Read it.

Yet none dare call it ‘invasion’….

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Hey, when you’ve got a racket, take it for all it’s worth.

Protesters interrupted the University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents meeting for a third time last week, demanding the end of “blatantly oppressive” standardized testing.

The group of about 40 students, who call themselves “BlackOut,” stood up an hour into the meeting and began loudly chanting, “Ashé,” a Nigerian word referring to the creative power of an artist to make something happen, with others responding, “Power!”

The urge to loudly chant ‘Bullshit!’ or ‘Boring!’ would have overpowered me; probably a good thing I wasn’t there.

Read it.

Considering that many of them are illegal aliens, I don’t doubt it.

A new crusade has emerged among college students who insist on insulation from the real world – now left-liberal campus activists demand safe spaces from U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who recruit at campus job fairs.

Hey, you never know, they might just whip some cuffs on you if you speak Spanish in the vicinity.

Protesters at several campuses in Southern California and Arizona have demanded administrators cut all ties with the federal agency, and some have protested agents’ presence on campus. Students say border protection representatives make students – especially students in the country illegally – feel unsafe.

Um, well, that’s sort of their job….

At UC Santa Barbara in late January, a parade of students boisterously demonstrated against border patrol recruiters at a campus job fair, loudly chanting “f*ck your borders, f*ck your walls.” One organizer told The College Fix agents’ attendance was “triggering” for undocumented students, adding “there is no space on this campus for an organization that continues to threaten the safety of students.”

It certainly seems to trigger a lot of juvenile behavior. But that’s probably not what they meant.

Read it.

Doubtless there is some utility in playing out worst-case scenarios as a way to plan for the future. That being said, the New York Times is reporting a new study, “Millions projected to be at risk from sea level rise in the continental United States,” in Nature Climate Change that calculates the number of Americans that would be affected by sea level rises between 3 and 6 feet by 2100 due to man-made global warming. As far as I can tell, the main contribution of the study is new coastal population projections. The researchers calculate that if sea level rises by 3 feet, the land that 4.2 million Americans live on will be at risk of inundation. If sea level rises by 6 feet, then 13.1 million Americans might have to move inland. The costs of relocating that many people could be as much $14 trillion. So researchers can now get their studies published in a prestigious scientific journal and publicized by leading newspapers by merely assuming a catastrophe. Neat trick.

On the other hand, I have this vision of seawater pouring down the stairs of a Manhattan subway stop. Mmmmm….

Read it.

If Hillary Clinton were the leading GOP candidate for president, the story of her email server would never get a rest. It is a subject of her bold and never-ending lies. It demonstrates her unfitness for public office. It demonstrates her fitness for an orange jumpsuit.

As it is, however, Clinton is the leading Democratic candidate for president and one has to be a news junkie to discover that yet another State Department employee has clammed up.

Read it.

That’s a picture of the logic board of an iPhone 5C, the same model as the San Bernardino phone. The chip with the red outline is a Toshiba THGBX2G7B2JLA01 NAND Flash chip. That’s the phone’s memory chip. All the data on the phone is stored there. It’s encrypted, but here’s the thing: the encryption key is also (almost certainly) stored in the same chip. So all the FBI needs to do is de-solder the chip, mount it in its own hardware, and read out the data. Unless the FBI is completely incompetent, it should be able to do this in less than a day. And again, unless they are completely incompetent, having read out the contents of the chip they should be able to decrypt its contents in a matter of minutes if not seconds. And even if they are completely incompetent, they could use a copy of the chip to try five different PIN codes, and then replace the chip with a fresh copy of the original and try five more. Lather, rinse, repeat. At worst this would take about a week or so.

How do I know that this is possible? Because one of the highly touted features of the iPhone 6 is that it has a secure enclave where things like encryption keys can be securely stored in a way that does not make them accessible using the technique I just described.

The FBI knows this. Everyone in the security community knows this. But not everyone in the general public knows this, and the FBI is counting on that ignorance to cover up the fact that their lawsuit against Apple is a charade. They are not worried about the data on the San Bernardino iPhone, because if they were they would have had it by now.

…

What the FBI is really trying to do here is to set a legal precedent that will let them use the power of the law to do an end-run around the secure enclave, and any other security technology that any company might produce in the future.  This is not about catching some potential terrorists, this is about effectively eliminating legal access to encryption technology.  Attempts have been made in the past to regulate encryption technology through the democratic process, and they have all failed.  So now the FBI is trying to get a court to do what Congress has on multiple occasions refused to do.

Precisely so. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth is that government bureaucrats are engaged in a continual grab for power, power over you and over yours, and will lie any lie and use any bit of force at their disposal to prevail.

Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Watch it.

Apparently an art project.

Read it.

Doesn’t surprise me none.

Steve Sailer points out some things you won’t see in the Drive-By Media.

With President Obama in Kenya meeting Kenyan supremo Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta, the American newsmedia are full of think pieces on the Meaning of It All, almost none of which mention that Barack Jr.’s dad was the anchor witness in the trial of the hired gunman in the most traumatic assassination plot in Kenya’s history, the murder of Luo statesman and Obama Sr.’s mentor, Tom Mboya, an assassination many Luo believe may have been ordered by Uhuru’s dad.

This is back from July and I’m just getting around to it. But that sure gave the Drive-By Media plenty of time to cover it. Which they didn’t.

Read it.

How about that National Health Service there in Britain! Don’t you wish we had something like that in the U.S.?

Obamacare is certainly taking its best shot….

Read it.

The term “mafia state” was pioneered by Bálint Magyar, a sociologist in Hungary, Russia’s closest ally in Europe. Magyar and his colleagues have elaborated on the concept in the last decade, as Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has amassed power, eliminated political and economic rivals, and turned the institutions of his state into instruments of personal power. So important is this concept to Hungarian intellectuals’ understanding of what has happened to their society that an edited collection of twenty sociological articles on the topic sold 15,000 copies there—an almost unheard-of figure for an academic volume anywhere, especially in a country of 9.8 million people. The concept is little-known outside of Hungary, though Magyar believes it describes the regimes in three other post-Communist states: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. (Magyar’s own book, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, has just been translated into English.)

This is what the Democrats in the U.S. aspire to.

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Currently, two billion dollars is given each year in perpetuity to an Obamacare slush fund known as the Prevention and Public Health fund. The Department of Health and Human Services is then free to spend these funds as they see fit, without any Congressional oversight.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to the slush fund being used by the Administration as a tool to push blatantly partisan, politicized policies.

Read it.

It’s only fair. Donald Trump has already given his brutal assessment of the rise of Barack Obama.

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A Portland man finally has his driver’s license after a nine-month appeal for a religious exemption. The man, who goes by Bishop, wanted to wear a fox hat in order to honor his spirit animal.

I am not making this up.

The Left Coast: Where a weirdo can wear a stupid hat in an official ID picture but nuns have to provide health insurance that pays for abortions. There is indeed something in the water.

Read it.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) students styling themselves the “Racial Justice Coalition” are demanding that their next Dean be “committed to social justice both inside and outside our community.”

And, of course, that has everything to do with learning to become a doctor.

Again, the intellectual fallacy here is that because Group X comprises Y percent of the population, then ipso facto they must be entitled to Y percent of the jobs in [insert your favorite field here].

Quite frankly, I don’t want anybody to be working on my health who is so stupid as to believe that .

Read it.

The Phillips 66 oil company wants to build a rail spur from the main railroad to their facility, allowing them to bring in oil trains through the city of San Luis Obispo, and the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission is currently reviewing it, conducting a hearing on it last week.

The resolution, authored by a trio of non-ASI member students, one of whom is on the ASI University Union Advisory Board, and sponsored by two members of ASI Board of Directors, called for opposition to the project.

I wasn’t aware that anybody gave a shit what college students thought when it comes to railroad projects.

Freeberg brings up some inconvenient truth:

Are the geeks like me keeping women out of the field? That is the idea you can see people would like to position ahead of a voice box, just before giving it some hot air so it can lunge out and achieve promotion to spoken thought. They seldom go this far because the thought wouldn’t last long. Keep women out of the field? What meeting was that? I must have missed it. And if I didn’t miss it, I sure as hell wouldn’t have voted yes. Shortening and brightening my work days, working alongside nice-looking intelligent women, like it seems ALL the other male working classes get to do…lawyers, architects, hospital workers, bureaucrats at City Hall, Hooters cooks. Nope, the software engineers just have to toil away endlessly, shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other sweaty guys. Oh, we’re working hard to keep it that way, are we? Well that would be news to this one.

And that really puts it in perspective. I know plenty of women in tech, and they don’t appear to have any problems. The real ulcers here are the people who appear to believe that women are ‘underrepresented’, as if the fact that women make up X percentage of a population ipso facto means that there ought to be X percentage of women in [pick your field here].

Read it.

A few weeks ago, I took my three young children to a stage show called “Wild Kratts Live.” If you’re not already immersed in the bizarre world of children’s television, I understand if this sounds odd, but bear with me. It gets weirder.

…

Unfortunately, in its earnest quest for female empowerment, America—never quite good at moderation, and always quite good at fighting the last battle—is quietly and methodically marginalizing boys. Every day, through various media campaigns, America’s boys absorb countless messages that girls can do anything—and that they deserve our unending attention and adoration. When it comes to boys, however, the cacophony of “dream big” media encouragement falls oddly silent. The assumption, one supposes, is that the giant, sinister swath of oppressive male “privilege,” supposedly inherited by young boys, speaks for itself.

All in service of The Narrative.

The Other McCain Told You So:

Mothers of sons consider this unfortunate, but feminists like Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman, Jessica Valenti and Alexandra Brodsky are enthusiastically in favor of marginalizing boys. Feminists despise successful men and resent male achievement, and seek to eliminate educational and career opportunities for boys.

Read it.

Here is a familiar fact pattern in large U.S. law firms.

Time 1. Partners come together and agree that diversity is part of their firm’s core values; they review the firm’s bleak statistics, particularly at the partnership level, and agree they can and will do better.

Time 2. Through significant time and expense, they successfully recruit a diverse class of incoming associates.

Time 3. A disproportionately large number of female and diverse associates leave the firm.

Time 4. The remaining associates eligible for partner are primarily white men.

Time 5. Partners come together and agree that diversity is part of their firm’s core values; they review the firm’s bleak statistics, particularly at the partnership level, and agree they can and will do better.

In other words, the firm is committed to fixing a problem that they didn’t create and that they are powerless to solve, unless they can somehow force women and minorities to stick around long enough to be considered for partner. (Can a government program be far behind?)

This is the catch-22 world that ‘diversity’ throws us into.

Read it.

Employees at the University of Washington (UW) blew thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds intended to foster scientific research on purchases such as deluxe Snuggies and tableware, a recent audit has revealed.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Far from a pristine forest stretching for mile upon mile, the Amazon was once home to millions of people who domesticated huge swathes of land before the arrival of Europeans caused their societies to collapse, according to a new study.

An international team of researchers concluded that the minimum population in 1492 would have been about eight million, with an “unlikely” upper figure of 50 million. Their findings suggest the forest returned to wilderness after the civilisations were wiped out by disease and conquest brought by the Europeans.

The researcher’s conclusions are partly based on one of the few remaining signs of the civilisations – the dark, fertile soil produced by farming techniques and waste. Some of theses sites are only accessible because of deforestation.

The research tallies with reports from some of the first Europeans to visit South America, which have been dismissed by some at the time as nothing more than propaganda.

So the eco-Nazis are full of shit … as usual.

Read it.

As I understand it, the theory underlying the concept of Very Serious People is as follows.

1. Everyone has a mix of beliefs, some of which are right, and some wrong.
2. Everyone co-exists in a social system that tends to value, heavily reinforce and widely disseminate some people’s beliefs while disparaging, heavily discounting, and tending to limit the circulation of certain other people’s beliefs. This bias is not random, but instead reflects and reinforces existing power structures and asymmetries.
3. People whose beliefs are reinforced and widely circulated so that they are socially and politically influential, even when they are manifestly wrong, are Very Serious People. The system provides them with no incentives to admit error or perhaps to understand that they have erred, even when their mistakes have devastating consequences.

Or: Shorter Theory of Very Serious People.

1. Being Tom Friedman Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Welcome Back My Friends

RIP Keith Emerson.

Read it,

You think you’ve got problems? Hah! Try being a medieval scribe.

There is a lot you can tell from medieval skin. Like a physician today, the book historian can make a diagnosis by observing it carefully. The best quality, for example, feels just like velvet. It usually has an even, off-white colour, and it makes no sound when you turn the page. Bad skin, by contrast, crackles. It is of uneven thickness, and shows staining and a variety of colours. Unlike what you may have thought, looking at imperfect skin is far more interesting than studying its perfect counterpart. This is because a defect tells a powerful story, shedding light on the book’s production and providing clues about its use and storage post-production. Here’s the skinny on bad medieval parchment.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

From the Los Angeles Times below is an article that makes evident how the violence against the Trump rally in Chicago was part of the ongoing Safe Spaces from microaggressions campus movement, such as the Yale freakout over Halloween costumes.

Of course, Safe Spaces has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the territorial imperative. Young people naturally feel the urge to fight turf wars, to stake out territory and drive out enemies. Normally in America we have laws to regulate the competition for property so territorial urges don’t turn into mob rule. But over the last year minority college students have increasingly asserted that they must be above the law because racism. It’s the only way they can be safe.

What we’re seeing at UIC is the balkanized future of America in which The Diverse can only come together over fear and loathing of whites. Hating whites is the KKKrazy Glue of the coalition of the fringes.

Read it.

Because they can?

Taking a cruise is, as the old saying goes, the pursuit of the “newly wed, the overfed and the nearly dead”. It seems also to be growing in popularity, so much so that we report today on one American enthusiast who has spent eight years on a cruise ship. Apparently she finds time to do plenty of needlepoint, which is just as well, as even the best appointed of these floating towns have a finite amount of entertainment available. How many performances of Fogwell Flax’s comedy routine, renditions of Grease, or Rob “this is the life” Brydon throwing shapes on the dance floor can one flesh-and-blood cruiser take?

Read it.

The Airlander 10 – part-plane, part-airship, and all of 90m long – is being assembled by the firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) on a site that has been associated with airships since 1915 when Shorts built the first giant hangar to build the R-31 and R-32.

The craft is nearing completion and later this month, if wind conditions permit, HAV’s chief test pilot, David Burns, will take the huge lighter-than-air craft east towards the A1M motorway. Passing drivers could witness the beginning of a revolution in air travel, cargo transport, military surveillance and even disaster relief.

The Airlander 10 prototype, which HAV hopes will be the first of 1,000 craft, is 25 per cent larger than a Boeing 747 and is designed to remain airborne for up to five days.

My, what a surprise.

Student activists at San Diego State are the latest to publish a list of demands, and roughly half of the demands involve their insistence that they deserve free stuff and more money.

Read it.

An adherent of the Religion of Peace stabbed a Jewish leader to death on the streets of Paysandú, Uruguay. Witnesses report that the alleged perpetrator proclaimed did it in the name of Islam, but the police are hedging their bets — all they will say is that the disturbed young man, who may have a history of mental problems, has not admitted a religious motive for his deed.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

It’s interesting. It would be healthy if it relied on a decent and crisp separation between fact and fiction. In a way, it does. But there’s something insincere about it as well. These people we today call “liberals” are the way they are, because we’re going through a cultural conflict. They’re intruding into an established culture, with a new culture they’d like to impose. “Conservatives” are any people who do something to resist this incursion. This new, enlightened culture says men should not address women in any manner or tone except for the most-deferential; to do otherwise is uncool, anywhere, inside or outside of the teevee set. And that goes double for pummeling terrorists to get information, of course. Their message is not one of “that’s only cool in make-believe, real-life people shouldn’t do that”; their message is that this is BadThink. It’s part of the thought-smallpox we’re supposed to make extinct, right?

The two examples — there may be more — dislodge a telling fig leaf. They reveal a meaningful truth, that liberals and conservatives don’t actually disagree about what’s cool. The disagreement is in whether ordinary people are worthy. Kinda gets back to what I was noticing about their newest, Trump-defense campaign slogan: “Americaa is already great.” You don’t know what that actually means, any better than I do. Does that mean, sometime since their guy got sworn in seven years ago, America crossed some threshold and became “great,” rather like the sun crossing the celestial equator and starting Spring officially? Because the liberal catechism sure as hell doesn’t smile on the idea that America was “already great” in 2009. So, when exactly was this crossover-point, this vernal equinox? Where is the enthused, self-identifying liberal who will comment on that?

Robert Higgs offers a little perspective.

No decent person likes the building of a fortified wall to keep peaceful migrants from entering the Land of the Free freely, but at least we are not marching members of the Five Civilized Tribes hundreds of miles at gunpoint in the dead of winter to live and die in a remote wilderness. No decent person likes the way blacks are victimized by the drug war, the crooked cops and prosecutors, and the prison-industrial complex, but at least we no longer have chattel slavery where human beings are bought and sold like livestock at private auction. No decent person likes the demonization of Muslims, but at least we haven’t forced all of them into prison camps, as the West-coast people of Japanese ancestry were forced in 1942-45. And so forth.

The country has always been rotten, full of coercive busybodies eager to use state power to punish their neighbors whose conduct, creed, or ethnicity did not please them. The country has always been teeming with hotheads eager to go to war with practically anyone who seemed to them suitable for killing. The country has always been ruled by crooked politicians and scheming, would-be crony capitalists. Rotten, rotten, rotten to the core from the get-go.

Perish the thought.

The Los Angeles Times reports today about how two bills that would make life easier for Uber drivers are being held up in Senate committee by Sen. Ben Hueso, chair of the Senate’s Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee.

Hueso’s brothers Alfredo and Jose Hueso just happen to run a cab company, USA Cabs, in San Diego who have sued to force Uber drivers to do something that one of the bills would exempt them from doing: register for commercial license plates.

The other bill Hueso is blocking from going for a vote, after passing the Assembly with almost no opposition (a single “no” vote between the two bills), “would allow rideshare companies to carpool, picking up multiple passengers with different destinations at the same time.”

All are Democrats, of course. Being a Democrat means never having to declare a conflict of interest — just ask Hillary.

Read it.

Must be Islamophobia or one of those things.

Being constantly insulted by feminists — “Heterosexuality Is the Structure That Keeps Sexist Oppression in Place” — is something men are expected never to notice. Any man who objects to feminism’s anti-male hate propaganda will be instantly branded a misogynist. This is “Kafkatrapping,” whereby the denial of guilt is cited as proof of guilt.

Read it.

And I regret that this turkey is in the race for the Republican nomination.

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A prominent Danish rights activist and author has been fined £2,300 for “people trafficking” after giving a Syrian refugees a lift.

Lisbeth Zornig and her husband Mikael Lindholm were handed a combined fine of 45,000 krone (£4,700) by judges in the city of Nykøbing Falster today.

Ms Zornig was prosecuted for picking up a Syrian family of four adults and two children in southern Denmark and driving them to Copenhagen on 7 September last year.

Read it.

Unions have been demanding a $15 minimum wage. But when passed, they turn around and seek an exemption for union businesses, effectively denying their members the fruits of their victory. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, a member of the 1,200-strong California Federation of Labor, recently did just that. It led a fight for a citywide $15 minimum wage—while vehemently opposing an exemption for non-profits and small businesses.  Immediately after the legislation was passed, however, they began lobbying for an exemption for unionized businesses.

This was too much for even the union-friendly Los Angeles Times, which captioned its editorial on the subject, “L.A. Labor Leader’s Hypocrisy on Minimum Wage.” In its defense, the Federation disclosed that its hypocrisy was not limited to Los Angeles County, that this is simply a standard exemption in minimum wage laws passed by California cities at the behest of the labor movement.

Read it.

A Pennsylvania newspaper has reported details of a $50 million alleged renewable energy scam. More shocking is how easy it was, to allegedly defraud government subsidies.

The problem will all these beguiling government programs to Improve Life And Save The Planet is that (a) as soon as ‘government money’ is available for something, a certain class of people immediately start figuring out how they can game the system, and (b) since government employees aren’t spending their own money they are less careful than a private company would be, and the result ranges from simple lack of due diligence to outright collusion in fraud.

This is exacerbated by government preferences for Fashionable Minorities, the recipients of which see the purpose of the government job as to Provide Them With A Job rather than to Get Something Accomplished. The resulting ‘work ethic’ is what you would expect.

Read it.

It might be a good idea to avoid London.

Read it.

A new treatment for a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer can make tumours “disappear” in just 11 days, scientists have said, as they hailed a “mind-boggling” breakthrough in the fight against the disease.

A trial of the use of two drugs in combination found that tumours were completely cleared in 11 per cent of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer and were reduced to a “minimal” size in a further 17 per cent. Nearly 90 per cent saw a reduction in the number of cancer cells.

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Valéry Giscard D’Estaing was the first to say it frankly in 2002: Turkey must never be a member of the European Union. It was not a matter of time, of Turkey’s adjusting to the political culture of Europe, of economic or legal harmonisation. For Giscard, never meant never, because Turkey is not a European country. To admit this huge Muslim, non-European state, he said, would mean the end of the EU.

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The treatment involved removing cataracts from the children’s eyes to allow the remaining stem cells to regrow functional lenses.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Exploding killer lakes may sound like the subject of a Stephen King novel but they’re actually out there, waiting to strike with a CO₂ cloud that suffocates every living creature in its path by sucking the oxygen out of the air.

In 1986 Lake Nyos near the border of Nigeria unleashed a deadly CO₂ cloud upon the people who lived in the valley below, killing over 1700 villagers and at least 3000 head of cattle.

Read it.

As you inch your way through security at the airport, you’ll be relieved of your penknife and terrifying tube of Pepsodent. Your unopened can of Coke will, of course, be thrown in the trash, along with any snow globes, and off go your shoes.

When at last you’re reshod and passing the duty-free shop, you can buy a well-deserved bottle of Scotch .?.?. which you can then bring on board, crack against the cabin wall and use as you would a machete.

So why all the security kabuki from the TSA?

That’s just one of the questions posed by Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon in their new book, “Playing by the Rules: How Our Obsession with Safety Is Putting Us All at Risk.”

Read it.

Östersund is a small town in the northern part of Sweden. Like most such towns, it has always been a placid, orderly, law-abiding place — that’s the Swedish way.

Until recently. Everything has changed since the arrival of “refugees” at asylum centers that are popping up like mushrooms all over the Swedish landscape, even in the most rural areas. In the past few weeks six violent crimes — including rape and attempted rape — have been committed by men of “foreign appearance” against women out alone at night in Östersund. Now the police are advising women to stay at home at night, or at the very least not go out except in groups.

Read it.

Asylum seekers in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt have been throwing themselves in front of cars. However, it doesn’t seem to be a collective death wish on the part of culture-enrichers, but rather a devious and cynical way to raise cash via the clueless Austrian judicial system.

Read it. And watch the video.

Bill Whittle describes well what he calls “the Progressive iron triangle of the New York media, L.A. culture machine, and Washington’s beltway corruption”.

…

To understand the elitists’ hatred of the middle class, I will recommend to you again – nay urge you to read and metabolize – Fred Siegel’s deft, definitive digging up of the roots of the elites’ scorn and their sleazy alliance with the underclass, people they would never consider their social equals, merely useful electoral fodder…

The reader will be taken aback at how old and enduring this anti-American claque really is.

Read it.

…is not, apparently, violating federal laws and regulations and State Department procedures in a manner that exposes thousands of classified documents to our enemies. No, that isn’t the sort of conduct that is likely to draw an indictment from Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice. Obama’s DOJ is more interested in trying to jail scientists who point out the rather obvious flaws in the government’s desperate effort to convince Americans that global warming is our greatest threat.

Read it. And watch the video.

In the latest in a series of German man- and woman-on-the-street interviews, a number of (mostly) women give their opinions on the violence against women that has accompanied the recent wave of “refugees” into Germany.

Arnold Kling sums it up.

Conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton’s most recent book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, critiques academics who did their scribbling in the twentieth century, creating what became known as the New Left. Most of the intellectuals profiled by Scruton are continental Europeans whose names are unfamiliar to most Americans today. Although few of us are conversant with the likes of Theodoro Adorno, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Slavoj Zizek, reading about them makes one realize how much of an imprint they have left on contemporary college campuses and even on the approach to politics taken by Barack Obama.

A major theme of Fools is that the New Left evolved a set of intellectual tactical moves against their opponents. These included creating a false left-right spectrum, delegitimizing other points of view, indicting capitalism and tradition for all wrongs while being vague about alternatives, and using Newspeak to present authoritarianism as a defense of freedom and human rights.