">forgotten its past</a>.
During the debate on H.R. 15951, Rep. Dan Heflin Kuykendall, a Republican from Tennessee, presciently said, “If we do this, 10 years from now our schoolchildren will not know or care when George Washington was born. They will know that in the middle of February they will have a three-day weekend for some reason. This will come.”
How right he was.
*To quell public outcry, in 1978 Veterans Day was returned to its proper date of observance on November 11, Armistice Day, the date World War I ended.
Article originally published February 16, 2018.

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Jared Sichel

Articles by Jared Sichel