I cannot embed this fabulous program, but you can find it on YouTube!

Mark Levin hosts Joe DiGenova and Dan Bongino, both of who are absolutely terrific in their knowledge of the Mueller scandal and the Obamagate spying scandal. Mark keeps calm throughout! This is his new Fox News Sunday show, which is called Life, Liberty and Levin.

Mark: Undermining the president's credibility not just at home, but abroad!

Joe: No crime has been asserted. How can Mueller constitutionally investigate no crime? Wasting the president's time amd causing an incredible burden on the president's exercise of his duties.

Dan: Mueller's intention is to impeach Trump, but also to keep attention away from the Clinton operation and the Obamagate spying scandal.

Mark: the official DOJ position (going back to the Bill Clinton era) is that you cannot indict a sitting president.

Joe: What you have is an illegitimate basis for an investigation. You cannot indict a sitting president, so why can you investigate him by force of a subpoena? Mueller doesn't have the power to investigate to impeach.

Dan: This is an on-going negative advertising campaign against the president. Mueller has sent a message to anyone who might be thinking of joining the administration: you might be targeted next!

Joe: This started out as a brazen plot through the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to exonerate Hillary Clinton...and then, if she lost, to figure out a way to frame Donald Trump and the people around him.

Dan: Most of the Republicans in Congress are really Democrats.

Joe: From the beginning they weren't investigating a crime. They were investigating a person. In so doing, it is the most vile violation of the Constitution! Mueller is a tool of the people who cannot stand Trump and want to destroy him.

Dan: Mueller is protecting Obama and Hillary, keeping us from finding out the details of their corruption.

Mark: Mueller must be brought before Congress and held to account!

Mark: the dossier is key. If the truth becomes known, you drag down Obama, Hillary, Brennan, Clapper and others!

Joe: Don't forget the illegal unmasking by various Obama administration officials!

Dan: Congress are mostly cowards, chumps. (Not true with regard to Devin Nunes, in my opinion.)

I was unable to embed the video. It is on YouTube. I wholeheartedly recommend it!

"The voice of those hearts was an unanswerable question."

At Feminists for Life we learn,

In Chile, pregnant women silently gave voice to the voiceless with “loudhailers” to amplify the sound of the ❤️s beating inside them.

One participant said, "Abortion activists lost all words. They watched in silence: The voice of those hearts was an unanswerable question."

Go here to see the photo of the pregnant women and their "loudhailers."

Love, Light, and Life

This guest post is by Suzann Darnall.

Red always makes me think of the love of Christmas. Bright and glowing red. Red like a heart. Red like the color of the blood Jesus would eventually shed for all mankind. Red like the lips kissing under the mistletoe.

Red is one of my favorite colors anyway. I love to wear red. I look good in red, too. It is one my high school colors. It is part of America’s patriotic red, white, and blue . . . which were also my Class of 1976 class colors. As well as being one of the class Christmas colors of red, white, and green. It is a color that says “joy”.

White makes me think of the many sources of light at Christmas Christmas. Bright and shining lights around trees, houses, and buildings. Stars shining in the sky at night. The Star of Bethlehem. Sparkles in the eyes of children waiting in line to meet Santa Claus. Tears in the eyes of loved ones meeting after long absences. Candles all aglow in windows, on feasting tables, or scattered about decorated houses.

White is another of my favorite colors. I look good in it and like to wear it. It is also a color for high school, patriotism, 1976 class, and classic Christmas. It also reminds me of the shining purity of the love of Christ. Of charity.

Green has come to mean two things to me for Christmas: Eternal Life and The Grinch! I hate that it has become tinged with sordid things in my mind. But, it has happened nonetheless.

It symbolizes eternal life because that is why God sent His Son, Jesus, to be born and die. That we might eventually be resurrected and live with Him forever. The evergreens that stay alive and lovely through the winter are a great reminder that even in darkness there is life, light, and love. The life, light, and love that is part of the Spirit of Christmas.

But, amidst this aura of life, light and love there are those who would steal, literally, the Spirit of Christmas. Like those who are stealing in this holiday season. Stealing decorations off lawns. Stealing checks and gifts from mailboxes. Stealing purses and wallets in stores. Just like the Grinch crept into Whoville to steal the trees, and feast, and gifts, there are those who commit theft and robbery around communities across our nation.

Nevertheless, despite these thieves of property and holiday joy, many Americans still hold Christmas in their hearts. They look beyond the decorations, the gifts, and the cost to remember the reason for the season: Christ our Lord. They see past the hate and anger to find the love and joy that should fill our hearts, homes, and holidays!

So, let’s fill our Christmas season with love, light, and life. Let’s push all those Grinches off to the side and not allow them to spoil our holidays. Focus on the joy. Find happiness with family, friends, fun, food, and faith! God bless us everyone!!!

Death-defying research

Is death an inevitability, or a solvable problem? Can science and technology help us live longer, say to 150 years? Ariana Eunjung Cha writes in the Washington Post that PayPal founder Larry Thiel, along with

the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

...Prevailing theory among the tech entrepreneurs holds that the federal government is too risk-averse to properly drive medical research. A failed project in Washington is akin to a great tragedy — with managers being called to testify at congressional hearings and Government Accountability Office investigations being launched into why so much taxpayer money was wasted. But in the entrepreneurial world, say tech leaders, failure is regarded as a learning opportunity on the way to the next innovation.

...The tech elite also have embraced as gospel two traditional scientific papers, both critical of the state of medical research. The first, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, is by John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor who has become the world’s foremost expert on the biases inherent to biomedical research. He argued that scientists, motivated by the pressures to publish and entangled in a web of conflicts of interest, manipulate data so often that it’s impossible to trust the body of scientific literature that assesses the efficacy of hormone-replacement therapy or vitamin E or low-dose aspirin. Of 45 well-accepted journal articles about medical interventions, Ioannidis found, 14, or 31 percent, were later shown to be wrong or exaggerated.

The second, published last year and co-written by Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize winner and former director of both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, carried an alarming title: “Rescuing U.S. biomedical research from its systemic flaws.” In the opinion piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Varmus and the other authors argue that much of the problem comes down to money. In essence, there are too many PhDs chasing too little money.

The entrepreneurs’ efforts are driven by the idea that they have plenty of money, and they can do better.

...For Thiel, death is the “great enemy” of humankind.

He said that in the past 25 years the pace of innovation in the biomedical realm has been demoralizing. “Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, and there has been frustratingly slow progress,” he said. “One third of people age 85 and older have Alzheimer’s or dementia, and we’re not even motivated to start a war on Alzheimer’s. At the end of the day, we need to do more.”

“I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he said. “I think that’s somewhat unusual. Most people end up compartmentalizing and they are in some weird mode of denial and acceptance about death, but they both have the result of making you very passive. I prefer to fight it.”

...The big challenge of aging research is that to make it work the way people want it to scientists would have to figure out a way to extend all human systems simultaneously and shut them all down at pretty much the same time. Otherwise you would be replacing one way of dying with another. Some argue that the world is already in a crisis of life extension. People are living longer than in the past but for many their final years are painful, as their bodies and minds are ravaged by cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases of aging.

Kenyon, a longtime University of California at San Francisco professor who recently joined Calico, the Google-funded health venture start-up that aims to “cure” death, now is focused on the idea that “there seem to be life-extending processes that exist in nature, and they can be coaxed out of animals,” she said.

Read more here.

We're the pleasure people

On depression, joy, life, and death

After Robin Williams committed suicide, The Academy of Motion Pictures tweeted this:



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The Academy ✔ @TheAcademy
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Genie, you're free.
6:56 PM - 11 Aug 2014

Matt Walsh responds:

Free? I’ve seen a lot of this kind of rhetoric. Robin Williams is “in a better place,” he is “free,” he is “at peace,” he is “smiling down upon us,” he’s “happy.”

This all might seem pleasant enough, but have we stopped to think how it looks and sounds to those who may be contemplating this heinous deed themselves? Can we tell our friend to step away from the ledge after we just spoke so glowingly of Robin Williams’ newfound “peace” and “freedom”? This is too important a subject to be careless about. We want to say nice things, I realize, but it isn’t nice to lie about suicide.

It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it?

First, suicide does not claim anyone against their will. No matter how depressed you are, you never have to make that choice. That choice. Whether you call depression a disease or not, please don’t make the mistake of saying that someone who commits suicide “died from depression.” No, he died from his choice. He died by his own hand. Depression will not appear on the autopsy report, because it can’t kill you on its own. It needs you to pull the trigger, take the pills, or hang the rope. To act like death by suicide is exactly analogous to death by malaria or heart failure is to steal hope from the suicidal person. We think we are comforting him, but in fact we are convincing him that he is powerless. We are giving him a way out, an excuse. Sometimes that’s all he needs — the last straw.

Second, we can debate medication dosages and psychotherapy treatments, but, in the end, joy is the only thing that defeats depression. No depressed person in the history of the world has ever been in the depths of despair and at the heights of joy at the same time. The two cannot coexist. Joy is light, depression is darkness. When we are depressed, we have trouble seeing joy, or feeling it, or feeling worthy of it. I know that in my worst times, at my lowest points, it’s not that I don’t see the joy in creation, it’s just that I think myself too awful and sinful a man to share in it.

So this, for me, is always the most essential moral at the end of these kinds of sad, terrible stories: we are all meant for joy. We are all meant for love. We are all meant for life. And as long as we can still draw breath, there is joy and love to be found here.

Joy and love. There might not be much else for us on this Earth, but these are the only two things that matter anyway. These are the forces that brought the whole universe into being, and these are the forces that sustain it, and us, and all life.

Life. Life exists, and we are made to live it.

To quote Robin Williams playing a character quoting Walt Whitman:

“What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here — that life exists.”

If you are thinking about suicide, don’t keep it inside. Tell someone.

Never give up the fight.

There is always hope.

Read more here.

It's not parenthood