Scrolling around... April 29, 2013

CIA sent tens of millions of dollars to Afghan president's office
For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader...

Back Alley Abortions or at Kermit Gosnell’s Front Door: No Difference
...Indeed, the legalization of abortion has failed to prevent women from being exploited, abused, traumatized, maimed, injured and killed before, during and after abortion...

Democrats lose sequester battle: Problem was, when the spending cuts came, nobody noticed
...But there's another lesson in the FAA furlough fiasco: Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. The furloughs weren't a reasoned effort to save money: They were an attempt to punish voters for not approving tax increases. If the politicians could have shut down ESPN and blamed insufficient revenue, they would have done that, too...

The Post-Welfare State Family ...Even the most redistributive president in history can’t change the laws of arithmetic. As can be seen most recently in Jonathan V. Last’s book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, the song of demographic unsustainability remains the same on both sides of the Atlantic. From Nicosia to Athens, London to Washington, D.C., the benefits promised to seniors and others before Western people stopped having babies will be shouldered in the years to come by a shrinking cadre of younger taxpayers. Nor is the discrepancy just some accounting shortfall to be finessed. As British psychiatrist and pundit Theodore Dalrymple once noted, this crisis is system-wide, “civilizational.”
 First baby born in shrinking Spanish village in 45 years

Doctor Tells Undercover Pregnant Mom: ‘We Would Not Help’ Baby Born Alive During Late-Term Abortion  ...While the medical professional noted that his intention is to remove the pregnancy “intact,” he noted that this doesn’t always happen. Additionally, he described the process and also made some curious comments about potentially declining to use life-saving measures, should the baby be born alive.

“I cut the umbilical cord first, wait for that to expire, and then we do it that way,” said Santangelo. “So hopefully…the fetus will expire first and then we do the pregnancy termination that way.”...
Undercover video: abortion worker tells woman to flush baby down toilet

How colleges scam the working class ...For a case study in how colleges came to this point of curricular incoherence, a recent report by the National Association of Scholars looked at Bowdoin College in Maine, which abolished all general-education requirements in 1969. As the school’s newsletter put it back then, “Bowdoin does not prescribe a pattern of required liberal arts courses for all students. Instead, each student determines, with the help and approval of his academic counselor, what pattern of courses is most ‘liberating’ for him.”...

The Decline of Men in One Word – Porn – And How Colleges Aid and Abet It The latest column from Julie Baumgardner, president of First Things First, offers a great summary of how porn is destroying men, based on the research from Dr. Phil Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, as well as Dr. Gary Wilson, who has studied the neuroscience behind porn watching.

The long and the short of it – porn causes: Erectile dysfunction. Depression. Social anxiety. Severe memory impairment. The list goes on and on, really....

6 Months After Sandy: Many Recovered, Thousands Still Homeless
...By many measures, the recovery from Sandy, which struck Oct. 29, has been slow. From Maryland to New Hampshire, the National Hurricane Center attributes 72 deaths directly to Sandy and 87 others indirectly from causes such as hypothermia due to power outages, carbon monoxide poisoning and accidents during cleanup efforts, for a total of 159...