Stephen Fry (fellow atheist) is urged by Gay Byrne to entertain the idea of an omnipotent, good, creator God, and speak to him at the gates of heaven.

So he tells the imaginary being, in blistering terms, that he is a monster of evil.

(Hat-tip to our reader and commenter Frank)

As a follow-up to our post Too many empty cells in Gitmo (February 6, 2015), here’s another video in which clear-thinking, firmly articulate Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), replying to criticism repeated to him by beautiful and brilliant Megan Kelly on Fox News – in order to give him a platform to reply – defends and thoroughly justifies his insistence that the Muslim terrorist prisoners in Gitmo should not be released.

Fun to watch.

Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, issued the administration’s lame excuse for releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, saying: “It would be unwise to neglect the fact that the prison at Guantanamo Bay continues to inspire violent acts around the globe.”

(One of the real reasons is that Obama wants to empty the prison so he can return the territory to Cuba’s Communist regime. Another is that he is emotionally pro-Islam as well as pro-Communist.)

Here Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) debunks the excuse with admirable bluntness:

Jonathan Tepperman, Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, reports on his interview with Bashar Assad. Fascinating!

The best comes near the end.

This video of Pat Condell saying what needs to be said was published last Thursday (January 15, 2015):

At Townhall, John C. Goodman presents and discusses two views of capitalism as expounded by Professor Johnathan Haidt.

The two views are summed up by these videos, made by Professor Haidt.

Capitalism as Exploitation

Capitalism as Liberation

John Goodman comments:

Now I would argue that one of these views of capitalism is factually incorrect. It’s not just a matter of “political and moral values” [as Haidt asserts]. In fact, in a video presentation of his theory, Haidt shows a chart mapping per capita income throughout all of human history. The chart shows (and this should be well known to all economists) that up until the last few hundred years the average human lived on about a dollar a day – in modern terms. At times and places, they might have enjoyed two dollars a day. If they were really, really lucky they might have hit three dollars a day. But that was it.

In other words, for 100,000 years our ancestors lived at the subsistence level. And then [with the advent of the Industrial Revolution – ed] we got capitalism. By that I mean not just free exchange, but also the institutions of capitalism, including enforceable property rights …

In all its guises the exploitation theory has one central message: the reason why some people are poor is because other people are rich. Here is Paul Krugman explaining why middle income families don’t have higher incomes. …

Soaring incomes at the top were achieved, in large part, by squeezing those below: by cutting wages, slashing benefits, crushing unions, and diverting a rising share of national resources to financial wheeling and dealing. Perhaps more important still, the wealthy exert a vastly disproportionate effect on policy. And elite priorities — obsessive concern with budget deficits, with the supposed need to slash social programs — have done a lot to deepen the valley of despond.

Really? J K Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series) is the richest woman in the world. Did she get rich by “cutting wages, slashing benefits, crushing unions,” etc.? I thought she got rich by writing books. How about Oprah? Has she “slashed” any benefits lately? What about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett? When is the last time they were out there encouraging scabs to cross a picket line?

Krugman’s point about political influence is almost as silly as his view of the economy. Earth to Krugman: the real base of the Democratic Party (the party of the left) has become the ultra-wealthy. And their political goals are harmful to the middle class, but not in the way that Krugman imagines. …

The problem for Democrats is that the party is increasingly ruled by the “new oligarchs”  … [who]  are basically anti-job creation and anti-economic growth – which they see … as a threat to their life style. This puts them squarely at odds with the working class voters who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party. …

The Democratic Party is [now] the party of the poor and the rich. It’s the middle class that is bolting and voting Republican. And what do the rich want from Democrats? Contra Krugman, they’re not demanding smaller deficits or smaller social programs or even lower taxes. What they want – in addition to looney environmentalism – is for government to protect their life style.

Once the plutocrats settle in a community they become fiercely anti-development and shape their communities in ways that price the middle class out of the housing market. As a result, wherever wealthy liberals tend to congregate, housing is more expensive …

Limousine liberals are a threat to the average worker. But not because they are wage-suppressing, union-busting, exploiters. It’s because their anti-capitalist goals are at odds with the aspirations of ordinary Americans.

It seems to be the case that most – probably all – of the successful entrepreneurs who live in Silicon Valley vote Democratic. Having achieved their own riches in the freedom of opportunity for the individual that the capitalist system gave them, they vote for socialism and the removal of individual freedom that it ensures, so others cannot do what they did.

Fossil fuels are very, very, very good for the planet.

We quote Investor’s Business Daily:

We go to Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, who just this year wrote The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

He writes:

In the last 80 years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible 98%. This means the incidence of death from climate is 50 times lower than it was 80 years ago … Once again, the leading experts we were told to rely on were 100% wrong. It’s not that they predicted disaster and got half a disaster — it’s that they predicted disaster and got dramatic improvement.

And yet again, we find that trusting the “leading experts” on global warming and climate change is a mistake. Trust the data, trust the evidence, trust reality — but be skeptical of experts who have a political agenda.

The politically correct establishments and media of the Western world protect Islam from criticism no matter what is done in its name. But they have made an exception of the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL). Or rather, they claim – ludicrously – that IS/ISIS/ISIL has “nothing to do with Islam”.

That exception explains why a documentary about Muslim men of IS/ISIS/ISIL selling Yezidi women and girls as slaves, was actually produced by the BBC.

Here’s the clip:

Words fail us.