Jim Goad is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Is it merely an accident that Brussels is simultaneously the capital of the European Union and Ground Zero for Islamic terror cells in Europe? And is it just an odd coincidence that almost without exception, modern progressives embrace the most egregiously sexist, patriarchal, and homophobic religion on Earth? No, because what unites the unelected EU bureaucrats who encourage open immigration and the deluded Marxists who welcome “migrants” with suicidally open arms is an unwavering moral conviction that everything innately European is evil to the core and needs to be exterminated.

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Based on this report from the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung, German police are doing their best not to have to deal with the fact that a Muslim mob attacked and beat up several people for walking a dog in front of their mosque.

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Islamophobic bees! Who knew?

No doubt it’s the Republicans’ fault.

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I am not making this up.

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Note that not once is there any mention of the elephant in the room: This would appear to be Just Another Islamic Honor Killing.

But that would be Noticing.

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I’d rather risk bowel cancer than have to drink coffee every day. Just sayin’.

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Dianne Feinstein came up empty when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle what Hillary Clinton accomplished during her time in the Senate. Feinstein couldn’t recall any “bills [Clinton] authored.” However, she noted that “there are things outside of bills that you can do.”

There are, indeed. A reader directs my attention to three such things Clinton did in the Senate.

My, what a surprise.

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.

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But  how do we distinguish between transgendered and transabled? What makes one a case of BIID while the other is not? Is it only the bizarre obsession of the secular world with pelvic issues, that no appetite should go unslaked provided only that it is sexual? Compare the reaction of the world to indulgence in the reproductive act to indulgence in the digestive act. In the latter case, we have an “epidemic” of obesity and have declared war on fast food. In the former case, it’s Wahoo! and Nellie, bar the door! Yet is it any coincidence that obesity and single motherhood have run up in parallel or that bulemia and abortion track? Both digestion and reproduction belong to the vegetative powers, and these are the most susceptible to “slip the leash” when reason loosens the reins.

Read it. And watch the video.

As a follow-up to Thursday’s post, the Russian TV news report below provides more extensive information about the recent arrest of members of an ISIS cell in Moscow. The Turkish connection is highlighted in this account — the terror cell is alleged to have provided Turkish passports for ISIS operatives who went back and forth to the Islamic State by crossing through Turkish territory. The report also asserts that Turkey’s security services are intimately involved in ISIS’ terror network.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video features a series of public statements made by prominent imams in Canada. If they had been anything other than Muslims, their prescriptions and opinions about the treatment of women under Islamic law would have had them up on “hate speech” charges for “inciting religious hatred”. But it Modern Multicultural Canada, such sentiments when expressed by Muslims are no big deal — they’re just examples of the rich cultural traditions that make Canadians so proud of their diverse and inclusive society.

Read it.

Cooked meat provided increased protein, fat and energy, helping hominins grow and thrive. But Mark G. Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, and his colleagues argue that there was another important food sizzling on the ancient hearth: tubers and other starchy plants.

Our bodies convert starch into glucose, the body’s fuel. The process begins as soon as we start chewing: Saliva contains an enzyme called amylase, which begins to break down starchy foods.

Amylase doesn’t work all that well on raw starches, however; it is much more effective on cooked foods. Cooking makes the average potato about 20 times as digestible, Dr. Thomas said: “It’s really profound.”

Cooking would have made wild tubers much more nutritious to humans, he noted, “which is not to be sniffed at, especially if you’re a very hungry Pleistocene hunter-gatherer.”

Another clue to the importance of carbohydrates, Dr. Thomas said, can be found in our DNA. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have two copies of the amylase gene in their DNA. But humans have many extra copies — some people have as many as 18. More copies of the amylase gene means we make more of the enzyme and are able to derive more nutrients from starches, Dr. Thomas said.

Dead cow and spuds are the basis of all true civilization.

Read it.

Oh, sure, that will work.

Maybe we ought to give up on building a fence along the Mexican border and just post signs saying ‘No Trespassing’.

Actually, come to think of it, they ought to ask EU migrants to take the same pledge. That would eliminate a lot of problems.

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Michigan continues to battle Massachusetts and California for the title of Most Socialist State.

According to The Michigan Daily, messages reading “#stop Islam” and “Trump 2016” were found on campus Wednesday. “The statements, which were largely washed off by Thursday, prompted students to call University police…” they report.

“This is so reflective of our student campus and the depths of racism and the things that students of color have to endure and that the administration is continuously silent on,” Michigan student Banen Al-Sheemary told the Daily.

Poor special snowflakes. Does that mean that Republican students (if there are any) would be justified in calling the police about pro-Hillary or pro-Bernie chalkings? I suspect not….

Read it.

United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., Inc. pits a family-owned business that harvests and processes peat for golf courses against the federal government. Hawkes Company was harvesting peat from a bog on privately owned property in Minnesota in compliance with state environmental laws when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put a halt to their operation, citing the Clean Water Act, which gives the federal government jurisdiction over all navigable waters in the United States. The Corps demand that the company submit to its permitting process before continuing.

The strange thing about this, and other similar cases involving the Clean Water Act, is that the Supreme Court will not rule on whether or not the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is correct in deeming the property a wetland subject to federal regulation, but whether or not the property owners even have a right to challenge the environmental agency’s decree in court.

SCOTUS adjudicated a simliar dispute between landowners and the Environmental Protection Agency back in 2012 in Sackett v. EPA. Reason TV profiled the Sackett’s case in the video above. While the agency involved is different, the principle is the same: Do landowners have the right to challenge orders from environmental agencies in court, or is such behavior illegal defiance deserving of thousands of dollars in fines a day?

Read it.

Researchers have identified speech patterns in a gorilla, previously thought to be impossible for apes.

A gorilla named Koko became famous for her ability to learn sign language in order to communicate with her keepers. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say that she is now displaying signs of being capable of speech.

Traditionally, it has been believed that vocal performance by apes has been limited to spontaneous noise expressed, for instance, at shock of seeing a predator or to intimidate a fellow mammal in a fight.

It was believed that beyond this, apes lacked the cognitive capacity and breathing control to engage in organised and premeditated speech.

Which doesn’t distinguish them from most teenagers, actually.

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“They do not have a personal knowledge like that,” explains Dato Akriani, one of the tiny number of people who have moved from the lowlands up to Pshavi, and who was initiated into the cult of Kopala 20 years ago. “They are the true inheritors and passers-on of the tradition, but they cannot explain it metaphysically. They cannot tell you why they are doing this or that and what it means. They cannot touch bears or wolves, touch chicken or eggs, or touch a woman when she has her period, but if you ask them why, they don’t know. It’s supernatural, it’s a mystery.”

We could draw a parallel with modern-day Africans, but that would be raaaaaaacist.

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New research settles argument about whether whether humans or climate change was responsible for the end of ‘megafauna’, it is claimed, and ‘debunks the myth of early humans living in harmony with nature’ New research settles argument about whether whether humans or climate change was responsible for the end of ‘megafauna’, it is claimed, and ‘debunks the myth of early humans living in harmony with nature’

Eh, scientists, what do they know? Most of them swallow ‘global warming’ — or say they do.

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That the doorless lift, which consists of two shafts side by side within which a chain of open cabins descend and ascend continuously on a belt, has narrowly escaped becoming a victim of safety regulations, has everything to do with a deeply felt German affection for what many consider an old-fashioned yet efficient form of transport.

In the UK, where paternosters were invented in the 1860s, only one or two are believed to be in use. In Germany which first adopted them in the 1870s, there are an estimated 250 and there was an outcry, particularly among civil servants, when they were brought to a standstill this summer while the legislation was reviewed.

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In 2010, the New York City affiliate of Habitat for Humanity received a $21 million federal grant to work on a city neighborhood hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis and help stabilize it.

The funds would allow Habitat-NYC to launch the most ambitious project in its 32-year history. Its neighborhood pick was Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically poor neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where the charity would focus on buying and renovating abandoned apartment buildings.

There was just one problem. With few vacancies in the gentrifying area, longtime tenants were pushed out of their apartments — some into homelessness — clearing the way for developers to sell to Habitat at a hefty profit, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Beware the partnership of do-gooder organizations and government. That always ends badly.

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Remind me again why we supposedly need more Mexicans in this country.

I’m really curious as to how they fit so many bodies in one report. As attachments?

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Potatoes, fat spreads and eggs are not as bad as you think and might actually be healthy, new research has found.

With fast changing nutritional guidelines, it is difficult to keep track of the latest health trend but a new study based on both old and current science breaks the stereotypes of what you should and shouldn’t eat.

Remember that the next time Nanny Government or ‘activists’ try to dictate what you eat.

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The body of Russian Sergey Lykhvar, 37, was discovered in the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua four days after he was reported missing.

He was last seen on Friday 25 March, a day after he left to snorkel around the remote Minyaifun island.

…

He said: “We believe he was killed by a crocodile judging from the missing body parts and the extent of his injuries.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The strongest recommendation for Donald Trump I’ve seen in months.

Although I’m sure that The Magic Negro is considering an Executive Order that would allow Europeans (and Africans, too! Why not?) to vote in our Presidential election ‘just this once’.

Read it.

Several of the largest education publishers say they now generate most of their sales and revenue from digital products, but both analysts and some in the industry disagree on if the shift represents a transformation for the textbook industry or a forced rebranding.

My, what a surprise.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he felt President Obama “double-crossed” him during his tenure over budget cuts to the Pentagon.

…

According to the report, Gates was told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget after already having slashed it.

“I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates said. “After all those years in Washington, I was naïve.”

Welcome to the club.

Repulsor Flashlight.

Any Maerial UV Cold Welder.

ManCan backpackable beer keg.

Nerf Combat Creature Terradrone.

USB flash drive disguised as a stone.

Read it.

Syrian state media reported the grim discovery as troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad and his supporters continued work to clear the city after driving militants out.

The government-controlled Syrian Arab News Agency (Sana) said at least 40 corpses had so far been recovered from the site, with some beheaded and others showing signs of “brutal” torture.

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

Read it.

Neither does Obama, the available evidence indicates, so I don’t know what he’s complaining about.

Steve Sailer calls out the Usual Media Suspects.

The L.A. Times article blames white people for the fact that Latinos are taking over formerly ‘integrated’ neighborhoods.

One seldom mentioned reason that white flight is a slow process in California is because the 1978 initiative Proposition 13 gives a major property tax break to homeowners who stay in their homes. So Los Angeles neighborhoods tend to be pretty stable compared to, say, Chicago neighborhoods. They don’t rapidly flip due to white flight, nor do they rapidly gentrify.

Liberals always want to get rid of Proposition 13 because it’s such an imposition on raising taxes to spend more on social programs. But nobody mentions that Prop 13 did more for neighborhood integration than just about any policy of the last 40 years.

That is, of course, not mentioned in the L.A. Times article.

Asians in Los Angeles used to be very integrated all over the place. But then forced racial busing came to LAUSD in the late 1970s, so the Jews bailed out to private schools and the Asians bailed out to small school districts in the San Gabriel Valley that they could take over and control, like Arcadia. This also proved a way for Asian parents to keep their daughters away from chasing white boys by moving them to Asian dominant public schools.

But whites are to blame nevertheless.

Read it.

California’s legislature on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to automate most of the Golden State’s fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and mid-sized retail chains by 2022. No, that wasn’t the stated intent of Senate Bill 3, which sailed through the Assembly and Senate on mostly party-line votes and after little debate. But that will be the likely effect of the law, which is supposed to phase in a $15 hourly minimum wage starting in January.

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Some great news in asset forfeiture reform is coming out of Florida. S.B. 1044, approved by the legislature earlier in the month, was signed into law today by Gov. Rick Scott.

The big deal with this particular reform is that, in most cases, Florida police will actually have to arrest and charge a person with a crime before attempting to seize and keep their money and property under the state’s asset forfeiture laws. One of the major ways asset forfeiture gets abused is that it is frequently a “civil”, not criminal, process where police and prosecutors are able to take property without even charging somebody with a crime, let alone convicting them. This is how police are, for example, able to snatch cash from cars they’ve pulled over and claim they suspect the money was going to be used for drug trafficking without actually finding any drugs.

So-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ is one of the most oppressive (and, I think, unconstitutional) tricks in the bag of police (and police agencies such as the FBI) in this country. It is inherently corrupt, placing with police every incentive to steal people’s property under color of law without respect to due process and basic Constitutional safeguards. This is a very big step in the right direction.

Read it.

This week, Connecticut lawmakers passed a bipartisan fix for this year’s $220 million deficit, but legislators in Hartford must now get to work fixing next year’s deficit—projected to be $900 million. And they have more work to do. Taken together, the state’s budgets for the next two years fall $4 billion short—even though, since 2011, Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic-controlled legislature have instituted two of the largest tax increases in state history.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Now Malloy and the legislators say they’re ready to try something different: Malloy is threatening to lay off at least 1,000 state workers. Up to now, the state’s public-sector unions have masterfully worked the political system for their benefit. State employees earn at least 25 percent more than private-sector workers in similar jobs. New union contracts don’t even require a vote from state legislators; if they aren’t rejected within 30 days, they automatically go into effect. And a state law says that any union contract that conflicts with or contradicts state law takes precedence. The result: state-employee benefit costs are growing at more than 5 percent a year, while revenue is growing at just 2 percent. Connecticut residents face a decline in services, even as they’ve been asked to pay higher taxes.

Look for … the Union label….

My, what a surprise.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has surfaced, once again to lecture the Anglosphere and the Western world about its “duties” to hurriedly absorb nearly half a million more Syrian migrants. The war-torn country’s surrounding nations, he argues, have done the heavy lifting already. Now the U.N. chief wants you and your communities to do more.

Why? What business is this of ours? They never say. It’s just assumed that the Great Souled International Crust has an unlimited claim on the resources of Everybody Else for whatever feel-good project they’ve dreamed up.

The New York Times reports that the Sec. General opened a conference in Geneva today, demanding “an exponential increase in global solidarity”, insisting that “Neighboring countries have done far more than their share” and imploring “Others [to] now step up.” And, of course, the stress was on European Union member states and the United States of America to do more.

Who gets to decide what each party’s ‘fair share’ is, and on what basis? They never say. Whatever it is, it’s never enough.

But while the United Nations lumps the responsibility onto the West, you might ask why countries like Saudi Arabia, which claims to have absorbed around half a million Syrians, do not provide any data to support their statements. Indeed, in 2013, net migration of those deemed to be Syrian nationals stood at around just 20,000, with criticism aimed at the country for only accepting Syrians who already have families in the Kingdom.

In fact countries that could take more, and haven’t remain free of criticism, presumably because they aren’t signatories to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. This isn’t a sign that we are better. It’s a sign that we are dumber. We as Western nations afford moral and political equivalence for almost all other countries around the world nowadays (most recently, Cuba and Iran) but we don’t make the same demands of these countries as we place upon ourselves.

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More than 300,000 Chicago children are missing school today because their teachers’ union wants taxes to rise. Unfortunately, this is not an April Fools’ prank. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is actually striking for higher taxes.

Unions are all about ensuring well-paid secure jobs for their members. If the actual job for which those members have been hired gets done as well, that’s a fortunate coincidence.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) does not have a record of success. One-third of the district’s students fail to graduate. This happens despite the district paying some of the highest teacher salaries in America. Rising pension costs have now pushed the district into a major deficit. Teacher pension benefits have quintupled over the past 30 years — well over twice the inflation rate. The average career teacher in CPS can now expect over $2 million in lifetime retirement benefits. To close this deficit, CPS offered the union major concessions. It offered to cap enrollment in (largely non-union) charter schools and relax teacher evaluation standards. In exchange, the district wanted educators to contribute more toward their pensions and health-care benefits. The Chicago Teachers Union considered that unacceptable. It wants state legislators to raise taxes instead. So the union called the one-day strike to pressure them to do exactly that.

Look for … the Union label….

My, what a surprise.

A private Islamic school in the United Kingdom is propagating radical Islam, promoting anti-Semitic propaganda and teaching that British customs are prohibited, Sky News reports.

In a leaflet, Mufti Zubair Dudha, the founder and head of the Islamic Tarbiyah Academy in Dewsbury, quoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notoriously anti-Semitic forgery which accuses the Jews of trying to conquer the world.

Dudha hails from the orthodox Deobandi Muslim sect, which is believed to control half of the Islamic schools and mosques in the United Kingdom.

Other disseminated materials assert that all mixed-gender institutions are evil and prohibit Muslims from watching television. The extremist messages also dictate that women should not work and should be fully covered when leaving the house.

Dudha also calls for Muslims to engage in violent jihad and prepare to “expend…even life” in order to establish a world operating “according to Allah’s just order.”

Read it.

BLUF: A Democrat administration in Westchester County, NY, colluded with HUD to accept 750 ‘affordable’ (i.e. full of NAMs) housing units in the county. Now, however, the current Republican is pushing back and refusing to Get With The Program. Hence, the HUD bureaucrat in charge of the scheme is trying to get a court to shut him up.

As Stanley Kurtz explains, the Federal Monitor’s attempt to silence Astorino comes in the form of a report filed on March 17 in federal court. The report claims that Astorino has spread false information about Westchester County’s housing settlement and about the efforts and intentions of HUD and the Federal Monitor himself.

As a remedy, the Federal Monitor seeks “the removal of press releases inconsistent with the declaration and findings” written by the Federal Monitor. He also calls for the hiring of “a public communications consultant that will craft a message and implement a strategy sufficiently robust to provide information broadly to the public that describes the benefits” of what HUD says it is trying to accomplish.

In effect, the Federal Monitor is asking a court to order Astorino to stop criticizing Obama’s HUD and start advertising HUD’s own views. I agree with Kurtz that “this is truly Orwellian stuff, a frightening demonstration of how the expansionist regulatory state ultimately chokes off political speech itself.”

Read it.

This Russian TV news report details a raid on an apartment in Moscow that allegedly served as the headquarters of a cell of operatives for the Islamic State. The men who were arrested were all Uzbeks, but there may well be a Turkish connection, judging by the presence of forged Turkish IDs among the fake documents. It seems that the cell’s function was to facilitate the movement of people to and from Syria and Iraq through Turkey, and within the Russian Federation as well.

Steve Sailer hits Broadway.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is the token Well-Read, Pro-Social, Pro-Wall Street Minority who turned a giant biography by Ron Chernow into a cool hip-hop musical about how the prototypical financier New Yorker Founding Father was actually, when you squint just right, Diverse. Thus Hamilton is beloved by past and present Secretaries of the Treasury, such as Lew, Geithner, and Paulson.

How hip and trendy. How well this Servant of the Crust has rewarded his masters.

But now Hamilton comes along and makes clear that the dominant mindset in New York today is plutocratic, aristocratic, elitist, and anti-democratic. The only thing worrisome about Hamilton to 21st Century New Yorkers is not his reactionary ideology, but his whiteness.

So, by imagining (the extremely Scottish-looking) Hamilton as nonwhite, he becomes a non-controversial Hero For Our Time, the epitome of the High-Low Squeeze Play on the Middle.

Yes indeed. Who’s next? Goebbels?