Mark Steyn is dismayed.

With each passing day, last week’s visit by Julie Bishop, Aussie Foreign Minister, to the offices of Charlie Hebdo seems more and more like some strange dream – or glimpse of an alternative universe where the inheritors of western civilization are not a bunch of spineless grovelers frantically trading core liberties for multiculti delusions. Six days on, Miss Bishop is the exception that proves the rule:

Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is among a group of at least six writers who have withdrawn from next month’s PEN American Center gala, citing objections to the literary and human rights organization’s honouring the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Ondaatje is the guy who wrote The English Patient. He’s not the only bigshot pulling out….

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Bill Whittle illustrates the dim bulbs graduating from college in the 21st century with a sad lesson from 2006, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice received an honorary degree from Boston College. About fifty brave students showed their bad manners and disrespect fearless rebellion by standing and turning their backs while she spoke. Such brave speaking of a silent truth to power is a good example of immature discourtesy. A maturity they no doubt failed to attain in their college classrooms. I’m impressed: for about $250,000.00 per undergraduate “education” fifty of these students came out even more ignorant than when they entered the ivied halls of Boston College.

Of course, if they had turned their backs on Hillary (not that any of them would), they’d have been suspended and their graduations would have been in danger.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Some of us manage to rant on the Internet without an Ivy League degree, but that’s just because of our “cis privilege,” I guess.

Of course.

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And who could blame them? The role of ‘journalists’ in fostering violent confrontations of this sort is vastly underrated.

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A crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $109,000 for the Christian-owned bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon was removed Saturday after complaints from gay rights advocates.

The website GoFundMe said in a statement that the page was yanked because the campaign violated the policy against raising money “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.”

Freedom of association is now a ‘heinous crime’. Glad we cleared that up.

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According to the Post, it took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

Much of the Foundation’s money goes to travel ($8.5 million in 2013); conferences, conventions and meetings ($9.2 million); and payroll and employee benefits ($30 million). Ten executives received salaries of more than $100,000 in 2013. Eric Braverman, a friend of Chelsea Clinton, was paid nearly $275,000 in salary, benefits, and a housing allowance for just five months’ work as CEO that year.

Bill Allison is a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group once run by prominent leftist Zephyr Teachout. In Allison’s view, “it seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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“We’re sort of seeing the world order cracking around the edges,” says Robert Kagan, a conservative author and historian whose writing has caught the president’s attention. “The only thing Obama can hope is that it doesn’t completely collapse while he’s still president.”

Him and everybody else. Michael Crowley in Politico writes, “Obama took office vowing to end America’s wars. Now we’re in at least five, and U.S. officials are unsure what to do about it.” In the meantime the public can listen to him tell jokes.  That is probably the highest and best use of his time until Hillary Clinton becomes president — an event which the press believes is foregone.  A survey of 70 journalists assigned to the White House revealed that 63% of White House correspondents think Hillary will be the next president. 21% think it will be Jeb Bush. Marco Rubio is given only at 4% of making it.

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SMUGGLERS who transport migrants across the sea to Europe have said that nothing will stop them from bringing in thousands more – even military force.

…

But one 34-year-old smuggler, who identified himself as Abu Ahmed, said:”Even if the EU threatens to strike our properties, destroy our boats, the issue will not stop. We are not the problem.”

The man, who makes thousands of dollars from the scheme each month, told The Times: “The migrants themselves are desperate to cross. Some of them, particularly the Syrians, have started buying their own boats and making the journey alone without our help. You can’t stop them.”

There you have it – straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth.

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The unanswered question: ‘To you, you’re a woman. And maybe to me you’re a woman. But to a woman are you a woman?’

I’d say probably not.

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Argentina’s top spy, who was also a major figure in the events surrounding the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman earlier this year, has fled the country.

…

Nisman, of course, is the the prosecutor who, far from ‘holding up’ an investigation into that attack, alleged Kirchner was involved in covering it up, and then was found dead the morning before he was due to testify. This week the prosecutor who took over that case formally dismissed it, amidst jeers from his colleagues that he was a “grave digger.” Kirchner, meanwhile, fingered her own intelligence service as part of a sinister conspiracy against her, setting off a train of events that led to Stiuso’s flight.

Nice of her to take this time from cozying up to Putin to get arms to use against Britain in the Falklands. Where does she fine the time?

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That the Hillary! candidacy is doomed is now a foregone conclusion. Madame Defarge has no aptitude for the job, only a taste for it, and a venomous certainty that it is somehow rightfully hers. But when you’ve lost Jon Chait….

…

There follows a list of the various Clinton disasters we have lovingly been chronicling here for weeks now. Still, it’s instructive that the default mode on the Left is to attribute to “disorganization,” “greed” and “sloppiness” (hello, Sandy Berger!) what is almost certainly outright and overt criminal behavior, undertaken in the belief that no one would ever be held accountable.

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And here it is: ACLU Sues Feds to Force Catholic Charities to Provide Abortions for Illegal Immigrants.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the ACLU and the current Democrat mindset.

Now, if Catholics were Muslims, there’d be a lot of firebombed ACLU offices coast to coast — but, of course, they’re not.

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Since taking office, Obama has refused to stand by his word. On Tuesday, April 21, the White House announced that it would again, for the seventh year since Obama’s pledge, not use the word “genocide,” thereby disappointing many human rights activists.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Really — if Obama were secretly a Muslim, what would he do differently?

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That’s what happens when regular business attire is hoodies and jeans.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Next the’ll find that there are preferences given for non-white people. Where will it all end?

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You mean it isn’t?

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Geez, you’d think they were still Communist or something.

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Funny how that works.

Steve Sailer has little patience for The Narrative.

The argument over who is privileged is pretty much one that nobody sensible can win because the peas keep getting shifted under different shells. When the CEO of Apple bullies an Indiana pizza maker, Tim Cook gets to claim disprivilege for being gay.

Yeah, Tim Cook is sure a member of an oppressed minority.

And the most definite outcome of all these prejudices is that our world becomes ever more pro-billionaire, anti-middle class. In other words, the more we hear denunciations of privilege the more privileged the privileged become.

…

How real justice, rather than social justice, works is not that complicated: Cartoonists shouldn’t be slaughtered and adolescent girls shouldn’t be gang raped. Why not? Because murder and rape are wrong. We don’t need to debate whether the criminals are more or less privileged than their victims. It’s irrelevant.

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Publication of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer’s expose of the money raised by the Clinton Foundation and the favors such money may have purchased, is two weeks away. However, some of Schweizer’s findings continue to trickle into the mainstream media. They are bad news for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

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Ever wonder why the places with the greatest income inequality are invariably run by Democrats?

I doubt that they ever have.

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By his own telling, the first time Walter L. Scott went to jail for failure to pay child support, it sent his life into a tailspin.

He lost what he called “the best job I ever had” when he spent two weeks in jail. Some years he paid. More recently, he had not. Two years ago, when his debt reached nearly $8,000 and he missed a court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest. By last month, the amount had more than doubled, to just over $18,000.

That warrant, his family now speculates, loomed large in Mr. Scott’s death. On April 4, he was pulled over for a broken taillight, fled on foot and, after a scuffle with a police officer, was fatally shot in the back.

The warrant, the threat of another stay behind bars and the potential loss of yet another job caused him to run, a brother, Rodney Scott, said.

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Ever wonder why you don’t read about Republicans getting paid off like this?

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Garth, Taylor, Jen, Kim and Kanye: no need, evidently, to say Garth, Taylor, Jen, Kim and Kanye who, they are assumed to be as familiar to the reader as the persons living with them. And they themselves must presumably want to be familiar to others in this way: for whether a woman or a couple is trying for a baby is something that can be known only to her or to them, unless they want it to be known – or unless the magazines make the stories up out of whole cloth.

The psychology of modern celebrity is curious and interesting. There seems to be an implicit contract between celebrities and those who confer celebrity upon them. Celebrity is conferred on people almost, though not quite, at random: their talents are minor and their appearance pleasing, but they must not otherwise be remarkable or too far removed in their tastes and manner, at least in public, from those who give them their fame.

Mark Steyn tries to explain why things go wrong.

One of the differences between the left and the right is that the right is forever looking for another towel to throw in. The left doesn’t do this: They push on till they win. That’s one of the reasons why, with rare exceptions, two-party systems boil down to activist left-of-center governments alternating with placeholder right-of-center governments – and why all the adrenalin rush of Tuesday-night GOP landslides in November shrivels to the cold grey morning after of bipartisan rubber-stamping for money-no-object thousand-page bills come January.

…

One reason why Republicans are such losers (and yes, sometimes they “win”, but nothing changes) is because they wind up playing the game to the other side’s rules – letting the left frame every issue. Why does Jonah think it’s so brave to ask his friends to throw in another towel? You can hardly get in the ring at all for the mountain of towels the right’s tossed in there.

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Think about that next time a Democrat opens his (or her) yap about ‘taxing the rich’.

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Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

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Does it help to push the buttons on pedestrian crossings, train doors and thermostats? Often the answer is “no”, as Chris Baraniuk discovers.

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Especially illegal mass migration.

Notice that somehow these migrants are leaving Italy for the richer territories of Northern Europe. That doesn’t mean that Italy isn’t facing severe strain in having to take them in as they land. And Italy faces severe criticism from the rest of the EU for letting them get away.

There are other interesting stories on that page, featuring – for instance – huge numbers turned back by Turkey’s Coast Guard. But still they come. Reading just the increase in numbers of incidents gives one an idea of the masses of humanity involved. The smugglers are ever more agile in escaping if the authorities come near. Out of 524 incidents of capture by Turkey in 2014, involving over twelve thousand people, only 74 smugglers were charged.

The increase in numbers of captured migrants since they started keeping count in 2011 is 24-fold. And going up.

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On Tuesday, President Obama announced that the U.S. is removing Cuba from its state sponsors of terror list. Hours later, FARC, a terrorist group long supported by Cuba, murdered 10 Colombian soldiers and wounded 17 others in a terror attack on a military base.

Just another fine day in Obama-land.

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I’m surprised it’s that low.

David Cole walks us through a typical incident in Obama’s America.

By the time you read this, the Memories Pizza “gay wedding” story will have gone the way of every overhyped, outrage-inducing Internet meme, relegated to the “you’re still talking about this after two weeks?” graveyard of planned obsolescence. The story has completed its arc: ABC affiliate makes national news out of totally random small-town pizza shop owner’s hypothetical statement that she wouldn’t cater a gay wedding if asked; gays go nuts and pummel pizza shop; Christians and conservatives rally around pizza shop, raising nearly a million dollars through a crowdfunding campaign; gays decide that all of a sudden the story isn’t as important as they thought it was 24 hours earlier; people move on and balance is restored to the universe.

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In 2010 the left-wing Center for American Progress published a monograph titled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.” Its purpose was to shine an admiring spotlight on the Progressive activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men and women who used government power to “promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.” The problem with that monograph, as I noted at the time, was that it failed to mention the Progressive movement’s widespread support for racist Jim Crow laws, sexist labor laws, and eugenics laws. It was, I concluded, “a fairy tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided narrative.”

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The rush, for everything from cardiology to cosmetic surgery, could be as much as three times Government estimates, a report will reveal this month.

Official figures put the number at 63,000 but a medical group found that vast numbers are so frustrated by NHS waiting lists they are scouring Europe for faster treatments.

How about that great free government-provided health care, hey? Don’t you just wish that we had a system like that in the United States.

Well, hold on, it’s coming….

Richard Fernandez looks at the craziness of modern life.

As a child I saw an ad for movie — which I never watched — titled “Japanese Tank Versus American Armored Car”.  All these years I’ve wondered what I missed by not viewing that extraordinary confrontation. But there was no need to worry as more bizarre spectacles awaited. Decades later Twitter is alive with matchups for the next presidential like “Two White Histpanics Versus One Elderly Woman” or “Elderly White Woman Versus White-Looking Native American”.

If it sounds weirder than Nipponese Tank vs Detroit Armored Car it is because identity politics is being driven by the American kaleidoscope of identities into a kind of reductio ad absurdum. One Tweet captures how strange things look through the traditional liberal identity politics viewport now that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have declared their candidacy for president.

Gates of Vienna is rather dyspeptic this day.

The more I watch our Western culture deteriorate, the more I am convinced of the Arab Effect. I’m sure you’re aware of the glorification of homosexuality here and in Europe. It is unfortunate particularly because it has led to a new plague of modern pedophilia every bit as bad as the old Roman Imperium permitted its children to suffer. Always, we must begin by protecting the children.

My prediction is that western culture will go the way of Japan, that the next logical step after homosexuality is asexuality. I am seeiing an increase in this movement toward asexuality in the generation coming up. The children imbibe culture’s strengths and weaknesses, and when they process them via their sexuality, we are given a clear and obvious reflection of what’s going on in the culture’s collective unconscious, which is where our past and future are contained. (The collective unconscious is not tied to temporality in the same way we think of time.) What is occurring now is a kind of die-out via asexuality.

Despite our concerns, it is probable that the Arabs will not prevail. They’re not intelligent enough; sheer brutality isn’t enough. But I do think the Chinese will prevail eventually. They are buying up much of European and North American and South African real estate. Heck, they own the Panama Canal and a lot of port space on both sides of the North American continent. It’s likely that if ‘hostilities’ ever break out it will be the Chinese who win the whole enchilada.

Why? Because their very old culture is also very adaptable — for example, a state-controlled version of Christianity already exists since Christian doctrine and practices placed within a Chinese framework ensures the productivity and usefulness of its adherents. And there is the educational edict that children must learn Western musical notation and play the piano.Again, for utilitarian reasons: internalize Bach and Mozart at a young age and math intelligence increases. Yes, the Chinese are great cultural borrowers and they’re not borrowing anything from the Arabs, are they?

So get out your Chinese syllabary and start practicing. Just imagine the many varieties of patois that will develop (though I think they will be like the Romans and leave local customs in place). In the hierarchy of inherited intelligence the Asians are above the Negro and Caucasian. Only Ashkenazi Jews are ahead of them.

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Upstate New York is becoming Detroit with grass.

Plenty of room for you guys in Texas. Remember, nobody ever retires and moves North.

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So much for the myth of the socially-irresponsible mad scientist.

Welcome to the Brave New World, where all the Chicken Littles gather together to petition the government to stop the sky from falling.

“But that trick never works!”

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What kind of class activity is this for elementary students?

Not hard to tell. I wager that the teacher, if not the class, is black, and is so steeped in Identity Politics that any black man who kills a cop, regardless of circumstance, is a victim of the Racism Inherent In The System and deserving of their support.

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New York’s transit woes are a portrait of the collapse of blue model in miniature. The factors that Renn argues are causing the high costs are the classic features of that out-dated system: burdensome regulations, cronyism, and corruption. The problems will be hard to solve because they are deeply rooted. Corrupt politics, rent-seeking crony capitalists, organized labor, NIMBY lobbies, administrative incompetence resulting from poorly organized and poorly run bureaucracies: it took a lot of cooks to spoil this broth.

But the good news is that studying America’s biggest problems and bottlenecks — like our expensive health care system, bloated higher ed system, collapsing infrastructure — offer us the chance to reform and redesign the outmoded systems that are holding us back. The old ways of doing things aren’t good enough any more; American society needs a new era of reform that can transform a social and political infrastructure developed for the needs of an industrial society to the smarter, sleeker and more efficient infrastructure that our emerging information society desperately needs.

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All in all this will give the average U.S. household an extra $700 to save or spend this year. Shale has done a lot for our country, and while much of it has affecting overarching narratives of our country’s overall energy security, that $700 is a very real and very welcome number for millions of Americans.

‘Progressives’, of course, are against fracking, because they think it will cause earthquakes that will make California slide into the sea or something. Actually they’re against cheap gas for whatever reason, because they don’t want cheap gas — they want expensive gas, too expensive for people to use, because they’re against automobiles and want people to use bicycles and trains.

Giving up automobiles for bicycles and trains is, somehow, progress. Or else ‘progressives’ are actually a walking oxymoron. We report, you decide.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

This absolutely fascinates me. If you imagine liberals thinking about their goals the way normal people do about theirs, beginning with the end in mind and persevering through setbacks large and small — if you imagine them that way — you would have to credit them with optimism beyond the perimeter of sanity, plucky resolve that is just off-the-charts, inhuman. You would have to see them as bursting at the seams with exactly what they do not encourage in others. The attitude of: Don’t worry, you’ll win in the end. This is 180 degrees contrary to their message to everybody else, which essentially is one of: If you’re making $45k a year now, we can guarantee you will never make more than $55k in your whole life. You need social programs. Don’t try. Give up. The rich people have rigged the game. Go on “foostamps.”

Do liberals think about the end game? They have such enthusiasm, in those low trenches following their most disappointing setbacks, I know I’m not capable of matching it in mine. And so I don’t think of them that way, I think of them more like the dog chasing the car. Not a thought in the world about where this is all going, the possible scenarios, the victory, the defeat. There is only the pursuit. That’s why they pound the pavement just as hard when things aren’t going their way, as they do when they are. Just like the dog. I think.

The ‘progressive’ mind is locked into a certain intellectual loop: 1. Progress is inevitable (things get better because they always have), 2. There is no progress without change, 3. Since progress is inevitable, any change is good because it will ultimately lead to progress.

This is not purely a political belief system, but rather a religious belief system with a political agenda — much like Islam. Even when one points to changes that have had bad effects, the response is always ‘Well, be patient — everything will work out for the best.’ (‘The Best’, of course, from the ‘progressive’ viewpoint.) This is why spending trillions of dollars of tax money on a problem with only negative results leads to continued calls to throw good money after bad — in social welfare, in education, in any high-minded program you can think of. If progress has not occurred, it’s because we haven’t tried hard enough, we haven’t spent enough money, we haven’t had enough change.

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Unfortunately, it’s the wrong half.

‘Marriage Equality’ is the trendy phrase homosexuals have come up with for their campaign to redefine the term ‘marriage’, attempting to piggyback on the good vibes that everyone has about the Civil Rights movement and ‘gender equality’. But, like every such tendentious weasel-phrase, it is a lie masquerading as a ‘greater truth’.

The simple fact is that homosexuals have, and always have had, ‘marriage equality’ — they have, and always have had, the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex than heterosexuals have, and always have had.

But that’s not what they want. They want a ‘right’ that no one, homosexual or heterosexual, has or has ever had: The right to ‘marry’ someone of the same sex. They call it ‘marriage equality’ so as to deceive the people on the left side of the bell curve (whose votes are just as good as yours). And a comparable status to marriage, with all of the same legal rights and benefits, isn’t enough; only a radical (reaching to the roots) re-definition of the settled ancient term ‘marriage’ will do.

So the next time you hear or read the phrase ‘marriage equality’, know it for what it is — a lie, dressed up to look like the truth.

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Hundreds of smart electricity meters exploded in California after a truck crashed into a utility pole and caused a power surge on Monday.

More than 5,000 homes in Stockton have been affected, according to CBS Sacramento, following a surge caused by a rubbish lorry driver crashing into a utility pole and causing the pole’s top wire to touch its bottom wire.

“The top lines are considered our freeways. The bottom lines are our distribution lines taking power directly to homes,” a Pacific Gas and Electric spokesperson told CBS. “So when the two collide, they’re at different voltages and the higher voltage wins out, causing an overload.”

Yup, those are pretty smart meters all right.

Smart meters are a popular idea with governments and electricity companies around the world. In theory they might help to reduce energy consumption as well as furnishing energy suppliers with a lot of valuable information about their customers. A smart meter often allows a customer’s supplies to be shut off remotely; another benefit from the utility company’s point of view.

Your tax dollars (and corporate fascism) at work.

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Not while Oregan has blue-state zoning laws. Even Voice of the Crust The Guardian can’t get around that one.

George Will points out some inconvenient truth.