The assassination of John F. Kennedy was fostered by the "climate of hate" created by conservative critics of the president in Dallas, many liberals said. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a communist from New Orleans, so this was a stretch. Sarah Palin's "inflammatory rhetoric" was to blame for the shooting in Tucson in January, 2011, in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz, was severely wounded, and six who'd come to hear her were killed, many liberals said. The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was mentally ill, had no ties to conservative groups, no political motive for the shooting. You'd look in vain to find conservative incendiary rhetoric inciting conservative violence, but it's easy to find regarding Democrats.  Now, in the wake of the murder of two New York City police officers Saturday (12/20), prominent Democrats are fearful Americans will hold them accountable for the consequences of their "climate of hate."

Yesterday in the Kremlin, the Putin Huilo gave what Bloomberg described as an "Extremely Long Very Weird Press Conference." It reminded me of the now-viral YouTube video of the Chinese two year-old missing a putt:

There's one chance in four a coed will be raped before she graduates from college, feminists say. Which is like saying the earth is flat, the sun revolves around it, the moon is made of camembert. Only about two percent of rape charges are false, feminists claim. That number originated in Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book, "Against Our Will." She offered no evidence to substantiate it. No study ever has, said Edward Greer in a law review article. The worse the crime, the more vile are those who make false accusations of it. That applies to feminists in spades.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of the necessary ordering that life requires: finding food, finding a mate, sleep cycles, protective behavior. But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our conscious mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival... or not. Because of this, we can do something pretty amazing: with our conscious minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. We do this by creating habits. The habits we practice daily, weekly, monthly... are all maintained through neural pathways that we've established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines. These habits - if they are good ones - help us to build a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. They are what allow us to persevere and reach long term goals. Without habits, we'd need to use our willpower for every single action we take. The trouble is, we acquire many of our habits by default - from routines that our family valued and practiced or that we learned in school or from influential people in our lives.  So here are some tips on how to get rid of bad habits and acquire good ones.

Why do very successful nations often adopt policies that lead to their undoing? After a revolution or major reform, some countries allow a high degree of economic freedom, establish the rule of law, protect private property rights and establish low tax rates with strict limits on government spending and regulation. The economy takes off, the citizens become far richer and then the government mucks it up, usually by attempting to redistribute income and expand state control. Is Chile, which has been one of the bright spots in the world economy, falling into this pattern under socialist President Michelle Bachelet? For the past three decades, Chile has outperformed the other South American countries and now has the highest per-capita income in South America, averaging approximately $22,000 per year on a purchasing power parity basis. The World Bank lists Chile as a "developed economy," and it was the first Latin American country to become a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The average Chilean has a per capita income about three times higher than in 1983. And now the Chilean people seem poised to let Ms. Bachelet throw it all away.

I kept asking myself, why would DiFi - Senator Dianne Feinstein - approve a "report" whose main effect inevitably would be to damage America?  And it occurred to me that it might be a mistake to try to understand this bizarre event in the usual context of domestic politics.  It probably belongs to a different realm of analysis:  national security, international affairs, and espionage.  Maybe that was really the point of the operation. It benefits our enemies, after all.  It undermines other countries' willingness to share information, and to work with us "in the field."  Anyone who takes life seriously must acknowledge that, quite aside from the merits of the "case" brought by Democrat staffers on the Senate Intel Committee, we've been damaged.  The real scary question is:  Did DiFi and her Democrat colleagues issue the "Torture Report" for no other purpose than to damage their own country?  The report itself contains a very large clue why the answer may be yes.