DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.

‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep!’
‘Well, so can I, or so can any man;
But do they come when you do call for them?’

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A college bound high school student criticized Black Lives Matter in his school paper and received death threats.

Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech.

Read it.

It has gotten to the point where we need elected representatives to fight for due process on college campuses.

Read it.

When it comes to the connection between Islam and “anti-infidel” violence, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in America are either liars or fools, or both. No other alternatives exist.

The reason for this uncharitable assertion is simple: If Islam was once a faraway, exotic religion, today we hear calls for, and see acts of, violence committed in the name of Islam every day. And if our leaders don’t, many of us still have “ears that hear and eyes that see” (Proverbs 20:12).

Some Government-Sponsored Syrian Refugees in Canada Would Rather Go Back to Refugee Camps in Jordan and Lebanon

Two arrested at Disneyland Paris after guns, ammo, Koran found in suitcase

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei questioned historical authenticity of Holocaust in video on his official website

‘Isis kangaroo filled with explosives’ part of teenagers’ Anzac Day terror plot, court hears

Sudan opens border with South Sudan for first time since 2011

Russia hunts for pilot’s killer in Syria-Turkey border town

Hundreds of DHS badges, guns, cell phones lost or stolen since 2012. Sure, we can track refugees, no problem.

Sweden to deport up to 80,000 refugees

Berlin grapples with Islamists, ISIS vets amid refugee wave

Iran and France cancel diplomatic lunch to welcome Hassan Rouhani after French refuse to take wine off the menu

Syria conflict: Russian air force and local militia hunt for Turkish nationalist suspected of killing pilot

Investigation Reveals Hizballah Directed Palestinian Cell to Kill Israelis

Vulture captured in Lebanon suspected of spying for Israel. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Jabhat al-Nusra greater threat than Isis, report claims

Isis fighters ‘virtually impossible’ to detect as group continues to use fake passports to exploit refugee crisis

FBI arrests Milwaukee man planning mass shooting at Masonic temple

Syrian children in bombed-out Aleppo ‘protest’ against Iranian intervention as President Rouhani visits Europe

ISIS planning ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks on more European targets, police warn

Christian pastor Saeed Abedini breaks silence after being freed in prisoner swap with Iran

In Syria, Locals Take the Fight Back to Islamic State

Libya’s oil guards accused of siphoning off country’s supplies for profit

Pubs and clubs in German town of Freiburg forbid refugees

Tareena Shakil: Woman who took toddler to live with Isis ‘escaped after realising she had made mistake’

Four suicide bombers linked to Boko Haram kill dozens in Cameroon

Libya rejects UN-backed peace deal and unity government

Five years on, the spirit of Tahrir Square has been all but crushed

Jews are leaving France in record numbers amid rising anti-Semitism and fears of more Isis-inspired terror attacks

Pro-Isis slogans and threats of an imminent terror attack daubed on Mahatma Gandhi statue in India

Indonesia province bans small Islamic sect from ‘spreading faith’

New ISIS video shows Paris attackers committing prior atrocities, threatening UK

War surgeon reveals how healthcare workers are being ‘systematically’ targeted in Syria

Syrian civil war: Assad’s forces recapture rebel-controlled town, Rabia, with Russian help

Muslim school labels claims pupil suspended for speaking to member of opposite sex ‘utterly misleading and inaccurate’

Is Algeria’s military making its move on ageing President Bouteflika?

‘Jihadi Jack’: Jack Letts reportedly first white British male to join Isis. Islam is paradise for a beta male.

Arab Spring: Why Tunisians ‘feel like nothing has changed’ five years on

Biden: US is prepared to seek military solution to ‘take out’ Isis

Syrian civil war: Why the endless conflict is at a decisive point

Western Sahara: Africa’s last colony takes struggle for self-determination to European courts

Saudi Arabia executions: Son of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr calls on David Cameron to save his cousin from death sentence

Calais refugees: Port of Calais closed after 50 migrants occupy ship following protest

Body found in shipping crate in Staffordshire identified as Afghan teenager

Refugee crisis: From border controls to cash seizures, how Germany turned its back on refugees

Migrants Storm Calais Ferry. And, of course, France does nothing.

Algeria raises alarm over Moroccans crossing toward Libya

Biden says US, Turkey prepared for military solution against ISIS in Syria

Palestinian girl, 13, shot dead while attempting attack on Israeli settlement guard ‘intended to die’, police claim

Germany follows Switzerland and Denmark to seize cash and valuables from arriving refugees

Germans battle refugee sex assaults with signs, cartoons

Jordan blocks Syria border leaving thousands of refugees in the desert – including hundreds of pregnant wome

Refugee crisis: 45 migrants drown overnight trying to reach Greece in overloaded boats

US ‘to admit civilian casualties’ in air-strikes against Isis

Read it.

The Guardian recently published a story based on documents captured by the Kurdish YPG forces after expelling the Islamic State (IS) from the town of Tel Abyad in northern Raqqa province on the border with Turkey. The documents concern issues of transportation and migration.

Since I helped the newspaper to verify the documents and did some additional research, I believe it worthwhile to write an extended commentary on this matter, not only to shed light on how transportation and migration work in the IS administrative system, but also the controversial issue of the Turkey-IS relationship.

Read it.

Just burn your passport… or eat it… and learn to say “I am Syrian” in German and English!

Moroccan “youths” know a good scam when they see one, and becoming Syrian refugees is their ticket to a prosperous future.

Read it.

“Infidels,” or non-Muslims—or those who are not Muslim enough or the wrong kinds of Muslims—are often seen as the natural recipients of Islamic violence as prescribed by Islamic law, or Sharia.

Few, however, are aware that Sharia can cause individual Muslims to do violence upon themselves.

According to France24, on January 15, a Muslim boy in Pakistan “cut off his own hand believing he had committed blasphemy, only to be celebrated by his parents and neighbours for the act.”

After an imam told a mosque gathering after Friday prayers that those who love Muhammad always say their prayers, he rhetorically asked if anyone present doesn’t pray. Mohammad Anwar, the overly eager 15-year-old boy, impulsively raised his hand, apparently thinking that the imam was asking who among the crowd does, as opposed to doesn’t, pray.

The response was typical: “The crowd swiftly accused him [the boy] of blasphemy so he went to his house and cut off the hand he had raised, put it on a plate, and presented it to the cleric.”

Read it.

So … what has transpired over the last 800 days or so in the national-security arena? ISIS went from being the “jayvee team” to a terrorist quasi-state launching deadly attacks from the Sinai to the streets of Paris. Iran’s navy fired missiles at US Navy ships and captured ten American sailors. China built an island in the middle of the ocean and claimed the area as territorial waters. North Korea has … continued being North Korea.

What did two top officials of naval intelligence know about any of these crises, and others? Probably nothing at all other than what appeared in the papers, because the admiral in charge of naval intelligence has had all of his clearances suspended since November 2013. The Washington Post reported last night that one of Vice Admiral Ted Branch’s key aides had his clearance suspended at the same time.

Unbelievable.

Read it.

Jefferson Airplane epitomized an era that I remember fondly from when I was an age where such things were important.

Read it.

DNA stores our genetic code in an elegant double helix. But some argue that this elegance is overrated. “DNA as a molecule has many things wrong with it,” said Steven Benner, an organic chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida.

Nearly 30 years ago, Benner sketched out better versions of both DNA and its chemical cousin RNA, adding new letters and other additions that would expand their repertoire of chemical feats. He wondered why these improvements haven’t occurred in living creatures. Nature has written the entire language of life using just four chemical letters: G, C, A and T. Did our genetic code settle on these four nucleotides for a reason? Or was this system one of many possibilities, selected by simple chance? Perhaps expanding the code could make it better.

We still don’t know how genes work and they want to make new ones.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s not so much that they’re afraid of fat as it is they’re against anything the people enjoy.

Plus they just like to tell people what to do; that’s a large part of it.

Read it.

While the idea of timber towers may conjure up visions of multi-storey Swiss chalets, or high-rise log-cabins, these skyscrapers are not the traditional timber-framed buildings we’re used to seeing. Instead, the designs take advantage of recent innovations in “mass wood” to create vast solid timber panels that can support buildings to a much taller height than ordinary wood can.

Green’s Baobab uses Cross Laminated Timber, or CLT. This consists of several layers of timber board glued together at 90 degrees to form large structural sheets up to 40cm thick. The cross-lamination provides the material’s dimensional stability and strength.

Ammo Grrrll doesn’t like what she sees.

Oh, God. Make it stop; make it stop. We are $18 bazillion quadrillion in debt (seriously, I looked it up…), half added since Dear Leader has been in charge. Obamacare accomplished absolutely none of the promised benefits (“Cover 40 Million people! Bend the Cost Curve! Keep your Insurance If You Like It! No Illegals, Except for the Illegals Who Don’t Have Insurance!”) in exchange for destroying the best health care delivery system in the world.

Millions upon millions of Federal employees are vulnerable to identity theft, blackmail, threats, at least four times as many people as the Administration admitted to at first.

Dear Leader is trying his best to lose against our beheading, gay-murdering, woman-mutilating enemies in the Middle East, but as slowly as possible so as to leave the biggest, most intractible mess for the next person in charge. The timing is tricky. If he’s not careful, Iran will have the bomb before Dear Leader is out of office. I’m sure it’s part of the backdoor deal to wait until January 21, 2017 to fire one at Israel. Was ensuring that Iran gets the bomb the ultimate pricetag for this Man-Choom-ian Candidate to pay back his consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who was born there? She made the Obamas rich beyond any possible dreams of obscene avarice even before the post-Presidential loot rolls in like a tsunami.

Read it.

For some people who experience traumatic events like robberies, war, or abuse, the emotional effects continue for decades after the episode has ended. Sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are susceptible to anxiety, flashbacks, and nightmares, which isn’t always ameliorated by treatments like therapy and medication. Now researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have developed a non-invasive patch that stimulates the brain to treat symptoms of PTSD, according to a study published today in the journal Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface.
The patch uses a technique called trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS). It’s hooked up to a 9-volt battery with which it generates small electrical currents that move through the forehead to parts of the trigeminal nerve, the largest nerve in the brain. The nerve is connected to many different parts of the brain, including the nucleus tractus solitarius, a structure found in the brainstem that is thought to integrate information from several disparate parts of the brain, including those in which patients with PTSD have abnormal activity. Targeting this nerve in particular makes TNS different from other neuromodulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), used to stimulate neuron activity in the prefrontal cortex, and transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS), which triggers brain cells to release painkilling compounds.

Great news.

Read it.

By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.

At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.”

This is what electing people like Bernie Sanders inevitably leads to. We’re already seeing the signs among college students, academics, and the media, not coincidentally Sanders’ most enthusiastic supporters.

Jonhathan Chait sums it up.

It always surprises me when I come across a Leftist who isn’t a gibbering idiot, so I really appreciate Jonathan Chait, even though he still drinks the Kool-Aid that Corporations Are Bad But Govenment Is Good without appreciating the fact that the latter are just like the former only with guns. Still, this is the thinking-leftist’s critique of Bernie Sanders, and it’s refreshing that there are still a few people around to make it.

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

You see, the Oscars are supposed to “reflect America.” Didn’t you know that? Well, apparently it’s true. “You don’t reflect America, your industry doesn’t reflect America,” a coalition of minority activists bellowed last week. Will Smith agreed, telling Good Morning America in a live satellite hookup from his solid-gold mansion under the sea that the Oscars should “reflect” American “beauty.” Al Sharpton, who’s normally so wary of bandwagons, uncharacteristically raised his voice in support, claiming that the Oscars don’t “reflect modern America.” And at a recent event in L.A., actor David Oyelowo claimed that the Motion Picture Academy “doesn’t reflect this nation.”

…

Of course, the truth is the Academy’s nominees are not supposed to “reflect America.” Entertainment-industry hiring practices in general are not supposed to “reflect America.” They’re supposed to reflect the available talent pool, and nothing else. The notion that Hollywood is supposed to reflect America is a pernicious bit of nonsense that even some conservatives buy into when they counter the current Oscar protests by (correctly) pointing out that black actors get hired roughly in proportion to the percentage of black people in the U.S. However, making that point merely plays into the fiction that “representing America” is somehow the goal. It isn’t. Acting isn’t like food-service work, retail or clerical work, factory work, janitorial work, or customer-service work. No one is ever forced into acting by a bad economy. No man has ever said, “They’re closing the plant and shipping the jobs to India, so I guess that means I’ll have to learn Shakespeare in order to support my family.”

Read it.

I take it you all know by now this is quite an ugly story, namely that both early progressives and late 19th century American economists were often quite appalling racists and eugenicists, and that such racism was built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way, including but not restricted to the American Economics Association.

Read it.

This sort of thing make me appreciate Proctor & Gamble.

Read it.

I’ve been expecting the day would some when the identity politics Left would turn on Martin Luther King Jr, and that day has arrived. Students at the University of Oregon (and surely elsewhere) are demanding that one of King’s most famous phrases, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” be taken down from a wall display in the student center because it is “not inclusive enough.”

Read it.

“Billions spent, but fewer people are using public transportation,” declares the Los Angeles Times. The headline might have been more accurate if it read, “Billions spent, so therefore fewer are using public transit,” as the billions were spent on the wrong things.

…

The situation is actually worse than the numbers shown in the article, which are “unlinked trips.” If you take a bus, then transfer to another bus or train, you’ve taken two unlinked trips. Before building rail, more people could get to their destinations in one bus trip; after building rail, many bus lines were rerouted to funnel people to the rail lines. According to California transit expert Tom Rubin, survey data indicate that there were an average of 1.66 unlinked trips per trip in 1985, while today the average is closer to 2.20. That means today’s unlinked trip numbers must be reduced by nearly 25 percent to fairly compare them with 1985 numbers.

Mass transit: Politicians spending billions of dollars on systems that take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to go at times that are convenient for them, not for you.

And they wonder why people prefer to own and drive automobiles.

Read it.

The global warming which recently hit the USA, has spread to a large area of East Asia, with reports of a brutal cold snap which has killed at least 85 people in Taiwan, and confirmed snowfall as far south as the Japanese island Okinawa, on the Northern edge of the Tropics.

How about that Global Warming, eh?

Read it.

Even though there are a few minorities shown, the ad leaves the impression of being very white. And Simon and Garfunkel is very white music.

Matthew Yglesias agrees, he complains that the ad is too white.

Well, really, there aren’t many people more white than Bernie. AlGore, maybe.

Read it.

As if the Obama administration could find its ass with both hands when it comes to stemming the rise of the Islamic Stat anywhere.

Read it.

The young woman featured in the video below was harassed and assaulted by a culture-enricher in Cologne. Fortunately for her, her injuries were minimal — she and her friend escaped without providing their assailant with the “easy meat” he had been looking for.

The girl and her mother are interviewed by a Moroccan-German journalist. One of the first things he brings up with the mother is — surprise! — her potential “racism”, and the mother acknowledges that yes, she is worried that she might be a “racist”.

What if the “youth” had actually raped her daughter? Or severely injured her? Or even killed her? Would Mom still be concerned about how “racist” she might appear?

What extremity of violence has to take place before people abandon this fetishistic obsession with “racism”?

As Chris Rock famously explained in his act, no white person ever robbed him at a bank machine.

Read it.

A 17-year-old girl who was physically and sexually attacked in Sønderborg will herself face charges for using pepper spray to fend off her assailant.

This sort of breakdown in civil order is what fostered the rise of paramilitary militias in Germany between the world wars and eventually birthed the totalitarian Nazi regime. The first duty of a government, the very first duty of a government, is to protect its people from criminals and foreigners, and when any government falls down on that particular job, people make ‘alternative arrangements’.

Read it.

Aw, where’s the fun in that?

Read it.

Well, autocratic states can do that sort of thing.

Read it.

May their memory be eternal.

Read it.

City planners in Los Angeles who think (albeit very incorrectly) that they have control over how residents live are famously pushing for general plan to “get people out of their cars” in this massive city and onto bikes or into mass transit and creating communities nestled around transit hubs. It’s called their Mobility Plan 2035. It would recast the city with a heavy emphasis on pedestrian and bicycle traffic, possibly at the expense of supporting motor vehicles.

There’s a slight problem with such a plan: This does not appear to be how the citizens of Los Angeles actually want to live. Use of mass transit in Los Angeles and Orange County continues to decline even as more and more money is thrown at it. To the extent that residents rely on mass transit, they seem to prefer buses to light rail, and when the costs of riding buses goes up and the availability or quality of service goes down, riders take a hike.

Funny thing about that whole democracy business; people keep trying to make their own decisions.

Read it.

Faith schools have been accused of adopting an approach bordering on  “religious racism” by turning away pupils simply on the grounds of their religion.

I am not making this up. I’m curious as to what part of ‘faith schools’ these people don’t understand. Certainly their understanding of language leaves a lot to be desired.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

And that’s it, in a nutshell — by controlling the words we use, these people are trying to control us. Understand what they’re doing, and resist.

Read it.

A new study suggests that a disproportionate number of professors are gay.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Read it.

Who’s winning in Iowa? That’s the question of the moment. But it’s also pertinent to ask who’s winning in Syria.

The answer is the very bad guys. Which very bad guys? It depends on the part of Syria in question.

Read it.

Perhaps Megyn Kelly ought to run for President. In a country where Obama gets two terms and Trump leads in the polls, how hard could it be?

Read it.

It appears based on London but, really, it could apply to every city with a river going through it.

Read it.

‘Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect,’ former chairman of the Equality and Human rights Commission say.

Ponder the situation where a European country has an ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission’.

Muslim communities are “unlike others in Britain” and “will not integrate in the same way”, according to the former head of the equalities watchdog.

If at all. But you’re not supposed to Notice that.

He went on to claim that we should accept that Muslims “see the world differently from the rest of us.”

Yes — as prey.

Read it.

Why not? Releasing lists of demands is all the rage on campus these days.

Read it.

No doubt you’ve had January 25, 2016 marked on your calendar this last decade, waiting for al-Gore’s shining prediction at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, which actually began with one of his books in 1996. [I forget which one now, but I remember him saying we’d have to learn to get along without the internal combustion engine. And from then on he walked everywhere (small lie in aid of his larger truthiness)].

…

But the world he swore would be much worse, with flooding in Manhattan, droughts and super-hurricanes? No, they didn’t happen; and that nor’easter this past weekend was within normal limits for weather. So yet again #ClimateHell has been deferred. Funny, he bought a mansion on the beach, did Al, while he swore erosion was inescapable. But then he did a lot of that – check out his dealings with Occidental Petroleum, work that bore lots of fruit and none of it ecologically sound, or so the stories report. A do-as-I-say kind of guy, methinks. And a very sad one.

Perhaps the worst of it was another Nobel Peace Prize wasted on another hollow man. In 2007, Gore shared The Peace Prize with the beloved IPCC. They beat out Irena Sendler. (She lost in 2006 and 2008, too. She died at the age of 98 in 2009 so they could finally cross her off the list.)

This woman was an authentic achiever and a real hero. She was a Polish Catholic nurse/social worker who quietly saved at least 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto before she was captured and tortured. Though she lived, those war years obviously took their toll: she married three times but never had any children. Without a doubt the PTSD from which she surely suffered – given her heart-stopping work in the Warsaw Ghetto – had a life-changing impact.

Read it.

One of the three violent convicts who escaped from a Southern California jail Friday had been ordered deported to his native Vietnam in 1998, but was able to remain in the U.S. and rack up more criminal convictions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Tuesday that Bac Duong, 43, came to the United States legally in 1991 but was ordered removed seven years later after he served time in state prison for a 1997 burglary conviction. However, the Orange County Register reported that Vietnam routinely refused requests from the U.S. to accept Duong and other deportees.

Read it.

When you see a superhero or a supervillain heading deep into their super-high-tech super-secret lair, do you ever wonder how the heck they keep that secret?

Did they build this massive thing on their own? Did they get their architecture, engineering, and interior design degrees while they went through that training/backstory montage? No, of course not. They had henchpeople build it for them, outsourcing the complicated stuff to people who knew more about constructing an island fortress than they do. There’s only one problem with that plan. Letting more people in on a secret virtually ensures that it won’t stay secret for long.

Unless you’re the government, of course, and can put people in jail for talking. And even then you might wind up with a Hillary Clinton.

In order to figure out the average length of time before someone blows a conspiracy’s cover, Grimes looked at three well-documented conspiracies. One, the reprehensible Tuskegee syphilis experiment lasted for a long time, nearly 25 years. The other two, the FBI forensics scandal and the NSA’s PRISM program took less time to come to light. (Each was uncovered in about six years.)

NOTE: THESE ARE ALL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES.

Read it.

In addition to his famous portrayal of Tessio in The Godfather, he was a fixture on the Funniest TV Series Ever, Barney Miller.

Read it.

It’s hard to remember who is allowed to criticize who.

Read it.

But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

And the dynamic regions are centered around cities. (The one apparent exception: supply regions, rich in natural resources. We’ll get back to them below; for now we’ll just note that they’re rich because cities want the resources and come and get them. Arabs didn’t have to travel across the oceans to find people to hawk their oil to.)

Harry Stein turns over a rock.

How did he in fact did survive? More than anything, it had to do with the identities of those who rallied to his defense—above all, his wife. It was the very next morning, January 28, that Hillary appeared on NBC’s Today, expressing absolute faith in her husband’s credibility and blaming the crisis on a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” led by Starr. As David Maraniss characterized her appearance in the Washington Post, “she assumed a familiar and crucial role as Bill Clinton’s first defender. She said she knew him better than anyone in the world, still loved him, and fully believed his denial of allegations that he had entered into a sexual relationship with a White House intern and had urged the young woman to lie about it. . . Her words at once established a clear line of counterattack for Clinton’s loyalists . . . The decision to transform Clinton’s public defense into a rhetorical war with Starr and the political right wing was made at the White House in a series of meetings over the past four days, according to several administration sources. In every discussion in which she participated, the first lady was a leading advocate of an aggressive strategy attacking Starr, but it was not until her remarks yesterday morning that they realized that counterattacking was their most effective choice, and that she was their most effective weapon.”

It’s now clear that from the earliest days of Bill’s public career, it had been Hillary taking the lead in tamping down the “bimbo eruptions,” as Clinton insiders termed them, which threatened their joint enterprise. According to Flowers, whose revelation of her 12-year affair with Clinton led to a sympathetic interview with both Clintons on 60 Minutes in which they asserted the strength of their marriage, the notion Hillary didn’t know about the affair is beyond ludicrous. “I think she has always known everything about him,” concurs Juanita Broaddrick, the Little Rock nursing home executive who charged Clinton raped her 1978. In an interview with Aaron Klein, she recalled being told personally by Hillary in 1978 to keep quiet about the episode. “I think they have this evil compact between the two of them that they each know what the other does and overlook it. And go right on. And cover one for the other.” “She enabled his behavior,” says alleged Clinton sexual assault victim Kathleen Willey flatly. “It’s as simple as that.”

Read it.

Two base jumpers are feared dead after jumping off a bridge over the Pacific ocean as one man tried to rescue his female companion, officials say.

Mary Katherine “Katie” Connell, from Ventura, California, first jumped off the 260-foot high Bixby Creek Bridge with one parachute and landed in the water below.

Footage not released by police shows that high waves overcame her shortly after landing, as reported by Monterey Herald.

The footage also shows her companion from Finland, who has not yet been named, jumping off the same bridge on about 7.30am Wednesday morning to rescue her. Both are now feared dead.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Many people use the words fear and phobia as substitutes. These words are not synonyms and they don’t describe the same condition. It’s important to know the difference between fear and phobia, because it shows us what we’re up against. Being afraid is normal while having a phobia is pathological.

Which is why the Usual Suspects do everything within their power to shoehorn normal fear on the part of the Other into the form of a pathological phobia, e.g. normal fear of an oppressive totalitarian ideology and its adherents as ‘Islamophobia’, normal disgust at deviant sexual practices as’homophobia’, etc.

Read it.

Well, economists who agree with the New York Times that ‘wealth inequality’ is ipso facto a horrible injustice.

These people — the top one-quarter of 1 percent of the country’s employed population — have enjoyed explosive gains in income and wealth in recent decades, even as salaries and wages stagnated for the typical American worker.

Note the use of the term ‘enjoyed’, as if this income had just dropped into their laps as they were somehow passing by on the street. No team of wild horses could get Nelson D. Schwartz to use the more accurate term ‘earned’, since that would be contrary to The Narrative.

Note that the entirety of the article is devoted to how much inequality is increasing — not one word attempts to justify the assumption that ‘wealth inequality’ is a Bad Thing.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Read it.

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city’s pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

This is more accurately an ‘energy recovery system’ than a power generation system, since the move of the the water is the result of it being under pressure from municipal pumps, who I suspect use electricity.