chattr +a -V

Something very odd is in the air.

Friday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution carried this story: Basketball player gung-ho to be Marine, reporting on Robert Brooks, the Ramblin Wreck grad enlisting (not headed for OCS at Quantico) in the Marine Corps. He was due at MCRD Parris Island on January 10, but 'the date was moved up to Dec. 27 at his request.'

Staff Sgt. Antonio Risby, the Marine recruiter in Jonesboro who signed up Brooks, said, "He's totally different from a lot of the recruits we get. He has a drive. He's on a mission."

...

When asked to list the reasons he wanted to join up, Brooks put patriotism first.

Brooks said he is disappointed in his generation. "They have no loyalty, no motivation, no dedication," he said.

Over the last two months, as Brooks finished his final class at Tech, he has assisted the Marine recruiters as they visited high schools trolling for potential recruits in Henry and Fayette counties.

Then, on Saturday, and also in Atlanta, we have this:

March pushes moral agenda

Thousands of Christian soldiers marched through one of Atlanta's most storied neighborhoods Saturday, opposing gay marriage and promoting what they see as a moral agenda for the country -- especially African-Americans.

Bishop Eddie Long, pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, led the march arm-in-arm with the Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Long organized the demonstration and carried an Olympic-style torch lighted from the eternal flame at the King Center, where the march began.



JOHNNY CRAWFORD / Staff
Thousands of marchers, many of them followers of Bishop Eddie Long, trek down Auburn Avenue on Saturday, supporting a U.S. constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

March pushes moral agenda

Now today, the Los Angeles Times surprises us with Justice Thomas' Line to the Deepest Bedrock by Thomas L. Krannawitter, Vice-President of the Claremont Institute:

Thomas' natural-law jurisprudence represents the greatest threat to the liberal desire to replace limited, constitutional government with a regulatory-welfare state of unlimited powers.

Thomas is one of the few jurists today, conservative or otherwise, who understands and defends the principle that our rights come not from government but from a "creator" and "the laws of nature and of nature's God," as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

The left understands that if it is to succeed, these principles of constitutional government must be jettisoned, or at least redefined. Thomas' frequent recourse not only to the text of the Constitution but specifically to the founders' natural-law defense of constitutional government is fatal to liberalism's goal.

Wait, there's more!

The New York Times tells us that pro-free market policies are turning enormous swathes of South America into a new breadbasket for the world.

One of the last places on earth where large tracts are still available for agriculture, the region, led by Brazil, has had an explosion of farm exports over the past decade. The growth has been fueled by a combination of market-friendly economic policies and advances in agronomy that have brought formerly unusable tropical lands into production and increased productivity levels beyond those in the United States and Europe, challenging their traditional dominance of the global farm trade.

...

Changes in economic policies have also spurred the boom here. At the beginning of the 1990's, for example, Brazil lifted longtime restrictions on imports, leading to a surge in purchases of tractors, combines, fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

A leap in exports came in 1999, when the government devalued the currency and allowed the real, which had been trading at near par with the dollar, to float on the currency exchange market. Today, the real trades at almost three to the dollar, which means incomes for agricultural producers have nearly tripled.

...

Government officials estimate that an additional 50 million acres, much of it as potentially fertile as the land being tilled here now, are likely to be put into production over the next decade.

"There's no way you can go wrong here," Mr. Lawisch said. "We're champions of production already, but we think we can do even better. We aim to feed not just Brazil, but the world."

I just started reading John Birmingham's Weapons of Choice in which an experiment propels Navy ships out of our universe and back in time.

'If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.' John A. Wheeler.