Hump Day Hunnies

No More Hyphenated Americans

Every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we confess that we are "one nation," but there is less and less cultural evidence of that.  In fact, after eight years of perhaps the most divisive president in American history, we are more balkanized than ever.  Not only have the ethnic divisions been exacerbated by the constant allegations of racism and white privilege, but we now contend with a whole new set of tribal identities.  We are not only segmented by racial classifications of black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, but shoehorned into the mix are sexual categories of gay; lesbian; bisexual; transgender, and, according to Facebook, 56 other gender identities.

With the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the time has come to take a bold step toward unity.  To borrow from the president-elect, it is time to make America unified again.  We will never be perfectly unified, but we can reverse the politics of division and reorient our culture toward unity.

Read more:
Articles: No More Hyphenated Americans

In The Arms Of An Angel-American Soldiers Tribute

A Brief History of Memorial Day

"US" by Paul Genova

   "US" by Paul Genova 

 
  (Mr. Paul Genova has been President and Chief Operating Officer of Wireless Telecom Group Inc. since June 30, 2016. 
 

 

I haven't said too much about this election since the start...but this is how I feel....

  I'm noticing that a lot of people aren't graciously accepting the fact that their candidate lost.

 

In fact you seem to be posting even more hateful things about those who voted for Trump.

  Some are apparently "triggered" because they are posting how "sick" you feel about the results.

  How did this happen you ask? Well here is how it happened!
  
You created "us" when you attacked our freedom of speech.

  You created "us" when you attacked our right to bear arms.

  You created "us" when you attacked our Christian beliefs.

  You created "us" when you constantly referred to us as racists.

  You created "us" when you constantly called us xenophobic.

 

You created "us" when you told us to get on board or get out of the way.

You created "us" when you attacked our flag

  You created "us" when you took God out of our schools.

  You created "us" when you confused women's rights with feminism.

  You created "us" when you began to emasculate men.

  You created "us" when you decided to make our children soft.

You created "us" when you decided to vote for progressive ideals.

  You created "us" when you attacked our way of life.

You created "us" when you decided to let our government get out of control.

  You created "us" the silent majority

  You created "us" when you began murdering innocent law enforcement officers.

  You created "us" when you lied and said we could keep our insurance plans and our doctors.

  You created "us" when you allowed our jobs to continue to leave our country.

You created "us" when you took a knee, or stayed seated or didn't remove your hat during our National Anthem.

You created "us" when you forced us to buy health care and then financially penalized us for not participating.

        And we became fed up and we pushed back and spoke up.

  And we did it with ballots, not bullets.
  With ballots, not riots.
  With ballots, not looting.
  With ballots, not blocking traffic.
  With ballots, not fires, except the one you started inside of "us"

  "YOU" created "US".

  It really is just that simple.

Friday Funnies

This Time They Came for Our Children

By Roger L Simon May 22, 2017 @ PJ Media 

It's not just "Manchester England, England." If you think what happened in Blighty can't happen here -- 19 killed, 59 injured -- you'll  have to excuse me if I say "You're out of your bloomin' mind." Did you already forget 9/11/2001?  Or the Boston Marathon? Or San Bernardino? Or the Orlando gay bar attack less than a year ago that killed 49?

Oh, yeah.  Seems so long ago, doesn't it, even that last one? The "new normal."  We put these things out of our minds the week after to deal with the next trivial Washington scandal or go about our petty lives.  Our culture lives in a self-destructive willful blindness, refusing to see the obvious even though it happens again and again across the globe.  Radical Islam, Islamism, or whatever you want to call it has been at war with us since the Twin Towers came down and even well before.  And they have no intention whatsoever of stopping.

Nevertheless we respond in the most perfunctory manner, nattering on about how Islam is a "religion of peace," criticizing ourselves and others for "Islamophobia," or dismissing it all as a police matter.

But this time it was teenage girls -- our children -- in that Manchester audience, murdered by a suicide bomber. If he had been more successful gaining entry, he might have killed several hundreds of them instead of, at this writing, only 19.

Have we learned anything?  Is this finally going to be enough?  Will we at last wake up?  You tell me that the next time you drop your young daughter off at a rock concert you're going to feel comfortable.  Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, libertarian, or ladeedah, you're going to have heart palpitations, I promise you.

Politicians blather on about how these terrorists are "cowards."  No, they're not.  Nothing cowardly about killing yourself for your vision of god, insane as it might be.  What they are is maniacally evil, the same kind of evil that marched innocents into gas chambers in the 1940s.  If you don't confront it, it goes on and on, just as happened then.

 
Read the rest here:
Manchester: This Time They Came for Our Children | Roger L. Simon

Hump Day Hunnies

Best Monologue Ever - Raymond Reddington

5 Facebook scams you need to watch out for in 2017 - ThatsNonsense.com

May 9, 2017 by Craig Charles

Facebook is a hotbed for any number of scams that social networkers need to be on the constant lookout for.

Scammers are always coming up with news traps or changing older scams in a bid to catch out unwary victims. Here are five such scams that have been popular during 2017.

5. Like and share this post to win! (coupled with advance fee fraud)

Everyone on Facebook has more than likely seen a Facebook post that claimed you could win some expensive prize (like a ‘Luxury RV’, free airline tickets or a Disney cruise) just for liking and sharing the post and following a page.

Those scams are everywhere. Most of them trick you into following ‘like-farming’ Facebook pages or some may even lure you to spammy marketing webpages that want all your personal information so they can spam you relentlessly.

However many of these fake competition scams have taken a more sinister turn by tricking those who do like and share their posts into handing over money to get their “prize” delivered to them. Only, of course, the prize doesn’t really exist.


Facebook users who like and share one of these spammy posts are contacted by the page, which claims that they’ve won the prize. But first they need to cough up money for things like “shipping costs” or “handling fees”.

Don’t worry, the Facebook page says, since the prize will more than reimburse the Facebook user for their woes. However, in reality the prize doesn’t exist, and when the Facebook user opens their wallet and pays, the crooks take the money and run.

You’re not going to win expensive goods for just liking and sharing a post. Only interact with competition posts from known and trusted brands with websites, contact information and a good reputation!
 

4. Your Account is going to be Disabled

These phishing scams have been around for years but have always remained a successful way of scamming victims due to their increasingly convincing appearance.

A Facebook user gets a message – through email or through Facebook Messenger – from what appears to be from Facebook. They are told they’re account is going to be disabled for a violation, unless they click a link, login and confirm their details.


However the user hasn’t been contacted by Facebook. It’s a scammer pretending to be Facebook, and the link leads to a spoof webpage designed to look like the Facebook login page. The user enters their login information, and that information gets sent to a scammer.

It’s a phishing scam. The crooks want your Facebook login information so they can take control of your Facebook account. Remember to always check the web address of a login page to make sure it actually belongs to Facebook, and consider enabling login approvals so criminals need more than just your password to access your Facebook account.

3. Is this you in this video?

This is another phishing scam that works very much in the same way as the above scam. However in this case the victim receives a message from a friend over Facebook (that friend has had their account compromised) that says something like “Is this you in this video?”.


The link appears to lead to a video sharing site like YouTube. However once again this is actually leading to a spoof webpage designed to trick you into handing over your Facebook login information. Alternatives to these scams actually try and trick victims into downloading a “video codec” to see the video which actually turns out to be malware.
 

2. Work-From-Home with Facebook!

2017 has seen a massive surge of scams claiming you can work from home using some sort of “legal loophole”. Many of these scams are using Facebook’s “sponsored posts” to advertse themselves, and Facebook seem to be doing very little to curb this trend.


These posts will appear in your newsfeed and link to a variety of different work-from-home scams, including get rich quick scams that claim you can get rich using Binary Options.
They are all scams, and remember, just because Facebook are “sponsoring” a post, it doesn’t mean it isn’t a scam.

1. Facebook Cloning scams

Facebook cloning is on the rise. Despite many misleading warnings, it’s not happening to “almost all accounts”, but it’s still something to look out for.

Facebook cloning is when crooks set up a duplicate ‘clone’ account to yours (by copying your name, profile picture and any other information they can glean from your account) to try and trick your friends into thinking they are you, and accept a friend request.

These scams are usually trying to trick your friends into sending “you” money. Only it’s not you, it’s the cloning crook.

Protect your friends from this scam and hide your friends list. This way a crook won’t know who you’re friends with. Read more about these cloning scams here.

For more online nonsense, follow our Facebook page here.

Thanks for reading. We hope you found the article useful. To finish up, this is just a reminder that we've teamed up with online rewards website SwagBucks to help our readers make a little extra money throughout 2017 just by doing stuff like surfing the Internet, playing games, completing surveys and other online activities. By doing this and accumulating points called SB, you can earn money to spend on websites like Amazon. Sign up with this link and select 'I have a signup code' and use code 'thatsnonsense' to get a bonus 70SB, on us ;) Also, if you earn 300SB throughout May, you'll get a bonus 300SB.

Remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter so you're always kept up to date with Internet nonsense.



5 Facebook scams you need to watch out for in 2017 - ThatsNonsense.com

'Jesus Was a Progressive Because He Advocated Income Redistribution to Help the Poor'

You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate the deceit in this canard. You just have to appreciate facts. 

 

Lawrence Reed | April 18, 2017

-- “Jesus Christ Was a Progressive Because He Advocated Income Redistribution to Help the Poor”

I first heard something similar to this cliché some 40 years ago. As a Christian, I was puzzled. In Christ’s view, the most important decision a person would make in his earthly lifetime was to accept or reject Him for whom He claimed to be—God in the flesh and the savior of mankind. That decision was clearly to be a very personal one—an individual and voluntary choice. He constantly stressed inner, spiritual renewal as far more critical to well-being than material things. I wondered, “How could the same Christ advocate the use of force to take stuff from some and give it to others?” I just couldn’t imagine Him supporting a fine or a jail sentence for people who don’t want to fork over their money for food stamp programs.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “Didn’t He answer, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ when the Pharisees tried to trick Him into denouncing a Roman-imposed tax?” Yes indeed, He did say that. It’s found first in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, verses 15-22 and later in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 12, verses 13-17. But notice that everything depends on just what did truly belong to Caesar and what didn’t, which is actually a rather powerful endorsement of property rights. Christ said nothing like “It belongs to Caesar if Caesar simply says it does, no matter how much he wants, how he gets it, or how he chooses to spend it.”

The fact is, one can scour the Scriptures with a fine-tooth comb and find nary a word from Christ that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth by political authorities. None, period.

“But didn’t Christ say he came to uphold the law?” you ask. Yes, in Matthew 5: 17-20, he declares, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” In Luke 24: 44, He clarifies this when he says “…[A]ll things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.” He was not saying, “Whatever laws the government passes, I’m all for.” He was speaking specifically of the Mosaic Law (primarily the Ten Commandments) and the prophecies of His own coming.

Consider the 8^th of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not steal.” Note the period after the word “steal.” This admonition does not read, “You shall not steal unless the other guy has more than you do” or “You shall not steal unless you’re absolutely positive you can spend it better than the guy who earned it.” Nor does it say, “You shall not steal but it’s OK to hire someone else, like a politician, to do it for you.”

In case people were still tempted to steal, the 10^th Commandment is aimed at nipping in the bud one of the principal motives for stealing (and for redistribution): “You shall not covet.” In other words, if it’s not yours, keep your fingers off of it.

In Luke 12: 13-15, Christ is confronted with a redistribution request. A man with a grievance approaches him and demands, “Master, speak to my brother and make him divide the inheritance with me.” The Son of God, the same man who wrought miraculous healings and calmed the waves, replies thusly: “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you? Take heed and beware of covetousness, for a man’s wealth does not consist of the material abundance he possesses.” Wow! He could have equalized the wealth between two men with a wave of His hand but he chose to denounce envy instead.

“What about the story of the Good Samaritan? Doesn’t that make a case for government welfare programs, if not outright redistribution?” you inquire. The answer is an emphatic NO!” Consider the details of the story, as recorded in Luke 10: 29-37: A traveler comes upon a man at the side of a road. The man had been beaten and robbed and left half-dead. What did the traveler do? He helped the man himself, on the spot, with his own resources. He did not say, “Write a letter to the emperor” or “Go see your social worker” and walk on. If he had done that, he would more likely be known today as the “Good-for-nothing Samaritan,” if he was remembered at all.

What about the reference, in the Book of Acts, to the early Christians selling their worldly goods and sharing communally in the proceeds? That sounds like a progressive utopia. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that those early Christians did not sell everything they had and were not commanded or expected to do so. They continued to meet in their own private homes, for example. In his contributing chapter to the 2014 book, “For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty,” Art Lindsley of the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics writes,

Again, in this passage from Acts, there is no mention of the state at all. These early believers contributed their goods freely, without coercion, voluntarily. Elsewhere in Scripture we see that Christians are even instructed to give in just this manner, freely, for “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). There is plenty of indication that private property rights were still in effect….

It may disappoint progressives to learn that Christ’s words and deeds repeatedly upheld such critically-important, capitalist virtues as contract, profit and private property. For example, consider His “Parable of the Talents” (see one of the recommended readings below). Of several men in the story, the one who takes his money and buries it is reprimanded while the one who invests and generates the largest return is applauded and rewarded.

Though not central to the story, good lessons in supply-and-demand as well as the sanctity of contract are apparent in Christ’s “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.” A landowner offers a wage to attract workers for a day of urgent work picking grapes. Near the end of the day, he realizes he has to quickly hire more and to get them, he offers for an hour of work what he previously had offered to pay the first workers for the whole day. When one of those who worked all day complained, the landowner answered, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?  Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

The well-known “Golden Rule” comes from the lips of Christ Himself, in Matthew 7:12. “So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” In Matthew 19:18, Christ says, “…love your neighbor as yourself.” Nowhere does He even remotely suggest that we should dislike a neighbor because of his wealth or seek to take that wealth from him. If you don’t want your property confiscated (and most people don’t, and wouldn’t need a thief in order to part with it anyway), then clearly you’re not supposed to confiscate somebody else’s.

Christian doctrine cautions against greed. So does present-day economist Thomas Sowell: “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” Using the power of government to grab another person’s property isn’t exactly altruistic. Christ never even implied that accumulating wealth through peaceful commerce was in any way wrong; He simply implored people to not allow wealth to rule them or corrupt their character. That’s why His greatest apostle, Paul, didn’t say money was evil in the famous reference in 1 Timothy 6:10. Here’s what Paul actually said: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Indeed, progressives themselves have not selflessly abandoned money, for it is other people’s money, especially that of “the rich,” that they’re always clamoring for.

In Matthew 19:23, Christ says, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven.” A progressive might say, “Eureka! There it is! He doesn’t like rich people” and then stretch the remark beyond recognition to justify just about any rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme that comes down the pike. But this admonition is entirely consistent with everything else Christ says. It’s not a call to envy the rich, to take from the rich or to give “free” cell phones to the poor. It’s a call to character. It’s an observation that some people let their wealth rule them, rather than the other way around. It’s a warning about temptations (which come in many forms, not just material wealth). Haven’t we all noticed that among the rich, as is equally true among the poor, you have both good and bad people? Haven’t we all seen some rich celebrities corrupted by their fame and fortune, while others among the rich live perfectly upstanding lives? Haven’t we all seen some poor people who allow their poverty to demoralize and enervate them, while others among the poor view it as an incentive to improve?

In Christ’s teachings and in many other parts of the New Testament, Christians—indeed, all people—are advised to be of “generous spirit,” to care for one’s family, to help the poor, to assist widows and orphans, to exhibit kindness and to maintain the highest character. How all that gets translated into the dirty business of coercive, vote-buying, politically-driven redistribution schemes is a problem for prevaricators with agendas. It’s not a problem for scholars of what the Bible actually says and doesn’t say.

Search your conscience. Consider the evidence. Be mindful of facts. And ask yourself: “When it comes to helping the poor, would Christ prefer that you give your money freely to the Salvation Army or at gunpoint to the welfare department?

Christ was no dummy. He was not interested in the public professions of charitableness in which the legalistic and hypocritical Pharisees were fond of engaging. He dismissed their self-serving, cheap talk. He knew it was often insincere, rarely indicative of how they conducted their personal affairs, and always a dead-end with plenty of snares and delusions along the way. It would hardly make sense for him to champion the poor by supporting policies that undermine the process of wealth creation necessary to help them. In the final analysis, He would never endorse a scheme that doesn’t work and is rooted in envy or theft. In spite of the attempts of many modern-day progressives to make Him into a political redistributionist, He was nothing of the sort.

Summary

• Free will, not coercion, is a central and consistent element in the teachings of Christ.
• It is not recorded anywhere that Christ called for the state to use its power to redistribute wealth.
• Christ endorsed things like choice, charity, generosity, kindness, personal responsibility, and voluntary association—things that are irreconcilable with coercively-financed redistribution schemes.
• For further information, see:

“For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty,” Anne Bradley and Art Lindsley, editors:  http://tinyurl.com/kez32e3

“Socialism: Spiritual or Secular?” by Francis Mahaffey: http://tinyurl.com/njpd2kx

“The Parable of the Talents: The Bible and Entrepreneurs” by Robert Sirico: http://tinyurl.com/p4gr8yl

“Lawrence Reed on The Platform” – a short video interview on income redistribution, the welfare state and Christianity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reo0p9N1p4A

“Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Economics” by Doug Bandow: http://tinyurl.com/n9sjth9

Cliché #20: “Government Can Be a Compassionate Alternative to the Harshness of the Marketplace” by Lawrence W. Reed: http://tinyurl.com/nnt3qty

“Christian Charity and the Welfare State” by Mark W. Hendrickson:  http://tinyurl.com/ks2xdxn

--
Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of the book Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

'Jesus Was a Progressive Because He Advocated Income Redistribution to Help the Poor' | Intellectual Takeout

Dead Wrong™ with Johan Norberg - Socialist Sweden

Friday Funnies

Facebook Cloning Scams

by Craig Charles
 
Facebook cloning scams that involve a scammer setting up fake Facebook accounts of real people to trick their friends into friending them on Facebook are proving to be extremely successful.

Imagine the scenario…

A scammer sets up a Facebook account under your exact name. They copy your profile picture and cover photo and upload it onto the fake account.

Then they start sending friend requests to all of your friends – claiming to be you – claiming that you had your account deactivated and need to refriend all of your friends. From there the scammer can try and trick your friends – posing as you – in any number of different ways.

How many of your friends would accept the request thinking it was really you? Probably quite a few, right?

That essentially describes Facebook cloning scams. Scammers clone your Facebook account using information that is set to public – i.e. the username, profile picture and cover photo – and using the users friend list, which will probably be public as well – begin sending friend requests.

And if your friends do accept the fake friend request they are potentially leaving themselves open to any number of different scams.

For example the scammer, whilst pretending to be a friend, may share links that – when clicked – lead to malicious websites that could harbour malware or possibly a phishing attack.

The scammer may also play the classic “Facebook friend in crisis” scam that involves pretending to urgently need money because they are stuck abroad.

Read more:
Facebook Cloning Scams - Copying Your Profile Picture - ThatsNonsense.com

Democrats Erasing History in American South

Under cover of darkness and with construction crews wearing masks, they drove Old Dixie down in
New Orleans.

A statue of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis was removed from its podium early Thursday morning, one of four Confederate memorials Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu has vowed to banish from the city in the name of “diversity, inclusion and tolerance” in the crime-ridden Louisiana city.

Though the removal of the statue was greeted with a cheer, The Lost Cause was not without its supporters, many of whom waved Confederate battle flags and called for the mayor to be imprisoned.

David Barton, a historian and author of “The Jefferson Lies,” said the crusade against Confederate monuments is simply an attempt by the left to erase history. He said even monuments that some might think are offensive can be used for a good purpose.

“Confederate Memorials would not need to be taken down if we still truly taught American history,” he told WND. “I can stand below the statue of Jefferson Davis, and although there were many good things that he did do, particularly before he joined the Confederacy, I can make his statue a positive helpful lesson by telling what we can learn from his life, including the bad that he did.

“I could explain the devastation, humiliation and tyranny that results from him having a philosophy that sees people not as individuals but only as part of groups, and that tries to interpret the Constitution apart from the values of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, progressives, liberals and the courts are doing that now! I wonder where that will lead? History clearly tells us – if only we still knew that history.”

Barton also believes the Democrats cheering the statues being taken down would be shocked if they knew the history of their own party.


Read more:
Democrats erasing history in American South

Kára McCullough Q&A Portion - MISS USA 2017

What Really Backs the U.S. Dollar?

By: Doug Eberhardt

Since 1971, U.S. citizens have been able to utilize Federal Reserve Notes as the only form of money that for the first time had no currency with any gold or silver backing.

This is where you get the saying that U.S. dollars are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. Government. In other words, Nixon implied; take our paper dollars or don’t.

The U.S. at this time was a world super power having been victorious in WWII and there really wasn’t much anyone could do about the decision by the U.S. government to abandon metal backing.

What Does a Dollar or Federal Reserve Note Represent?

What does a dollar or Federal Reserve note represent now that gold and silver no longer back any of the currency printed in the U.S.?

A dollar bill used to say “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank.” Look at a dollar bill today. It simply says; “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” In other words, you can’t redeem it for “lawful money.”

Guess what folks? A dollar bill is not lawful money, but rather “legal tender.”

From the Treasury;

“Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything. Redeemable notes into gold ended in 1933 and silver in 1968. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy. In another sense, because they are legal tender, Federal Reserve notes are “backed” by all the goods and services in the economy.”

What the government, via the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, really did in 1971 was coerce you to accept something (Federal Reserve notes) that used to be redeemable for gold and/or silver but now aren’t redeemable at all.

But let’s play along with their definitions and see if “all the goods and services in the economy” really back the dollar?

What the Treasury would have you believe is that GDP backs the dollar. GDP is defined as “The monetary value of all finished goods and services within a country’s borders in a specific time period It includes all of private and public consumption, government outlays, investments and exports less imports that occur within a defined territory.”

Read more:
What Really Backs the U.S. Dollar?

The Real Story Behind Mother’s Day

Bill Federer remembers selfless hands that rock cradles everywhere.

Mothers’ Day was held in Boston in 1872 at the suggestion of Julia Ward Howe, writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But it was Anna Jarvis, daughter of a Methodist minister in Grafton, West Virginia, who made it a national event.

During the Civil War, Anna Jarvis’ mother organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to care for wounded soldiers, both Union and Confederate. She raised money for medicine, inspected bottled milk, improved sanitation and hired women to care for families where mothers suffered from tuberculosis.

In her mother’s honor, Anna Jarvis persuaded her church to set aside the second Sunday in May, the anniversary of her mother’s death, as a day to appreciate all mothers. Encouraged by the reception, Anna Jarvis organized it in Philadelphia, then began a letter-writing campaign to ministers, businessmen and politicians to establish a national Mothers’ Day.

In response, on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first National Mothers’ Day as a “public expression of … love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

President Reagan said in his Mother’s Day Proclamation, 1986: “A Jewish saying sums it up: ‘God could not be everywhere – so He created mothers.'”

“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” wrote American poet William Ross Wallace, who died May 5, 1881.

This concept was echoed by historians Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History, 1968: “Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted … civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”

Brought to you by AmericanMinute.com.

Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore!
  

12 Steps

Friday Funnies

Good Jobs Are Out There – It’s the Schools that Are Failing

By Karin McQuillan

It’s the public schools that are failing, more than the job market. Last summer set an all-time record of 5.9 million unfilled jobs. Manufacturing job openings were at the highest level in years, with 300,000 new jobs becoming available each month. 

A Wall Street Journal interview with the CEO of United Technologies, Greg Hayes -- who famously caved to Trump and kept the Indiana Carrier plant in the U.S. -- has some surprising information about jobs and American workers. His company has jobs for machinists, with only a high-school degree required, that pay $100K a year. The jobs are going begging. Applicants cannot read or do math.

    “I’ve got thousands of job openings.”

    Do you really?

    “Thousands,” he replies. “A lot of this is because we’ve got growth in business on the aerospace side, but we’ll be adding thousands of jobs in the next three years, and right now I cannot hire mechanics who know how to put together jet engines. But it’s not just jet engines. We also make fan blades, other products, very sophisticated things. These are the high-value manufacturing jobs that America can actually support.”

    A Pratt machinist earns $34 to $38 an hour, which with overtime works out to more than $100,000 a year -- “pretty good money,” Mr. Hayes says. The positions can be filled by high-school graduates with “basic competencies in math and English” sufficient to, say, read a blueprint.

Why don’t our students have basic competence in math and English? The decline of American education is a long-term problem with many causes, but the dumbing down of our schools was put on overdrive by Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Gates. We’ve had five years of the bizarre diktats of progressive Common Core education that decided numbers were too difficult for “at risk” (poor black and Hispanic) students, so no child in America should be taught normal arithmetic.

The result is what you would expect -- the lowest math scores in 25 years of testing.

Read the rest:
Articles: Good Jobs Are Out There – It’s the Schools that Are Failing

Hump Day Hunnies

7 Harsh Realities Of Life Millennials Need To Understand

Millennials.

They may not yet be the present, but they’re certainly the future. These young, uninitiated minds will someday soon become our politicians, doctors, scientists, chefs, television producers, fashion designers, manufacturers, and, one would hope, the new proponents of liberty. But are they ready for it?

Time after time, particularly on college campuses, millennials have proven to be little more than entitled, spoiled, anti-intellectual brats who place far too much emphasis on feelings and nowhere near enough emphasis on critical thinking. To the millennial, words are cause for the creation of safe spaces, alternative ideas must be stifled, and anything they perceive to be a microaggression is enough to send them spiraling into a state of mental distress.

It’s time millennials understood these 7 harsh realities of life so we don’t end up with a generation of gutless adult babies running the show.

1. Your Feelings Are Largely Irrelevant
Seriously, nobody who has already graduated college cares about your feelings. That means that when you complain to your boss because your co-worker mis-gendered you, he’s probably not going to bend over backwards to bandage your wounds. Given feelings are entirely subjective in nature, it’s completely unreasonable to demand everyone tip-toe around you to prevent yours from being hurt. The reality is that people will offend you and hurt your feelings, and they won’t stop to mop up your tears because they shouldn’t have to. Learning to accept criticism, alternative viewpoints, and even outright insults will make you happier in the long run than routinely playing the victim card.

2. You Cannot Be Whatever You Want To Be

This is a comforting lie parents have started telling their children to boost their morale in school. Unfortunately, millennials are now convinced it’s true, especially as society has now decided to push this narrative as well. The reality is if you’re 17 years old and still can’t figure out basic division, you’re not going to be a rocket scientist. If you’re overweight and unattractive, you’re not going to be the quarterback’s prom date. If you lack fine motor skills, you’re not going to be a heart surgeon. It’s okay to accept that you cannot be whatever you want to be. In fact, once you accept this, you’ll be able to focus on the things you can be — the things you really are talented at.

Read the rest here:
7 Harsh Realities Of Life Millennials Need To Understand | Zero Hedge

Asking the Right Questions about Health Care

By Ted Noel, M.D.

If I set out to accomplish a task, I have to start with the basics. What is the job? What steps are involved? The list goes on. The same concept applies to ObamaCare. It's broken. Whether we repeal it or fix it, we have to start with foundations. In other words, as Herman Cain notes, we have to ask the Right Questions.

Paul Ryan didn't ask any of the right questions. And the very first one is simple: "What is our objective? Do we want to make health insurance affordable, or do we want to make health care affordable?" Put differently, do we want to guarantee a subsidy for the health insurance companies, or will we put patients first?

Health insurance is a subsidy to health insurance companies, because it has preferred status in the tax code. Taxpayers get a tax break for supplying health insurance companies with profits. That means that insurance companies will spend breathtaking amounts of money to support legislators who protect their profits. Legislators will respond by creating bigger tax incentives to buy health insurance, and the cycle will continue. Health insurance is a classic example of the Law of Subsidy in action.

The Law of Subsidy: Every time you subsidize something, you get more of it, and it gets more expensive.

Nobody asked, "Does health insurance improve health?" Had they asked, they would have learned that for the general population, health insurance does not improve health. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment showed that:

"Medicaid coverage resulted in significantly more outpatient visits, hospitalizations, prescription medications, and emergency department visits. Coverage significantly lowered medical debt, and virtually eliminated the likelihood of having a catastrophic medical expenditure. Medicaid substantially reduced the prevalence of depression, but had no statistically significant effects on blood pressure, cholesterol, or cardiovascular risk. Medicaid coverage also had no statistically significant effect on employment status or earnings."

 Read more here:
Articles: Asking the Right Questions about Health Care

Evidence About Jesus is Weaker than You Might Think

By Valerie Tarico and David Fitzgerald | 13 April 2017
ValerieTarico.com

This story was co-authored with David Fitzgerald, author of “Jesus: Mything in Action.”
 
Before the European Enlightenment, virtually all New Testament experts assumed that handed-down stories about Jesus were first recorded by eye witnesses and were largely biographical. That is no longer the case.

Assuming that the Jesus stories had their beginnings in one single person rather than a composite of several—or even in mythology itself—he probably was a wandering Jewish teacher in Roman-occupied Judea who offended the authorities and was executed. Beyond that, any knowledge about the figure at the center of the Christian religion is remarkably open to debate (and vigorously debated among relevant scholars).

Where was Jesus born? Did he actually have twelve disciples? Do we know with certainty anything he said or did?

As antiquities scholarship improves, it becomes increasingly clear that the origins of Christianity are controversial, convoluted, and not very coherent.

1. The more we know the less we know for sure.
After centuries in which the gospel stories about Jesus were taken as gospel truth, the Enlightenment gave birth to a new breed of biblical historians. Most people have heard that Thomas Jefferson secretly took a pair of scissors to the Bible, keeping only the parts he thought were historical. His version of the New Testament is still available today. Jefferson’s snipping was a crude early attempt to address a problem recognized by many educated men of his time: It had become clear that any histories the Bible might contain had been garbled by myth. (One might argue that the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of the books of the Bible that they called “apocrypha,” was an even earlier, even cruder attempt to purge the Good Book of obvious mythology.)

In the two centuries that have passed since Jefferson began clipping, scores of biblical historians—including modern scholars armed with the tools of archeology, anthropology and linguistics—have tried repeatedly to identify “the historical Jesus” and have failed. The more scholars study the roots of Christianity, the more confused and uncertain our knowledge becomes. Currently, we have a plethora of contradictory versions of Jesus—an itinerant preacher, a zealot, an apocalyptic prophet, an Essene heretic, a Roman sympathizer, and many more—each with a different scholar to confidently tout theirs as the only real one. Instead of a convergent view of early Christianity and its founder, we are faced instead with a cacophony of conflicting opinions. This is precisely what happens when people faced with ambiguous and contradictory information cannot bring themselves to say, we don’t know.
This scholastic mess has been an open secret in biblical history circles for decades. Over forty years ago, professors like Robin S. Barbour and Cambridge’s Morna Hooker were complaining about the naïve assumptions underlying the criteria biblical scholars used to gauge the “authentic” elements of the Jesus stories. Today, even Christian historians complain the problem is no better; most recently Anthony Le Donne and Chris Keith in the 2012 book Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity.

2. The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.

Every bit of our ostensibly biographical information for Jesus comes from just four texts—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Though most Christians assume that associates of Jesus wrote these texts, no objective biblical scholars think so. None of the four gospels claims to be written by eyewitnesses, and all were originally anonymous. Only later were they attributed to men named in the stories themselves.

While the four gospels were traditionally held to be four independent accounts, textual analysis suggests that they all actually are adaptations of the earliest gospel, Mark. Each has been edited and expanded upon, repeatedly, by unknown editors. It is worth noting that Mark features the most fallible, human, no-frills Jesus—and, more importantly, may be an allegory.

All of the gospels contain anachronisms and errors that show they were written long after the events they describe, and most likely far from the setting of their stories. Even more troubling, they don’t just have minor nitpicky contradictions; they have basic, even crucial, contradictions.