Read it.

Anestos Canelides’ latest essay concerns Faisal Mohammad, the young culture-enricher who stabbed and injured four people at the University of California Merced on November 4 before being shot dead by campus police. Publication of this piece was delayed first by the Paris Massacre and then by the San Bernardino Massacre. Yet it is closely related to both events, even though the incident in Merced was of lesser scope — in all these cases, the perpetrators were following the Way of Mohammed.

Read it.

As reported in recent news feeds, both Austria and Macedonia have tightened up their borders to try to slow down the influx of migrants coming in from Greece (and ultimately from Turkey). The video report below shows the building of the new fence between Slovenia and Austria, as well as the backup of refugees at the border between Greece and Macedonia.

On of the “youths” interviewed for this report says, “They should’ve stopped us in Turkey.” And indeed they should have. But the current “refugee” crisis in Europe is the result of a Turkish decision to stop stopping the people-smugglers. For reasons of state policy, the Turkish government decided to let the traffickers conduct their business without further interference.

By the way — I’m told that if you look closely the shirtless “youth” who turns his back to the camera, you can see by the label that he is wearing designer clothing.

Steve Sailer boils it down.

For example, the ongoing Black Autumn protests on college campuses are in part an outgrowth of the near-universal demand for diversity that spreads blacks in a thin layer across practically every college with enough of an endowment to afford affirmative action. Much of the hysteria on display by black students this fall stems from homeboys and, especially, homegirls feeling uncomfortable by having been made so welcome on diversity-worshipping campuses across the country. Because the institutional competition for black students is so fierce—every prestigious college’s admissions department has its quotas to fill—black students aren’t allowed to clump up naturally in large groups at a few colleges, where they’d feel more at home.

…

For example, we are lectured that only xenophobic nativists worry about allowing Muslims to move en masse to Western countries because concepts like nationalism are obsolete, divisive, and uncool. But the sons of Muslim migrants pay no attention to these sermons denouncing territorial instincts. They tend to grow up on the streets of Europe to be extremely controlling of their turf, often forming street gangs to harass non-Muslim men and groom underage infidel girls.

Read it.

Welcome to the 20th century, guys. Still got a hundred years to go, but that’s commendable progress.

Read it.

Scalia made the very reasonable suggestion that perhaps it isn’t doing black students any favors by admitting them to a school on the basis of their skin color rather than their qualifications, and the Usual Suspects in the Drive-By Media had the expected meltdown.

This commentary demonstrates mismatch of a kind — the mismatch between a serious Supreme Justice and a press corps too lazy, too ideologically left-wing, and/or too politically correct to engage an argument that, though controversial, is well-rooted in research and legal scholarship.

More broadly, we see an example of a dangerous tendency. Too often nowadays, arguments and assertions of fact are judged by whether they are “offensive,” not by whether they are valid or true. A joke can be judged by its offensiveness (in addition to its humor). However, arguments should be judged only by whether they are valid and assertions of fact only by whether they are true.

Read it.

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Folks at the moovel lab were curious about how true this statement is, so they tested it out. They laid a grid on top of Europe, and then algorithmically found a route from each cell in the grid to Rome, resulting in about half a million routes total. Yep, there seems to be a way from Rome from every point.

Read it.

India’s crucial role at the climate change talks in Paris has once again been underlined by a high-level outreach by the United States, including a call to Prime Minister Modi from President Barack Obama who hopes to cement his legacy with an ambitious global agreement on curbing global warming.

God forbid he should spend any time doing his job, which is protecting the American people from their enemies, such as Muslim jihadists.

Obama reached out to Modi on Tuesday in an attempt to break the deadlock at the climate summit, where the responsibility of developing countries such as India in tackling rising global temperatures has been a sticking point.

That’s because the ‘developed nations’ are wanting the ‘developing nations’ to bear the bulk of the expense for fixing ‘global warming’, and the ‘developing nations’ rightly suspect that it’s a crock of shit — which it is.

Sources said an agreement in Paris will not be possible without India and the US converging on a range of issues. A lot is at stake for both countries as the Paris climate agreement on limiting carbon emissions and financing cleaner energy will have a far reaching impact on their economies.’

And that’s the problem in a nutshell. The proposed ‘policies to address climate change’ are going to cost somebody a lot of money, and the argument is (as always) about Who Pays So That Progressives Can Feel Good.

Obama, who faces opposition to his clean energy plan in the Republican-controlled US Congress – both chambers – and multiple states, wants to leave the White House next year with a “climate legacy” that protects American interests.

The hard reality that there is no such thing possible doesn’t intrude on his fantasy world in the slightest. The Selfie & Hashtag President just doesn’t see why everybody doesn’t get with the program.

“There was very little agreement on most issues,” a negotiator from a developing country said.

And you can carve that in stone.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal actually does some journalism, unlike the knee-jerks of the rest of the Drive-By Media.

Executive Summary: People are tired of the Political Correctness straightjacket into which they have been crammed by the existing Ruling Class, and they rejoice to see somebody who’s willing actually to say what they’ve been thinking. The don’t like where the country is today, they hate Barack Obama, they hate the mainstream media, they’re suspicious of Muslims, and they don’t buy the media meme that it’s unreasonable to feel that way.

“Right now the establishment Republicans just died,” Mr. Luntz said.

And good riddance.

Mark Steyn shows our tax dollars at work.

In the US Senate, at least on Tuesday, senators wander in and out constantly. Their five-minute “question” sessions are generally four-minute prepared statements of generalized blather followed by a perfunctory softball to “their” witness, after which they leave the room without waiting to hear the answer – and then come back in when it’s their time to speak again at which point the staffer feeds them the four-minute blather they’re supposed to be sloughing off this time round. The video doesn’t capture the fakery of the event because under Senate rules the camera is generally just on whoever’s speaking. Whether this meets the “decorum” of the Senate, it certainly doesn’t meet the decorum of life; it’s a breach of the normal courtesies – and, frankly, Americans are the chumps of the planet for putting up with it. Since the 17th Amendment, senators have been citizen-legislators like any other, and so their contempt for the citizenry who have graciously consented, at their own time and expense to appear before them, demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the relationship.

Take this guy Brian Schatz, the Senator from Hawaii. He did his shtick, lobbed a softball at his witness, Rear Admiral Titley, and stood up to leave. I said I’d like to respond, and he demurred on the grounds that he was outta there, he had to get back to washing his hair or whatever. I said I’d still like to respond to what he said, and so I did – to an empty chair. A pseudo-parliament is a fine place in which to debate pseudo-science, but “decorum” has nothing to do with it.

Read it.

A while ago WUWT wrote about the inexplicable green fascination with technological monstrosities, such as artificial trees, to replace real trees. And of course we already know about the green love of wind turbines and solar farms, which cover vast acreages of the natural landscape with concrete, plastic and steel.

Now greens appear to have gone one better – toxic artificial trees which emit cyanide.

Hooray.

Read it.

One of the goals of Californians who traveled to Paris for climate talks this week was to showcase green-energy businesses that are succeeding in the state.

But on Monday it was the “coercive power” of government for which Gov. Jerry Brown was seeking credit.

Regulations, he said at an event with billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer at an art museum in the city, “work hand in glove” with innovation, forcing companies to adapt to cleaner technologies. Brown held out the introduction of the catalytic converter and the proliferation of renewable energy as examples of industry responding to regulation.

“You do have to have, at the end of the day, a regulation, a law,” he said. “Progress comes from well-designed regulatory objectives that business then follows.”

Later, at the site where world leaders are meeting to negotiate a climate pact outside of Paris, Brown urged a small crowd to “never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”

“You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating,” the Democratic governor said. “And, shall I say, keep taxing.”

And there you have it … right out of the horse’s ass mouth.

Yet another reason not to live in California.

Read it.

I’ll bet they’re really great wings.

Read it.

Just a few ‘lone wolves’. Nothing to worry about. Islam is a Religion of Peace(TM)!

Read it.

Adults these days are as educated as they have ever been, but poverty is no lower than it was in 1991. This is not because the few lingering people with “less than high school” have soaked up all the poverty. Quite the contrary: poverty has simply moved up the educational scale. The poor in 2014 were the most educated poor in history.

Read it.

Just so you’ll know.

Read it.

The U.S. population contains just about twice as many Jews as Muslims. Yet Jews were the target of four times as many hate crimes as Muslims in this country.

A fact you won’t see in the Drive-By Media, who are too busy wringing their hands over non-existent ‘Islamophobia’.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Trump’s Luck is the pattern that whenever the national media announces that This Time, Trump Has Gone Too Far, the next day’s headlines will be about some outrage validating Trump’s general point. For example, remember last summer when everybody respectable was worked up over Trump saying the Mexican ruling class dumps their unwanted, low quality people on America as illegal aliens and … a five time deported Mexican illegal alien murdered that poor lady on the waterfront in San Francisco?

Today, the FBI investigation into San Bernardino is turning up all sorts of details that would be hilarious if there weren’t so many dead people.

Read it.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been on a tear denouncing his most recent commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama.

His latest salvo came last week in a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post. Gates painted a picture of what our next president must be simply by listing, bullet point by bullet point, everything that Obama is not.

…

His thinly veiled critique comes as many express frustration over a lack of leadership from a lame-duck president who seems more preoccupied with checking off boxes in his “legacy” agenda — Pacific trade deal, Iran nuclear deal, any sort of climate-change deal (regardless of how meaningless) — than in putting out the fires of successive crises abroad.

This frustration culminated in widespread criticism of Obama’s prime-time address Sunday on terrorism, which, clocking in at 13 minutes and coming four days after the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings, seemed to many to be too little, too late.

Read it.

The Democrat program to produce a country that consists of a wealthy Overclass and a dependent-on-government-benefits Underclass is well underway.

Mark Steyn lays out some inconvenient truth.

I switched on Fox News in my hotel room this morning to catch Bill Hemmer saying that this means “Seven of the nine terrorists were European.” As the Guardian report continues:

The latest information means that all of the assailants identified so far were French or Belgian, all native French speakers, and the attacks increasingly appear to have been part of a homegrown terror plot.

So “Europeans” are the principal security threat. Along with “Americans” like “28-year-old California man Syed Farook”.

This is why the public is not joining the media, the Democrats and the GOP establishment in getting the vapors over Donald Trump’s comments about Muslim immigration. The men pulling the triggers in Paris and San Bernardino are men with French, Belgian and US passports, but they are not “French”, “Belgian” or “American” in any meaningful sense. They regard their primary identity as Muslim – and their citizenship as a mere travel document. So it doesn’t require a large leap to wonder whether Islam is, in fact, an issue.

Mark also agrees with me on ‘radicalized’.

~The latest brain-dead euphemism is “radicalized”. As in: Oh, did you hear about poor Mohammed? He became radicalized. Don’t know how it happened. He went out for a stroll in the park, and somehow came back “radicalized”. This morning FBI Director Comey, in a fine demonstration of what a money-no-object bureaucracy can buy, announced that Syed Farook and his lovely bride had become “radicalized” even before they began (in Comey’s delightful formulation) “courting”.

Read it.

The syringe is used to fill a gunshot wound with small sponges that fight infection and help stop the bleeding of the most traumatic injuries.

Read it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a complete major media freakout like last night’s NBC Nightly News coverage of Trump—it tops even the breathless coverage of the “constitutional crisis” of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973. You can watch it at the link above if you are a glutton, but suffice it to say the NBC News crew failed in concealing their animus and panic toward Trump (I thought NBC’s foreign correspondent Richard Engel was going to have an embolism on camera, and Andrea Mitchell looked like she’d need another facelift by the end of her report) and, by extension, his millions of supporters who are presumed to be semi-literate gun-toting racist xenophobes . . . have I left anything out? Oh yeah—Trump’s supporters probably eat at Denny’s and don’t listen to NPR. The horror.

…

Covering Trump has to be the best thing since the invention of moveable type: you never know what he’s going to say.

Trump is the most entertainment to happen in an election since Ross Perot.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine calls out the Great Obfuscator.

Freeberg nails it again.

The snooty, snotty, condescending phrase “that’s not who we are” has overstayed its welcome by a good long stretch, much like the house guests reminding of the dictum that “guests, and fish, smell after three days” — and then continuing to squat for another year or two. It’s at the point where we all should start asking ourselves how it came to be that we tolerated it this long; it reflects poorly on the nation. Aren’t we supposed to have guts and conviction in this country? And can you claim to have them, if some gasbag at a podium can persuade you to engage, or even consider, a complete one-eighty-degree course correction by throwing out some paternalistic, hackneyed catchphrase? The solution makes more of the same problem, for that is not who — you know the rest.

To the phrase ‘that’s now who we are’, the only rational response is ‘what do you mean “we”, paleface?’ (Tonto was an undiscovered gem of a political philosopher).

That’s kind of, you know, the whole point. If we aspire to be anything definable, there are going to have to be some restrictions. That’s how any organism or construct declares what it is, by way of rejecting the unlike, not by way of embracing the like. It says “I’m absolutely incompatible with that thing, over there,” and the definition is made. Such things also protect themselves against threats this way, by forming policies, written and unwritten, essentially saying “I’m not going there, and if it comes here, I’m moving.”

Well said. The number of groups in which ‘we’ includes both me and Paul Ryan is shrinking as he speaks.

But he’s [Trump] opened a very worthwhile debate that his opposition, perhaps deliberately, has turned into a very silly one. The citizenry has been led down a primrose path here; a lot of people don’t understand how much precedent such a plan has, or how unprecedented our current “Hoover Vac” immigration policy is.

It is a worthwhile and very necessary debate, one in which the Democrats and quasi-Democrats in the Republican Party are avoiding as if it had cooties.

The American solution is to look at what sort of immigrant is trying to make a life here. What kind of life is to be made? And what nobody is discussing is, the democrat solution: Go ahead and look into it, and make sure that life is one of dependency. To get on the welfare systems, stay on them, and create whole new generations of second- and third-generation immigrants, also made dependent and embracing dependency, from the crib to the crypt. So that democrats can win more elections.

The shootings in San Bernardino underline in blood that even Muslims who were born in this country can go jihadist-mass-murderer, and there’s no way to tell who that will be before it happens. That’s why it’s a problem with Islam, just a problem with certain people who, oh, just by the way, happen to be Muslim. Buddhists don’t do this shit, Hindus don’t do this shit, Jains and Sikhs and Taoists don’t do this shit; only Muslims (and wackos, which we will have always with us) do this shit. So that’s where we need to focus our attention. And the Political Correctness twitch about NOT NOTICING does not do us any favors here.

As far as the theatrical outrage about crossing some uncrossable line of bigotry, or some such. I find it thoroughly revolting that anybody, anywhere, would reach up to take solutions off the table, before it’s been made clear in any way that there are still solutions on the table that might work. Or even, that anything will work. This is not a fight our country has won yet, so who are these people working so hard to eliminate possibilities? It’s become such a regular thing, nobody seems to question it anymore; it’s yet another primrose path down which we have been innocently toddling, for years, decades, generations — we approach a particularly vexing problem that has evaded any promising solution for some indeterminate length of time, and before anybody can shed some rays of hope upon it here comes some jackass trying to make himself sound more important with a lot of “No no, oh heavens no, win or lose we can NEVER do X.”

Read it.

In Washington, the nation’s two most powerful Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined on Tuesday in the GOP establishment’s near-universal condemnation of the presidential candidate’s proposal. But in Iowa and New Hampshire, the key early nominating states, Trump’s backers moved forcefully to counter party insiders’ censure.

“It is un-Republican, it is unconstitutional and it is un-American,”Jennifer Horn, the New Hampshire state party chairman said in a statement.

That prompted New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who backs Mr. Trump, to call for Ms. Horn’s resignation. He said establishment Republicans “don’t like Trump because he tells it like it is. I’m not prejudiced against Muslims, but until we can straighten them out and know who’s who and who is coming into our country, we have to stop the immigration.”

This actually may be a healthy thing for the Republican Party. There has long been a divide between the ‘establishment’ or ‘country club’ faction in the party, which pretty much controls the formal party structure and encompasses most Republican-affiliated legislators, and the ‘movement conservative’ wing, which makes up a strong party of the Tea Party movement and which has criticized the other faction as me-tooist semi-Democrats. Trump’s candidacy has hit this fault line with a meat cleaver, and whatever effect it has on this season’s Presidential race, it may spark an internal ideological revolution and re-alignment in the GOP. Interesting times.

Read it.

The evening after, FDR was to have had dinner with Edward R. Murrow. Instead, they had sandwiches and a midnight snack in the White House and FDR spilled all the beans — which battleships had been sunk and all the rest. FDR said nothing about being “off the record.” Murrow, the first celebrity journalist, decided to… keep the information private until after the president addressed the United States in Congress Assembled. He felt that the People should get the news from the president, not from a radio reporter. Who among the Late Modern fourth estate would show such judgement?

But another theme ran silently throughout the background. In one scene, the dead from the attack are buried unceremoniously in a mass grave and the news film shows only about two dozen of the survivors in attendance. Everyone else was off getting the ships repaired and prepping for war with Japan.

In contrast, sneak attacks by a determined enemy today elicit not the grim determination of 1941, but a fusillade of mutual hugs, tears, teddy bears and lighted candles. That will make the enemy quail! They might have guns, but by gum! we have flowers. The enemy will also flee from our barrage of self-doubt and our plaintive questions about how we brought this on ourselves. Not to mention the focus not on the enemy who wrought or encouraged the attacks, but on our keepers who didn’t warn us about it ahead of time.

Read it.

And if you think this has nothing to do with Donald Trump, go to the back of the class.

Read it.

A study for the National Literacy Trust shows a remarkable improvement in reading ability amongst boys who do their reading online through ebooks.

The researchers studied the boys’ reading performance for an average of 4.2 months – and found that their reading age improved by 8.4 months during that period.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

We are confidently told that religious tests have never been used in determining who gets into America and therefore America must take in any Muslim not currently wearing a suicide bomb vest. Or something.

But a reader points out the U.S. State Department’s Religious Minorities refugee program under the Lautenberg Amendment.

Of course, that’s to favor rather than disfavor certain religious minorities. But the principle is still the same.

Since 1989, the U.S. has admitted more than 440,000 refugees processed according to standards of the Lautenberg Amendment, which applies to members of specified religious minorities (Jews, Evangelicals, and certain members of the Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian Orthodox Churches) from the countries of the former Soviet Union. In FY 2012, the U.S. admitted 1,129 refugees from 11 countries in Europe and Central Asia, including those under the Lautenberg Amendment in-country processing program.

Read it.

1. Avoid wog food.
2. Most especially, avoid hipster fake wog food.
3. Dead cow and spuds constitute the basis of all true civilization.

Read it.

A study appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that specifically three-dimensional video games can boost performance on memory tests by up to 12 percent. Researchers note that this is typically the percentage of memory function lost between the ages of 45 and 75.

“Just by playing a commercial video game and by exploring the world in it, you seem to get better in your ability to learn and remember details of other events,” Craig Stark said, in an email to Popular Science.

So there.

Read it. And watch the video.

A Connecticut teenager named Austin Haughwout created a global stir a few months back when he posted a video of a homemade drone firing a handgun he had attached to the aircraft. Yesterday he upped the ante on weaponized aerial robots, posting a clip to YouTube of a drone with a flamethrower roasting a Thanksgiving turkey.

Like all smart YouTube creators, Haughwout leveraged his fame to entice #brands into paying to sponsor his content. In this case the video was backed by HobbyKing, an online retailer that sells all kinds of parts for DIY drones. No word on who provided the turkey, but the fuel pump for the flamethrower came from Amazon.

‘The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.’

Read it.

Rutgers University recently dedicated an entire week to celebrate Paul Robeson, an avowed communist who spoke out vehemently against the U.S. government during the post-WWII era.

Robeson was one of the greatest bass voices in the country’s history, an astonishingly talented man who perverted that talent in the service of one of the world’s foulest dictatorships. He represents one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.

Read it.

The organization I founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned – usually with success – on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.

When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.

Now Greenpeace has knowingly made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth. By opposing capitalism, it stands against the one system of economics that has been most successful in regulating and restoring the environment.

Read it.

Sometimes the system works.

A 22-year-old man reportedly out to burglarize a few homes in Brevard County found out the hard way that crime doesn’t pay.

According to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, a burglary suspect they were actively looking for on Nov. 13 realized deputies were hot on his trail and chose to hide near Barefoot Bay lake. That decision proved fatal.

While hiding near the water, it seems the burglary suspect, identified as Matthew Riggins, ran afoul of an 11-foot alligator. Seeing easy prey, the gator attacked.

Riggins, the sheriff’s office said, drowned as a result of that attack. His body, however, wasn’t found until 10 days after the initial burglary call came in.

Read it.

Which wouldn’t work, because of the Islamic doctrine of Taquiya.

Read it.

Just as thousands of birds migrate every year in search of better weather, thousands of jobs in food manufacturing, such as those in the candy-making industry, migrate out of the country in search of cheaper sugar. Who is to blame behind the mass exodus of jobs? The culprit is none other than the federal government. Through the U.S. Sugar Program, the federal government artificially raises the price of sugar in the U.S. to double the world price, just to benefit a small number of sugar farmers.

Crony ‘crapitalism’ red in tooth and claw.

The U.S. Sugar Program is a relic of Depression-era policy. Its origins start when the federal government passed The Sugar At of 1934. The original program sought to protect U.S. sugar farmers with generous protectionist policies and special treatment. Since then, the sugar program has ballooned in size, thanks to the efforts of special interests.

Special interests that, oddly enough, our Ruling Class cannot seem to work around.

Because of these protectionist policies, the price of sugar in the U.S. is twice the world price. The price of sugar cost American consumers up to $3.5 billion every year in higher prices for sugar-containing food, and of course sugar itself. For an individual family, the sugar program adds an extra $40 on their grocery bill every year.

Although Food Nazis will say that this is a good thing.

Above all, the biggest casualty of the sugar program is jobs – the Sugar Program has forced the migration of thousands of good-paying jobs in the food manufacturing industry. Yet unlike the thousands of migrating birds, however, these jobs do not return to the U.S. As ATR President Grover Norquist and Congressman Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) recently wrote in the National Review, we must finally put an end to this expensive, insider sweetheart deal.

But, sad to say, Obama has more serious things to worry about — like climate change.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine is not impressed by Obama the Preacher Man.

President Obama fancies himself a progressive in the Progressive tradition. He wants not only to ride the wave of the future but to sense where it is going and give it a nudge. As with all good progressives, it is history by which Obama takes his bearings, not the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. Thus in his Oval Office speech this past Sunday, he declared that “we are on the right side of history.” Steve Hayward deals with the thought underlying this claim here.

The argument from history is a weak argument to begin with, but Obama does no honor to it. Recall that Obama came out in favor of preserving the democratic “process” in Egypt in order to support Mohammed Morsi. Obama sought to preserve Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt. The damage Morsi’s authoritarian governance had done to rule of law and the other fundamentals of a free society were left unspoken.

But this is inevitable. The core dogma of ‘progressivism’ is that Progress Is Inevitable (‘right side of history’) and so Change Invariably Leads To Progress; so, if at first your changes don’t succeed, just keep changing until the desired progress comes around on the guitar.

Obama would love to find a way to get the United States aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas branch in Gaza and Iran’s Hezbollah subsidiary in Syria and Lebanon. They are the logical destination of his Middle Eastern fantasies. Coincidentally, Obama has just named a fan of Hamas as his Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria. In the Middle East, anyway, Obama is riding the wave of the eighth century.

And so, to the extent that Obama is on any side of history, his is the Wrong Side — that ship sailed over a thousand years ago.

WE ARE ENGAGED IN A GREAT EXISTENTIAL WAR with an oppressive totalitarian ideology that has been Stealing People’s Stuff for over 1400 years. It isn’t going to change any time soon. And our leaders have to bit the bullet and accept reality, or we are going to keep losing.

The FBI has finally, with much sighing and moaning, admitted that the the San Bernardino shooters were ‘radicalized’.

Don’t you just love that word, ‘radicalized’? Sounds like a treatment — like sanforized, anodized, bastardized, caramelized, generalized, homogenized, etc. But the key aspect of being ‘-ized’ is that it is something that is done to you, not something for which you are responsible; not a free choice, but an Occurrence, like getting caught in the rain, or imbedded in carbonite by Darth Vader.

This is all a part of the Narrative, in which nobody who is a member of a Fashionable Victim Class is ever responsible for what they do, but rather are puppets being pushed along by the Evil Racist Sexist Homophobic Islamophobic society in which they happen to find themselves.

The chief intellectual defect of ‘progressives’ is this refusal to believe that people are free agents, who make choices and who are responsible for the results of those choices. (Hat tip to the Forces of History via Cultural Marxism.) If nobody is responsible (except Republicans, the ‘1%’ who don’t vote Democrat, and maybe the Koch brothers), then everybody is a victim, and as victims deserve hugs and money.

Unfortunately, being shot (or blown up) by a ‘victim’ has the exact same effect as getting shot (or blown up) by a far-right-wing neo-Nazi secretly-KKK NRA member. No difference — except in which direction the fingers get pointed.

This is the chief thing for which ‘progressives’ will have to answer to history: The denial of free will, the deeply religious belief that We’re All To Blame, and so none of us are.

George Will lays out some inconvenient truth.

Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income inequality, and their current hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), favors increasing the tax system’s progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of the income tax, it is timely to note that there still is no intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation.

Arguments for it are invariably arguments for increased equality of social outcomes. Because individuals have different vocational desires and different aptitudes for adding value to the economy, inequality is inevitable. Because individuals have different social sensibilities, opinions will differ about what degrees of inequality are intolerably unlovely (more about this aesthetic metric in a moment). But inequality, even when unlovely to some, is unjust only when it arises from unjust social arrangements. So, the degree to which inequality is morally troubling depends on the degree to which the process that allocates wealth does so according to political influence and rent-seeking rather than merit and self-reliance.

…

Proportionate taxation always is what progressive taxation never is: simple. What justifies progressive taxation, and characterizes progressivism, is confidence that at any moment in society’s endless evolution, what is equitable can be known and society can be fine-tuned to achieve it. Which is how we got our baroque tax code.

Freeberg adds some additional insight:

There are people who hate money. No seriously. They bring it home, and figure the odds are stacked against them because after they’ve paid the essentials and made the minimum payments on the credit cards, which are maxed, there’s nothing. If this is ever discussed anywhere, it leads to some dirge about how the situation came to be, the high debt is the aftermath of some health crisis or what-not…but, nobody ever plotted a decent course forward by looking back at where he’d been. The real issue is that if the debt wasn’t high, they wouldn’t know what to do. If the debt was somehow gone tomorrow, and they had ten grand in the checking account, they wouldn’t see it as the end of a calamity but rather as the beginning of one. The money would represent an unfinished task, an unsolved problem.

Hand them $50, they start looking for things that cost $60. These are people who will never have money left at the end of the month. Ever. Because the simple fact of the matter is that isn’t what they want to have happen.

Mark Steyn sums it up.

As the President and Attorney General see it, the biggest national security threat is apparently bigoted, racist, Islamophobic Americans. Useful to know.

Hard to understand why he still consents to be President of such a place. Perhaps he ought to resign and move back to Kenya.

Read it.

Egyptian religious scholars are now admitting what few of them ever even wanted to discuss openly; that Egyptian Islamic scholars provide the religious justification for groups like ISIL (al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant). Making this public is a side effect of yet another outbreak of Islamic terrorism in Egypt. The last one, in the 1990s, took years to suppress and that campaign only managed to eliminate the most violent Islamic radicals inside Egypt. Many of the Islamic terrorist leaders fled to other countries (one now leads al Qaeda) and many of the Islamic scholars who inspired the Islamic terrorists (but never officially joined Islamic terrorist organizations) remained free on the understanding that they would not encourage any more Islamic terrorists. That restriction began to erode after the 2011 revolution that overthrew the Mubarak dictatorship that had long enforced it. Now some of those pro-Islamic terror scholars are having second thoughts.

Read it.

In the last few weeks watertight doors have been clanging shut all along the route taken by the “refugee” flood of that’s been overflowing Europe since the middle of last summer. The point of entry is Greece — specifically, the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean — and the last border that has been tightened is the first one the migrants have to cross, the one between Greece and Macedonia.

The Macedonian government has put up razor-wire barriers and placed restrictions on which asylum-seekers may enter. Needless to say, the “refugees” are unhappy, and are making their feelings known. “Open [the border] or die” — yep, that’s the sort of sentiment that’s bound to melt the hearts of Europeans and cause them to welcome the “New Europeans” into their homes and larders.

Culture-enriching “youths” at one border crossing tore down part of the razor-wire barrier, attacked police, threw stones, and engaged in some of the other high-spirited antics that have made them so popular all over Europe.

Read it.

Constitution? What Constitution? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution.

“Obviously this is a country that is based on free speech,” Lynch told the audience at the Muslim Advocates dinner in Arlington, VA. “But when that edges towards violence…we will take action.”

Except when it’s by Muslims, of course. That would be ‘Islamophobic’.

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It is the last great taboo of genetic medicine but some scientists now believe the time has come to consider the deliberate engineering of human eggs, sperm or embryos in order to block the transmission of inherited disorders by altering the DNA of all subsequent generations of affected families.

Why is this a problem? Because Government is standing in the way.

Germ-line gene therapy is banned in Britain and 14 other European countries but recent advances in the technology of gene-editing has meant that society should once again debate the idea of deliberating changing the genomes of future generations of children, scientists said.

God forbid that anything be outside of the control of the government, even if it saves lives.

“This technology is poised to transform preventive medicine. Rather than talk about the possibility of banning alteration of the human germ-line, we should instead be discussing how to stimulate ways to improve its safety and efficacy,” said Professor George Church, a leading geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Good luck with that.

“Banning human germline editing could put a damper on the best medical research and instead drive the practice underground to black markets and uncontrolled medical tourism, which are fraught with much greater risk and misapplication,” Professor Church said.

Thank God for the ‘black market’, otherwise human progress would grind to a stop.

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In his lamentable speech last night, President Obama concluded that we could be confident of defeating ISIS because we are “on the right side of history.” As though “history” cares about us, and has something tangible like the force of gravity to bring to someone’s side. It’s what substitutes for gravitas among liberals. As the Wall Street Journal commented this morning, “History is made, not delivered as a birthright, and victory against killers has to be won.”

“The right side of history” is perhaps the laziest trope in the liberal lexicon, but it has a serious intellectual pedigree. By coincidence, this morning I was re-reading Leo Strauss’s lecture “Progress or Return?”, and came across this long passage that explores not the depths, but the total abyss, behinds this commonplace cliché.

This slogan is a pure reflection of the ‘progressive’ belief that Progress Is Inevetable (progress being defined as things going their way) and that history inevitably moves in their direction, and their ain’t nothin’ you kin do about it.

The connection with the Hegelian thought behind Marxism is obvious, and organic.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

No round doors or windows, though.

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Muslim engineers, that is.

More than twice as many members of violent Islamist organizations have engineering degrees as have degrees in Islamic studies. Nearly half of those terrorists who had degrees had degrees in engineering. Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance. They find a similar pattern among Islamist terrorists who grew up in the West – fewer of these terrorists had college degrees, but even more of those who had degrees were engineers.

So much for the H1-B Visa crowd.

Read it.

Trump has no set in stone an ideology other than winning. If he has to modify some of the promises he made during the Republican primary in order to win the general election, who doubts he will? And just try and call him out on it. When has Trump ever been harmed by being caught in a flip-flop or a lie? He just denies he has flip-flopped or lied, even when there is overwhelming evidence, and moves along. Such a strategy doesn’t work for most candidates, but for some reason it works for Donald Trump.

Just as it worked for Bill Clinton, who I will remind you got two terms despite being a serial liar and rapist.

What’s more, once he is the nominee, Trump-The-Master-Brander will immediately attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton in the same manner he destroyed “low-energy” Jeb Bush and some of his other primary contenders.

The biter bit. I would find that entertaining.