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srael is offering for sale a laser weapon that can shoot down artillery and mortar shells as well as rockets and small UAVs. Called Iron Beam it has a range of 2,000 meters and is expected to enter service in Israel by the end of 2015. There is a lot of action on Israeli borders for a system like Iron Beam and it will soon become evident if Iron Beam is the first effective laser air defense weapon or not.

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President Obama, with the help of some seriously misguided Republicans, is devoting the last segment of his presidency to helping one of his favorite interest groups — criminals. Not content with letting thousands of them out of jail early, the president is now attempting to improve their chances of obtaining federal employment by banning federal agencies from asking applicants about their criminal histories on job application forms. This policy goes under the slogan of “ban the box.”

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Police said Rivera and four other men were fixing dinner and drinking in an apartment at 1445 Lakeside Estates. Officials said Rivera got angry when Darwin Gonzalez, 34, took the last piece of chicken. The two men began arguing and the argument spilled out into the parking lot where fists started flying.

Investigators said at some point, Rivera stabbed Gonzalez with a knife and fled.

Sure, we need more Hispanics in this country. Adds diversity, don’t you know.

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The family of a Chicago man gunned down during a robbery attempt are calling for his shooter, a concealed weapon permit-holder, to be prosecuted for the shooting. The Washington Post is helping to further that effort, suggesting the failed robbery could even be a Halloween prank gone horribly wrong.

Police say Saturday night Reginald Gildersleeve walked into the small bodega Agencia Mexicana while wearing a mask and announced a holdup, whipping out what appeared to be gun. Moments later he was gunned down by an unnamed patron. It was later discovered that Gildersleeve’s gun was a paintball gun.

Think of it as evolution in action.

But now, Gildersleeve’s family is calling for charges to be levied, saying that the habitual criminal didn’t deserve to die. Igbinosa Oronsaye, Gildersleeve’s stepson, told The Chicago Tribune the shooter overreacted in shooting multiple times.

 “Some people don’t actually know how to use guns,” Oronsaye said. “They go to firing ranges, but it’s not the same as a bullet going into someone’s body, it’s not the same as a bullet going into flesh. They should be able to wound first, kill next. He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”

Uh, yes he did.

The family’s argument is being pushed along by The Washington Post, where writer Michael Miller says the shooting is “raising questions.” Miller wrote up Gildersleeve’s death Monday morning in a manner that seems intended to frame Gildersleeve in the best possible light. Miller, for instance, describes the shooting as “mysterious” because it “occurred on Halloween and involved a man in a mask with a fake gun,” although robberies with fake guns happen all the time.

From Hillary Clinton to Reginald Guildersleeve, the Washington Post never met a criminal it didn’t like.

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Well, bad news for those very few people (currently 14 out of 1,135 voters; see below) who think the TSA is more like a panther than, say, an elderly orangutan or the mythical skunk ape. John Roth, DHS’s hard-working but continually frustrated inspector general, is back in front of Congress today to talk about why the department’s least-popular child keeps coming home with big red Fs on its report card.

When we last left our heroes back in July, they had more or less shut down the Houston airport because they were worried it might be under attack by several hundred sorority members, an attack that came just one day after it allegedly caught Morrissey trying to smuggle his junk onto a plane in San Francisco. Granted, at the time the agency had just come under new management (see “New TSA Administrator to Explain Why Agency Will Fail Differently From Now On,” and this followup), so there was at least some reason to believe that it might at least, well, fail differently in the future.

This belief was unjustified.

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Officials say they could hire boats to send large numbers of African migrants across the Mediterranean, massively adding to the numbers already reaching Europe’s borders.

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Because it’s congenital?

Biden goes out of his way to assert that Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration is an “attack on all immigrants.” Why lie? Anyone who is paying attention knows that Trump’s position on immigration is addressed to illegal immigrants. Why efface the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants?

Biden is utterly representative of Democrats on this point. It could be that Biden and his fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton see no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It could be that Biden sees illegal immigrants as a core constituency of the Democratic Party. It could be that Biden thinks it is in the Democrats’ interest to foment confusion among voters on this point. It could be that the man is a natural born demagogue. It could be all of the above.

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The Greensboro massacre occurred on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. Five protest marchers were shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party at a rally organized by communists intended to demonstrate radical, even violent, opposition to the Klan. The “Death to the Klan March” and protest was the culmination of attempts by the Communist Workers’ Party to organize mostly black industrial workers in the area.

Let’s see: Hold a ‘Death to the Klan’ march, and five of your guys get shot and killed.

The Left keeps holding these “Death to X” and “Smash the Y” rallies and it never seems to work. I wonder why.

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Well, then, go back where you came from. Better yet, don’t leave there in the first place.

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But she told the co-hosts of Fox’s The Real that she had whiteness “thrust” upon her.

Poor baby.

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What’s happening in Denmark is part of a trend. Since 2001, it’s become more difficult for migrants, especially Moslems, to stay in Europe. More of these refugees are getting deported back to the old country. And those wanted by the United States are getting extradited, although only after the Americans promise not to send the accused to Guantanamo, or to execute them. Other than that it’s good riddance. The Europeans need all the jail cells they can get, because more and more of their own Moslems are crossing the line, and getting locked up. Despite decades of good intentions and accepting millions of Moslem refugees Europeans are realizing that they have caused more problems than they hoped to solve.

Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.

The New York Times has a series of articles examining the causes of why an entire generation “has become less tolerant of free speech” noting the growing list of subjects or persons that are now banned on campuses to prevent people from freaking out.

In defense of this trend, a recent graduate from Brown explained that certain points of view were intolerable to people and they saw no reason to endure it.  Therefore, a rising generation that simply wanted a “more inclusive and just world” has decided to exclude certain people and topics the way filters block unwanted signals.

Such “safe spaces” shouldn’t be disparaged as echo chambers she argues, but rather regarded as a form of air conditioning where the mental content can be maintained in a desired state.  Surely no one can object to air conditioned rooms?  Why not thought conditioned campuses? What they neglect to consider in the argument is the cost of air conditioning.  All controlled environments cost money and quit working the moment power goes out.

The safe spaces they crave don’t exist in in the ambient environment. To maintain a “nuclear free” or “gun free” zone someone has to do the distasteful work of maintaining it.  Probably some guard, soldier or policeman with a gun. Cafeterias and dorms have to be supplied with meat, fossil fuels and dirty pharmaceuticals; the wrong people have to be shown the door by the academic equivalent of a bouncer.  All this takes labor and costs money.

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Peter Callaghan, a reporter for the Minneapolis Post, has figured out that rail transit planners routinely overestimate transit ridership. He calls this the Pickrell Effect, after US DOT researcher Don Pickrell, whose 1990 report found that most rail projects underestimated costs and overestimated ridership.

(Callaghan doesn’t mention the other Pickrell Effect, which is that government employees who report such shenanigans are likely to be sent to the local equivalent of Siberia. For his effort, Pickrell was told by a Deputy Secretary of Transportation that he would never be allowed to work on a transit study again.)

Read it. And watch the video.

The following news report was originally broadcast by Spiegel TV Magazin. In it you can follow the columns of “refugees” from their landing on Lesbos through the Balkans to their arrival in Austria, with their final destination Germany.

Every step of the way they are simply waved through, in violation of the Schengen Agreement and EU law. But none of that seems to matter to any of the countries along the route — the important thing is to get them to Germany as quickly as possible. After all, it was Chancellor Angela Merkel who invited them.

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The money for all of this Obamanomics has to come from somewhere, folks. Sooner or later we’re going to get a Republican President who’s going to worry about the national debt level and the only income the government has is ripped from your paycheck and mine; you KNOW Congress isn’t going to quit spending.

Read it. Love the video.

A key part of imposing the Camp of the Saints on Europe is to demoralize Europeans with the argument that it’s impossible for European countries to maintain land and sea borders: Whaddaya whaddaya? Dontcha know, the migrant always gets through!

Two obvious counter-examples, however, are Israel and Australia. Israel is tricky to demonize for obvious reasons, especially in America, but demoralizing Australians into giving up their quite effective system that keeps out boat people is straightforward. White Australians are evil and therefore deserve to lose their country.

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Of course not. That would be silly.

In the wake of the CNBC debate debacle, Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant on liberal media bias on today’s Morning Joe. He summed things up this way, in challenging the panel: “you can’t do it and nobody here can do it: name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years: you can not do it.”

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The famous Irish stout is to become vegan friendly for the first time in its 256-year history, as the company halts the use of fish bladders in its brewing filters.

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Isinglass has been used since the 19th Century and while large quantities of the agent are filtered out during the brewing process, there are still traces of fish bladders in the finished product.

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A few years ago, Jeff Katzenberg, the über-Hollywood mogul, sat onstage with me at a Milken conference and said that the worst career advice anyone can give is this: Follow your passion.

I couldn’t agree with him more, and I wrote about it here. The problem with this advice is that it’s so generic and so untrue that I feel sorry for people who heed it. There are plenty of people who are extremely successful doing things they’re not exactly passionate about. They just happen to be very good at what they do. There are also people who are undyingly passionate about something, but they’ll never make a career of it. They’ll remain poor, but at least they love what they do and are OK with that.

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The UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) is running short of money, which is donated by member nations; (over 90 percent from the U.S. and European states. One reason for the lack of money is the usual donor nations refuse to give more because UNRWA is seen as supporting Islamic terrorism, especially against Israel. The UN does not like to admit this, even when they were recently shown very visible of anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist support on social media by dozens of UNRWA staff running UNRWA schools for Palestinian children. The UN very quietly apologized and said it would discipline or fire the offending employees.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. Considering the sort of stuff the U.N. does, it would be delusional to think that the vast majority of its functionaries aren’t the sort of goo-goo ‘progressives’ that infest so many international organizations.

UNRWA was established in 1949 because Arab nations refused to accept and absorb Moslems who fled (mostly) from what is now Israel on the promise of the Arab nations that they would soon mobilize sufficient military strength to destroy Israel, drive the Jews out and allow the refugees to return home. That never happened and the UN quickly recognized that there was a serious refugee problem. Not only was UNRWA established to take care of these refugees but in a very unusual move the 750,000 original Palestinian refugees were allowed to pass on their refugee status to their children. No other refugee group was allowed to do that by the UN. About the same number of Jews were driven out of Moslem countries after 1948 and they were all accepted and absorbed by other nations, mainly Israel and the U.S. Since 1947 the number of “Palestinian refugees” has grown to five million and Arab states continue to refuse to absorb them.

Imagine that.

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The eukaryote in question is called Dulse (Palmaria sp.) and, as explained Oregon State University, is already in demand as a tasty addition to various recipes. Boffins at the University had been experimenting with a new strain of the plant designed to boost growth of abalone, a delicious and expensive shellfish. Results were good: abalone grew faster on a diet of modified Dulse than they did on other foodstuffs.

Jim Goad sounds the alarm.

A friend of mine recently told me of his pal’s ethical struggles during a visit to the formerly English nation of England.

…

It’s clear what’s going on here: Kevin is afraid of being called xenophobic and Islamophobic. By his own admission he doesn’t fear Muslims; he fears being accused of fearing them. And this is perhaps the most pervasive and justified fear these days—the fear of being called bad names that can destroy your social and professional life. We occupy a world where sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will get you fired. It’s a fear so thick, you even hesitate to whisper in closed quarters that you’re afraid.

The Other McCain documents our return to  the 1950s, when almost nobody had sex on campus.

The implementation of so-called “affirmative consent” policies means that every heterosexual male student is at risk of expulsion if he attempts to have sex on campus. College orientation is now basically an anti-sex training program where female students are (a) taught that all men are rapists and (b) encouraged to file sexual assault charges if they have any physical interaction with male students. The fate of “John Doe” at Brown University — banned from campus for making out with a girl he met at a party — illustrates the extreme danger male students face in an academic environment where feminists have ginned up a frantic hysteria of hatred. Because the number of actual rapes does not justify their claim that 1-in-5 college women are victims of sexual assault, officials are trying to make up for the “Rape Shortage” by inciting false accusations.

I remember the fifties. They weren’t too bad.

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So what if he stole your stuff? Doesn’t make him a bad person, does it?

In the site’s Crime and Safety area, where residents share strategies for fighting crime, Malkia Cyril of S.F. suggests that her neighbors stop using the label because it shows lack of empathy and understanding.

Cyril pointed out that instead of calling the thief who took the bicycle from your garage a criminal, you could be more respectful and call him or her “the person who stole my bicycle.”

“I [suggest] that people who commit property crimes are human and deserved to be referred to in terms that acknowledge that,” Cyril, who’s the executive director of the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, writes in the thread.

I am not making this up.

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I’m still looking forward to New York being under water when the Antarctic ice sheet melts.

NASA schmasa, what do they know?

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In one of the great success stories of interspecies animal breeding, the coyote-wolf hybrid ‘coywolf’ can now count its numbers in the millions.

This new animal, which has emerged in the eastern part of North America over the last century or so, is better than both its predecessors.

At 25kg, it’s twice the size of a coyote; it has larger jaws and bigger muscles meaning it can take down deer; it’s equally adept at hunting in forests and open terrain.

It’s also got some dog in it, about a tenth. With 25 per cent wolf DNA, coyote is the dominant species, according to research by Javier Monzón from Stony Brook University in New York.

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Qwasie Reid, an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in New York City, was transporting a nursing home patient to a doctor’s appointment in an ambulance last week when he was flagged down by a “frantic man” near a Brooklyn school who said a student was choking.

Ignoring his partner’s advice to stay in the ambulance, he went to help the seven-year-old who had reportedly started choking while eating a sandwich.

According to WABC-TV, Mr Reid “cleared out the little girl’s mouth, put an oxygen mask on her, used a defibrillator and started CPR.”

Mr Reid told the TV station that the girl, Noelia Echavarria, was already “blue in the face and lips” when he got there but that no one at the school had administered first aid.

He said he was subequently suspended without pay by his employer, Assist Ambulance.Company, because the firm’s policy forbids paramedics from making any unauthorised stops.

I would not work for such a company. Hopefully this guy will get a job elsewhere.

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Imagine that. This is like Himmler complaining that nobody makes good bagels any more.

Just keep it in mind.

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To make a case against the viability of a modern socialist state—particularly one that relies on exporting natural resources—one need only point to Venezuela. Since President Nicolás Maduro ascended to power following the death of Hugo Chavez, the country’s economy has spiraled into a meltdown replete with shortages of basic commodities, depletion of reserves, pawning of fixed assets, and hyperinflation north of 100 percent annually.

The foundational principle of socialism is theft. A political system that does not respect the right of property will respect no other right, and eventually descends into kleptocracy as government workers accrue all power and status to themselves. Venezuela is merely the most recent poster child for this inevitable truth.

The Other McCain comes out and says what everybody knows.

This has profound repercussions, because every intelligent college student is aware of the political biases of the faculty. Because the left-wing prejudice of professors is so extreme — 14-to-1 — young conservatives know that they have a near-zero chance of ever being employed in academia. Therefore, conservatives simply don’t pursue advanced degrees that would qualify them for such employment. No matter how much interest a conservative student might have in a field like psychology or history, there is no incentive for a conservative to seek a Ph.D., because no university would ever knowingly hire a conservative scholar.

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Discrimination against conservatives in academia, in turn, influences the larger culture. An obvious reason for the blatant bias of the mainstream media is that all the university professors who train journalists are Obama voters. Go to Northwestern University or Columbia University and try to find a Republican on the communications, journalism or political science faculty. Think about this: Who is the most successful radio broadcaster of the past 25 years? Rush Limbaugh. Has any university communications department in America ever asked Rush Limbaugh to lecture their students? Don’t be absurd.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

One of the most wrong-headed people I know, is fond of saying “It’s true to a certain extent.” She says this when something is undeniably true, but to acknowledge the undeniable truth would be to concede defeat about something she wants. And I don’t think she’s ever been compelled to go without something she wants, so she goes after this “certain extent” thing. She doesn’t really have any such certain-extent in mind, she’s just avoiding things. The same is true of liberals when they argue with you on the Internet.

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Furthermore, progressives are — progressive. If the application of the word contains a shred of honesty to it at all, it is because they don’t believe in standing still. There’s no “certain extent” or optimal level of anything. We all know it. Liberals argue as if we could achieve this optimal level, and they’d go away happy. The ensuing years would not bring any of them back to say something like “It’s a problem that the rich aren’t paying their fair share” — they wouldn’t say that, because everyone would be paying their fair share already. Does anyone believe that? If you do, you’re just wrong. Progressives progress.

Exactly right. The God of ‘progressives’ is progress, and progress doesn’t occur without change. Therefore, change must always be happening, otherwise progress cannot occur. So there’s no such thing as ‘enough’. The goalposts are always receding into the distance.

The Left, as we know it today, pulls this crap pretty often. “Oh but it’s not one or the other, there are shades of gray in between.” They have yet to define how that matters. Increments show that a measurement is relative; when we observe that a point on the Earth’s surface is East of one thing but West of another, this proves the relativity. It does not, however, show that East is West, or vice-versa. And the same is true of relative measurements that deal with abundance and absence, like heat & cold, light & darkness. So, no. Even if you can define your increments of something like gender, which would really just be more nonsense, this still wouldn’t show that men are women, or women are men. These are two different things.

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All lives matter, or black lives matter? Supposedly, there’s something wrong with “all lives matter.” But what?