A while back I wrote a piece about the resurgence of the Red Menace in various parts of the world. The Communist Party in Japan is rapidly winning converts; and Karl Marx’s birthplace in Germany has become a tourist attraction, with the financial crisis convincing many that his ideas deserve a second look (in reality, this is the umpteenth look, and the results of previous looks have never looked good). And, unfortunately, it isn’t just overseas that communism finds a home.

In a piece I just penned about assaults on Austrian pro-lifers, I mentioned the very bizarre Museum of Abortion and Contraception in Vienna. It is a macabre place “cataloguing a history of human effort through the ages devoted to suppressing or destroying the next generation of human life in the womb,” as the pro-life LifeSiteNews.com put it.

One of the quickest ways to provoke resentment in a sibling relationship is for the parents to continually show favoritism to one of the children. And here is a Psychology 101 question: Whom will the disadvantaged child often despise more: A, the parents; or B, the apple-of-the-eye sibling? Ever since an envious Cain murdered Abel, we’ve known the answer.

Back when my family vacationed in Miami Beach, it wasn’t uncommon for the hotels abutting the shoreline to have high diving boards. I mean sometimes really high — maybe even the kind you see on Olympics telecasts. It was a scary jump for me as a child, but I think I mustered the courage once or twice. But I couldn’t as an adolescent. You see, the boards were closed down by then (circa 1980), an obvious victim of our society’s increasing litigiousness. Insurance regulations, you know.

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected, one of his supporters, alluding to George W. Bush’s supposedly lacking intellect, said to me, “I’m just happy to have someone intelligent in the White House.”

All around the realm was heard a fateful cry:


'Twill make us sleep the nightmare if ye tax the other guy.


We can accept the yoke of poor polity,


If the misery cursing all gives equality.


Play one group against another, and us all you may ream,


Too busy envying each other we ignore your wicked scheme.


'Tis the rhyme of the time, no matter tyranny be nigh;


'Twill make us sleep the nightmare if ye tax the other guy.


Tax 'em high!

A study was once conducted in which participants played a game involving the accumulation of money. It had an interesting finding: Those describing themselves as leftists were much more willing than others to give up a bit of their own cash if it meant taking more from somebody else. What motivated this? It’s called envy, and we used to call such people immoral. Now we call them "liberals."

The gulf oil gusher is a disaster of great proportions. We’ve all seen the pictures of petroleum-soaked birds and dead fish, and the area’s economy is on life support. The mishap truly is a tragedy for all, from Gulf residents to English pensioners to marine wildlife to, yes, BP itself. As bad as this is, however, there’s a way to make the situation worse: by compounding it with another tragedy, one both foreseeable and preventable.

It sounds like a dark story from the days of ancient pagan rituals: A person tears open a woman’s womb while she’s still alive and takes her baby from it. I wrote about such a crime in August of last year, but, tragically, it was no isolated event. And now a different case of this kind is coming to trial, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It is a bucolic region of verdant meadows, rolling hills, and babbling brooks, a largely peaceful place where big city hustle and bustle and crime are very far away. Yet, like a pig in a beauty contest, within this pastoral setting lies something incongruent: a Jihadist training center. In this compound, women are taught to slit throats and mount assault-weapon attacks and, presumably, some brand of Islamic piety is the order of the day. But this place isn’t found in the Mideast’s Fertile Crescent or in sub-Saharan Africa. It's name is Islamberg. It's in the town of Hancock.

It's hard to imagine anything more evil: a woman kills a friend so that she can steal her unborn baby by ripping it from her womb.