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As a sharper picture formed of a shy 15-year-old raised in a troubled and sometimes violent home, Adrian Jere Gonzalez appeared in court for the first time to face charges of raping and killing 8-year-old Madyson 'Maddy' Middleton.

Protesters have taken it upon themselves to lecture Japanese people about "cultural appropriation" of Japanese culture by whites. The bizarre interaction took place at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The museum has been holding an exhibit encouraging visitors to wear a kimono to celebrate Claude Monet’s painting “La Japonaise.” The largely non-Japanese protesters decided that this exhibit was a form of "cultural appropriation" of Japanese culture. They have been protesting the event for weeks, calling the museum "white supremacist" and "racist." Now, a counter-protest which includes Japanese women are taking the "cultural appropriation" protesters to task. The counter-protesters...

Much has changed in America since the last year... since the last few months and weeks even! The hope and joy that once filled American has turned to great despair and dread concern. We have had many great challenges before in our nation's past but we have never experienced an inward hostile take over of our three branches of government as we have seen of late. The years of leftist preparation and incrementalism have finally paid off and they have seized the power and are now implementing their socialistic secular lawless tyrannical agenda full bore. This present state of helplessness...

The Federalist's Robert Tracinski examines the question: Why are we suddenly having a full-blown culture war right now? The answer is that the vital political issues are no longer under the control of the American people. He says that the President and Congress stymie each other. This implies that just about everything that’s actually going to happen in national-level politics is going to be happening by executive Fiat. ...[and]What doesn’t get done by executive fiat will be done by the courts, as in the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on ObamaCare and gay marriage.Foreign policy decisions are made by one man:...

Entities have identities. To identify a nation, or anything else, is to define it. That is, it must have specific limits — one must be able to tell what it is, largely by ruling out what it is not, implicitly and explicitly. In the case of a country, there must be territorial boundaries. It also has have additional characteristics to distinguish it from other countries. That’s where America went wrong, and dead-ended. In trying to be all things to all people everywhere around the globe (not so much a place, necessarily, but an idea, of limitless opportunity and diversity), we...

CNN contributor Katia Hetter is the author of one of the strangest, weirdest, and downright craziest articles I’ve ever read on that website — and that’s saying a lot. This deluded mom writes: 'My daughter occasionally goes on a hugging and kissing strike. 'She’s 7, and she’s been holding these wildcat strikes since she was 3 or 4. Her parents can get a hug or a kiss, but many people who know her cannot, at least not all the time. And I won’t make her. “I would like you to hug Grandma, but I won’t make you do it,” I...

I know, I know … Europeans also believe in the fantasy that they can live in a socialist utopia of sorts and the bill will never come due too. Er, except in Greece, of course.This “new” outrage, though, is simply the usual Euro “superiority” fantasy. They always have a better/smarter/eco friendlier idea and we New Worlders, well, we’re wasteful, uncouth and unsophisticated barbarians, or something: Overall, it’s safe to say that Europe thinks America’s love of air-conditioning is actually quite daft. Europeans have wondered about this particular U.S. addiction for a while now: Back in 1992, Cambridge University Prof....

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) – All the high-profile violent crimes hitting the Albuquerque area may be helping gun sales. One local shop says they’ve seen a major uptick in sales in what’s usually the slowest time of the year and that they heard from a lot of people after the murder of Steven Gerecke. Omni Arms near Central and Juan Tabo typically sells about 30 guns a week in the summer. The store manager says in the week after police say Gerecke was killed in his own driveway by six teens on a crime spree, they sold around 50 guns. And they...

I saw this billboard from the Pennsylvania Turnpike today. Seems divisive, to me. Seems like the PC gods would never countenance a recruiting poster that celebrated white values. Seems like the empire is recruiting foreigners for its legions, in preference to its own, or because its own don't want to serve. The picture isn't mine. I found it online at this Kansas source, dated three years ago, the author reacting much as I did.But the tin gods still think it's a good idea.

The Justice Department announced a deal Friday requiring Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to provide services in Spanish to his jail inmates, settling part of a two-year-old discrimination complaint the Obama administration filed against the man known as “America’s Sheriff.” Federal authorities will also become permanent overseers for all worksite raids, with the power to demand information about any raids that deputies perform. The Justice Department says it will scrutinize them to make sure they’re following the Constitution. Still to come is a ruling by a court on charges that sheriff’s deputies discriminated in targeting Hispanics for traffic enforcement. But...

Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, believes that there is a thing called "sneaker culture" and it is sexist. She has brought her beliefs to the United States with “The Rise of Sneaker Culture,” an exhibition that explores such topics, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum on July 10. “We don’t consider sneakers to be feminine. Therein lies the essential difference,” Semmelhack explains. “Sneaker collecting, done by many men, is [described] in the tradition of other male collecting, like baseball cards and fine wines. It’s about having every single one in every single model....

In an episode that speaks volumes about cultural institutions, ethnic sensitivity, and the power of protest in the digital age, the Museum of Fine Arts is hastily pulling back on an event that protesters labeled a latter-day form of racist minstrelsy. MFA officials announced Tuesday they would recast “Kimono Wednesdays,” an attraction scheduled to run throughout July. It is extremely rare for the MFA to change exhibition plans in the wake of protests; it appears such action had not been taken for decades. Created as a light summer distraction, “Kimono Wednesdays” invited visitors to “channel your inner Camille Monet” by...

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (AP) — Pope Francis denounced the "throwaway" culture of today's society that discards anyone who is unproductive as he celebrated his first public Mass in Bolivia on Thursday, one of the key days of his South American pilgrimage. It was to culminate with a summit of farmers, fishermen and indigenous whose causes have long been championed by history's first Latin American pope.

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This is an age when Confederate monuments still stand; when white-privilege denialism is surging on social media;... And that’s looking only at race. Add gender, guns, gays, and God to the mix and the culture war seems to be raging along quite nicely. Yet from another perspective, much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. Not long after his original book came out, Hirsch published the first of several editions of a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. [T]he Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. [Thus, the] omni-American...

[SNIP]...We are not all equally failing, indifferent, dimwitted, or immoral, nor are we all equally talented, worthy of love and attention, successful, or productive. Not everything is subjective. Not everything is just an opinion. To collectively believe otherwise is suicidal, and this thinking has directly contributed to the decline of our civilization, one in which far too many people are now appallingly ineffectual, apathetic, and unskilled.The notion that all people, no matter what they do or don’t do, accomplish or don’t accomplish, are equal–no better or worse than anyone else–must be fought against.We are fast becoming a nation of lazy,...

Real-estate mogul and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a boycott of Macy's on Wednesday after the retail company said it would drop Trump's products. Earlier in the day, Macy's said it was snubbing Trump because of the "disparaging characterizations" he made about Mexican immigrants during his campaign launch. Among other things, Trump accused Mexico of sending its "rapists" and drug dealers to the US. In addition to blasting Macy's in an official statement, Trump attacked Macy's in a series of tweets for being "weak on border security" Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boycott-macys-2015-7#ixzz3ergFOT2w

In a commonsense decision, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a case that decided that people registering to vote in federal election don't have to prove their citizenship. That means that people registering to vote won't be bullied into proving citizenship, which now seems to be an irrelevant criterion for voting. “I am very pleased, obviously,” said Dolores Furtado, president of the Kansas chapter of the League of Women Voters. “It’s a good feeling because we’re truly trying to help” people get registered to vote. Furtado said the league’s main interest is in increasing participation in the...

I loved reading the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books to my daughter. The somewhat Aesopian theme is that if you give the mouse what it wants – a cookie – it will just want more: a glass of milk, a straw, etc. The story came to mind last week, a week that began with many vowing to inter the Confederate flag and that ended with the Supreme Court mandating that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As far as culture-war victories go, the flag news was big, but the marriage ruling was tantamount to VE...

The United States is now the world’s second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico, according to a new study published by the prestigious Instituto Cervantes. The report says there are 41 million native Spanish speakers in the US plus a further 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. This puts the US ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million) and second only to Mexico (121 million). Among the sources cited in the report is the US Census Office which estimates that the US will have 138 million Spanish speakers by 2050, making it the biggest...