Odds and ends for a sleepy Tuesday afternoon

Victorian posy of pansiesVictor Davis Hanson puts his finger on something important: It’s not that the federal government has grown in size under Obama; it’s that it’s grown in arrogance. It no longer makes even a pretense of being the people’s servant. It knows it’s our master.

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I’ve always enjoyed reading books about nature’s “germ warfare,” such as Rats, Lice and History, Plagues and Peoples, and Napoleon’s Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory.

These books remind us that, throughout history, nations have often been won or lost, not because of battles between men with swords or guns, but because of battles between germs and immune systems. The Plague of Athens, Justinian’s Plague, and the Black Death reshaped the ancient and medieval world.

In somewhat more modern times, indigenous people in the Americas didn’t lose their territorial control just because they had only Stone Age weapons to fight guns. They also lost because their immune systems were unable to withstand the scourge of diseases that European immune systems had already tamed.

This historical knowledge makes me absolutely neurotic when I read stories about the most dangerous thing of all crossing our Southern border: germs. Unchecked, uncontrolled, untreated germs. It won’t be the cartels that kill us, it’ll be the doe-eyed two-year-old harboring a pandemic disease.

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The Weekly Standard has unearthed a video that perfectly explains the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Why else would it have ignored the Kurds’ timely offer to destroy ISIS while it was still possible?

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Tongue firmly in cheek, Charlie Martin explains how disastrous Dubya’s endless presidency really was.

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Anti-gun logic with kids as targets

Hello IRS

Who really should get a raise

Stop trying to change the 2nd amendment

You idiots still love me