Stephen L. Miller read some and tells us those emails portray a Hillary better suited to an Assisted Living facility than the White House.

If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like “doesn’t drive,” “needs food prepared,” “needs help with the remote control,” “needs people to bring her beverages,” “has trouble remembering things,” and “doesn’t pay her own bills” about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures.

But, as we now know courtesy of the ongoing FOIA e-mail dump, all of these traits accurately describe the current Democratic front-runner and (as she is always eager to remind us) doting grandmother, Hillary Clinton. Amidst the e-mail revelations, an alarming pattern is developing about Clinton’s personal dependency on those inside her inner bubble. She isn’t just delegating important tasks to underlings, as any executive might; these aren’t urgent matters of national security, such as aides’ fetching satellite intelligence or the latest reports relevant to a managing executive. Rather, it appears that Hillary is either helpless or unwilling to perform even the most menial and trivial of daily tasks. In a recently released e-mail from January 3, 2010, she personally messaged an assistant, wishing her a Happy New Year, and then offered a demand list to start the year off:

I’d like to work w you to prepare a menu for Jason. Also does he give me a monthly bill for the food he buys and prepares for me? Could you or he buy skim milk for me to have for my tea? Also, pls remind me to bring more tea cups from home . . . Can you give me times for two TV shows: Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife?

Read the whole thing.

CNN:

Five hungry polar bears have surrounded a team of unarmed researchers at a remote outpost in northern Russia.

The bears have settled in the fields outside a weather station on the island of Vaygach in the Arctic Sea, preventing researchers from leaving the building to conduct their work, the World Wide Fund for Nature in Russia said in a statement.

The team, which consists of two meteorologists and an engineer, tried to scare them off with flares, but the bears were undeterred — and the Russian WWF says the team has no other weapons at its disposal.

The bears sleep near the station and have been seen fighting with one another outside the building in recent days, one of the researchers at the station told Viktor Nikiforov, the head of the WWF Polar Bear Patrol project.

The team, which consists of two meteorologists and an engineer, tried to scare them off with flares, but the bears were undeterred — and the Russian WWF says the team has no other weapons at its disposal.

The bears sleep near the station and have been seen fighting with one another outside the building in recent days.

Christopher Taylor identifies the point we’ve reached in America’s relationship to its Constitution.

And so we reach the point at which I’ve given up the idea of ever getting back to the constitution today. In fact, I’ve come to the realization that there’s no point in appealing to the document as any kind of governing and restraining document because the government and people have simply abandoned it except as a fetish.

Recent supreme court decisions have simply negated the constitution entirely, building on decades of ignoring and twisting the document, inventing things not in it until its simply trash. And all of this happened because of well-meaning tiny little steps, any one of which the founding fathers would have been enraged at, but we sigh and shrug at today.

There is no rational basis for thinking that any government will reverse this. It simply is without precedent in human nature and history for a politician to voluntarily surrender their own power or a government to weaken its self. There is only one direction, one trend: toward tyranny.

The founders knew this. They did their best to lock in our freedom and protect this inevitable tendency of the state. It was so well done that the nation lasted more than a century with great, widespread liberties. That era is over, and only one future lies before us, barring some act of God.

The only question is what lies beyond that point, and how we get through it.

Lots of conservative legal experts, including Antonin Scalia, Jon Adler, and Jacob Sullum have come forward to argue that Kim Davis should either do her job and issue same-sex marriage licenses or resign, Douglas Wilson produced an exceptionally eloquent rebuttal.

A consensus appears to be developing among otherwise reasonable people that Kim Davis, of Rowan County fame, either needs to start issuing marriage licenses or quit her job.

For those just joining us, a county clerk in Kentucky is refusing to issue marriage licenses against her conscience and is also refusing to resign. Her name, which should be on a bronze plaque on the side of the courthouse, is Kim Davis. A federal judge has ordered her to appear in his courtroom Thursday to explain why Davis should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses.

But there is a difference between contempt of court and seeing that the courts have become contemptible. …

[Rod Dreher (9/1) wrote of Kim Davis’s stand: In the future, there will surely be hills worth dying on, so to speak, as Christians. This is not one of them.]

I want to begin by making an observation about that hill-to-die-on thing, but then move on to discuss the foundational principle that is at stake here. After that, I want to point out what it would look like if more government officials had the same understanding that Kim Davis is currently displaying — despite being opposed by all the intoleristas and also despite being abandoned by numerous Christians who admire her moxie but who don’t understand her moxie.

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming. …

The point here is not just private conscience. The right to liberty of conscience is at play with florists, bakers, and so on. But Kim Davis is not just keeping herself from sinning, she is preventing Rowan County from sinning. That is part of her job.

Every Christian elected official should be determining, within the scope of their duties, which lines they will not allow the state to cross. When they come to that line, they should refuse to cross it because “this is against the law of God.” They should do this as part of their official responsibilities. This is part of their job. It is one of the things they swear to do when they take office.

This is nothing less than Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates (Institutes 4.20.22-32), which I would urge upon all and sundry as relevant reading material. And as Calvin points out, after Daniel — a Babylonian official — disobeyed the king’s impious edict, he denied that he had wronged the king in any way (Dan. 6:22-23).

Read the whole thing.

West Point cadets in India White uniforms celebrating after Class Ring ceremony.

New York Post reports that a new ingredient will go into the melting pot, along with class rings belonging to West Point graduates of long-ago.

When graduates of West Point’s Class of 2016 go into their years of service as officers of the Army, they will be wearing something no other cadets have worn before — class rings that include steel from the World Trade Center. …

It’s at the ring ceremony that seniors — known as “firsties” — get their rings, which become a physical link between future officers and the West Point graduates who went before.

The ceremony takes place at one of the most beautiful places in America — Trophy Point. The trophies, which are cannons captured in 1812 and other wars, look out over a slope giving north into the Hudson River.

Class of 2016 cadets were marched — to a cadence set by trumpets, pipes and drums — onto this slope. They passed Stanford White’s famous battle monument, topped with a statue of “Fame.”

The Army knows how to do ceremonies like few other American institutions. The cadets are dressed in a uniform called India Whites, worn only by West Point cadets.

There are about 1,000 cadets in the Class of 2016, and it takes a while for them to be marched in. It’s an important enough event that parents and relatives, girlfriends and boyfriends have come from across the country.

Each class designs its own rings. The ingots of the Class of 2016’s rings were poured earlier in the year at the Pease & Curren refinery in Rhode Island. That ceremony, known as the “ring melt,” is a tradition begun for the rings of West Point’s bicentennial class in 2002.

Since then, it’s not just any gold that goes into these rings. They’re made from gold from class rings that were worn by earlier graduates and that have been donated, melted and mixed with new gold to make rings for the following year’s first-class cadets.

A small amount of gold is preserved after each melt so that every graduating class will have traces of gold from all the rings that have been donated since the program began.

This has enabled every class since 2002 to “grip hands” with graduates from the past.

This year, 34 class rings were donated from classes between 1924 and 1985. Some families donating rings sent family members to the ring melt, where they placed the rings in a crucible. A film of the event shows a number of them, including Tom O’Neil, who donated the ring worn by his grandfather.

The grandfather, Col. Thomas O’Neil, had been in the Class of 1934. His grandson had carried his ring through two combat tours in Iraq and two years in Afghanistan. At the ring melt, he spoke of what the moment would have meant to his grandfather.

Five daughters of Col. Leo Hugh Lennon, who had been in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, placed his class ring in the crucible. Others did the same, some saluting.

This new tradition has brought to 356 the number of rings whose gold is in the latest ingot.

It was the Class of 2016 itself that decided to include in the alloy of the rings for this year steel from the World Trade Center, Cathy Kilner of the Association of Graduates tells me. …

Toward the end of the ring memorial ceremony, the cadets are ordered to “reeee-cover,” meaning put their hats back on, and are dismissed. They make their way up the slope and across the plain, past the statues of Sylvanus Thayer, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and George Washington.

From the People’s Cube via Vanderleun.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), Yale Class of 1804, 7th Vice President of the United States 1825-1832.

At the time, in the early 1930s, when Yale was creating the first ten residential colleges, John C. Calhoun was regarded as an inevitable choice for one of their names. Calhoun was only too obviously the single most illustrious statesman and political philosopher to have graduated from Yale.

Eighty-odd years ago, the political conflicts of the 19th century, the contest between Federalism and the Rights of the States, Secession and the American Civil War were viewed dispassionately as past history. Yale President James Rowland Angell was born in Vermont. Neither he not the members of the Yale Corporation of that time are likely to have agreed in the least with John Calhoun on Nullification, Secession, or the benevolence of Slavery, but they all properly regarded those matters as settled and the battles and controversies surrounding them as mere history, unconnected practically or emotionally to their own time.

Naming a Yale residential college for Calhoun simply accorded with a general American recognition of Calhoun as one of the most influential thinkers and most important statesmen in American history. As Richard Hofstader acknowledged, Calhoun was “probably the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking.”

Naming a residential college for John C. Calhoun obviously did not imply that the generally-New-England-bred authorities of that Connecticut University had suddenly converted into Confederate sympathisers. It merely signified their recognition of the accomplishments, personal stature, and historical importance of one of Yale’s most famous graduates. Doubtless, it was also intended, in a minor way, to recognize the national character of the modern university by honoring the champion of the (defeated) Southern section.

It appears, now, that the 21st Century Yale under a newer and more cosmopolitan leadership is about to reverse President Angell’s decision and to reject 80+ years of Yale history by removing the name of John C. Calhoun and renaming his residential college.

President Peter Salovey, last Saturday, welcomed the entering freshman class and announced an “open conversation” on renaming Calhoun College.

We all know what that means. Yale will accede to the loudest, shrillest, most emotionalist, and most radical voices. There will be a narrative about the injured feelings, the wounded sensitivities, of 21st Century African American students. Rational observations will be shouted down, and with complete pomposity and sanctimony President Salovey will express regret, but explain the vital necessity of bowing to contemporary political correctness. Calhoun will be out. His (previously vandalized) stained glass window pulled out and replaced. His name chiseled out of the Gothic sandstone. And you can bet that the college will be renamed, specifically in order to rub it in, for some personage of color, somebody like the world-famous Edward Bouchet, Yale Class of 1874, the first African American to graduate from Yale.

The fight went on for half an hour on a street near Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Both snakes apparently wandered into the city from nearby jungle.

The cobra was subsequently captured and deposited in the local zoo. The python was released in a wooded area, but it had been bitten by the cobra and is not expected to survive.