Read it.

The world as understood by Islamic nations varies wildly from the Western nations’ understanding of the world. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.

This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources — words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe.

Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years. Not only are Mideast and Asian regions included, but the map includes European lands: Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, and Cyprus.

Read it.

The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has been promised 75 Soviet-era tanks by the Syrian government. The gift consists of T-55 and T-72 tanks and comes as a thank you for Hezbollah not complaining about the presence of Russian forces in Syria. Apparently more such gifts are forthcoming if Hezbollah works with the Russians against Syrian rebels. Russia deployed a mix of Su-24 and Su-25 ground attack planes, plus four Su-30 fighters since early September.

After all, what could go wrong?

Read it.

Earlier today, a 20-year-old man named Chris Mercer murdered 10 people at a community college in Oregon. At this moment, little is known about Mercer or his motives. (No doubt he had grievances.) Three handguns and a rifle reportedly were recovered at the site, but we don’t know whether he obtained those firearms legally or illegally. At this point, it is hard to say anything intelligent about the shootings except that they were a horribly evil deed.

That, of course, doesn’t stop our president from trying to make political hay. He immediately took the podium to demand that Congress pass more gun control legislation–any gun control legislation, apparently, whether it has any relationship to this crime or not.

Chances are it was a ‘gun-free zone’ (boy, that worked, didn’t it?) and so the shooter knew he had a blank check.

Read it.

Most Americans haven’t even heard of civil asset forfeiture. This is why the programs have run unchallenged for so many years. An uninformed electorate isn’t a vehicle for change. This issue is still a long way away from critical mass.

Without critical mass, there’s little chance those who profit from it will lose their power over state and federal legislatures. Forfeiture programs are under more scrutiny these days, but attempts to roll back these powers, or introduce conviction requirements, have been met with resistance from law enforcement agencies and police unions — entities whose opinions are generally respected far more than the public’s.

…

Even if awareness increases, legislators at the top end of the food chain are more interested in appeasing law enforcement agencies and prosecutors than pushing through reform bills that arrive on their desks with nearly unanimous support. Informing the electorate may put better people in office, but it won’t change the mindset that almost always believes law enforcement knows best.

This problem is compounded when the law enforcement lobby starts complaining about the budgetary shortfalls reform efforts will create. If they aren’t allowed to seize anything for any reason, they won’t be able to buy the things they want or offset the costs generated by their seizure efforts. Any state strapped for cash — and that’s most of them — will be hesitant to pick up the tab for “lost” revenue.

Read it.

Maybe this time next century.

Mark Steyn turns over a rock.

This tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons is a glum day for free speech. But that’s no reason for some “social media” billionaire not to make it worse. During her visit to New York for the grand UN dictators’ ball, Angela Merkel was overheard rebuking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for permitting people to post “anti-immigrant” sentiments on social media:

On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported.

The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?” Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.

The very small cartel that run “social media” worldwide are increasingly hostile to free speech outside of a limited and largely trivial number of subjects. Ours will be the first civilization to slide off the cliff while watching cat videos.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Individuals respond to incentives, so it’s not surprising to observe an ongoing Flight from White currently.

This is in contrast to the Flight Toward White in the mid-20th Century. For example, the Census Bureau didn’t separately count Hispanics / Latinos / Mexicans in the 1950 and 1960 Censuses in response to the League of United Latin American Citizens’ contention that it would be better for them to just be officially classified as white.

Now, of course, the Census Bureau laboriously classifies Hispanics as its own Ethnicity. (Nobody else gets an Ethnicity, just Hispanics.) This 1970-2010 Census ploy allows Latinos to get the benefits of affirmative action while also allowing individuals to assert their racial whiteness (because that means a lot to many Hispanics). In the future, it would not be surprising if the Census Bureau promotes Hispanics to their own race.

Other groups want in on the action, too. For example, Arab-American pressure groups are pushing the Census Bureau to count “Middle Eastern / North African” individuals separately from whites on the 2020 Census.

Those who aren’t counted as a separate Identity Politics Fashionable Minority don’t get a space at the government trough. It’s not surprising that Jews, who aren’t stupid, want to get in on the act.

Daniel Hannan reminds us that fascism is indeed a left-wing thing.

Why do we downplay that memory? Largely because it doesn’t fit with what happened later. When Hitler attacked the USSR – to the utter astonishment of Stalin, who initially ordered his soldiers not to shoot back – it was in everyone’s interest to forget the earlier phase of the war. Western Communists, who had performed extraordinary acrobatics to justify their entente with fascism, now carried out another somersault and claimed that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had only ever been a tactical pause, a moment when Stalin brilliantly stalled while building up his military capacity. Even today, the historiographical imprint of that propaganda lingers.

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I am not at all susceptible to white guilt myself, but I know people that are.  It’s obvious to me from observing them that white guilt delivers great psychic rewards.

…

Twenty or thirty years from now we shall have figured out how reading Ta-Nehisi Coates or denouncing racial crimethink sets off floods of pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters in so many white people’s brains.  Until then white guilt will wax strong, whatever happens with demographics.