One woman's tough and tender approach to grassroots conservative principles in an era of unreasonable logic from those who claim progressive strategies but fail to heed how those same strategies have failed miserably throughout history.
"Be wise as serpents ... harmless as doves."
Smoking high potency ‘skunk-like’ cannabis can damage a crucial part of the brain responsible for communication between the two brain hemispheres, according to a new study by scientists from King’s College London and Sapienza University of Rome.
Researchers have known for some time that long-term cannabis use increases the risk of psychosis, and recent evidence suggests that alterations in brain function and structure may be responsible for this greater vulnerability. However, this new research, published today in Psychological Medicine, is the first to examine the effect of cannabis potency on brain structure.
Exploring the impact of cannabis potency is particularly important since today’s high potency ‘skunk-like’products have been shown to contain higher proportions of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than they did around a decade ago. In experimental studies THC has been shown to induce psychotic symptoms and ‘skunk-like’ products high in THC are now thought to be the most commonly used form of cannabis in the UK.
So, as long as you want to claim that smoking pot is just another lifestyle choice, an adult decision without no ramifications, remember studies like this. While you or your family/friends are getting high, you might want to show them this study. Maybe it will make them slow down, or maybe even reconsider destroying their brains for a brief period of pleasure.
Senate GOP Plan to Use Budget Process to Block Obama's Climate Change Pact
Senate Republicans, girding for another budget battle in early December, are vowing to use the process to undercut President Barack Obama’s chances of brokering an international climate pact expected to emerge from negotiations in Paris.
The GOP lawmakers want to leverage their appropriations power to block $3 billion pledged by the Obama administration to help developing countries manage climate change.
“We want to make sure that any of these countries that think they’re going to have a check to cash … that they shouldn’t cash the check just yet,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Politico.
The threat arrives less than two weeks before U.S. diplomats are set to join representatives from nearly 200 nations in Paris to finalize a climate deal intended to cut carbon emissions.
The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. We’ll respect your inbox and keep you informed.
Negotiators are expected to sign the final agreement Dec. 11 during the United Nations summit, running parallel with a deadline for Congress to submit its 2016 spending bill to Obama.
Barrasso and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., sent a letter last week to the White House pledging to use the budget legislation to prevent U.S. tax dollars from flowing into the climate plan unless the president submits the deal to Congress for review.
Obama is said to be devising a strategy to avoid sending the agreement to Congress because of near inevitable rejection from the GOP-led legislature.
“While the executive branch and Congress both play an important role in the foreign policy of our nation, Congress ultimately holds the power of the purse,” Barrasso and Inhofe wrote.
The senators demanded that Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, relay to foreign counterparts that “Congress will not be forthcoming with these funds in the future without a vote in the Senate on any final agreement, as required in the U.S. Constitution.”
Rachel Bovard, director of policy services at The Heritage Foundation, said the Obama administration plans to cast the pact as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, which requires two-thirds approval in the Senate, because it would not attract the votes required for ratification.
“In an incredibly bold move, he has decided to subvert the intent of the Constitution—which requires Senate advice and consent for treaties,” Bovard said of Obama:
Essentially he is using legal loopholes to get around the constitutional role of the Senate, and impose this agreement—and its billions of dollars in costs—onto the American people without the say of their elected representatives.
During a hearing last week by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Barrasso said Congress never approved the president’s promise to pour billions of U.S. funds into the Green Climate Fund. That United Nations fund allocates money from developed countries and private contributors to assist developing nations with protections against climate change.
“These actions in the House and Senate send a strong signal that the U.S. will no longer underwrite the global climate change project,” said Steven Groves, a senior research fellow in foreign policy at The Heritage Foundation. “If the poor countries attending the Paris negotiations don’t think the U.S. will make good on its financial pledges, they won’t sign any climate change agreement.”
Much of what we know about the first Thanksgiving comes from a letter written by Edward Winslow in 1621. The letter, lost for nearly 200 years, was discovered by Boston publisher Alexander Young and later published in 1841.
The first Thanksgiving, according to the account, was primarily a day of fasting to remember and thank God.
While George Washington held a Thanksgiving as president, it was Abraham Lincoln that made it a national holiday.
Right after the battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving an annual day of remembrance to be observed the fourth Thursday of every November. From 1863 to 1939, Thanksgiving took place on the fourth Thursday, allowing people to stop and to give thanks to God.
As Glenn outlined on radio, the tie between Thanksgiving and God slowly unraveled during the Progressive Era.
In an official statement issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a subtle change in wording and tradition began the unraveling.
“I, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States do hereby designate as a day of general thanksgiving, Thursday the 28th, this present November, and I recommend that throughout the land, people cease from their wanted occupations.”
“Notice the date was still the same [the fourth Thursday of November], but this is the first time the president said we should take the day off,” Glenn explained. “This was unusual because up until the Progressive Era, we thought it was abhorrent to take even Christmas off. …In fact, the Pilgrims and our Founders thought it would be crass to take the day off and make it not a day of work for either holiday, either Thanksgiving or Christmas. We worked on Christmas. But it was the progressives that wanted us to cease from occupations.”
Roosevelt’s statement went on to “thank the giver of all good for the countless blessings in our national life.” Glenn pointed out the subtle, but extreme importance of the language used: FDR said, “our national life,” not “individual life.”
Woodrow Wilson issued a similar statement, urging citizens to take the day off.
“I, Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, do hereby designate Thursday the 27th of November as a day of Thanksgiving and prayer and invite the people throughout the land to cease from their wanted occupations.”
At the beginning of the Depression in 1931 when things were really bad, Herbert Hoover followed suit.
“I, therefore, Herbert Hoover, president of the United States, do hereby designate Thursday, November 26th, as the national day of Thanksgiving and recommend that our people rest from their daily labors, and in their homes and accustomed places of worship, give devout thanks for the blessings which a merciful Father have bestowed on all of us.”
Again, while most people wanted to work, a progressive president told them to stay home and rest.
So that brings us to the change from the third Thursday to the fourth in November — and its impact on Thanksgiving and American society. The change happened in 1939.
“At the tail end of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, hoping to boost the economy by providing shoppers and merchants a few extra days to conduct their business between Thanksgiving and Christmas, moved Thanksgiving to November’s third Thursday,” explained Glenn. “So the only reason why we changed from the fourth Thursday to the third, was because in the third term of FDR, he officially disconnected it from God and connected it to the God of America, the almighty dollar.”
That’s right, liberal progressives who purportedly hated business, hated commercialism and despised the power of big business, made Thanksgiving all about money.
Interestingly, a Gallup poll at the time showed 59 percent of Americans disapproved of the date change. Twenty-two states decided to go along with Roosevelt’s plan. Twenty-three decided to stick with the old date, affirming Thanksgiving should be about thanking God, not shopping. Both dates were recognized by the press, the latter referred to as the Republican Thanksgiving because it was connected to God, the founding and Abraham Lincoln.
In 1941, the Wall Street Journal looked at a large pool of data and declared the move a bust. It provided no real boost to retail sales.
It did accomplish one thing, though. It further separated the American people and society from God.
Featured Image: Constant Snow walks through the 1627 Pilgrim Village at ‘Plimoth Plantation’ where she and other role-players portray Pilgrims seven years after the arrival of the Mayflower November 17, 2005 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The 17th century replica village was the site of the first Thanksgiving in 1623. Thanksgiving Day, believed to have originally taken place at the end of July, was established as a national holiday by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and is celebrated on the last Thursday of November. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Black pastor: ‘Blaming white privilege is toxic to actual advancement’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a recently published article about racial unrest at the University of Missouri, the Rev. Harry R. Jackson Jr., gave an honest assessment of the concept of “white privilege.”
Jackson, a black man who serves as senior pastor at Hope Christian Church in Washington, D.C., believes that “white privilege” exists. But he also believes that many black people, and well-meaning white people, are wasting their time focusing on the topic.
“The people – white and black – who are shining the light on white privilege must understand that focusing on it will, in and of itself, bring no measureable improvement to the lives of black people or other minorities, “ Jackson wrote.
“Our real focus should be upon how people of every race can set and achieve their personal goals. My grandfather grew up in a level of material poverty that is virtually unknown in our country today.
“Early on he did not have indoor plumbing and only a grade-school education. He did not rise above this situation and make a better life for our entire family by bemoaning the advantages that white people had. He focused wholeheartedly on what he could control, not on how other people thought about him.”
Hard work and social stability are the only reliable tickets to social advancement, for blacks or other minorities, he wrote.
“If blacks and Latinos wish for more than superficial gestures and condescending lip service, they must understand that blaming white privilege is toxic to actual advancement.
“We must envision strategies that will give millions of urban youth incentives and strategies to earn their way out of poverty. Children of color – especially those living in poverty – need stable families, or failing that, dedicated mentors.
“They need rigorous education, strong work ethics and emotional resilience. It is absolutely true that wealthier children can make horrible decisions without facing nearly the level of painful consequences that poorer children do, which is why I continue to advocate for criminal justice reform. But even with second chances, people must learn to live responsibly in order to break the cycles of generational poverty.”
Improving educational outcomes for minority students is a major key, Jackson argued.
“What most black college students need far more than more diversity programs is a stronger academic foundation before they even think about applying to college,” Jackson wrote. “In Missouri, for example, the average African-American high school graduate in 2014 scored between a 16 and 17.7 on the ACT.
“These numbers are more than four points lower than the state average and indicate that the overwhelming majority are not ready for college-level work. Addressing those numbers might prove more productive for advocates who want to see more black students at the flagship state university.”
“At the end of the day, whites who want blacks to listen to them, or support them politically, would do well to develop empathy for those who may have had a radically different experience in America than they have had.
“And those who are serious about improving the lives of minorities in this country must focus on substantive improvements in family stability, job creation and education, recognizing that without these, nothing will get better.”
German Professor: NASA Has Fiddled Climate Data On ‘Unbelievable’ Scale
A German professor has confirmed what skeptics from Britain to the US have long suspected: that NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has largely invented “global warming” by tampering with the raw temperature data records.
Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert is a retired geologist and data computation expert. He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed to NASA’s revisions, you’ll find that since 1940 the planet has been cooling, not warming.
According to Günter Ederer, the German journalist who has reported on Ewert’s findings:
From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.
Apart from Australia, the planet has in fact been on a cooling trend:
Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C […]. The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 0.3739°C since 2000.
But the activist scientists at NASA GISS – initially led by James Hansen (pictured above), later by Gavin Schmidt – wanted the records they are in charge of maintaining to show warming not cooling, so they began systematically adjusting the data for various spurious reasons using ten different methods.
The most commonly used ones were:
• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase. • Reducing the high values in the first warming phase. • Increasing individual values during the second warming phase. • Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995. • Shortening the early decades of the datasets. • With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.
Ewert’s findings echo that of US meteorologists Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts who examined 6,000 NASA weather stations and found a host of irregularities both with the way they were sited and how the raw data had been adjusted to reflect such influences as the Urban Heat Island effect.
Britain’s Paul Homewood is also on NASA GISS’s case. Here he shows the shocking extent of the adjustments they have made to a temperature record in Brazil which has been altered so that a cooling trend becomes a warming trend.
Unadjusted temperature record: shows cooling trend.
Adjusted temperature record: shows warming trend.
For still more evidence of NASA’s adjustments, check out Alterations to Climate Data at Tony Heller’s Real Climate Science.
President Obama's idealistic and outright dangerous Syrian refugee relocation plan
By Mike Huckabee
Armed with grenades and guns, Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic radicals struck again, took 170 people hostage at the Raddison hotel in Mali. These barbaric terrorists spared the lives of hostages who proved their Islamic bona fides by reciting the Koran, while 27 innocent civilians were killed.
After this attack in West Africa, Obama’s new domestic terrorism plan probably requires Americans to memorize Koran verses.
Why does the Obama administration express more outrage at conservatives than at radical Islamic terrorists? President Obama seems more interested in protecting the reputation of Islam than protecting the American people.
Bomb-throwing Baptists, Anglican arsonists, or radicalized Roman Catholics don’t commit these atrocities—radical Islamic jihadists do. Yet this administration is so naive, they refuse to speak the truth about Islamic terrorism. Benghazi, Boston, Ft. Hood, Paris, 9/11, Kenya, Tanzania, the USS Cole, the list of radical Islamic carnage keeps growing.
Sadly, the Obama administration is moving full-steam-ahead with its idealistic and outright dangerous Syrian refugee relocation plan, which will resettle more than 10,000 unchecked, unscreened foreigners across America towns. The FBI director has explicitly stated that we cannot conduct background checks on these people, yet nothing will stop Obama’s obsession with pandering to the international community, even if it poses a direct threat to Americans. Europe's experiment with open borders collided with radical Islam, and the results are deadly. How has Obama not learned these lessons?
Republicans in Congress have stepped-up their efforts, but they lack the strength to hold this out-of-control president accountable.
On Friday, French authorities revealed another Paris attacker was masquerading as a Syrian refugee. Two others conspirators had visited Syria, including one who had trained with ISIS. This past week, authorities apprehended five Syrians in Honduras with fake Greek passports. They have apprehended Syrians on the Texas border near Laredo. The Syrian refugee crisis must not be taken lightly.
In the face of this chaos, America needs real strength, moral clarity and commonsense. Obama’s politically-correct, press release foreign policy is a complete disaster, and it shouldn’t take another Paris or Mali for the cartoonish clowns in the administration to wake-up.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is a 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States. This op-ed was originally posted on www.FoxNews.com.
TOP CHRISTIAN VOICE UNCORKS ON LIARS IN MEDIA, POLITICS
Dr. Ravi Zacharias is one of Christianity’s foremost apologists. His ministry, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, is based in Norcross, Georgia.
Is the West being slow-cooked by a resurgence of Islamic fervor across the globe, responding to individual attacks by separate groups but refusing to engage in the wider battle?
One of Christianity’s most widely respected thinkers and erudite apologists says that is exactly the case.
In an op-ed titled “Is Paris Burning,” Ravi Zacharias says Europe, America and the entire free world are being lied to by their politicians and most of their media, who refuse to ask the appropriate questions and brand those who dare to do so with nasty labels.
The Paris attacks targeted every-day people having fun – at restaurants, pubs, a soccer stadium and a concert hall.
Zacharias, who is speaking in Egypt this week, was in England the night of the Paris massacre.
The newspapers the next day described the horrific attacks that killed 129 and injured more than 350 with words like “carnage,” “massacre,” “assassination,” “murder,” “blood,” “death,” “screams,” “terror” and so on.
“Television programming was pre-empted and viewers were cautioned that some of the scenes of the slaughter were graphic. It was real,” Zacharias wrote. “A few hours later, names and pictures of the dead were shown. It was like we had heard this before. But it was new and real: the victims’ lives cut short in the peak of their careers. Children who weren’t going to come home.”
He said there is a sense that we are at war, but not officially and not seriously enough to name the enemy.
“War in small increments can be deadlier than large scale war because it doesn’t just desensitize the killers; it desensitizes all of humanity.
“Killers who do not represent a country and whose belief is debated ad nauseam as to whether it is a version or a perversion are truly sinister and are the cancerous cells of our time,” he continued. “They are protected by having no roots either in country or belief. The West is being taken down in small portions till one day the lie of the murderers being protected by smooth-talking power brokers with a bodyguard of lies will be seen for the terrifying belief that it is. No contrary view will be allowed then.”
Until that happens, Zacharias says deception will continue to rule the day.
“For now, the layers of distortion cover the graves of the murdered. The whole world has become a courtroom where clever lawyers make truth unattainable,” he wrote. “Whether it be 9/11 or the carnage at the Boston Marathon or blown-up planes or Paris, we will not find answers because to ask the question is either to receive a lie from some politicians or many in the media, or to invoke the wrath of hate-filled killers.”
Those who expose the truth about Islam do so at great risk to their personal safety. Many, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, also get lampooned in the media and even barred from entering once-free countries like Britain.
“So we ask,” says Zacharias, “what is the belief behind all this that kills with such callousness? We do not get any answers. We are told by some that it’s a religion of peace. Others call it a political theory at its core covered with the garb of religion to give it maximum protection as it invokes the laws of blasphemy.”
What is the answer?
“We had dare not unpack the truth. In one sense, strangely, one feels almost pity for these murderers,” he said. “The possessor of hate loses the essence of life much more than the victim does. Living with a heart so deceived breeds a decimating misery within and spreads the venom globally. There must be scores of young men within the belief who do not wish to inflict such pain but who now live with the pall of suspicion over them. Such is the contagion of a poisoned soul.”
In fact, those who try to break with Islam invite horrific consequences of their own. A man in Britain who converted a decade about from Islam to Christianity lives in constant fear of attacks. The father of six, Nissar Hussain, was brutally beaten outside his home last Tuesday by two hooded Muslims. He was dealt a broken arm, a broken knee cap and a concussion.
“This is the new Britain. This is the path Britain has chosen,” Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” wrote at her blog. “The U.K. Home Office banned me from the country for standing up against this Muslim brutality and thuggery — and they’ve ruthlessly moved against everyone who stands up against it. So now the Muslim thugs and jihad killers have the run of the place. ”
Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy, says she holds America’s leaders responsible for the failure to recognize Islam for what it is. There has always been a disconnect, she said.
“Our top leadership has never understood what Islam really is and implemented policies they thought were going to empower ‘democratic forces’ against dictators – never realizing the reason those dictators were able to hold things together was precisely because they suppressed jihad, and that if they let up the pressure or if genuinely free elections were held, the jihadis would win – or at least surge back up to cause mayhem again,” Lopez told WND.
Author and filmmaker G.M. Davis takes up the crucial question in his new book, “House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World.” In it, he not only asks but answers the forbidden question, concluding that “the origin of Islamic violence is Islam itself.”
Davis quotes Hiskett, who makes the following observation about multicultural Britain which could just as easily be applied to America:
“Britain has failed because the multiculturalists have failed to understand the nature of Islam. What they offer is a gallimaufry of humanist ideas, and some selective comparative religion, shorn of all ‘irrational’ elements, for which an unhallowed relativism, not a passionate accession of faith and a blinding encounter with divinity, is the premise. This is defended as ‘an ability to cope with the uncertainty posed by pluralism.’ In fact, it is an attempt to extinguish the sacerdotal. It may seem admirable in the fashionable context of liberal doubt. But what he multiculturalists forget – or have never understood – is that the equation is altogether one-sided. For the Islamic side there is neither doubt nor pluralism, and only very limited tolerance. … All multiculturalism does is to enable the Muslims to run rings around their trusting multiculturalist and interfaith well wishers, in the business of bending the British education system to their will.”
While countries like Britain, Germany, Sweden and Belgium appear to have made their choices of what path to follow, the quest for answers still haunts, says Zacharias.
“In one Middle Eastern country, an awful thing happened. Two young Muslims turned atheists were on a program. They argued for the reality that blood had been spilled across the centuries and that there was no denying that from its earliest days to the present, this was the same blood-letting in the name of the belief as originally given and carried out. Then one of them asked the cleric a question that was as pointed as could be. It was a powerful question with an irrefutable fact within the question. The question laid bare a reality that was deemed blasphemous. The next day that man and his family were murdered, just for asking a fact-laden question that was unanswerable without conceding the truth. For that, he and his family paid with their lives.
“That’s the depravity of our age. It is death to ask the pointed question because the answer, if true, betrays the real truth. The masquerade is on and it is deadly. We watch hundreds die. We hear speeches full of distortions; we tolerate deceit and even reward it. Some in power and in the public eye whitewash the reality while the blood of the murdered cries out from the ground. Our children and grandchildren will inherit the whirlwind because our media pundits and misguided speech-makers have sown to the wind by trading in lives for their power.”
Zacharias says there is hope even in the midst of the reigning lie.
“The lie has a shelf life. The truth abides forever,” he said. “God can even conquer through our perversion.”
![[Tips] Try These 3 Pure Flavors With No Added Fillers](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tI1G9PEIdt8zYXMj8YHDVbIFmr1vjDDQ2HlF63KhiZrLevW-F4tR8a-jxUdXU5cLoKr7qfBSy6ZEfZRNenNUl26UbdRhhEPahgfSKa-JIZhCowOPyVIq48m_53CCw4VP_w-qIoQWO8jjBBpql65C33vHKVQNgc3Tklww7kXxIWw-ZUHA=s0-d "[Tips] Try These 3 Pure Flavors With No Added Fillers")
