Read it.

Poland and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have asked for some American troops. Not enough to halt a Russian invasion, just enough to ensure that the Americans and their NATO allies (or at least some of them) will intervene if Russia does attack. These four nations already have a mutual defense guarantee from NATO in the form of NATO membership. But that is not enough and what has been asked for, and granted, are some American troops in each of these nations. Not many, there will only be one reinforced battalion per country. That means about 4,000 troops overall.

These four East European countries join a growing list of nations who, threatened by dangerous neighbors, have agreed (and often asked) to host American troops. The first and most obvious examples of this are South Korea, Japan and Germany, where the host nations even pay for some of the costs for the foreign troops to be there. This form of defense has been quietly followed by a number of nations in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). All of these Persian Gulf nations want the Americans around to keep the Iranians out. But it is not just the Iranians. Inside Iraq there have been American troops in northern Iraq to protect the autonomous Kurdish majority up there from the Arab majority.

Some of us remember.

Read it.

“I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms.” So declared John R. Salter Jr., the civil rights leader who helped organize the legendary non-violent sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. As Salter recalled it, he always “traveled armed” while doing civil rights work in the Jim Crow South. “Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine,” Salter wrote. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.”

He wasn’t a Christian.

He wasn’t a Republican.

He wasn’t an NRA member.

He wasn’t ‘white’ as the Left understands the term.

He wasn’t Donald Trump.

He wasn’t Rush Limbaugh.

He wasn’t one of the Koch brothers.

He wasn’t an ‘Islamophobe’.

He wasn’t a member of any of the ‘hate groups’ identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So who was he?

He was a Democrat.

He was a Muslim.

He was an Afghan ‘anchor baby’, a U.S. citizen only by virtue of our insane citizenship laws.

He had complied with all of the ‘gun control’ laws that Democrats have been pushing all these years.

He would have been able to purchase his guns legally under any of the laws now being pushed by Democrats.

Read it.

“Trump says very scary things—deporting immigrants, massive militarism and, you know, ignoring the climate,” Stein explained on Democracy Now. “Well, Hillary, unfortunately, has a track record for doing all of those things. Hillary has supported the deportations of immigrants, opposed the refugees—women and children coming from Honduras, whose refugee crisis she was very much responsible for by giving a thumbs-up to this corporate coup in Honduras that has created the violence from which those refugees are fleeing. She basically said, ‘No, bar the gates, send them back.’ You know, so we see these draconian things that Donald Trump is talking about, we actually see Hillary Clinton doing.”

My God, somebody on the Left who is actually paying attention! How did that happen?

‘I love the wisdom of crowds. It’s the individuals I hate.’ — Leo Laporte, This Week in Tech

Joel Kotkin just paints what he sees.

The great tragedy for Trump is that the basis for a grass-roots-led Republican victory lay within his grasp. He could have been, like Ronald Reagan in 1980, the instrument of populist revolt had he shown the same wit, self-control and positive eloquence. Instead, his crudity, his barely disguised racial stereotyping and his obsession with himself has taken from the GOP, at least for this election cycle, the possibility of reaping an enormous windfall from the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class.

As the North Vietnamese General said to the American General in response to the American’s claim that the North Vietnamese had never won on the battlefield, ‘That is very true. It is also irrelevant.’

One can generously concede all of the criticisms anyone might choose to make of Trump without touching on the core reality of the situation: No matter how imperfect a vessel for populist revolt against the ruling class Trump might be, he won because he was the only horse in this particular race.

No other Republican candidate presented himself (or herself) as potential standard bearer of ‘the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class’.

In politics, as in warfare, you fight with the candidate you have, not the candidate you wish you had.

Sarah Hoyt speaks truth to all of those other things out there.

Some time ago some people did a study and decided that people who were mildly depressed had a better grip on their circumstances and chances than those who were optimistic.

True dat.

Read it.

David R. Hall has a plan, and he’s done the math.

The wealthy Mormon engineer says he wants to build 20 “sustainable” megalopolises in Vermont, starting with 1 million people in the Upper Valley, where he has bought land around a sacred site of the Latter-day Saints in the tiny town of Sharon.

By his calculation, about 20 million people could fit in Vermont.

Hall calls the project NewVistas, and while he insists it is not sanctioned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or limited to the church’s members, the religious overtones are hard to ignore. Ground zero for the project is the birthplace of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. The NewVistas communities would have a governance structure similar to the Latter-day Saints hierarchy. And the land use design comes from a blueprint for ideal communities devised by Smith, called the “Plat of Zion.”

I’d rather live next to an LDS than a socialist. I’ve never met an LDS that I didn’t like, and rarely met a socialist that I did.

David Cole spends time in the underbelly so that you don’t have to.

Last week, the 2016 Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF) concluded its weeklong series of screenings here on the L.A. Westside. It’s always a special time when the LAJFF comes to town, because when else are you going to see Jews in Beverly Hills?

…

First off, it’s important to get an understanding of the definition of “false flag” among the conspiracy-minded. Initially, the term had a fairly simple meaning. It’s an operation designed to hide the true identity of the perpetrators of a crime while at the same time framing an innocent person or entity. Soldiers from country A dress in the uniforms of country B and carry out atrocities to make country B look bad. That has happened, no question. In fact, it’s an age-old war tactic, although so is claiming that something was a false flag when it wasn’t (country B actually does commit an atrocity and tries to weasel out of it by claiming, “No, it was people from country A wearing our uniforms! We wuz framed”).

…

I’ve had several prominent false flaggots tell me that I was an “inspiration” for this lunacy during my Holocaust revisionist years. “You’re the one who taught me, man, to, like, examine film clips and photos for tiny clues to expose hoaxes!” I hear that more times than I’d like to say, so permit me to set the record straight: If you think my work poring over documents and taking a magnifier to historical ruins is in any way equal to what false flag nutjobs do these days, you’ve completely missed the point of my work. Please stop giving me credit, and, while you’re at it, stop sending me so many damn friend requests.

The Other McCain vents a bit.

This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?

A good point, although I disagree with him about many of the movies he appears to dislike — I suspect that he appears to dislike.

Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression?

Obviously the latter, since that’s all they’re going to get.

Read it.

Presumably this is to make it apparent that they are not goons for a Mexican drug cartel.

I think.

Now, if they’d only publish one for high-school girls….

Read it.

LawNewz.com discovered that when it comes to politics, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, the law firm behind the class action lawsuit, is not exactly neutral either. Our analysis, using data first compiled by The Washington Post, found that Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid the Clintons a total of $675,000 in fees for speeches since 2009. Hillary Clinton gave a $225,000 speech at the law firm as recently as September 4, 2014.  Bill Clinton also gave a speech for the same fee back in 2013, and another one in 2009 before the firm had been renamed (they used to be called Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP). In fact, of the five law firms that paid for the Clintons to speak over the last few years, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid out the most money.

I love the smell of Conspiracy Theory in the morning.

Read it.

Oops.

Two men attempted to carry out an armed robbery on a McDonald’s in France – only to be thwarted by a table full of soldiers from an elite military unit having their lunch at the restaurant.

The thieves burst into the restaurant in the eastern commune of Ecole-Valentin on Sunday night – one firing a warning gunshot while the other began raiding the tills, as customers and employees fled the scene.

…

It was at this point – once everyone was out of danger – that the soldiers made their move, pursuing the robbers into the car park.

They shouted for the men to stop, but they just carried on. One fell on some stairs and was quickly apprehended, while the other was halted by a shot to the abdomen.

To be fair, any twelve soldiers would have done the same.

What’s the French for ‘You deserve a break today!’?

Read it.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party is divided between two elements of its coalition – an oligarchy that supports Clinton and a base of workers, many of them younger, who favor Sanders. To the Clintonites, her positions on gay rights, the environment and feminism make her an acceptable progressive. However, to those who back Bernie, her embrace of, and by, the oligarchs, amid rising economic inequality, represents a glaring contradiction with someone supposedly leading “the party of the people.”

Read it.

Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African-American studies, explodes some of the mythology surrounding the late Muhammad Ali. The first myth is that Ali was a civil rights advocate or activist. Not so.

The Muhammad Ali after whom Cassius Clay re-named himself was, among other things, a proponent of black slavery:

Muhammad Ali next turned his attention to military campaigns independent of the Porte, beginning with the Sudan which he viewed as a valuable addition resource of territory, gold, and slaves. … Ali’s reign in Sudan, and that of his immediate successors, is remembered in Sudan as brutal and heavy-handed, contributing to the popular independence struggle of the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, in 1881.

What a role model. All of the black people who become Muslim might as well cut to the chase and join the KKK.

Some of us remember.

Read it.

When Sonia Sotomayor said that being a “wise Latina” influences her decisions for the better, that—we were told—was not merely nothing to worry about but a sign of her judicial temperament and fitness for the High Court. When Trump says being a Latino will influence this judge’s hearing of his case, he’s Hitler.

There may seem at first glance to be an inconsistency here. But there is a common thread. The left mostly takes for granted, first, that people from certain ethnicities in positions of power will be liberal Democrats and, second, that they will use that power in the interests of their party and co-ethnics. This is a core reason for shouts of “treason!” “Uncle Tom” (or Tomas) and the like. People like Clarence Thomas are offending the left’s whole conception of the moral order. How dare he!

The implicit assumption underlying Sotomayor’s comment and Thomas’ refusal to play to type is that there is a type—an expectation. By virtue of her being a liberal, a Democrat, a woman, and a Latina (wise or otherwise), Sotomayor’s voting pattern on the Court ought to be predictable. As, indeed, it is. So should Thomas’, but he declines to play his assigned role.

The whole ‘progressive’ playbook comes down to the heartfelt cry, ‘Please! Be reasonable! Do it my way!’

Trump simply took this very same logic and restated it from his own point-of-view—that is, from the point-of-view of a rich, Republican, ostentatiously hyper-American defendant in a lawsuit being litigated in a highly-charged political environment. He knows full well that at least 50% of the country will howl like crazy if he wins this suit. He knows that the judge knows that, too. He further knows that judge knows what his own “side” expects him to do. It would take an act of extraordinary courage to act against interest and expectation in this instance. And our present system is not calibrated to produce such acts of courage but rather to produce the expected outcome.

That’s what diversity is for. That is, beyond the fairness issue, viz., that in a multiethnic country, it’s unwise and arguably unjust for high offices to be monopolized by one group. But that’s an argument for something like quotas—or, if you want to be high-minded about it, “distributive justice”—and the quota rationale for diversity is passé. The current rationale is that diversity provides “perspectives.” Perspectives to aid in getting around the law and procedure. Otherwise, who cares about diversity? Just apply the law. Simple.

Trump is taking for granted—because he is not blind—that ethnic Democratic judges will rule in the interests of their party and of their ethnic bloc. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The MSM and the overall narrative say this is just fine. It’s only bad when someone like Trump points it out in a negative way. If a properly sanctified liberal had said “This man is a good judge because his background gives him the perspective to see past narrow, technical legalities and grasp the larger justice,” not only would no one have complained, that comment would have been widely praised. In fact, comments just like it are celebrated all the time. That is precisely what Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” phrase was meant to convey.

The game is rigged. You know it, I know it, the judge knows it, and Trump knows it. Trump just has the utter unspeakable gall to say it.

Read it.

Escalating costs for nuclear power plant construction in the U.S. were not inevitable, according a new study in Energy Policy. They were largely the result of the increased regulation that followed the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in 1979.

Government is a problem, not a solution.

Read it.

I’m convinced.

Read it.

A Rutgers University social science professor set out to research how stereotypes are inaccurate so he could proclaim and promote that to the world with hard scientific data – but eventually made a startling discovery: most stereotypes are accurate.

Scholarly claims of “stereotype inaccuracy” are baseless, Dr. Lee Jussim told The College Fix in an interview.

“When I first began my research, I had assumed all those social scientists declaring stereotypes to be inaccurate were right, so I wanted to know the basis for those claims,” he said. “I would track down the source in an attempt to get the evidence. And slowly, over many years, I made a startling discovery – claims of stereotype inaccuracy were based on nothing.”

In other words, scholars who claim stereotype inaccuracy do not offer citations to a source providing the evidence, or never provide scientific support for their claims.

“As I read more of the literature on stereotypes, I discovered this pattern was pervasive,” Jussim told The Fix. “Every article or book that declared stereotypes to be inaccurate either similarly cited no source, or ended in an identical dead end via a slightly different route.”

Stereotypes, like clichés, are based on experience, and persist because they are confirmed by experience.

Lion of the Blogosphere reveals some Inconvenient Truth.

I believe that the BORINGNESS factor plays a very important role. Girls find computer programming BORING. They also find math really boring, which could explain in part why they don’t do as well on the math SAT. This is not to say that there aren’t biological differences between the sexes, but is it that girls are biologically inclinded to do poorly at math (relative to boys), or are they biologically inclined to find math boring, which in turns demotivates them from studying and learning the material, which causes the lower math SAT scores? I say that it’s probably a little of both. And the BORING factor can run in the other direction, because people are naturally less interested in things they are bad at.

…

We don’t live in a society where young people are normally told that they should persevere with boring material because it would lead to a higher paying, but boring, career. Young people are more often told the opposite. “Follow your passion.” “Do what you love and the money will follow.” You are ten times more likely to hear a high school commencement speaker say something like that rather than “study something BORING that pays well.” But in India, the opposite is true. Everyone in India wants to learn IT, not because they love it or have passion for it, but because they see it as a ticket for moving to America and getting a job here. (And I should add that American corporations seem happy to punch a lot of Indian tickets.)

Read it.

It’s zombie time at campaign Hillary. Behold the dead men walking! It was with strangely slow, narcotized numbness that the candidate and her phalanx of minions and mouthpieces responded to last week’s punishing report by the State Department’s Inspector General about her email security lapses. Do they truly believe, in the rosy alternate universe of Hillaryland, that they can lie their way out of this? Of course, they’re relying as usual on the increasingly restive mainstream media to do their dirty work for them. If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.

Hillary is so dislikeable that even Voice of the Crust Salon.com is noticing.

Read it.

Recently, Rep. Martha McSally suggested that the Air Force conduct a fly-off between the F-35 and the A-10 to see which did better at providing Close Air Support (CAS). But effective CAS is about more than just the capabilities of the aircraft involved. It requires an Air Force community with intimate knowledge of the Army’s maneuver tactics, mindset and intent.

The A-10 community has this knowledge. But that understanding will be lost if and when the Air Force retires the A-10 weapons system—unless its leadership takes a different course of action than the one currently planned.

The Air Force is led by fighter jocks who really don’t care about Close Air Support. This is why the Army needs an Army Air Corps, flying A-10s or equivalent, so that it can be integrated with other land-centric operations, just as the Navy has its own air support branch.

Quite frankly, I don’t see why the Air Force needs to be a separate service at all, but that’s an argument for another day.

Steve Sailer looks at Trump.

The core of the Trump Phenomenon is the question of freedom of expression.

Donald Trump has come to be seen by both his enemies and his supporters as the living embodiment of a potential revival of the American tradition of free speech after the Obama ice age of political correctness. Trump’s backers tend to believe they have more to gain from frank, outspoken debate (whether in pragmatic advantages or simply in entertainment value), while his opponents assume that they, personally, have more to lose from a return to a freer market for ideas.

This is one of those rare cases in politics where both sides may be right.

Read it.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Watch it.

Read it.

It’s now official. Burlington College is closed, largely due to Jane Sanders, wife of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

More here: How Bernie Sanders’ Wife Destroyed Burlington College

Read it.

The idea that these elite fighters can adapt solely by addressing emotional trauma, some experts said, is badly misplaced. Their primary difficulty is not necessarily one of healing emotional wounds; they thrived in combat. It is rather a matter of unlearning the very skills that have kept them alive: unceasing vigilance; snap decision making; intolerance for carelessness; the urge to act fast and decisively.

“I don’t even leave my house much,” said Jeff Ewert, who served with the Marines in Iraq and now lives in Utah. “I’m scared not because I’m an über-killer or anything. I just minimize my exposure because I know how easy it is to cross that line, to act without thinking.”

You will note that the Big Money, especailly from the Other Left Coast, is going to Hillary.

But I thought that the Republicans were the Party of the Rich [tm]?

David Brooks writes like a conservative about once a year just to show he knows how.

The argument against this sort of pure moral heroism is that fanaticism in the relief of suffering is still a form of fanaticism. It makes reciprocal relationships difficult, because one is always giving, never receiving. It can lead to a draconian asceticism that almost seems to invite unnecessary suffering.

Love, by its nature, should be strongest when it is personal and intimate. To make love universal, to give no priority to the near over the far, is to denude love of its texture and warmth. It is really a way of avoiding love because you make yourself invulnerable.

And then, of course, he has to walk it back.

Yet I don’t want to let us off the hook. There’s a continuum of moral radicalism. Most of us are too far on the comfortable end and too far from the altruistic one. It could be that you or I will only really feel fulfilled after a daring and concrete leap in the direction of moral radicalism.

Victor Davis Hanson lays it out.

If Donald Trump manages to curb most of his more outrageous outbursts by November, most Republicans who would have preferred that he did not receive the nomination will probably hold their noses and vote for him.

How could that be when a profane Trump has boasted that he would limit Muslim immigration into the United States, talked cavalierly about torturing terrorist suspects and executing their relatives, promised to deport all eleven-million Mexican nationals who are residing illegally in the U.S., and threatened a trade war with China by slapping steep tariffs on their imports?

A number of reasons come to mind.

John C. Wright lays it out.

I am not a Trump fan, but I am a fan of his fans. I trust the common sense of the common man, and the common man is sick of being lied to, and about.

And that pretty much sums up my opinion as well.

We are all, Republican or not, all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing racists calling us racist because we are antiracists, we who want a colorblind society where a man is judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

We are all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing baby-killers protesting, mocking, feminizing and dismantling our military, while calling our soldiers and heroes baby-killers.

We are all of us of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing fruit baskets spending our grandchildren into unrecoverable debt, and then lying about how sound the economy is. You morons have brought us to the point where it will take a minor miracle to prevent the Yuan from becoming the default currency of the international banking system, and a major miracle to prevent a second Great Depression.

And that Depression happened to grown ups, who worked their way out of debt by hard work. The coming Depression will happen to lazy and self-absorbed children, degenerates and weaklings who hate the free market and do not understand how ‘work’ works. They will riot if not feed bread and circuses from Caesar’s hand. Every city will be Detroit, and every township Ferguson.

And that about says everything that needs to be said.

Read it.

The importance of HSAs is why Congress should pass H.R. 5324 and S. 2980, the Health Savings Account Expansion Act of 2016, legislation introduced this week by Congressman Dave Brat (R-Va.) and Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). This legislation contains a number of important reforms that will make HSAs even better.

First, the legislation more than doubles HSA contribution limits. Current HSA contribution limits are $3,350 for a single filer and $6,750 for a joint filer, and this legislation increases that to $9,000 for single filer and $18,000 for joint filers per year.

Second, the HSA expansion act lifts Obamacare restrictions on over the counter purchases and penalties placed on certain withdrawals.

Third, the bill allows HSA funds to be used to pay premiums and direct primary care expenses.

Lastly, superfluous regulatory requirements would be streamlined with the high deductible health plan mandate eliminated.

Read it.

News reports often make it seem like gerrymandering, and redistricting in general, as being a simple matter of politicians being evil to a greater or lesser extent, when it’s actually much more interesting that. Similarly, it’s something that mathematicians and computer scientists often see and think is trivial – and there are actually a lot of interesting problems in gerrymandering to which math and CS can be applied that definitely aren’t trivial, which I’m always excited to share.

Watch it.

… we could all go home early.

John C Wright ponders the Potter milieu.

Asking on a questionnaire whether one is open to diversity is like asking whether one likes raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And the caricature of conservatives as cretins who applaud deadly force and torture, intolerance and cruelty, is as much of a world make-believe as Voldemort himself.

Finding that no one in real life believes what bigoted leftists pretend conservatives believe does not mean most people lean left: it means leftists are bigots.

Well, yeah.

For better or worse, reality is conservative. Because of this, drama in any form tends to be conservative: readers still enjoy reading love stories and heroic adventures. Hence a book like Harry Potter, which is based on archetypes as old as cave paintings — wise men with long gray beards, evil serpents, trusted comrades, the unloved orphan (who, like Hercules or Moses, is chosen by fate to slay monsters or evil lords and save his people) — is innately conservative.

Read it.

‘Introduces’? One of my fondest memories of Yale was stepping out of the shower spring term of my freshman year in Byers Hall and finding a young lady wrapped in a towel brushing her teeth at one of the sinks. This was 1975.

Read it.

It’s surprising that medieval people got anything done, so politically incorrect were their diets.

Read it.

Looks like the ‘Democrat coalition’ of interest groups is dissolving.

Blue-collar union leaders—already furious over the Obama administration’s scuttling of the Keystone XL pipeline and Hillary Clinton’s vow to shut down the coal industry—took another hit earlier this month, when the Democratic Party announced the formation of For Our Future PAC, a voter-turnout initiative in partnership with billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has long waged war against projects that the trade and construction unions hoped would create jobs. The New York Times portrayed the reaction to Steyer’s involvement in the new $50 million super PAC as a “rift between labor and environmentalists” within the Democratic Party, but that’s nothing new: trade unions and environmentalists have long been at odds. The real news was that much of the rest of the labor movement—led by public-sector unions—had agreed to work with Steyer, highlighting the ever-widening divide between blue-collar labor groups and their public-union counterparts. That split has already driven some trade unions into the arms of Republican candidates, and may account for some of the support Donald Trump gets in polls from working-class voters.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

That’s me. I am a Thought Leader. (Minus the coffee, which I can’t stand.)