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I remember about 10 years ago, I was watching a National Geographic show about a hunter-gatherer tribe in Papua New Guinea. The men were running around in loincloths with spears, hunting animals, making offerings to the gods — you know, typical primitive-tribe stuff. But okay, I don't judge... we're all descended from people like that. ......................................................... I suspect that the real reason we don't adopt Japanese toilets is the very fact that people are so eager to give reasons not to. We've grown used to the idea that everything good is invented in America. If it wasn't invented here, it...

The UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi has apologised to the Syrian people after peace talks in Geneva ended without making progress. He had held final discussions with both sides in Geneva in a last-ditch bid to break the stalemate between the Syrian government and opposition. Mr Brahimi said a key sticking point was the government's refusal to talk about a transitional governing body. No date has been set for a third round of talks. The UK and France have blamed President Assad's government for the failure of the talks. The conflict in Syria has claimed more than 100,000 lives since March...

Call me a cockeyed optimist but many of the recent reports about our energy resources and discoveries in medical advances conjure up visions of an America enjoying low gas and energy prices; low unemployment, high wages and low cost medical treatments. None of these changes will be possible, however, unless we have a government willing to allow them. American citizens (legitimate citizens, not just residents) can vote to elect a government that is not beholden to special interest donors and lobbyists. While this sounds unlikely at the moment, it is not impossible especially if the comatose voters who got us...

The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center. For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.

United States Secretary of State John Kerry insisted on Sunday that concrete progress has been made in peace talks between Israelis and the Palestinian Authority (PA), but said details will be kept under wraps, AFP reports. Kerry, who has made nine trips to the Middle East since March and helped launch nine-month direct talks between the two sides in July, said talking about any agreements could be counterproductive. "I'm personally encouraged that very tough issues are beginning to take shape," he was quoted as having said in an interview with ABC's "This Week." .....

The White House has released its second monthly report card on Obamacare enrollment in state and federal exchanges, documenting a mix of progress and problems in the system since it launched in October. The numbers offer some good news: a surge in sign-ups in November after a barrage of improvements to HealthCare.gov, and robust online traffic to the insurance portals shows that interest in the products remains strong. But the figures also illustrate some serious problems ahead: there's a huge backlog of consumers who have applied for a plan but not yet picked one, and electronic errors on the computer...

…and a pretty sweet Minority Report-esque dynamic infographic (“infomotion?”), to boot. The point? The world today has more than its share of problems, but we can all be thankful it isn’t the world of 200 years ago. The charming Swede is Hans Rosling—physician, statistician, and host of BBC 4′s The Joy of Stats. Pretty much everything about this video makes me happy, not least of all that the Brits have a TV program celebrating statistics itself.

A Progress Kentucky volunteer who was at the center of a story involving the secret recording of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign meeting earlier this year has publicly admitted to making the recording, and he says that his attorney has been contacted by an assistant US Attorney about the matter.Curtis Morrison, a founder and volunteer for Progress Kentucky, admitted to making the recording in a self-confession of sorts today at Salon.com.From ABC News (via AP): A Kentucky man has admitted to secretly recording a private campaign meeting between Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his aides earlier this year.Curtis Morrison of...

President Obama told an audience of high school students in Texas on Thursday that the economy is "poised for progress" after clearing away the rubble of economic crisis. OBAMA: Our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in years. But now we’ve got to budget in a smarter way so it doesn’t hurt middle-class families or prevent us from making the critical investments that we need for your future. So a lot of sectors of our economy are doing better. The American auto industry is thriving. American energy is booming. American ingenuity and our tech sector continues to be the...

According to White House visitor log records, Obama’s chief fundraiser Matthew Barzun was among those in attendance at the Dec. 5 White House meeting that also included Shawn Reilly, the Kentucky politico who is accused of secretly bugging a campaign meeting held by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. Longtime journalist and Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board member Keith Runyon was also there. These facts, along with other emerging details, further undermine the narrative that Reilly and his colleagues were nothing more than quixotic rogues who got out over their skis.

A distraught mother as told how she pleaded with young robbers to spare her toddler's life before they shot him dead as he slept in his stroller. Sherry West was pushing her 13-month-old son Antonio yards from their home in Brunswick, Georgia, early yesterday morning when she was approached by two African-American boys. She told how one of them, who looked about 15, demanded money from her and threatened to kill her if she didn't give him any. She told him she didn't have any. 'He said: "Well, I'm going to kill your baby", and I said "Please don't kill...

(Stephen Chikhani and Nadia Lockyer made sex tape; cuckholded treasurer Bill Locker poses with his wife) California state Treasurer Bill Lockyer's differences with his estranged wife, former Alameda County Supervisor Nadia Lockyer, might not be so irreconcilable after all. The 71-year-old mainstay of state Democratic politics this week withdrew divorce papers he had filed last July against his 41-year-old wife, whose methamphetamine addiction and extramarital affair ended her political career and could have stained his. "He and Nadia have agreed to try and work things out, to try and reconcile," said Tom Dresslar, Bill Lockyer's spokesman. "He's proud of...

I can only hope that the scourge of racism is finally purged from Stewartstown and Pinkham's Grant. These are two of 10 New Hampshire towns covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires local officials to get permission, or "preclearance," on any changes to their election laws. Stewartstown has just over a thousand souls in it and is 99 percent white. In 1970, when it was put under the authority of Section 5, the census listed two blacks out of its 1,008 residents. Pinkham's Grant boasts nine residents, and it must also beg Washington for...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Greek mythology, with its tales of Zeus, Apollo and Hera doesn't have a thing on the mythology that liberals have created around themselves. There's Bubba, the President who can feel your pain, BO the leader who has the ability to never be blamed for anything and, of course, the wronged woman Fluke who the gods granted free birth control for the rest of her life for not being allowed to speak to a committee...or something. Still, as you're about to see, the real face of liberalism looks a lot more like Medusa than Aphrodite. 1) Liberals are pro-capitalism: Many liberals...

This is perhaps the most lucid, even-handed, and convincing examination to date of the threat that President Obama - and his potential reelection - poses to our republic. No one who reads I Am the Change will come away thinking this election is about the economy. In truth, this election pits America's founding principles against Obama's efforts to transform them. Obama noted as much in October 2008, declaring in a rare moment of candor, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Kesler cautions: "Those words mean this will be a different country when he's...

On October 28, 2012 Ukraine will hold their first democratic parliamentary elections since agreeing to new rules in November 2011, a significant achievement in reforming the electoral process. The current government has made headlines during the past year, including in the U.S., because it is going through a complicated reform process. Ukraine is a place where economic freedom and embrace of democracy are still the exceptions and not the rule, and the current government needs the support of the West. However, recent events could make it easy for the U.S. to take the wrong angle and accidentally push the country...

The Oval Office isn't the place to learn on the job. That was the line from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008. In fairness, that's always the argument the more experienced candidate uses against the less experienced candidate (just ask Mitt Romney). But Barack Obama seemed a special case, easily among the least experienced major-party nominees in U.S. history. A Pew poll in August 2008 found that the biggest concern voters had with Obama fell under the category of "personal abilities and experience." In a "change" year, Americans swallowed those concerns and voted for the change candidate. Four...

Why isn't this on the news? Would they report it if he said he was a socialist? Well I guess not because even after his redistribution of wealth video surfaced yesterday, the corrupt media did not report it. We are going to have to figure out a way to make people understand the media needs to go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsobm33ATC0&feature=player_embedded

In Rogers Arkansas, Walmart recently asked employees and their friends with iPhones to test out a new self scan-and-go app. It's one of a few mobile initiatives Walmart is working on that could one day replace or aid its many cashiers.