Random links of interest, concern or curiosity from the past week or so, that deserve at least a SHORT mention:
Lake Superior nearing rare ice-over ~ Baby it’s really cold out there!
Google’s Weird Passive-Aggressive Olympics Gay Rights Protest ~ As the Games begin, Google feels strangely compelled to make an adolescent political statement.
And, as Daniel Greenfield observes,
“Progressives pick their battles and they do so in a cowardly and dishonest manner.”
I’m sure the Googloids would be thrilled to learn that taxpayer dollars were invested to answer that mysterious $464,272 question…National Institutes of Health Spent $464,272 to Find Out Why Gay Men Get Syphilis in Peru
‘We left God out of the battle’: Irish pro-life leader on how abortion was legalized in Ireland~ Pro-life Catholic believes secularism and the pro-aborts won because Christians left God out of the fight ~
“If you think of what St. Patrick did to bring the faith, not just to Ireland, but throughout the world, he defied the very lawmakers at the time by lighting the fire on the hill of Tara. And yet we denied God and we put Him out.”
~ Bernadette Smyth ~ Director of “Precious Life in Northern Ireland”
(Highly recommend watching the short video interview w/Ms. Smyth)
UK Floods – farmland wrecked, lives severely disrupted all because of political incompetence ~ and the upside-down priorities of enviro-wackos ~
People on the Somerset Levels, a vast area of fertile reclaimed farmland, have been successfully managing floods since the 13th century. But once the last socialist government got it hands on the Environmental Agency, they stopped dredging the rivers, choosing instead to spend £20 million on a coastal nature sanctuary and running programmes to encourage farmers to flood their land in order to promote birdlife. As a result of these policies, the tidal Rivers Tone and Parrett are so clogged up with silt they are wholly incapable of handling the level of rainfall experienced over the last few weeks, so now locals have to be ferried over flooded land to get their basic supplies.
“It is one thing to approve a waiver in a particular case with uniquely compelling circumstances; it is entirely another thing to declare a plain legal requirement is null and void,” he said. “What is the point of Congress passing a law if the Administration abuses its ‘discretion’ to say that law simply no longer applies? This is yet one more instance of the Administration rewriting U.S. code through executive decree.”
But, as Bruce S. Thornton explains, this disregard for the rule of law, the appropriation of power from the people, and the establishment of an elite ruling class, are simply the rotten fruit produced from the seeds of the early Progressive movement ~ Executive Tyranny: The Problem’s Bigger Than Obama
Quotes of Hope: Iraqi Social Media Posts ~ Although the Christians in Iraq are among the most persecuted in the Middle East, they’re certainly not without hope.
Baby Saved From Late-Term Abortion When Car Dies on the Way to the Clinic ~ A miracle? “What if it’s God? What if He’s trying to tell us something?”
Could be… 
