Random links of interest, concern or curiosity from the past week or so, that deserve at least a SHORT mention:

 
New National Test Scores Show Betsy DeVos Was Right About Public Schools ~
Devos was castigated by the Left for stating the obvious; more money is not the answer ~

Forty-nine out of 50 states were stagnant on the 2017 report card, and achievement gaps persist. Historically, federal education spending has been appropriated to close gaps, yet this spending — more than $2 trillion in inflation-adjusted spending at the federal level alone since 1965 — has utterly failed to achieve that goal.

 
How To Destroy Western Civilization Without Spilling Your Latte ~ Exposing the wild delusion that smashing the foundations of our Judeo-Christian heritage will lead to blissful utopia ~

The only reason Western Civilization survived the fall of Rome was Christianity. All that Classical philosophy and literature would have vanished forever if monks hadn’t thought it important enough to recopy the books by hand. And to do it over and over and over again as the paper decayed. Even the books that got preserved in Islamic countries mostly were recopied by Christian minorities there.
 
Take away the Christians, and the pagan tribes that overran the West would have used those old scrolls in the privy. Likewise, for most of Western history, thoughts of ethics and the common good have come to the masses through their churches.

‘MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME’: Hillary, DNC Funneled $84 Million Through State Parties To Avoid Campaign Finance Laws, Lawsuit Claims ~ Committee to Defend the President (CDP – a political action committee that used to be called Stop Hillary PAC) is suing the Federal Election Commission (FEC) claiming that complaints against the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the DNC have been ignored They’re alleging that ~

… the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) sent millions of dollars in donations it received into a money laundering scheme to skirt campaign finance laws.

Is the FEC yet another bureaucracy that’s been politicized? It sure looks that way ~

“The Clinton machine has escaped accountability for its illegal practices for far too long,” Ted Harvey, chairman of CDP, told Fox News. “After months of review, the FEC has refused to address the Clintons’ $84 million money laundering scheme that violated several campaign finance laws.”

 
The Sex Education We Need ~ In her new book, Nancy Pearcy explains why God’s divine design for human sexuality is so much richer than the cheap version our secular culture is pushing ~

This book (Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality) is meant not to persuade secularists but to galvanize and catechize believers. The audience seems to be young evangelicals and the adults responsible for their formation, so Pearcey keeps her ideas accessible, her prose brisk, and her arguments rooted in scriptural authority.

 
Illegal Migrant Uses Fake ID to Get NHS Transplant While Locals Die on Waiting List ~ Isn’t universal healthcare a wonderful thing?

An illegal immigrant from Albania who used a fake ID to get a kidney transplant, costing (Britain’s) National Health Service (NHS) more than £72,000, has been imprisoned.
 
The crime only came to light after Tafa’s boyfriend had been deported and she told medical staff at a check-up that she had defrauded the NHS.

 
And in other news from the UK ~
Leading Surgeon Says Violence in Khan’s London ‘Like South Africa’, Predicts ‘Summer of Carnage’ ~ Gee, it’s almost as if they’re imported a pathology… ultra-violence in the capital is “the new normal” ~

Dr Martin Griffiths, a consultant surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust, said soaring knife and gun crime has resulted in London “looking more like South Africa, or inner-city U.S.” with regards to the rate of attacks […]
 
More than 60 people have died from stabbings alone in Sadiq Khan’s London so far in 2018, with the UK capital having catapulted ahead of New York in the homicide rankings for the first time since 1800 earlier this year.

 
Meanwhile, in France ~
Riots, Cars Burned After Woman Ordered to Remove Full-Face Islamic Veil ~ While the mainstreams are focused on their primary mission – bringing down the Trump presidency – they missed this latest skirmish in the European jihad ~

Hundreds of police were deployed after residents rioted and torched cars in Toulouse following a police stop of a woman wearing an illegal full-face Islamic veil […]
 
Around 15 cars were torched by the rioters and 200 police mobilised during the riots which lasted several hours with some 300 tear gas grenades fired until calm was restored at around midnight.

 
March of Man Disbanded ~ With each new fossil discovery, the iconic monkey-to-man picture of evolution is looking more and more like man-to-man ~

Although still widely pictured in the mass media, paleoanthropologists have long abandoned this picture. They have also unsuccessfully struggled to replace this highly inaccurate picture of human evolution with more accurate illustrations of what they now believe. It looks nothing like the Progression.

 
‘He Placed Us in Here at the Right Moment’: Spirit of Revival Washes Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ~ (Video) Some good news in the wake of last year’s hurricane; the Holy Spirit can always find a way ~

“If you ask any pastor across Puerto Rico, across denominations, no one will say that Hurricane Maria was a bad thing. In the human perspective – of course,” he said. “We still have a lot of people without power but in the spiritual perspective, no, it was a blessing.” (Carlos Rodriguez, who oversees church planting on the island for the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board)

 
Florida the Latest State to Join National Legal Stunt ~ Lawfare. Ever since President Trump got us out of the Paris Accord the climatists have been getting desperate ~

The National activist campaign to sue governments over climate change on behalf of “kids” has officially added Florida to its list of targets. It’s the latest political stunt in a series of cases brought all over the country. The lawsuits are not brought forward on legal merits — the true motivation is to generate press coverage and carry out PR stunts to turn public opinion against energy companies.
 
While these lawsuits name young people as the plaintiffs, the effort is really backed by deep-pocketed environmental organizations with the ultimate aim of curtailing oil and natural gas production – forcing through their political will via the courts when state legislatures do not embrace their desired policy.

 
ANTARCTICA : It’s Time We Had That Talk ~ It’s the continent that just refuses to comply with all the alarmists’ climate models ~

Antarctica, the ‘inconvenient’ pole, the naughty child, has been gaining ice mass and cooling for decades, despite a 20 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, and model predictions to the contrary.

 
What’s So Funny About Laughter? And how do we get to a cheerful heart? ~ Al Perrotta at The Stream explores our varied responses to humor and shares some lighthearted advice ~

So here’s my challenge today: Let’s take to our day with a cheerful heart. A heart so cheerful its beat drowns out our thoughts of offense. And beats our defenses to the punch. For those of us who process the humorous in our head and not our heart, Shakespeare says: “Frame your mind to mirth and merriment which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”

Reminds me of Bob Goff’s infectious cheerfulness