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This story might make you want to point a wand at your computer screen and shout Avada Kedavra: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has come under fire for appropriating Native American culture in recently released stories that build on the mythology she created.

…

Is something wrong with this? No. There is an entire genre of fiction, in fact, built around “secret histories,” where authors use real historical events or legends but retell them with revisionist or fantastical elements.

But Rowling has run afoul of the people who shout “cultural appropriation” whenever someone borrows from an ethnic tradition to which they do not belong. As was the case with Renee Bierbaum—the yoga instructor who was shut down by the county government after a Native American activist accused her of culture theft—a militant defender of Native traditions is asserting that Rowling is taking “a living tradition of a marginalized people.”

“That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation,” wrote Dr. Adrienne Keene, an academic and member of the Cherokee Nation, on Twitter.

Somebody needs to tell these people to get over themselves.

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Federal prosecutors in Nashville announced this week that all charges related to an alleged Somali sex-trafficking ring had been dropped. The decision to drop the charges against 16 remaining defendants comes in the wake of a federal appeals court ruling that three men previously prosecuted as part of the case had been wrongly convicted, owing to the fact that the entire case was a sham.

…

As detailed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, prosecutors’ case against these so-called sex traffickers was based entirely on the faulty testimony of two victims, both of whom were caught in multiple contradictions and lies, and of a Minnesota police officer who was also found to be fabricating facts. And though the case had been billed and prosecuted as one of “child sex trafficking,” one of the allegedly underage victims—intitially described as a 15-year-old—had a falsified birth certificate. It was determined likely that the “minor,” Jane Doe 2, was actually 19-years-old during the time period in question.

At every step of the case, however, red flags that should have given law enforcement pause were ignored or overlooked. Former-U.S. Attorney Todd Jones, then in Minnesota (where the bulk of the alleged activity had taken place), even declined to prosecute the case based on concerns about its quality. But because several of the alleged sex-trafficking incidents had happened in Tennessee, federal agents were able to take the case to trial in Nashville, where a jury acquitted six defendants and convicted three. A trial judge subsequently acquitted these three defendants, but federal prosecutors appealed.

This is horrible. Hopefully there is some way that these jerks wind up in jail. The Somalis are also owed some sort of compensation, as well, although I don’t know what (if any) mechanism exists for providing it.

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When Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump were introduced by their husbands a few years ago, they clicked immediately — the two famous daughters swanned around Manhattan together for a time, posing on the red carpet at events like the Glamour Women of the Year Awards where they laughed and embraced for the cameras.

They seemed to genuinely delight in each other’s presence and had much common ground. Last year, Chelsea even compared Ivanka’s natural charm to her own father’s while praising her in the glossy pages of Vogue.

But with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump now on track for a King Kong versus Godzilla political collision in November, that friendship has been put temporarily on hold — both women, sources close to them said, have chosen to no longer be seen together in public during the election. Given the personal nastiness and vitriol of the campaign already, it may be difficult for the relationship to recover.

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This converts them from ‘migrants’ to invaders.

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National intelligence services (like the CIA and MI6) continue to find themselves relying more and more on civilian sources for the best data and analysis. A recent example was revealed because of all the anxiety over the huge numbers of illegal migrants trying to get into Europe and other Western countries, many of them by boat. Turns out that the best tool for reducing the use of ships for smuggling was an Israeli firm that built a business on creating a database of normal, and abnormal (and usually illegal) behavior by ships at sea for shipping and maritime insurance companies.

This data was easier to collect since the 1990s when all larger ships were required to use the AIS (Automated Identification System) which is essentially an automatic radio beacon (transponder) that, when it receives a signal from a nearby AIS equipped ship, responds with the ship’s identity, course, and speed. This is meant to enable AIS ships to avoid collisions with each other. An AIS activity database makes it possible to identify patterns of normal and abnormal behavior. The abnormal behavior, like arriving outside a port and waiting for several days to enter, is what smugglers are often forced to do to avoid arrest. Same thing with travelling outside the most efficient (in terms of fuel used and weather encountered) routes. With enough of this data and a thorough analysis it is very difficult for seagoing criminals to escape detection. Now that navies and coast guards are increasing using this “maritime BI (Business Intelligence)” tool to more quickly shut down the criminal gangs making over a billion dollars a year from all this people smuggling.

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Sheffield University, a public university in England, has expelled Felix Ngole, a graduate student in social work, after it found he’d posted a Bible verse condemning homosexual acts in a private Facebook discussion. A university panel said that while he had a right to his opinion, his remarks could have offended some people and would make it difficult for him to work as a social worker.

They certainly have the last part right.

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The Antiplanner confesses to not be a bible expert, but I don’t think Jesus ever said, “Thou shalt steal from thy neighbors so thee can afford to take expensive train rides.” But that seems to be the goal of Isaiah, a faith-based group in Minnesota that demands that taxpayers subsidize commuter trains from St. Cloud to Minneapolis.

Of course they do.

The Northstar commuter-rail line currently operates over the 40 miles from Minneapolis to Big Lake, about 28 miles short of St. Cloud. The line is a huge loser: it carried an average of around 1,250 round-trips a day in 2014, earning fare revenues of less than $2.4 million but spending $15.2 million on operations and $7.4 million on maintenance.

Of course it does.

St. Cloud residents who want to catch the train have to drive or take a bus to Big Lake. But taking a bus is so “antiquated,” complains Reverend James Albert, Isaiah’s leader. Apparently, they didn’t teach much history in Albert’s seminary school, or he would know that trains are nearly 100 years more antiquated than buses.

Evidently not.

“We feel we deserve the option to not own a car,” says Isaiah member Richard Gordon, a student at St. Cloud State University. While no one is preventing him from taking that option, that doesn’t also mean that he deserves to have 90 percent of his transportation costs paid for by taxpayers.

Students: The Entitled Class.

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But you knew that.

National Public Radio collaborated with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to survey Americans’ recent experience with health care. As to the Affordable Care Act, the survey’s findings are damning. They suggest that Obamacare has been worse than a complete waste of money.

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Gee, I wonder why?

Well, not sold out — they were giving the stuff away for free. The politicians distributing the pepper spray in downtown Vienna were labeled “far right” because they wanted to give Austrian women the opportunity to defend themselves against the predatory migrants that are now so numerous in the capital. There was so much demand that they ran out, and had to issue rain checks.

There’s a great idea — maybe the city of Detroit ought to distribute free bolletproof vests to their inhabitants.

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An Israeli man who was stabbed, removed the knife from his neck and used it to stab his attacker.

The victim, a 40 year-old ultra-orthodox Jew named as Yonatan Azarihab, was later hospitalised after suffering multiple stab wounds to his upper body from his attacker, reports the Times of Israel.

Mr Azarihab, who was reportedly collecting money for charity, was followed into a wine shop in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv, before what police described as the “frenzied attack” took place.

I’m impressed.

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Amity Shlaes clues you in.

My kind of a President.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Looks as if it would feed a family of five. Enough fur for a child’s coat.

Jen Hislop, 43, from North Ayrshire, was chosen out of hundreds of applicants and Atlas left for his new home at the weekend.

She said: “I burst into tears when I got the phone call saying I had been chosen to rehome Atlas and I cried again when I collected him.

“Animals are just pets to some people but my rabbits are family members.

Well, I suppose some are more desperate for family than others.

“I’ve decided to change his name to Atilla the Bun Binky Master Jazz Paws, but I think we’ll call him Atty for short!”

Why am I not surprised….

The New York Post is delightfully dyspeptic today.

How will today’s college students function once they leave campus and find the world no giant “safe space” protecting them from things they don’t want to hear?

University of Pittsburgh students last week declared themselves “in danger” and “traumatized” over a provocative campus speech by righty flame-thrower Milo Yiannapoulos.

So traumatized that, at a student government hearing, they demanded to know why the school hadn’t provided on-site therapy for those who felt “invalidated” by the speech.

A speech that no one had to attend.

My, what a surprise!

Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) praised the murder of Taylor Force, an American West Point graduate visiting Israel with a group from Vanderbilt University, who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist during a stabbing spree yesterday at the Jaffa port, reports Palestinian Media Watch.

Mr. Force, 29, of Lubbock, Texas, had served with the U.S. Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation New Dawn (Iraq), and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan). His wife was also severely injured in the attack outside Jaffa.

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That’s the question Glenn Reynolds likes to ask periodically over at Instapundit. Today we’ll add some data points to the file, starting with the news that the New York Times has settled a discrimination lawsuit.

All of these student disturbances are at schools run by ‘progressives’ for ‘progressives’. You never hear about any problems at conservative institutions, like Hillsdale in Michigan.

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Last Saturday night two groups of rambunctious culture-enriching “youths” in Vienna got a little rowdy and went after each other with knives, metal pipes, and other implements of destruction. One of the groups (the Afghans) outnumbered the other (the Chechens), and two of the mischievous youngsters are now in critical condition in the hospital.

I incline toward #3, but it’s all good.

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There’s lots of data, especially the comparison of rental rates for moving trucks into and out of California, to show the steady exodus of prosperous Californians and their businesses. The truck rental companies will almost give you a one-way truck to move from Texas to California, but charge a lot for a one-way truck from California elsewhere, which tells a lot.

A few years ago I was at a panel of business executives who bemoaned California’s high taxes and unfriendly regulatory environment, but who said their headquarters and major operations would stay put for the time being because they had long-term leases on building facilities, and as such it would cost more to move now than they’d save on lower costs elsewhere. But when those leases ran out. . .

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Yeah, right after destroying the American health care system, giving millions of illegal immigrants driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, and maybe a golf game or six.

Nine years after Robert Levinson went missing on an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, the White House reiterated on Wednesday that the United States has not abandoned him.

Although it might look like that to the Casual Observer (not to be confused the the Low-Information Voter, who will believe a White House pronouncement over your lyin’ eyes any day).

“Finding Mr. Levinson remains a top priority for the United States, and we continue to spare no effort to bring him home,” Earnest maintained.

Apparently no effort is all the effort they can afford to spare.

His daughter, Sarah Moriarty, claimed at the time that the family had “reached our breaking point” with the Obama administration.

“We are crushed and outraged,” she said.

Yeah, that sure sounds like the Obama administration to me.

The Obama administration, he added, is “holding Iran to its promise.”

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Birmingham announced this week that it had charged a former employee of Brink’s with stealing $196,000 from a federal reserve bank. Not that big of a deal as these things go, except that it was all in quarters. 784,000 quarters, to be exact.

The archetype two-big gangster.

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Well, obviously, we can’t have that.

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In the West Bank and Israel the Fatah sponsored “knife terrorism” campaign continues. Since last October 28 Israelis and over 170 Palestinians and have been killed. This is all about making the corrupt and incompetent Fatah more popular in the West Bank but opinion polls show that many (but not most) Palestinians would vote for anyone but Fatah and Hamas if elections were held right now. Moreover polls show enthusiasm for the knife terrorism campaign is waning. Like many past Fatah publicity stunts the knife terrorism makes life worse for most Palestinians and provides one more reason for foreign investment to stay away from the West Bank. Despite the Palestinian terrorists trying to go after tourists (and sometimes succeeding) the latest Palestinian terror campaign has had little impact on the Israeli economy. In 2015 the Israeli economy grew 3.3 percent while the West Bank economy declined nearly as much.

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Hardee’s customers won’t have to deal with Hardee’s human employees much longer. The fast food franchise is experimenting with self-service kiosks at several of their restaurants, claiming, “The self-ordering kiosk gives the customer a fun, interactive and user-friendly way to control their order.”

This marketing blurb is obviously an exaggeration. There has never been a kiosk experience that was anything other than tolerable.

What these glorified iPads actually provide is a capital substitute for certain types of labor. Fast food restaurants are not exactly known for their sophistication in customer service and instead entice customers with speed, convenience, and consistency. Wages for fast food employees are in turn derived from the value workers add in these various capacities. The replacement of workers with kiosks signals that the value added by these services is most assuredly in decline.

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Leave it to the Middle East studies establishment to defend the vilest forms of conspiratorial anti-Semitic rhetoric, provided it’s in service of demonizing Israel. Jasbir Puar, the Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor and Israel-boycott advocate who, in a controversial February 3 lecture at Vassar College, charged the IDF with the organ harvesting, deliberate maiming, and stunting of “Palestinian bodies,” can certainly count on support from its ranks.

Notorious Israel-bashers such as Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), and Steven Salaita (American University of Beirut) are among the signatories to an open letter to Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill defending Puar against an alleged campaign of “vilification and hatred” following her inflammatory lecture. Unlike the vast majority of academic jargon-filled apologias for bigotry that populate the lecture circuit, Puar’s talk was widely covered and rightly condemned by a disgusted public. In evoking “hate mail and other threats” against Puar, the authors allude to the specter of death threats — whether real or imagined — a time-honored tradition among academics unaccustomed to the twin horrors of criticism and accountability.

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In a country where one-third of teenagers are regular smokers, the risk of an attack on a group of students amassed on the street was deemed greater than the well-documented dangers of tobacco usage. The BBC reports that the union of school administrators first suggested a change in the policy banning smoking at schools immediately after the attacks, but was flatly rebuffed by the health ministry.

Regardless, schools have begun allowing smoking on their property even without permission from the national government, which Deputy Secretary General Michel Richard of the administrators union justified by saying, “Students massing on the street constitutes a very high risk, one that is certainly greater than that posed by the consumption of tobacco.”

Read it. And watch the video.

Detroit is a case study in the wreck of liberal governance and the politics of racial grievance. Michael Barone is from Detroit originally and has occasionally written about its decline, as in his CRB review “The unheavenly city” (on Charles LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy). The review opens: “When people ask me why I moved from liberal to conservative, I have a one-word answer: Detroit.”

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Turkey recently ordered $700 million worth of smart bombs from American suppliers. This order is for over a thousand bombs and will take until 2020 for all of them to arrive. Turkey has been using smart bombs on its F-16s since the 1990s but this is the first time they ordered the laser guided, 909 kg (2,000 pound) BLU-109. This “bunker buster” can penetrate five meters (16 feet) of concrete and even more earth. It is believed Turkey wants these to go after PKK (Kurdish separatist) and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) facilities in caves and other underground bunkers.

What do they know that John Kerry doesn’t?

A great deal, I suspect.

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The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn’t come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.

Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.

The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.

…

The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.

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Have you ever wondered how it feels to suddenly find yourself in the midst of a terror attack, and how you would react? It’s everyone’s worst nightmare, but for a growing number of people in Israel over the 5 ½ months since the latest Palestinian uprising began, it has been a shocking reality.

Since September 13th, 32 Israelis and one Palestinian have been murdered, most by Palestinian attackers. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs counts “195 stabbings and attempted stabbing attacks, 79 shootings, and 40 vehicular attacks” involving the ramming of pedestrians. The attacks continue and the figures are updated almost daily.

More than 170 Palestinians reportedly have been killed by Israeli security forces or armed Israeli civilians during the same period, most during or in the aftermath of a terror attack; the remainder in clashes at violent demonstrations.

Read it.

Scientists have made a dissolvable patch that can deliver vaccines — potentially eliminating the need for needles entirely.

The new vaccines are delivered simply by laying a tiny patch onto a person’s finger, before it dissolves into their skin. As such, it could vastly reduce the spread of diseases, by making the delivery of vaccines much more effective and cheap.

The new technology is made of a dissolvable material, meaning that when it is placed onto the skin it will dissolve straight away.

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For some reason, either because the color scheme offered better camouflage or simply random chance, the leopards in this region are almost entirely black, which makes them really difficult to tell apart. Until now. In a new study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, researchers found that by using infrared cameras, they could actually see a leopard’s distinctive pattern of spots.

When a person looks at a black leopard, the distinctive pattern of spots (unique to each leopard) blends in with the dark fur. But cameras equipped with an infrared flash (usually used to take night pictures) can see the subtle difference between the two dark colors of fur. The resulting photograph of a leopard shows a unique pattern of spots that researchers can use to identify animals, and get a better idea of how many rare black leopards are left in the wild.

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We posted yesterday about the 14-year-old (now turned 15) “German” mujahidette who attacked and severely wounded a police officer at a train station in Hannover. The young zealot was angry because she was prevented from traveling to Syria and joining the Islamic State, so she decided to take it out on Germany by stabbing a policeman.

The following article from Bild provides some additional details.

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Student activists at Western Washington University—a public university in Bellingham, Washington—have published their demands, which easily trump Oberlin College students’ demands in terms of sheer absurdity. WWU students want an entire academic college dedicated to breeding social justice activists, separate residential safe spaces for racial groups, and a student committee charged with policing offensive speech.

It’s no exaggeration to say that if students got their way, WWU would essentially become an indoctrination camp. The proposed College of Power and Liberation would teach a very narrow far-left ideology, and the proposed Office for Social Transformation would investigate professors and students who are accused of microaggressions.

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Magic will, of course, be under strict government control, because that’s how they do things in Britain (the ‘Ministry of Magic’), and Rowling can’t conceive of any other arrangement.

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Remember: the uses listed above are detailed as such in Quran verse 9:60, and thus, being the command of Allah, are beyond disagreement or dispute. This makes it clear that Zakah is anything but charity money. Its uses make it clear that it is a fund at the disposal of Muslim leadership, to be used to further the cause of Islam, to make Islam victorious. It is more in the nature of a tax, much like the revenue collected by a regular government of a country.

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New book from Princeton University Press giving the lie to the common Crustian meme that jihad arises from the poor and oppressed.

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The young brownshirts of the left keep on marching.

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Rama Kunwar’s homecoming proved fatal as she returned to her family after marrying a man from a different caste.

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Just think of what it would have been like at a Hillary rally.

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One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered.  This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the  engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.

A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers.  And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes.  The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces.  The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces.  But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.

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

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Tyler Cowen has argued that Paul Krugman is the Milton Friedman of the early 21st century, and in many ways that’s true. Among all economists, he is clearly the most influential public intellectual. But an even better comparison might be John Kenneth Galbraith, who was the favorite economist of intellectuals who hated economics.

I’ve noticed that if you explain to intellectuals that a minimum wage will hurt the poor by increasing unemployment, or that rent controls hurt renters by creating shortages, or that unemployment insurance increases unemployment, or that taxes on investment income should be abolished, they’ll give you this look like “I don’t know whether this guy is evil or crazy.” Non-economists strongly resent the implications of much of economic theory, as it punctures holes in all their pet theories. So when a Nobel Prize winner comes along that confirms all their political views, he’s going to be extremely popular among intellectuals. Especially when he’s as brilliant and witty as Paul Krugman.

I don’t want this too sound too negative. Just to be clear, Krugman is 10 times the economist that Galbraith was. I often disagree with him on macroeconomics, but his views are defensible and brilliantly explained. He’s a great writer, and a superb theoretician. Galbraith was a great writer and . . . and that’s about it.

Watch it.

I guess those super-strict Australian gun-control laws really work.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

Without so much as asking a single question, many modern whites have gullibly swallowed a skewed and incomplete historical narrative that depicts them as history’s sole villains and the nonwhite world as innocent, suffering lambs.

Hey, it’s working.

Nearly all modern historians agree that the scenario depicted by Alex Haley in Roots—that of white raiders penetrating the African interior to rout African villages for slaves—is fraudulent. Instead, European slave traders nearly always bought slaves from African vendors at coastal markets. We hear much about the brutal “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean, but almost never about the estimated 10 million or so indigenous Africans who perished while being marched to the sea in chains and yokes by their African captors.

We don’t hear that according to Boston University’s Linda Heywood and John Thornton, about 90% of Africans transported to the New World had initially been enslaved by other Africans. We don’t hear about Tippu Tip, who was once a world-famous black slave trader in Zanzibar. And we certainly don’t hear much about how Barack Obama—who has no ancestral ties to African slaves in America—is descended from the Luo peoples, who routinely captured other Africans in war and sold them into slavery.

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This brief news clip is amusing, at least for those of us with a sardonic sense of humor. Under any other circumstances, the lefties of this illegal “squat” in Berlin would be out there protesting on behalf of the immigrants, proclaiming the migrants’ right to accommodation and sustenance at the expense of the German taxpayer. And maybe throwing a few paving stones and Molotov cocktails at the police whilst expressing their opinion.

But not this time. You see, the proposed asylum residence is planned for the very property where the Anarchist-Antifa types squat. That’s going too far! With the rallying cry of “Not in my backyard!” — and maybe a smoke bomb or two — they’ve been demonstrating in front of city hall against giving up their beloved abode.

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And hipsters everywhere have a massive orgasm.

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You knew it was something.