Breaking A “Pay-It-Forward” Chain Isn’t Being A “Cheap Bastard.” It’s Good Economics — If you want to “pay it forward” like this, be my guest.  I don’t want to steal anyone’s joy.  But people don’t seem to understand what is really going on here.  Pressuring someone to donate sucks the fun out of it for them.  They aren’t able to give cheerfully, à la 2 Corinthians 9.  And Starbucks is making money off of everyone, so the notion that they should get positive public relations from this is a joke.

When you combine coffee with a poor understanding of economics, two things can happen: You feel smug and self-congratulatory, or you demonize the wrong person. Both happened at the same Starbucks this week, when a chain of 378 people “paying it forward” was supposedly broken by “some cheap-ass” in a white Jeep.

“Cheap Bastard Ends 10 Hours of Starbucks Customers ‘Paying it Forward’” was Gawker’s headline summary of the event. The news, which began in a local paper, even made the Today show.

Everyone seems to misunderstand what’s actually happening during these “pay-it-forward” chains, which occasionally develop at this and other coffee joints. So let’s break it down, at the end of which you’ll understand this: The woman in the white Jeep is innocent. And nobody involved in these chains should be overly pleased with themselves.

Pew survey: evangelical Christians least likely to believe superstitious nonsense — Yep.

The least superstitious people are conservative evangelical Republicans, while the most superstitious people are Democrat liberals who don’t attend church.

More Women Picking Up Guns — Good news.

The number of American women picking up guns for fun is growing.  There are now over 6 million female target shooters in the U.S. — up over 70 percent in the last decade — and those taking up hunting as a sport is now over 3 million.

But more surprising than those numbers is that it was CBS This Morning reporting that story earlier this week and doing so in a positive way.  As a native Texan living in the heart of gun-controlled Washington, D.C., I have to give kudos to CBS correspondent Jan Crawford for straight-shooting this story.  I loved what one of the shooting instructors she interviewed said, “We’re playing golf basically, only with a shotgun…”

Venezuela to Require Fingerprinting to Buy Food — Socialism is awesome.

Dragonfly both perfect at first AND “the perfected result” of 300 mya of evolution? —  Such is the problem when assuming the tautology that is Darwinian evolution.

Philosopher Laszlo Bencze reflects on a recent National Geographic program on dragonflies:

First I hear, “The dragonfly, the perfected result of 300 million years of evolution.’’ Then a few minutes later I hear, “The dragonfly was perfect when I first appeared 300 million years ago.” I guess the producers of these shows don’t bother listening to what they’re saying as long as they are saying something about evolution and how wonderful it is. Oh, and there’s not a word about how the imperfections of the dragonfly might reveal the random meanderings of an evolutionary process. Nope, it’s the perfection of the dang thing that tells us evolution is responsible even though it doesn’t change a bit after it first appears.

The Silent Terror: Media Ignoring Islamic Radical’s Murder of Seattle Gay Men? 

Noah Rothman at Hot Air suggests the national media is ignoring Brown’s murder spree precisely because it is Islamic terrorism. Certainly, if these killings had been committed by anyone who could be portrayed as “right-wing,” there would be wall-to-wall coverage on CNN and MSNBC, liberal blogs would be going crazy and President Obama would be welcoming the families of the victims at the White House. But that’s not happening, is it?

The Matthew Sheppard killing had something to teach us. There were many, many reports about that. It was the most infamous single American murder of that decade.

In this case, three gay men were murdered. Three.

Not even a blip on the national news radar screens.

You know what this reminds me of? The “Asian rape gang” phenomenon.

Schoolgirls in England, some as young as 12, were basically being “groomed,” seduced and pimped out by gangs of Islamic men. (In Britain, “Asian” is a term used to describe immigrants or the children of immigrants from Pakistan or wherever, most of whom are Muslim.) These stories made tabloid headlines, but the respectable “mainstream” media was hopelessly gagged by political correctness and the fear of being perceived as racist or “Islamophobic.” However, despite this self-imposed blackout by the respectable press, everyone in England knows what is really happening. The subhuman status assigned to women in Islamic cultures is certainly no secret, yet British feminists were suspiciously mute about the rape gangs.

There is a conspiracy of silence, you see, which includes both gay activists in America and feminists in England, to suppress the brutal truth about Islamic jihad and what it really means. Why is this? Because the gay-rights movement and the feminist movement are both part of the progressive Left, which aims to destroy Western civilization — and Islam is their ally in that regard.

Media curiously silent on “Truthy” — How odd!  Wouldn’t the mainstream media oppose the government using tax money to do the media’s job?

It’s been a couple of days since the Washington Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington first reported on the three-year-old  federal grant from the National Science Foundation for the “Truthy” database, and … not much else has happened. Blogs have picked it up, including our own Mary Katharine, and Reason’s Bobby Soave did a good job of highlighting its inherent contradictions. Twitchy has collated a number of tongue-in-cheek attempts to kick-start Truthy. Other than that, the national media appears to have gone radio silent on this latest project; according to a Bing news search this morning, no national outlet has yet picked up the story from WFB.

That’s interesting, because one might have guessed that they would take notice of a million-dollar effort to encroach on their fact-checking turf. In my column for The Week today, I wonder why the federal government is spending a million dollars to create a mechanism that sounds like it could come straight out of Orwell when we have a perfectly good private-sector market for free speech . . .

 

As Food Stamp Program Explodes, Efforts to Combat Fraud Decline — Food stamps are 50% since Obama took office.  That’s part of the plan (see Cloward/Piven and Alinsky — if you haven’t heard of them, that’s part of the problem).

Why would an explosively growing federal program not see a corresponding growth in efforts to prevent fraud?

Because it does not serve the government’s purposes to prevent fraud. It doesn’t make an difference to Obama or his bureaucracy whether you need food stamps — only that you take them.

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Riveting 14 minute documentary on Darwinism as one of the root causes of WWI — The Germans helped put Darwin’s goal of Social Darwinism into place.  Twice.  Share this with the next atheist claiming Hitler was a Christian.

 

 

 

Evolutionary ethics underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics . . . euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare and racial extermination. Hitler’s ethic was essentially an evolutionary ethic that exalted biological progress above all other moral considerations. Humans must adapt to and even model themselves after the laws of nature.

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One of the all-time foolish, deadly and hypocritical quotes.  Anyone saying such a thing hasn’t put much thought into it, because you can just reverse it to justify guns — and you’d be much more accurate as well! (“If allowing guns and ammunition can save just one child . . .”)

What makes it worse, of course, is a pro-abortion extremist pretending to care about children.  If banning abortion could save just one child . . .