What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread, so feel free to share. 🙂

Here’s a few to start off with.

1. Does prayer help boost emotional stability and self-control?

From TheDailyMail  “Does prayer help us resist temptation? Talking to God boosts self-control and emotional stability, claims study

• People turn to prayer ‘as a coping  response to the high demands in life’ and are rewarded with an increased ability to resist temptation

• Previous findings have shown that when  people try to control their emotions, the risk of  aggressive outbursts and binge drinking rises

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2. Of course he did. 🙄

From CNN  “President Obama paid a visit Friday to a group of activists who have been fasting for weeks in the hopes of pressuring Congress to pass new immigration laws.

The President and his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, visited the group on the National Mall to lend support for the cause. The “Fast for Families” protesters have given up all sustenance except water during their protest, which they hope will force lawmakers to take up immigration reform measures pending on Capitol Hill.”

“The President has pushed for an overhaul to the nation’s immigration system, most recently during a speech in San Francisco on Monday. He praised the fasting protesters during those remarks, saying the group was “sacrificing themselves in an effort to get Congress to act.”

“I want them to know we hear you.  We’re with you. The whole country hears you,” Obama said during his remarks in California.”

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3. Faith-based negotiations.

From TheWeeklyStandard  “Here is perhaps the biggest contradiction of the nuclear talks: The Obama administration wants to believe that the supreme leader just might forsake his historic mission—the quest for nuclear weapons begun under Khomeini and carried forth at great cost by Khamenei and every single Iranian president—because the United States, “the epicenter of evil,” has rallied the West against the Islamic Republic. The reasons administration officials give for why this extraordinary tergiversation will take place vary, but most spin around the idea that the supreme leader and his Revolutionary Guards—who oversee the nuclear program, terrorist operations, and domestic riot-control—really aren’t sufficiently committed to developing a nuclear weapon that the forces of moderation can’t seduce them from this dangerous course. The alleged forces of moderation are, in order of importance, newly elected president Hassan Rouhani, foreign minister Mohammad Zarif, and the Iranian people, at least those who voted for Rouhani. “

“Those who make these arguments, inside the U.S. government and out, rarely cite any primary material. Yet there is much to ponder in the lengthy speeches of Khamenei and senior guard commanders who scorch America and the West with nearly every breath; in the nuclear memoirs of Rouhani, which reveals a proud revolutionary determined to keep and advance the nuclear program despite European pressure (and, a decade ago, a widespread fear of George W. Bush); and in the recently published memoirs of Zarif, which limn a deeply conservative man wedded to the Islamic Revolution. In an odd twist on Iran’s controlled democracy, administration officials can tell you that since Rouhani received a mandate for change, and since he has promised to get rid of the hated sanctions, then ipso facto he must be prepared to do the thing necessary to achieve that end: Rouhani, they conclude, intends to roll back Iran’s nuclear aspirations. “

“Rouhani, they believe, must be more or less a moderate—a talented, politically savvy insider, not an egghead reformer like the former president Mohammad Khatami, whom Khamenei and his minions sliced and diced. He is, after all, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the uncouth, pietistic populist. He has a Ph.D. from a Scottish university (think Duns Scotus, David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and Gordon Brown). 

This is such a nonsensical take on Iran’s deeply religious and ruthless power politics, and Rouhani’s personal voyage through the Islamic Revolution, that it’s hard to know where to start deconstructing the fiction and illogic. Suffice it to say that Khamenei has spent considerable energy the last four years destroying the threat of democracy inside his country. He has so elevated the Revolutionary Guards that their power rivals his own. He has given no indication that he now quakes before the very people he’s squashed. Neither, by the way, does Rouhani, who raised not a finger in protest when Khamenei gutted the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 and playfully eviscerated Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former clerical powerhouse, the true father of the regime’s nuclear-weapons program, and Rouhani’s primary mentor. “

I have no faith in either party.

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