Read This Stuff (11/2/2015)

China and Dithering (and Syria)

If your neighbor’s house catches fire, is it wiser to call the fire department or to trust the good will of the flames to put themselves out? Faced with strategic conflagrations scorching much of the globe, President Obama’s approach is to delay as long as possible then to attempt to negotiate with the blaze.

If forced to act at last, he responds to wildfires with a water pistol.

The Clueless Generation

A lot of the cluelessness regarding the Middle East, and a lot of the ignorance regarding the sexual immorality in our culture is a result of a stunning lack of knowledge about the Bible, even amongst Christians and Jews. This document contains much of what we need to know about how decent citizens should behave individually, and about how national entities should wisely comport themselves. Over and over again we see nations try to make up their own rules and fall flat on their faces. Economies fail, marriages and families break apart, health collapses, babies die before they are even born and all because people have chosen to be ignorant of 1) the proof, both historical and scientific, that the Bible is accurate and God does exist and 2) that He has reasons for the rules He has set for us. We are making life and death decisions witlessly.

Fred Thompson, 1942-2015

“Do you remember a case you prosecuted in 1970 against a moonshine family? That must have been something. Would you tell me about it?”

His smile turned rueful. He went quiet, and then came one of those moments in which the world actually enlarged for me — in which my perspective was unexpectedly broadened. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “Those people. Those poor, poor people. They had rickets. Living in a shotgun shack. What they made from that liquor — nothing.” He explained that the case had been brought to his office by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the bureau was still trying to justify the A part of ATF that had been part of its original mandate under its original name: the Bureau of Prohibition. So it went around hunting backwoods folk on the grounds that they weren’t reporting the income they made off their moonshine to the IRS. He shook his head at the memory. “We should have left those people alone,” he said. “What harm were they doing. What harm had they done.”

Tom's hair is nappier than my mom's.

Yeah, Tom. We'll claim ya. 

“A lot of people still think I’m black,” [Tom] Jones said. “When I first came to America,
people who had heard me sing on the radio would be surprised that I was white when they saw me. Because of my hair a lot of black people still tell me I’m just passing as white.”

His mother got similar queries when she gave birth to him, Jones noted.

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