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Mocking treasured liberal slogans is as easy as shooting (bicycle-riding) fish in a barrel.

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Slow news day.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

But even before the murders actually happened, the media was moving on to the real story: its fears of a backlash against Muslims, and the one brave woman, Melbourne writer Tessa Kum, who courageously tweeted her opposition to this theoretical but widely hoped for / denounced backlash. Tessa’s tweet is a genuine Big Story with Google News listing her in 88 news articles.

All you have to do is put the boot in when helping the Crust beat up on somebody in order to be praised for your ‘courage’, like a little kid smiling up at his big brother when he adds his pathetic little kick to the guy who is on the ground.

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Federal prosecutors have stopped trying to steal $33,000 from an Iowa restaurateur who irked the IRS by making deposits of less than $10,000. The New York Times highlighted the case in October, noting that federal law lets the IRS “seize accounts on suspicion, no crime required.”

Mrs. Lady’s, Carole Hinders’ Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, does not take credit cards, so she has a lot of cash to deposit. There is nothing illegal about that, although the Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to report deposits of $10,000 or more. Deliberately keeping deposits below that threshold to avoid the reporting requirement is a crime (known as “structuring”), but Hinders was never charged with it. Instead federal prosecutors argued that her bank account had facilitated the crime of structuring, making it subject to civil forfeiture.

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

(Look for … the Union label….)

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‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’

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Omar Mahmood is a student at the University of Michigan. He considers himself a political conservative and a Muslim. And until recently, he enjoyed writing for both of the campus’s newspapers: the institutional, liberal paper, The Michigan Daily, and the conservative alternative paper, The Michigan Review.

After penning a satirical op-ed for The Review that mocked political correctness and trigger warnings, The Daily ordered him to apologize to an anonymous staffer who was offended and felt “threatened” by him. He refused and was fired.

Last week, he became the victim of what The College Fix has described as a “hate crime.” The doorway of his apartment was vandalized in the middle of the night; the perpetrators pelted the door with eggs and scribbled notes like “shut the fuck up” and “everyone hates you you violent prick.” They left copies of the offending column and a print-out picture of Satan.

The column that caused such a controversy, “Do the Left Thing,” was published in The Review last month. It’s a first-person narrative in which Mahmood pretends to be a left-handed person who is offended by the institutional patriarchy of right-handedness.

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At the largest amnesty workshop to date in Los Angeles, government officials from Mexico and El Salvador advised illegal immigrants, some of whom had criminal records, on President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty program.

And who could blame them? They love that their criminals are moving to the U.S.

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At least 126 people, mostly children, have been killed in a Taliban assault on an army-run school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, officials say.

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Back in 2009 Sheikh Haron, the allegedly late alleged hostage-taker in Sydney, was arrested and charged with sending hate mail to the families of deceased Australian soldiers. He was a self-declared man of peace in those days. He said, “This pen is my gun, and these words are my bullets.”

I’m sure everyone believed him back then, just as they are now expressing their solidarity with self-declared “peaceful” Muslims and warning against a “backlash”.

By the way — also in 2009, in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, famously said: “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Some things never change.

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As Scott Shackford noted last week, Google News is pulling out of Spain after the newspaper industry there, represented by the Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles (AEDE) successfully lobbied to force newspapers to charge Google for the inclusion of their content in news search results. Yes, really. Since Google News makes no money, Google found this a bit rich and decided to close shop rather than hemorrhage cash for the privilege of including Spanish newspaper results. Now, the AEDE wants Spanish and European Union government officials to force Google to keep the local edition of Google News operating. And, presumably, paying newspapers.

Franco may be dead, but the Fascist spirit apparently lives on.

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TV Showing Cafe’s Customers With Hands Up; Islamic Flag Displayed.

…

It wasn’t clear if the attack was linked to hard-line Islamist groups, such as Islamic State, which have been the focus of a crackdown by authorities in recent weeks.

Just another day in the Religion of Peace. Nothing to see here — move along, move along….

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Of course, if the Democrats want to base their 2016 campaign on anti-bank populism, they will have to deal with the fact that the financial industry contributed more money to Barack Obama’s campaigns than any industry has contributed to any candidate in the nation’s history. Why might that be? The Democratic Party is, and has been for a long time, the party of Wall Street. The congruence between the Obama administration’s policies and Goldman Sachs’s interests is almost perfect. Will Elizabeth Warren really disrupt that alliance? Or will banks fund the Democrats’ demagogic attacks on themselves? The latter, I suspect. Wall Street will assume that Warren is a hypocrite, whereas I think she is just a liar.

The Motley Fool tells you what you need to know.

9. Wealth is relative. As comedian Chris Rock said, “If Bill Gates woke up with Oprah’s money he’d jump out the window.”

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Blood, as the vital and life-sustaining passageway through the body, has a strong incentive to flow as easily as possible — in all cases except that of injury. With a cut or larger bleeding injury, platelets rush to the opening, part of the body’s desperate action to cut off what had moments ago flowed so freely. That switch takes time, and as good as platelets are, in trauma situations or on the battlefield, they might not work fast enough unaided. Now, a team of scientists at Texas A&M, Harvard, and MIT just developed an injectable gel that uses synthetic nanoplatelets to staunch the bleeding.

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The following pronouncement originated with Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Rulings by Al-Azhar are instructive, because there is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine. The institution is the closest equivalent to the Vatican that can be found in Islam.

Al-Azhar has now declined to pronounce takfir against the Islamic State, which would have placed the Caliph and his followers outside of Islam. This raises an important question: if Al-Azhar — whose scholars know more about Sunni Islam than anyone else in the world — will not anathematize ISIS, how can dilettantes such as Barack Obama and David Cameron declare so confidently that the Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam”?

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Systematic Islamist indoctrination in Turkey is becoming less stealthy.

Education is the new battlefield. Turkey’s government is pushing to advance its declared policy goal of “raising devout (Muslim) generations.”

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Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

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

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Officials in San Luis Obispo, California, plan to buy houses in certain neighborhoods and sell them with deed restrictions requiring they be owner occupied. The goal is to keep college students from living in those neighborhoods.

Hey, you know what college students are like. (Mostly white and Asian….)

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Pay real attention to the commercials for just one night instead of making a sandwich. You will quickly notice there is an heirarchy of correctness for commercials on Planet Diversity.

There is equality of one sort: Married men of all races are hen-pecked morons whose wives are much smarter and more attractive. The pathetic idiots never know what cereal to eat or which laxative to use. It’s a miracle they can dress themselves and locate their jobs.

Black people are always cooler, smarter, and hipper than white people in commercials. Any doofus will be white. The guy with the “wrong” phone or computer will be white and uncool. Black people can be cutely wacky, like the football player who gets excited when his number comes up at the deli. But they can never be stupid, bad, ugly, or subservient.

Asians do not exist except very rarely as part of the wallpaper in a crowd scene and identifiable Jews do not exist at all. Any women who are “acting stupidly”, will also be unattractive. An example is “Helen” the bad dancer at the high school dance where JJ Watt appears. But in most ad “storylines”, women will be thin, pretty, and in charge.

Children of all races are smarter than adults, but particularly their fathers. Father not only no longer knows “best”; he knows next to nothing. He is lectured by his offspring about phones, computers, cars, and his own investments. Without kids to tell him what’s what, he would be probably be homeless. Once again, played for humor, but part of the relentless assault on everything male, traditional, or authoritative. Government is Big Daddy, Sugar Daddy, and Baby Daddy now; no need for any real flesh-and-blood fathers.

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Everything you’ve heard from the city of Portland about its streetcar lines is a lie. That seems to be the conclusion of the latest review of the operation by the city of Portland’s own city auditor.

Portland Streetcar, the private organization contracted to run the streetcar for the city, claims to have met the city’s on-time goals. The audit finds that it hasn’t. Portland Streetcar claims to have increased ridership by 500,000 riders in fiscal year 2014. The audit finds that that Portland Streetcar overstated ridership by 19 percent and actually ridership was 1.1 million trips less than claimed.

The auditor is also unimpressed by claims that the streetcar has generated billions of dollars worth of economic development. “Based on studies [Portland Bureau of Transportation] provided to us,” says the audit, “we conclude this research has yet to describe a causal relationship of how streetcars may affect economic development.” In other words, it’s just another fabrication.

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

Read it.

But only if they’re Irish. (Don’t tell Michelle; she’ll blow a gasket on all those carbs.)

My Macintosh is sick, so blogging will be light until it gets fixed.

Science-Fiction Door Decals. You, too, can live behind an airlock door.

Stun Gun iPhone Case. Now you’re talkin’.

Neck Massager with Wireless Remote Control.

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In connection with the UN Climate Change conference in Peru (Ronald Bailey writes about that here) Greenpeace activists marched across the off-limits Peruvian site of the world-famous Nazca Lines, near its iconic hummingbird, leaving foot marks which the Peruvian government says marred the site, in order to lay out huge yellow cloth reading “TIME FOR CHANGE The Future is Renewable Greenpeace.”

Greenpeace is composed of people whose universe didn’t exist until they were born, and  who consider themselves the crown of creation.

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Gee, I’ve been saying that for years.

Gomez and Uncle Fester divide up the world.

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A left-coast writer named Mark Morford thinks that gas prices falling to $2 a gallon would be the worst thing to happen to America. After all, he says, the wrong people would profit: oil companies (why would oil companies profit from lower gas prices?), auto makers, and internet retailers like Amazon that offer free shipping.

If falling gas prices are the worst for America, then the best, Morford goes on to say, would be to raise gas taxes by $6 a gallon and dedicate all of the revenue to boondoggles “alternative energy and transport, environmental protections, our busted educational system, our multi-trillion debt.” After all, government has proven itself so capable of finding the most cost-effective solutions to any problem in the past, and there’s no better way to reduce the debt than to tax the economy to death.

Read it.

As Judicial Watch previously reported, there has long been ample evidence the Obama Administration was operating in anticipation of a surge in illegal aliens that it, in fact, clearly instigated. As Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has said, “The rising crisis at the border is the direct and predictable result of actions taken by President Obama. He and his administration have announced to the world that they will not enforce America’s immigration laws, and have emphasized in particular that foreign youth will be exempted from these laws. The world has heard the president’s call, and illegal immigrants are pouring across the border in pursuit of his promised amnesty. President Obama is responsible for this calamity.”

After Judicial Watch’s HHS-BCFS FOIA lawsuit, we now have further evidence that this is the case. The start date of BCFS’s contract was October 1, 2013—a full eight months before the deluge of illegal alien children the US suffered in mid-summer 2014. The project’s end date of September 30, 2016, suggests that the Obama administration anticipates that the deluge will continue until near the end of his presidency.

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Morris says a 2013 study by Greg Duncan, at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, showed that math knowledge at the beginning of elementary school was the single most powerful predictor determining whether a student would graduate from high school and attend college. “We think math might be sort of a lever to improve outcomes for kids longer term,” Morris says.

Oh, ya think?

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Case in point: Obama supporter Catherine Keefe. On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an essay by Keefe lamenting the ways “Obamacare has hurt my family.” Keefe says her husband Jim was recovering from open-heart surgery when Obama was elected and that she was “elated” that Obama’s promise of health care reform would benefit she and her husband–a hope that never came to fruition.

First came the cancellation of both Keefe and her husband’s insurance plans, a pain experienced by nearly 5 million Americans whose plans were canceled by Obamacare. Keefe says Obama’s now-infamous broken promise–“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan”–was her and her husband’s “biggest disappointment.”

Next came the realization that another Obama promise–“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”–was also untrue.

Finally, Keefe says the endless hassles, higher premiums, and bureaucratic hoop jumping leaves her and her husband with nagging doubts and worries about what the future portends.

Be careful what you vote for.

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Kosta Karageorge, a fifth-year senior, had missed practice Wednesday and hadn’t been seen since.

Sgt. Richard Weiner, with Columbus police, said that Karageorge died from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

His body was found inside a Dumpster and identified at the scene through tattoos, Weiner said.

There you go. Those tattoos are actually useful. (We’ll pass over the part about a ‘fifth-year senior’….)

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According to the Des Moines Register, the state’s Department of Transportation is aiming to next year provide a free app that will store your license, for use in traffic stops and any place else you’re asked to provide your ID—even when boarding a plane at an Iowa airport. Such a venture would make Iowa the first state in the U.S. to provide digital identification documents. Iowa is one of several that states already allow for proof of insurance to be displayed on an electronic device.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Speaking of drones — imagine that is Joe Biden’s head….

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And why would they? That’s not their job. Their job is to spend money and buy votes, and more spending is always better for that.

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Not while Joe Biden is still breathing, anyway.

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Across Europe and America, governments and intelligence officials are struggling to address the problem of Western Muslims who join the jihad in Syria – and then come back home again. But in the process, they may be missing the bigger threat: the ones who never left.

Counterterrorism experts agree that the danger posed by returning jihadists is significant: already radicalized before they joined groups like the Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), they are now well-trained in the practice of terrorist warfare. Unlike most Westerners, they have overcome any discomfort they may have previously felt about killing or confronting death. Chances are, they’ve already done it.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported “27,483 unintentional fall deaths” in 2011 alone. That is 27,460.5 more deaths each year via unintentional falls than “school shootings,” yet Everytown is pulling out all stops to make America safer by pushing more gun control.

Well, then, let’s just ban heights. Nothing easier. IT’S FOR THE CHILDREN!

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I predict that it crashed.

The most interesting part of the picture is the girl with him, who appears to be no more ‘black’ than he is. Perhaps the implicit message is that one needs significant white ancestry in order to code. The brown-bag-and-ruler test appears to be alive and well.

Read it.

First, the tone of the report is remarkably hostile to the CIA. It reads like a prosecutor’s brief. I don’t know what the Agency did to get on the wrong side of Dianne Feinstein, but the report is, seemingly, an act of revenge. I suspect that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself would render a more sympathetic account of the CIA’s interrogation program than we got from Senate Democrats.

Second, a great deal of the report is devoted to proving that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did no good. I didn’t find this discussion particularly persuasive, mostly because it is so patently partisan and one-sided. Further, while it is appropriate for the intelligence agencies themselves to analyze the success, or lack thereof, of various approaches they have used, this issue strikes me as almost beside the point. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was vitally important to learn all we could about al Qaeda–who was in it, how it was organized, how its members communicated, and above all, what other plots were in the works. It was appropriate to try just about anything to get information from the small number of high-level al Qaeda members to whom we then had access. If some techniques worked and others didn’t, so be it; but they all had to be tried.

Third, the report goes to great lengths to document alleged misrepresentations by the Agency concerning the enhanced interrogation program. Many of these come from Congressional testimony by former CIA Director Michael Hayden. The Agency has acknowledged that Hayden got some facts wrong, especially relating to events that occurred before he became Director. In other instances, I don’t find the Committee’s effort very persuasive. Once again, the vituperative tone of the report undermines its credibility.

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The Washington state healthcare exchange accidentally canceled coverage for some 6,000 accounts. Exchange officials say they don’t know how large a share of total accounts that represents because they don’t know how many people have signed up.

George Will pulls back the curtain.

Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity.

Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.

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Some 3,000 Americans gave up their citizenship last year, a tiny number that’s nevertheless been soaring. Yes, a few expatriates may be trying to avoid future taxes, as Senator Charles E. Schumer accused the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin of doing two years ago, when Mr. Saverin, who lives in Singapore, surrendered his passport ahead of the company’s initial public offering.

But most, like me, are not tycoons. We’re responding to the burden and cost of onerous financial reporting and tax filing requirements that are neither fair nor just. (Living and working in London, I pay higher taxes, to Britain, than I would in New York.)

Some 7.6 million Americans live abroad — expats would be the 13th most populous state, if we were a state. Many are overseas temporarily, for work or study. But many others marry foreigners, start companies or have long-term overseas assignments. We are just like ordinary Americans — except that we lack representation.

The United States is an outlier: Its extraterritorial tax laws apply to American citizens and companies no matter where they are. We are the only country (except, arguably, Eritrea) that taxes all of its citizens on worldwide income rather than where the income is earned. Expatriate Americans have to pay taxes once, wherever they live, and then file again in the United States.

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In mid-August Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America launched a campaign pressuring Kroger to bar law-abiding citizens from openly carrying guns for self-defense in their stores. Kroger refused to change its policy and in the third quarter–“ending Nov. 8”–Kroger saw a “21 percent increase in profit…compared with the same period last year.”

I guess that’ll show ’em.

Jim Goad is nicely dyspeptic today.

Despite the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax and the fact that on any given day you can search the phrase “false rape” on Google News and dredge up countless stories of bitter, scorned, vindictive, psychotic women falsely accusing men of rape, the howling harpies of latter-day feminism and their gelded male worker elves continue to insist that false rape accusations are a patriarchal fiction.

That’s why the nuclear-reactor-level meltdown of that mossy old rancidly flatulent hippie rag Rolling Stone over an at least partially—and perhaps entirely—fraudulent gang-rape story at the University of Virginia is so exquisitely delicious.

We live in a world where a fake rape at UVA gets more press than that (and worse) in entire Muslim countries. Go figure.

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Both good things. At last, a useful piece of ‘wearable’ tech.

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Sustainable-development theorists’ aversion to, and environmental activists’ dislike for, synthetic products, long-distance trade and economies of scale is most unfortunate. True, manufacturing operations are not yet perfect, but the ‘green’ alternatives touted as inherently superior, from organic food to local and smaller-scale productions, are typically much worse.

Natural dyes are a case in point. What well-meaning activists and ‘enviropreneurs’ miss is that their ‘solution’ to a largely non-existent problem would come not only with a hefty price for consumers (in terms of paying a lot more for inferior products), but it would also affect the environment given that many parts of the world that have been allowed to ‘rewilden’ in the past few decades would need to be, once again, put under the plough.

Market processes are not perfect, but they constantly reward the development of more efficient and less problematic alternatives over time. Ignoring the lessons of business and technological history can only deliver a poorer and more environmentally stressed world.