Read it.

To identify the cities most likely to boom over the next 10 years, we took the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on eight metrics indicative of past, present and future vitality. We factored in, equally, the percentage of children in the population, the birth rate, net domestic migration, the percentage of the population aged 25-44 with a bachelor’s degree, income growth, the unemployment rate, and population growth.

…

The most vital parts of urban America can be encapsulated largely in one five-letter word: Texas. All four of Texas’ major metro areas made our top 10. Austin, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth and San Antonio are very different places, but they all have enjoyed double-digit job growth from 2010 through 2014, well above the national average of 8.1%. They also all have posted income growth well above the national average.

But the biggest divergence from the pack may be demographics. The Texas cities have become major people magnets, with huge growth in their populations of young, educated millennials and households with children. The clear star of the show is No. 1-ranked Austin, which has become the nation’s superlative economy over the past decade.

Read it.

Unfortunately, this comes as a surprise to some people.

Read it and weep.

National Geographic, which until recently was an excellent magazine about travel and the wide world, is now just another Voice of the Crust.

Example: the subhead for the above title, which is “A new book looks at extreme priviledge in an unequal world.’ Not only do they not know what the word privilege means, they can’t even spell it correctly.

Presumably whoever wrote that line went to a government school — all the traces are there. (I suspect that Becky Little’s real first name is ‘Chicken’.)

Read it.

It is against the law to sell homemade baked goods in Wisconsin. Cookies, brownies, muffins, whatever. Those who violate the law potentially face up to $1,000 in fines and up to six months in jail.

…

Wisconsin’s GazetteXtra notes that the Wisconsin Bakery Association also lobbied against the bill, saying that commercial operators “don’t need more competition; we need cooperation from our government!” Well, there wasn’t even a mask to slip off, was there? They are simply saying that the government should protect them from the marketplace, and it doesn’t even occur to them that this is wrong and unconstitutional, or they just don’t care.

Read it.

The pigeons of Image Politics come home to roost.

The new year began with an underground nuclear-bomb test in North Korea, the worst first week for the Dow since 1897, and Iran forcing 10 U.S. sailors to their knees.

But the man delivering the State of the Union is “optimistic” because “unconditional love” will win.

Of course he is. His job is safe, and his pension guaranteed.

Mr. Obama said in his speech that the economy is producing jobs, which is true, and that it is “peddling fiction” to say the U.S. economy “is in decline.” Really?

The U.S. economy’s average annual growth rate since World War II has been about 3%. In Mr. Obama’s seven years it has been about 2%. Some 65% of people think the U.S. is on the wrong track. You can discover a lot about the wrong track in that missing 1% of economic growth, Mr. Obama’s “new normal.”

Everybody who is paying attention realizes that the economy is anemic at best. Of course, that category rarely includes President Obama.

The leaders of Communist China lie awake at night worrying about creating 10 million new jobs every year to prevent a revolution. The elected leader of the U.S. lies awake every night thinking about jobs making . . . windmills and solar panels.

And we’ve got a revolution.

Well, it’s pretty revolting, that’s true.

Both the Republican and, to a lesser extent, Democratic parties have elements now who want to pull down the temple. But for all the politicized agitation, both these movements, in power, would produce stasis—no change at all.

Donald Trump would preside over a divided government or, as he has promised and un-promised, a trade war with China. Hillary or Bernie will enlarge the Obama economic regime. Either outcome guarantees four more years of at best 2% economic growth. That means more of the above. That means 18-year-olds voting for the first time this year will face historically weak job opportunities through 2020 at least.

Under any of these three, an Americanized European social-welfare state will evolve because Washington—and this will include many “conservatives”—will answer still-rising popular anger with new income redistributions.

And for years afterward, Barack Obama will stroll off the 18th green, smiling. Mission, finally, accomplished.

Read it.

David Brooks, the pet ‘conservative’ columnist for the New York Times, reveals himself publicly as just another shill for the Crust.

For our younger readers, the transitive verb “to bork” is an eponym from the late Robert Bork, whom Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated to the high court in 1987. Political lexicographer William Safire defined it as to “attack viciously a candidate or appointee, especially by misrepresentation in the media.”

…

Brutalism is a style of architecture, but Brooks means to repurpose the term as an ideological slur—and a religious one.

“In his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues,” Brooks writes. “Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy.”

That line of attack is redolent of the late Sen. Howell Heflin, an Alabama Democrat who—as George Will noted the following year—said he opposed Bork in part because, as the senator put it, he was “disturbed by his [Bork’s] refusal to discuss his belief in God—or the lack thereof.”

Scott Johnson, a Real Lawyer, reviews the Haley case that causes Brooks such heartburn here and concludes that Cruz had a legitimate case.

I would be surprised if Haley did not know that Texas has a three-strikes law. When he committed the second felony he obviously knew that he had been accused of the first felony (he was convicted three days later). More importantly, when Haley stole the calculator five years later he certainly knew that he had two separate prior felony convictions, which would usually be considered “two strikes,” and Haley obviously did not know that the second felony was not technically a second strike because he did not raise it at trial. Nor did he raise this on his appeal of his conviction, which he lost.

The sentencing issue was raised for the first time on a habeas corpus application in state court, which was refused because his argument was not based on any facts that were not known at the time of the trial (the timing of the convictions was obviously in the record, it was just that nobody realized that the two prior felonies were not technically sequential to each other), and Haley had not raised the issue on appeal.

To permit defendants after all their appeals are exhausted to raise arguments that should have been raised at trial is a dubious proposition at best. The discovery of new evidence is one thing, but does a defendant have a perpetual right to suddenly say, “wait, I should have said…”?

Read it.

Climate activists on trial for blocking an oil train may be about to set a controversial legal precedent. According to Mother Jones, for the first time in American legal history, activists will be allowed to present their concerns about climate change as a legal defence for their allegedly criminal actions.

If this succeeds, the Green Shirts will soon be setting up People’s Courts to impose politically-correct environmentalism on an unsuspecting nation.

Read it.

The woman, in her 60s, was attacked by the animal at Three Mile Creek in Wyndham, 2,000 miles north of Perth, on Wednesday afternoon, Western Australia’s County Health service told AFP news agency.

…

Eyewitness Paul Cavanagh, said his nephew and son-in-law, who were near the creek at the time, took the woman to hospital after noticing she was missing her arm just above the elbow.

Yeah, it was kinda hard to miss.

Michael Snowball, a cafe owner who witnessed the incident told AFP the woman was beside the creek when the crocodile “came out of the water and grabbed her and did a death roll and took her arm off near the elbow.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A senior prison official has been accused of stealing the pavement from a 31-mile stretch of public road in Russia.

According to a report in the Russian daily newspaper, The Kommersant, Alexander Protopopov, acting deputy chief of the national prison service, oversaw the dismantling of a concrete highway and sold off the slabs in the thinly populated region of Komi, in northern Russia.

Investigators say the scheme had cost the Russian Federation over six million rubles, equivalent to around £54,000.

Read it.

Swedish police will no longer be able to give descriptions of alleged criminals for fear of being seen as racist.

According to an internal letter, police in capital city Stockholm are instructed to refrain from describing suspects’ race and nationality, according to news website Speisa.

…

The crimes “involve everything from lighter traffic accidents to serious crimes like muggings, beatings and murder,” the paper reported.

The letter specifies that, for everyday crimes such as burglary, basic information such as ethnicity, nationality, skin colour and height should not be given.

Steve Sailer weighs in.

One advantage of the St. Louis Rams football franchise moving to currently NFL-vacant Los Angeles (along with possibly the San Diego Chargers and, more remotely, the Oakland Raiders) is that it removes the threat of moving to Los Angeles that every NFL franchise in a marginally major league city has possessed for the last 20 years: “Submit to our extortionate demand for a taxpayer-subsidized superstadium or we’re relocating to giant Los Angeles!”

An NFL team is a natural monopoly. (Currently, only the New York and San Francisco Bay metro areas have more than one franchise, although Los Angeles had two from the early 1980s through 1995, when it suddenly went to zero because L.A., for all its faults, at least isn’t neurotic about being a Major League City). And NFL owners are extremely clever about extracting monopoly profits from their hosts.

I’d like to see a federal law outlawing professional sports leagues’ ban on community ownership. If the people of, say, Cleveland, are dead set upon staying a Major League City, let them buy shares in their teams and take on the risks and rewards of ownership.

The Other McCain continues poking under the rock called feminism.

In an astounding leap of feminist logic, Berkeley law student Courtney Fraser condemns chivalry as “benevolent sexism,” blaming “sexual violence against women” on “the perpetuation of rape culture, which normalizes this violence.” Of course, “the age of chivalry is gone,” as Edmund Burke observed in 1790, but feminists are fiercely determined to eradicate whatever vestiges of the “unbought grace of life” yet remain. Men’s obligation of courtesy toward women is patriarchal oppression, and any sense a man may have of a duty to protect women against insult or injury must be abolished, Ms. Fraser insists.

Read it.

New Trier High School, one of the country’s top public schools, is forcing students to attend seminars on racial identity on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

“The goals for this day are to help New Trier students develop a deeper understanding of their own racial identities and the identities of others, and to better understand how we can all work to counter the impact of systemic racism in our lives,” reads a statement on the school district’s website.

Attendance is mandatory, though other public institutions in New Trier Township will be closed in observance of the holiday.

I would move to another school, even if I had to run away from home.

Read it.

Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is blamed by scientists for intensifying storms, raising sea levels and prolonging droughts. Now there’s growing evidence of a positive effect: we may have delayed the next ice age by 100,000 years or more.

The conditions necessary for the onset of a new ice age were narrowly missed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin wrote Wednesday in the journal Nature. Since then, rising emissions of heat-trapping CO2 from burning oil, coal and gas have made the spread of the world’s ice sheets even less likely, they said.

A lawyer looks at the Powerball.

As Wired magazine lays out here, the maximum number is what you’d get if you took the payout over 30 years. You’re not dumb enough to do that, so you’d take it in cash, giving you just $868 million. Wait, who’s that at the door? Most likely an IRS agent, dressed just like the one also waiting at the back door, so don’t bother trying that. That big bag slung under a helicopter is to take away about 40% of your winnings. The less-well-dressed agents behind them, with a smaller bag under a smaller helicopter, are there to take your state’s cut, unless you had the good sense to move to a state with no income tax before you won the lottery. But you didn’t. Now you’re down to $394 million, barely enough to get you a decent condo in the Bay Area, and according to Wired this brings your expected return on a $2 ticket down below $2. But the more people who play, the more likely it is that the jackpot will be split anyway, and then it just gets worse.

John C. Wright reacts to VoxDay’s Musings on Immigration (see previous post).

We Americans have never lived in, and can hardly imagine, living in a nation that is not dedicated to an ideal.

We have no idea what it is like to live in a land that stands for nothing, means nothing, and has no future. Small wonder Science Fiction is dominated by the Americans and, to a lesser extent, by the Japanese. In Britain, science fiction has long grown pale on the tall shadow of Michael Moorcock and his New Wave, that is, socially relevant, bitter, and unappealing futurism. The Michael Palin movie BRAZIL is of this same spirit, if not of the same camp.

The grim and boring Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has the same social message, even though it is fantasy, not science fiction: since there is no God, hope is for chumps, therefore stay in school and be kind to people in small things.

In Europe, there are no great things to do or to defend.

That strikes me as right on target.

Read it.

Biologist Josiah Zayner, founder of the Open Discovery Institute (ODIN), is now offering kits via Indiegogo that enables DIY gene-editing of single-celled critters in the comfort of your own home. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Be the first on your block to start the Zombie Apocalypse.

Check it out.

I rather doubt that they can do anything about ‘planetary defense’, but as a long-time SF fan I’m glad we have one.

Read it.

Cue hand-wringing from the usual chattering class.

The United Nations’ refugee agency has sharply criticized the plan that could be adopted by Parliament as early as next month, calling it a deeply concerning response to humanitarian needs. The agency appealed to Denmark to drop the new measures.

Translation: ‘humanitarian needs’ = ‘free stuff for fashionable victims’.

But the Danish government is continuing to press ahead with a number of initiatives that authorities describe as attempts to make the country less attractive to immigrants.

Which it will certainly do, and which will make it a target for obloquy from the international Crust.

Read it.

I suspect that both the players and the organization would much prefer to live and work in L.A. than in (yuck) St. Louis.

The St. Louis Rams will move to the Los Angeles area, where they intend to build a new, nearly $3 billion stadium in an entertainment complex in Inglewood, Calif., just over 10 miles from downtown.

Inglewood is a notorious black slum area and this will give the City/State a chance to put a lot of poor black people out on the street in favor of a (primarily publicly-funded) ego-monument to economic illiteracy.

The decision, in a 30-2 vote among the league’s 32 team owners, comes after more than a year of often acrimonious lobbying by the Chargers, the Raiders and the Rams, who each applied to move to the Los Angeles area last month because, they said, they were unable to get enough public support to build new stadiums in their markets.

In other words, they want new homes built at taxpayers’ expense. That was the original reason for moving out in the first place, the publicly-funded bribe wasn’t big enough.

Scott Johnson points out the holes.

President Obama gave his last State of the Union Address last night. The White House has posted the text here and video here. I’ve also embedded the video below.

Obama’s Iranian friends provided their own commentary in advance of the speech, seizing two Navy riverine ships and detaining 10 sailors (nine men and one woman). The mullahs were expressing their complete and utter contempt for Obama. Obama did things his way, omitting to mention the sailors (or the other Americans held by Iran) in his speech. He looked the other way.

Obama’s SOTU was just another example from the last seven years of preferring to living in a fantasy world of his own devising rather than addressing real problems in a practical way.

Read it.

Leading House Democrats are escalating their criticisms of President Obama’s immigration policies, saying the administration’s recent arrest of scores of Central American families has “terrorized” immigrant communities nationwide.

The Democrats say they recognize the need for the Homeland Security Department (DHS) to be tough on border enforcement in order to deter the next great migrant wave.

But the agency’s recent home raids, which rounded up more than 120 immigrants denied asylum claims and now in line for deportation, backfired and sent shudders of fear through immigrant communities at home instead, the Democrats charged.

I guess they’ve lost sight of the fact that Obama isn’t a Republican.

Read it.

A female president would be more attuned to the issues facing America’s families than a male president, Hillary Clinton argued in a new interview released Thursday.

“My life experiences, what I care about, what I’ve been through just make me perhaps more aware of and responsive to a lot of the family issues that people are struggling with, whether it’s affording child care or looking to get their incomes up because everything is increasing in cost,”

How to help struggling families? Increase taxes! (Yeah, that’ll help.) I suggest that Hillary either didn’t learn as much from her ‘life experiences’ or ignored what she did learn in favor of vote-pandering.

Steve Sailer looks at Barry’s last SOTU.

Despite the origin of the phrase among conspiracy-loving Byzantines, Lofgren warns enthusiasts that the American deep state is more mundane:

Those who seek a grand conspiracy theory…will be disappointed. My analysis of the Deep State is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal. I use the term to mean a hybrid association of key elements of government and part of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.

The American deep state is less Oliver Stone’s JFK than The Office. Lofgren remarks upon “the sheer weight of its boring ordinariness once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time.” It’s an emergent phenomenon of a quasi-empire run out of a wealthy and not exceptionally at-risk republic.

Read it.

Scientists who scoured the DNA of brain tumors, searching gene by gene for bad actors, were puzzled. The cancers had none of the mutations in growth-causing genes that are typical of other tumors, yet they grew quickly, with no brakes. The question was why — what had altered their genetic instructions to lead to runaway cell division?

The surprising answer, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that the three-dimensional structure and organization of the DNA had been disrupted. As a result, two genetic neighborhoods that are usually separated, as if they are two gated communities, were merged. The effect was to allow a powerful snippet of DNA from one neighborhood into the one next door, where it woke up a near-dormant growth gene. And the cells took off.

For all the hand-waving and raised eyebrows, I still haven’t seen any evidence that Donald Trump has lied even half as much as Barack Obama, much less Hillary Clinton. Where’s the outrage about that?

At least Trump is entertaining, something that nobody has ever said about Barry or the She-Wolf of Washington.

Read it.

You, too, can play along.

Tonight’s State of the Union will be President Obama’s last, leading into a final presidential year that is unlikely to produce any major legislative action. And so, as multiple news outlets have reported, the speech won’t be a laundry list. Instead it will be more of a description of the sorts of outfits that he would like to see America wear.

…

As a report from RealClearPolitics describes it: “Gone in Obama’s eighth year are sweeping legislative ambitions. In their place: political storytelling aimed at a hoped-for Democratic successor and a Democratic Senate in 2017; maneuvers to protect seven years of governance; and lofty rhetorical riffs for the history books.”

…

Which brings us to the point of this post: Reason’s 2016 State of the Union drinking game—the very last under SOTU drinking game under president Obama! It’s the end of an era, folks. Drink up!

Check it out.

The Mapping Militants Project identifies patterns in the evolution of militant organizations in specified conflict theatres and provides interactive visual representations of these relationships. Relationships are traced in interactive maps, which provide visual representations of how those relationships change over time. The maps are also linked to profiles, which compile open-source news and data on militant organizations to provide a comprehensive, fully cited report on each group. For more information or to contact us, see our About page.

Read it.

Since the scores of New Year’s Eve sexual attacks on German women by hundreds of men identified as Arab or North African, the left in Germany has faced a dilemma: which to fight for first — women’s human rights or multiculturalism?

This was the same dilemma that faced British authorities between 1997 and 2013. During those six years at least 1,400 girls from the age of 11 in just one English city (Rotherham, population 275,000) were raped by gangs of men, nearly all of whom were immigrants (mostly from Pakistan) or their sons.

But British authorities kept silent. Why?

We know why.

In 2014, the reason finally was revealed: The perpetrators were Muslim, and British authorities were therefore afraid to publicize — or often even investigate — the crimes. They feared being branded Islamophobic and racist. Politicians on the left and right acknowledged this fact.

Reaped women are only individuals; the Multiculturalism Mob is exactly that.

The Ministry of Truth will get you for any ThoughtCrime. Never forget it.

Eric S Raymond has an interesting take.

I’m bringing this up now because I want to put a stake in the ground. I have a personal theory about why Europo-American dueling largely (though not entirely) died out between 1850 and 1900 that I think is at least as well justified as the conventional account, and I want to put it on record.

Read it.

The chief victims of Muslim extremists are overwhelmingly other Muslims.

Read it.

‘How dare he not do things our way!’

The problem with stupid people is that they tend to be totalitarians as well.

Read it.

A man was head-butted at London Bridge station after another man had become angry about music being played from a mobile phone.

A special snowflake gets what’s coming to him.

“There is no excuse for such violent behaviour and we need people to help us find the person responsible.

Yeah, I’d like to buy him a beer.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

At least he’s abandoned the pretense that he’s some kind of Republican.

Read it.

Democratic orthodoxy is fundamentally hostile to immigration law that imposes real limits. It adheres to doctrinaire Lennonism at its core: “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do.”

It’s even easier to “imagine” if you make the concept of illegal immigration a thoughtcrime, as it has become in the Democratic Party. In the video below, Fusion’s Jorge Ramos asks Madam Hillary if she will banish the term “illegal immigrant from her vocabulary.” Like the momentarily broken hero of Cool Hand Luke, Clinton vows that she has got her mind right.

Sarah Hoyt opines.

If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true.  This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.

Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true.  The Noblemen had it better.  And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it.  Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down.  Or a million other such things.  And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.)  Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear.  (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?)  And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.

No one would believe any of those things undiluted.  But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.

Read it.

The investigation is the first time that scientists have been able to pinpoint on a large scale how different genes are linked to developing the disease, as well as the mutations involved.

Researchers also found important information on how mutations associated with breast cancer are also linked to other forms of the disease.

Read it.

Watching New York drown is almost a religious experience.

Unfortunately, you can’t enter negative numbers to model how the next Ice Age will work. Pity.

Read it.

How multicultural.

Read it.

But the mass immigration that Britain has experienced since 1997—the year Tony Blair’s New Labour government radically revised the immigration laws in a deliberate effort to transform Britain into a multicultural society—has had an effect wholly different from that of all previous political and social disruptions. Mass immigration hasn’t merely embellished, changed, or even assaulted the enduring, resilient national culture that Orwell adumbrated. Rather, by its very nature—by its inherent logic, and by the ideology, aspirations, and world-historical forces from which it springs and to which it gives expression—it perforce obliterates that culture.

…

In significant respects, the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis form a metaphorical foreign encampment, rather than an immigrant neighborhood, within a country in which a significant minority of them feels in fundamental ways incompatible. A Home Office report on the standoffish Pakistani and Bangladeshi districts in the northern mill towns found that “Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives.” Less abstractly, Andrew Norfolk, the self-described liberal London Times investigative reporter who methodically uncovered the Rotherham sexual grooming scandal, concludes that “It is possible for a Muslim child to grow up—in the family home, at school and in the mosque and madrassa—without coming into any contact with Western lifestyles, opinions or values.”

The result, as Trevor Phillips asserted in a speech focusing on Pakistani and Bangladeshi neighborhoods, is that “Residentially, some districts are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettos—black holes into which no-one goes without fear and trepidation, and from which no-one ever escapes undamaged.” Two-thirds of British Muslims only mix socially with other Muslims; that portion is undoubtedly higher among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis specifically. Reinforcing this parallel life is the common practice of returning “home” for a few months every two or three years and an immersion in foreign electronic media. Integration into a wider national life is further hindered—and the retention of a deeply foreign culture is further encouraged—by the fact that most Pakistani marriages, even if one spouse is born in Britain, essentially produce first-generation-immigrant children: the one study that measured this phenomenon, conducted in the north England city of Bradford, found that 85 percent of third- and fourth-generation British Pakistani babies had a parent who was born in Pakistan. (Incidentally, that study also found that 63 percent of Pakistani mothers in Bradford had married their cousins, and 37 percent had married first cousins.)

Read it.

We wrote here, here and elsewhere about the mass sexual assaults that occurred across Germany, often in conjunction with robberies of young women, on New Year’s eve. All or substantially all of the assaults were committed by Islamic immigrants, in many instances just-admitted “refugees.” It is hard to say which is more appalling, the mass sexual assaults or the efforts by Germany’s officials at all levels to cover them up.

…

It is really extraordinary: there were “widespread sexual assaults against teenage girls” last summer, but the Swedish press made a conscious decision to kill the story.

Read it.

Robots may not stop war, but they may someday be able to save the humans fighting it. Developed by Tactical Robotics, the Air Mule is a hovercar-like aircraft, built to be an ambulance. On December 30th, it flew autonomously, giving a wobbly glimpse at what battlefield salvation may look like later this century.

Read it.

Americans for Tax Reform once again presents a series of handy Bingo cards you may use to check off terms and phrases likely to be used during President Obama’s (FINAL!) State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Read it.

As many as 25 House Democrats are expected to have Muslim guests during Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech. It’s in response to a call from Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim voted into Congress, to counter an “alarming rise in hateful rhetoric against Muslim Americans and people of the Islamic faith worldwide.”

The gesture might not generate much more than a shrug, except that in at least two cases, Democrats invited officials from a group the FBI formally avoids due to historic ties to a Hamas support network. Delray Beach Rep. Alcee Hastings invited Nezar Hamze, regional operations director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Florida. And San Jose, Cal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren invited Sameena Usman, a 10-year veteran government relations official with CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned.

Oops.

Read it.

Question: Would Bill Cosby be facing criminal charges if he hadn’t departed from liberal orthodoxy? Keep in mind that the old rumors and ugly stories were reignited by a liberal black comic, Hannibal Burress, who objected to Cosby’s controversial speeches from a few years ago criticizing urban black culture. If Cosby had kept to the politically correct line, I doubt he’d be facing charges. After all, look at the pass Bill Clinton has gotten. Take, for example, the remarks of Joy Behar on The View last week:

JOY BEHAR: Chappaquiddick.  I mean, a girl drowns and he abandons her and she drowned and women still voted for Teddy Kennedy. Why? Because he voted for women’s rights. That’s why. That’s the bottom line of it in my opinion. I mean, I don’t like either one of them, to tell you the truth, Teddy or Bill. They’re both dogs as far as I’m concerned. But I still will vote for Bill Clinton because he votes in my favor.

It’s always about who’s on who’s side. That’s why Muslim rapists get a pass. That’s why black gang thugs get a pass.

Eric S. Raymond lays it out for you.

I have been studying these questions for years as part of my self-training. I learned some of the basics of counter-terrorism theory from a former SpecOps officer, and more from my Kung Fu instructor whose day job is as a criminal forensics and counter-terrorism specialist consulting to law enforcement. I’ve also read up on the subject, and thought carefully about what I’ve read.

The following is a primer on how people whose job it is to prevent and mitigate terrorist activity and spree killings think about it.

Read it.

In allying with Obama, tech is moving in the opposite direction to much of the business community, particularly small business, which Gallup finds a hotbed of anti-Obama sentiment. Other traditional industries like oil and gas have also turned overwhelmingly to the right, as Obama has targeted them for their role in climate change. In 1990, energy firms gave out almost as much to Democrats as Republicans; in 2014 they gave over three times as much to the GOP.

In contrast, the oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In 2000, the communications and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012, it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to the Democrats with their donations.

…

One critical PR advantage the tech firms enjoy is that most, with a notable exception of Amazon, don’t mistreat blue-collar workers, or unions, since they have few of either. This gets them a free pass from social-justice warriors unavailable to traditional firms. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford mostly exploited workers in Pittsburgh or Detroit, and paid a price; the exploitation of the oligarchs takes place far away in Chengdu, Guangzhou or India.

…

What are ‘tech liberals’? Ferenstein provides a picture of an unconscious elitism that runs through their worldview. Although their industry is overwhelmingly based in the San Francisco Peninsula’s suburban sprawl, the internet oligarchs, he claims, want ‘everyone’ to move to the urban centre, something not remotely practical for most middle- and working-class families. They also advocate for strict environmental laws and ever higher energy prices, which don’t threaten their lifestyles, but are often devastating to those below them.

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The new political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs. With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates, subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of ‘green jobs’.

This ‘upstairs-downstairs’ California coalition could presage the country’s political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their profits and expansion into other markets.

Read it.

In the days after my first election to Congress, in 2000, I attended several orientation sessions in Washington, eager to absorb the lessons of history. I wanted to learn what Congressman Abraham Lincoln had learned, to hear the wisdom of predecessors like John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Joseph Gurney Cannon. The romance was crushed by lesson No. 1: Get re-elected. A fund-raising consultant advised that if I didn’t raise at least $10,000 a week (in pre-Citizens United dollars), I wouldn’t be back.

The money race began, and I attended political action committee fund-raisers, which are like panhandling with hors d’oeuvres. There were hours of “call time” — huddled in a cubicle, dialing donors. Sometimes double dialing and triple dialing. Whispering sweet nothings and other small talk into the phone in hopes of receiving large somethings. I’d sit next to an assistant who collated “call sheets” with donor’s names, contribution histories and other useful information. (“How’s Sheila? Your wife. Oh, Shelly? Sorry.”)