Read it. And watch the video.

That’s not how the English-language media described yesterday’s car-ramming incident in the French town of Valence. In fact, the MSM made sure to leave the impression that the attack was most likely Islamophobic in nature, and the soldiers guarding the mosque got in the driver’s way before he could damage the mosque or hurt any Muslims. (See articles: The Daily Mail, Fox News, the BBC, France24.)

However, the following news report from French TV tells a different story. The driver is not only identified as a “North African”, but he is said to have been screaming… well, take a wild guess as to what he screamed… as he rammed the soldiers.

Read it.

The question from the congressman to the Obama administration official was straightforward enough: How many foreign visitors overstay their visas every year?

The reply was simple too, but not in a satisfying way. “We don’t know,” the official said. …

And these are the people who are going to carefully investigate all Syrian refugees and make sure there are no hidden jihadists in the group.

Right.

Paul Krugman loves to criticize Republican rich people but doesn’t seem to make the connection with rich Democrats.

Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

The names that leap immediately to mind are Clinton, Obama, and Soros. Krugman has other ideas, of course.

And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

“Clinton” leaps immediately to mind in every American not living on one of the Left Coasts.

So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?

They turn into a Crustian-dominated welfare state, where tame mobs of Underclass intimidate those who won’t Get With The Program. Take a look around you.

Read it.

Big Brother is not your friend. Just sayin’.

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For people who are supposedly against racism, Democrats seem to be working that particular seam pretty hard.

Read it.

If the first of January comes on a Friday, the winter will be temperate, and the summer and autumn, dry. Grain will be cheap. There will be eye diseases, and many infants will die, and there will be movement of knights, and there will be much oil in some places.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Just in case you need one. Sometimes the old ways are best.

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2015 ended on a high note when ISIS was defeated in Ramadi. The news seemed all the brighter because according to reports from U.S. commanders, Iraqi military forces retook the city without help from Shiite militias.

However, the distinction between Iraqi military forces and Shiite militias may not be as sharp as these reports assume. David French cites a Newsweek report that “the security forces of the Iran-backed regime in Baghdad largely consist of Shiite fighters in league with murderous militias that have slaughtered innocent Sunnis after ousting ISIS militants from Tikrit and other battlegrounds in the past year.” Newsweek adds that the Shiites are now “ready to pounce” in Ramadi and elsewhere in Anbar province.

Read it.

Voice of the Crust the New York Times sees a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand….

BLUF: If Trump can get the Republican nomination, he can pull enough Democrats to win the Presidency. And the Ruling Class is getting uneasy.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Gavin McInnes gets us all ready for the New Year.

Just for fun, let’s pretend the Old Testament was even worse than the Koran and we were way more barbaric 500 years ago. How about what Islam is doing today? The Western world has moved forward since the days of fire and brimstone, but the Middle East is turning backward toward it. There are a lot of reasons for this, but their handbook is a great place to start. Here are 10 examples of Koran quotes coming to life right now.

This is a great compendium of the reasons why Islam is an existential threat to our civilization.

Our foreign policy is likely a factor in Muslim rage, but they’ve been behaving like this off and on for centuries. Inbreeding doesn’t help things, but the one constant we have with all this Muslim violence is a manifesto explaining exactly what to do (I’m not even including all the Koran offshoots that inspired other acts of violence). You can have all the strange bedfellows you want, but there is one in particular who can’t wait to strangle you in your sleep. Wake up or die.

Read it.

By the end of 2015 the U.S. and Britain revealed that they are sending more commandos (SAS, Special Forces, SEALs) to Iraq and Syria, all in response to the November 13 ISIL attack in Paris. Previously it was known that Jordan and Iran also had commandos operating in the area. Recently Russia has sent some of its spetsnaz commandos to Syria and several other nations (mostly NATO) are also making contributions. All this is shaping up to look like Afghanistan in the decade after 2001. So many nations spent commandos to Afghanistan in that time that this soon be called “the Commando Olympics”. This was not because so many nations had contingents there but because so many of them were working together for the first time. The different commando organizations weren’t competing with each other and were performing similar missions. But each national contingent used slightly different methods and equipment. Naturally, everyone compared notes and made changes based on combat experience. That was the draw for commandoes; getting and using “combat experience.” Training is great, but there’s nothing like operating against an armed and hostile foe. This is big thing, as the participating commandoes are becoming a lot more effective. But you can’t get a photograph of this increased capability, and the commandoes aren’t talking to the press. So it’s all a big story about commandos in Afghanistan and Syria is something you’ll never hear much about, except in history books, many years from now.

Read it.

Over the next few days we will see the homicide figures for 2015 from various cities.

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The H-2 guest worker program, which brought in 150,000 legal foreign workers last year, isn’t supposed to deprive any American of a job. But many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to deny jobs to U.S. workers so they can hire foreigners instead. A BuzzFeed News investigation.

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It’s the meme that refuses to die. It started, back in 2011, with the Waltons: six members of the family, we were repeatedly told, were worth as much as the bottom 30% of all Americans combined. I tried to address this silly stat back then, but now it’s gone global: back in January, Oxfam announced that the world’s 85 richest people had the same wealth as the bottom half of the global population. And now Forbes has come along to say that, actually, it’s not 85 people — it’s a mere 67.

Oxfam does a pretty bad job of footnoting its report, but I did manage to finally track down how it arrived at this conclusion. The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from?

The answer is that it comes from a pair of tables in Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Databook. First of all, you have to find the total wealth in the world, which you can find at the bottom of the fourth column on page 89: it’s $241 trillion. Then, you flick forwards to page 146, where you find the proportion of all global wealth held by each of the world’s income deciles. The top 10% have 86% of the wealth; the next 10% have 7.8%, and so on. Add up the bottom five deciles, and you get 0.7% (not 0.71%, which is the number in the Oxfam report; I have no idea where that extra basis point came from). And if you multiply $241 trillion by 0.7%, you get $1.7 trillion.

Basically, another instance of the Aggregation Fallacy.

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A. Because there are virtually no Muslims in Japan.

And all strata of Japan, from the prime minister to the working class, intend to keep it that way.

Japan is the poster child for those who not only don’t value diversity but who actively work to exclude it.

The official policy of Japan is not to give citizenship to Muslims who come to Japan, and even permits for permanent residency are given sparingly to Muslims.

…

Japanese companies seeking foreign workers specifically note that they are not interested in Muslim workers. And any Muslim who does manage to enter Japan will find it very difficult to rent an apartment. Anywhere a Muslim lives, the neighbors become uneasy. Japan forbids the establishment of Islamic organizations, so setting up Islamic institutions such as mosques and schools is almost impossible. In Tokyo [population 13.35 million] there is only one imam.

Hard to argue with success.

Read it.

On December 2, the law school’s dean, Martha Minow, sent an email to all alumni about the incident. It said, in part:

Several days ago, our community was shocked and saddened by the defacement of the portraits of some of our African-American faculty in Wasserstein Hall. The Harvard University Police Department is investigating this as a possible hate crime. The outpouring of support for these faculty members has been a heartening reflection of the community that I know and love so deeply.

Since then, there has been radio silence on the investigation. This is, perhaps, because a group of students set up a web site called Royall Asses that argued, highly persuasively, that “anti-racist” social justice warriors perpetrated the alleged hate crime as a hoax.

Read it.

Aktarer Zaman, now 23, didn’t back down when United Airlines (UAL) and Orbitz sued him a little over a year ago for opening a website called Skiplagged.com to help travelers find cheap plane tickets.

Sounds to me like a useful service. Typically, when airlines discount seats it’s because people aren’t buying them, so he’s helping them fill up their planes.

United and Orbitz were livid about Skiplagged, calling the start up website “unfair competition” that promoted “strictly prohibited” travel. They filed a federal lawsuit and demanded Zaman pay them $75,000 in lost revenue.

If it was ‘strictly prohibited’, then how were they able to get the tickets? I smell a rat.

Skiplagged helps travelers find cheap tickets through a strategy called “hidden city” ticketing.

The idea is that you buy an airline ticket that has a layover at your actual destination.

Say you want to fly from New York to San Francisco. You book a flight from New York to Portland with a layover in San Francisco and get off there, without bothering to take the last leg of the flight. Sometimes, that can save you money. Flying this way isn’t always cheapest, but it often is.

Apparently the airline created its own problem. If they want to prevent that sort of thing, they need to adjust their pricing, not sue the guy who is taking advantage of the system that they set up.

Zaman says he and his lawyers realized early on that United’s case was flawed. United claimed Zaman broke the “contract of carriage,” but that’s a contract between passengers and airlines — not third parties like Skiplagged.

You’d think that their lawyers would have realized that. Figuring out who is bound by a contract is something they teach first semester at law school.

“I’m just providing people with information and making them more informed,” he said. “I never saw that as a bad thing, making people be more skilled travelers.”

And indeed it is not a bad thing, but rather a good thing. Access to information is one of the chief ways individual consumers can reverse the ancient advantage that vendors have in any market. This guy ought to get some sort of award.