Read it.

Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African-American studies, explodes some of the mythology surrounding the late Muhammad Ali. The first myth is that Ali was a civil rights advocate or activist. Not so.

The Muhammad Ali after whom Cassius Clay re-named himself was, among other things, a proponent of black slavery:

Muhammad Ali next turned his attention to military campaigns independent of the Porte, beginning with the Sudan which he viewed as a valuable addition resource of territory, gold, and slaves. … Ali’s reign in Sudan, and that of his immediate successors, is remembered in Sudan as brutal and heavy-handed, contributing to the popular independence struggle of the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, in 1881.

What a role model. All of the black people who become Muslim might as well cut to the chase and join the KKK.

Read it.

The Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, who is also a former Public Editor of the New York Times, has an idea that she claims is novel, but may sound familiar to Republicans: news outlets should coordinate their efforts to defeat Donald Trump!

Voices of the Crust, to the barricades!

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall liberal columnists objecting to Trump’s free publicity during the primary season, when it helped him defeat Republicans who would have been stronger general election candidates.

Hey, it’s all about the Narrative.

In other words, the job of a reporter is to help win the election for Hillary Clinton.

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

Read it.

The now famous exchange on video between FOX News reporter James Rosen with then State Department spokesman Jen Psaki was sent down the memory hole by someone at the State Department. The exchange homed in on the administration’s deceit regarding negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Whoever dun it with the video at the State Department archives was likely acting at the behest of someone else in the Obama administration. Current State Department spokesman John Kirby has declared that the department’s less than Sherlockian investigation failed to identify a perpetrator.

Where is that super-efficient and super-effective government that we see in the Jason Bourne movies? Where are the paragons of virtue to which we are supposed to entrust our health care? Either the government is full of crooks or the government is full of incompetents. Either way, I suggest that we not give them any more money or power.

From her position at the State Department Psaki has of course failed upward. She now serves as the White House communications director. Her current position in the least transparent administration in American history can also make one wonder.

Democrats investigating Democrats: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

Read it.

Isis militants have publicly executed 19 Yazidi women by burning them alive in Mosul, Iraq, local activists report.

The women were burned to death in iron cages because they refused to have sex with Isis fighters, the Kurdish ARA News agency reported.

“They were punished for refusing to have sex with Isis militants,” Abdullah al-Malla, a local media activist, told the agency.

Read it.

Stonehenge was originally a mass tomb in Wales before being transported to its current location on Wiltshire, scientists now claim.

Speaking at Hay Festival, archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson from University College London (UCL) said the 5,000-year-old monument originated 140 miles away in the Preseli mountains in west Wales.

Archaelogy teams from UCL and the University of Leicester were able to find the West Wales quarries that produced the spotted dolerite bluestones and the ryolite bluestones that make up the monument.

Some of us remember.

Read it.

It was on 9/11, but not in 2001 and not in New York.

Rather, it was September 11, 1683, when Europe stopped the invading Islamic armies at the Gates of Vienna, marking the end of the Islamic conquest of Europe.

That is, until now. The Battle of Vienna took place after the city had been besieged by 300,000 jihadis of the Ottoman Caliphate for two months.

Behind the city gates was the army of the Holy Roman Empire, led by the Habsburg Monarchy and aided by Catholic legions from Poland and Lithuania.

Today, no Turkish troops besiege Vienna, but Islamism and the idea of the Islamic Caliphate still haunt Austria.

Read it.

In a few weeks, Crisis of Character by former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne, a “tell-all” book about Hillary’s time at the White House, will be released.

“What I saw [at the White House] in the 1990s sickened me,” says Byrne. “I want you to hear my story.”

Indeed, Hillary would seem to require a veritable Mormon Tabernacle Choir of whistleblowing.

Read it.

One of the basic problems with feminism is that, by making equality the measure of human happiness, the feminist purchases an infinite supply of resentment. If you convince yourself that everything in the world should be divvied up equally, and that any observable instance of inequality is proof of oppression — social injustice! — you will become permanently angry, and perfectly miserable. Ronald Reagan once mocked the fundamental error of the egalitarian worldview: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

Read it. And watch the video.

The following news video shows an unprovoked attack by five culture-enriching “youths” on a 14-year-old boy at a shopping center in Melbourne, Australia. The first blow was a kick to the head while the victim had his hands in his pockets.

Let’s hear it for the Religion of Peace.

Read it.

“The other boat that was in the water was five-and a half metres long”, Police Inspector Mulligan said. “And they say that the shark was longer than their boat.

Five and a half meters is over 18 feet. A shark that long would be about six feet broad and four feet thick. We’re talking JAWS territory here.

The woman was the second person killed by a shark in Western Australia in less than a week.

This is God telling you to Take the Hint.

Read it.

Which would only balance the racial politics of the present, which the GOP Establishment is too frightened to admit.

At the 2005 NAACP convention in Milwaukee,  then-Chairman of the Republican National Committee Ken Mehlman sought to apologize for that history, conceding that the party had used race as a wedge to win votes.

One would think that the Republican Establishment would learn that this sort of Marxist self-criticism never works and only leads to worse.

“He’s a Mexican,” Trump said in another interview. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” Curiel, a son of Mexican immigrants, was born in Indiana.

I was born in Indiana, too, as were my parents, but that doesn’t keep people from calling us Irish. Let’s not go all disingenuous, here.

“Do you worry at all that your nominee now, Donald Trump, will do to Latino voters what Barry Goldwater did to African-American voters?” Tapper asked.

“I do,” McConnell said. “I do.”

This presumes that most Latinos are Republican now, which is a fantasy that not even McConnell believes — or, if he does, he’s too much of an idiot to have any business in the Senate.

But Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist based in California, cited Trump’s recent comments about  Curiel as a troubling signal the celebrity businessman “is doubling down on other completely inexcusable things he has done to race-bait.”

This is one of the ‘Republican strategists’ who have consistently lost elections and, even when they’ve managed to win, put RINOs in office. Remind me why we ought to be listening to them.

“It’s pretty clear it’s calculated, it’s part of a strategy, and it should horrify Republican leaders,” Stutzman said. “He’s trying to incite an angry, disaffected white vote.”

Let’s get the cart back behind the horse, here. There already is an angry, disaffected white vote, which is why Trump is where he is. He didn’t incite it; it incited him. (That sort of reasoning is why we ought to be ignoring losers and morons like Stutzman.)

Read it.

And once again Trump has the gall to say what everybody knows but won’t say.

I doubt very much that they had to be paid. A word in the right ear was undoubtedly sufficient. ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome Trump?’

Jonathan Turley points out the parallels.

It has taken almost 50 years, but the Democrats have finally found their inner Nixon. Make no mistake about it: Hillary Clinton is the most Nixonian figure in the post-Watergate period. Indeed, Democrats appear to have reached the type of moral compromise that Nixon waited, unsuccessfully, for Republicans to accept: Some 71% of Democrats want Clinton to run even if indicted.

Bill Clinton was a more successful Nixon than Nixon ever tried to be, because Nixon was a product of an earlier time and had some shame, whereas Bill Clinton never did.

While Obama could be criticized for embracing Nixon’s imperial presidency model, his personality could not be more different from his predecessor. Clinton however is the whole Nixonian package. On a policy level, her predilection for using executive and military power is even coupled with praise for (and from) Nixon’s secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. However, it is on a personality level that the comparison is so striking and so unnerving. Clinton, like Nixon, is known to be both secretive and evasive. She seems to have a compulsive resistance to simply acknowledging conflicting facts or changes in position. She only makes admissions against interest when there is no alternative to acknowledging the truth in a controversy.

Hillary is trying to be a cheap copy of Bill and will end up being merely a cheap copy of Nixon, taking the present Democrat party down with her.

It is certainly true that Washington’s powerful have always attracted a circle of sycophants. Indeed, the most powerful figures often seem to need continual stroking from underlings and there can be a race to the bottom as aides outdo each other in their adoring rhetoric.

Whenever I see a ‘James Bond Supervillain’ in a movie, I always wonder where they find the untold millions of loyal minions by which they are invariably supported. The answer is: They are all around you.

Read it.

When Sonia Sotomayor said that being a “wise Latina” influences her decisions for the better, that—we were told—was not merely nothing to worry about but a sign of her judicial temperament and fitness for the High Court. When Trump says being a Latino will influence this judge’s hearing of his case, he’s Hitler.

There may seem at first glance to be an inconsistency here. But there is a common thread. The left mostly takes for granted, first, that people from certain ethnicities in positions of power will be liberal Democrats and, second, that they will use that power in the interests of their party and co-ethnics. This is a core reason for shouts of “treason!” “Uncle Tom” (or Tomas) and the like. People like Clarence Thomas are offending the left’s whole conception of the moral order. How dare he!

The implicit assumption underlying Sotomayor’s comment and Thomas’ refusal to play to type is that there is a type—an expectation. By virtue of her being a liberal, a Democrat, a woman, and a Latina (wise or otherwise), Sotomayor’s voting pattern on the Court ought to be predictable. As, indeed, it is. So should Thomas’, but he declines to play his assigned role.

The whole ‘progressive’ playbook comes down to the heartfelt cry, ‘Please! Be reasonable! Do it my way!’

Trump simply took this very same logic and restated it from his own point-of-view—that is, from the point-of-view of a rich, Republican, ostentatiously hyper-American defendant in a lawsuit being litigated in a highly-charged political environment. He knows full well that at least 50% of the country will howl like crazy if he wins this suit. He knows that the judge knows that, too. He further knows that judge knows what his own “side” expects him to do. It would take an act of extraordinary courage to act against interest and expectation in this instance. And our present system is not calibrated to produce such acts of courage but rather to produce the expected outcome.

That’s what diversity is for. That is, beyond the fairness issue, viz., that in a multiethnic country, it’s unwise and arguably unjust for high offices to be monopolized by one group. But that’s an argument for something like quotas—or, if you want to be high-minded about it, “distributive justice”—and the quota rationale for diversity is passé. The current rationale is that diversity provides “perspectives.” Perspectives to aid in getting around the law and procedure. Otherwise, who cares about diversity? Just apply the law. Simple.

Trump is taking for granted—because he is not blind—that ethnic Democratic judges will rule in the interests of their party and of their ethnic bloc. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The MSM and the overall narrative say this is just fine. It’s only bad when someone like Trump points it out in a negative way. If a properly sanctified liberal had said “This man is a good judge because his background gives him the perspective to see past narrow, technical legalities and grasp the larger justice,” not only would no one have complained, that comment would have been widely praised. In fact, comments just like it are celebrated all the time. That is precisely what Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” phrase was meant to convey.

The game is rigged. You know it, I know it, the judge knows it, and Trump knows it. Trump just has the utter unspeakable gall to say it.

Read it.

On offer in a Swiss referendum this Sunday: a guaranteed monthly income for every adult, paid for by the government.

What could go wrong? Oh, let me count the ways….

But Gfs.bern, a Swiss firm monitoring voter opinions, projected that only 22 percent voted yes for “free money” on Sunday, based on a partial count of ballots. Most Swiss vote in advance by mail, so most ballots have already been counted, according to Agence France-Presse.

The reason for the opposition isn’t what you’d expect, either. Most aren’t worried that a universal basic income would disincentivize workers from finding jobs or turn Switzerland into a Marxist dystopia. The fear is that $2,500 a month would make the country too attractive to economic migrants.

Would that Obama would get the same clue. You can’t have generous public benefits and open borders — As Mrs Thatcher famously said, eventually you run out of other people’s money.

The Swiss have already rejected initiatives that would have increased the minimum wage and extended the minimum paid holiday time from four to six weeks.

The Swiss are basically sensible people.

Read it.

Chronicling another step in the ‘progressive’ program to cancel the 20th century.

Martyn Heighton, head of National Historic Ships, an advisory body that reports to the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, thinks the market will expand. “There is growing trade for symbolic cargos,” he said.

I love that — ‘symbolic cargoes’. You don’t actually have to do anything, just embrace a token of your Political Correctness.

Next step is undoubtedly streets full of horse manure.

Read it.

Escalating costs for nuclear power plant construction in the U.S. were not inevitable, according a new study in Energy Policy. They were largely the result of the increased regulation that followed the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in 1979.

Government is a problem, not a solution.

The Other McCaine laments his lost youth.

Today I was scrolling around feminist sites when I saw another angry young Tumblrina ranting about the patriarchy (because a guy was rude on the subway) and it hit me why this bothers me so much: When I was a teenager, life was fun because America was a free country.

Don’t get me wrong. There was plenty of misery and loneliness in the world during the 1970s, but people didn’t have to tiptoe around in fear they might say something “offensive” to somebody. In fact, America in the 1970s was arguably a Golden Age of free expression. The great convulsive upheaval of the 1960s — stuff that happened while I was in elementary school — had the effect of undoing many of the constraints on art, music, literature, movies and TV that had previously imposed limits on what you could say or write. So when I was a teenager, my buddies and I could listen to comedy albums by George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Cheech and Chong saying stuff that was hilarious in part because it was stuff you weren’t supposed to say. We went to the movies and saw Blazing Saddles, Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House — movies that were a deliberate poke in the eye of “good taste.” National Lampoon was full of wicked satire, “Doctor Demento” was on the radio every week, Saturday Night Live was in its glory days and, for anyone with a sense of humor, the 1970s was a great decade to be alive, because there were no rules.

I remember those days. Good times.

This is what Milo Yiannopoulos and the “Dangerous Faggot” tour is all about. Milo doesn’t even have to say anything to spark a left-wing riot on university campuses. His mere existence offends progressives so much that you could shut down any college in America for a day, merely by announcing that Milo would be there. If he missed his flight and didn’t even show up for the speech, you’d still have a bunch of angry fat girls with bad hair stomping around campus chanting stupid slogans, claiming to be “traumatized” by the thought that someone who disagreed with them had been invited to speak. So if Milo missed a connecting flight in Atlanta or Chicago, he’d still be trying to get a new ticket and meanwhile, outside the university auditorium 800 miles away, protesters would be screaming themselves hoarse in paroxysms of rage for no reason at all.

Read it.

Violent mobs who have attacked Donald Trump supporters at one rally after another wave Mexican flags while burning American flags. The vast majority of Americans will disapprove, to say the least, so the Associated Press felt called upon to assure us that Mexican flags are really OK: “Mexican flag, seen at Trump protests, has long history in US.”

The flag of Mexico has a long history in the United States, despite being a symbol of a nation south of the border. It became a topic of discussion last week after a violent anti-Trump protest in Albuquerque.

Trump lashed out on Twitter after protests outside his Albuquerque rally sparked a riot that caused thousands of dollars in damage, condemning “thugs who were flying the Mexican flag.”

“Lashed out” is what reporters say when they want you to be skeptical of a remark that otherwise seems to be plain common sense.

Read it.

Turns out a lot of Sanders supporters really need a lot of free stuff. Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for producing this chart, which shows that over a quarter of Sanders donors are not working:

Read it.

A comparison of records by David Goldstein, investigative reporter for CBS2/KCAL9, has revealed hundreds of so-called dead voters in Southern California, a vast majority of them in Los Angeles County.

“He took a lot of time choosing his candidates,” said Annette Givans of her father, John Cenkner.

Cenkner died in Palmdale in 2003. Despite this, records show that he somehow voted from the grave in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

But he’s not the only one.

Republicans have been warning for years about the necessity for photo ID for voting, but Democrats always waved their hands in the air and said that there’s no evidence of voter fraud. Well, here it is.

Laser-cut folding Ukulele (Soprano size).

Three Dimensional Labyrinth Orb.

Whirlpool’s Vessi Fermenter to make your own beer.

Pie Crust Maker Bag.

Trakline Essentials Belt.

Read it.

I’m convinced.

Read it.

Oh, they wouldn’t do that, would they?

The allegations surfaced days ago on the eve of a scheduled trial, which is now delayed. In court papers filed May 26, lawyers alleged that prosecutors had secretly gained access to discovery document files assembled by the defense team.

The lawyers wrote that an assistant U.S. attorney informed them in April that an FBI agent had received CDs containing duplicates of discovery files the defense had assembled and scanned from the more than 200 boxes of seized government evidence made available to them.

The duplicates, they wrote, were provided by a government-contracted service that makes copies of government discovery documents that defense lawyers want to inspect.

The lawyers said the owner of the service told them in an email that he has routinely provided the FBI with duplicates of the set-aside files — and not just in their case.

“It appears that this practice of surreptitiously duplicating the discovery work-product of defense counsel in the Southern District of Florida has been the norm for at least the last ten years,” lawyers representing Salo Schapiro, a Broward County doctor charged with health-care fraud, stated in court papers.

Oops.

Read it.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.

Apparently ‘homeland security’ doesn’t mean what we all thought it means.

Read it.

FoxThey live among us: people born with genetic mutations that give them awesome power—the power to be constantly offended by things that wouldn’t bother a normal, reasonable human.

Read it. Feel free to barf.

To unravel the great mysteries of this phenomenon, the Pentagon gave $170,000 to researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The grant was made through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.”

In a resultant study entitled, “Walking with coffee: Why does it spill?” the scientists found that “in the walking with coffee problem the motions of the human body, while seemingly regular, are quite complex and are coupled to a coffee cup and liquid therein, which makes it difficult to unravel the precise reasons behind coffee spilling.”

They ultimately determined differences like “common cup sizes, the coffee properties, and the biomechanics of walking [are] responsible for the spilling phenomenon.”

Read it.

A Rutgers University social science professor set out to research how stereotypes are inaccurate so he could proclaim and promote that to the world with hard scientific data – but eventually made a startling discovery: most stereotypes are accurate.

Scholarly claims of “stereotype inaccuracy” are baseless, Dr. Lee Jussim told The College Fix in an interview.

“When I first began my research, I had assumed all those social scientists declaring stereotypes to be inaccurate were right, so I wanted to know the basis for those claims,” he said. “I would track down the source in an attempt to get the evidence. And slowly, over many years, I made a startling discovery – claims of stereotype inaccuracy were based on nothing.”

In other words, scholars who claim stereotype inaccuracy do not offer citations to a source providing the evidence, or never provide scientific support for their claims.

“As I read more of the literature on stereotypes, I discovered this pattern was pervasive,” Jussim told The Fix. “Every article or book that declared stereotypes to be inaccurate either similarly cited no source, or ended in an identical dead end via a slightly different route.”

Stereotypes, like clichés, are based on experience, and persist because they are confirmed by experience.

Read it.

IRGC Commander Ali Fadavi’s recent threat to “drown American vessels” in the Persian Gulf is only the latest indication that America’s relationship with Iran resembles a dhimma contract more than a traditional foreign policy.

Since the seventh century, everyone defeated by Islamic conquest was given three choices: conversion, death, or a dhimma contract, which Bat Ye’or calls the “treaty of submission for people conquered by jihad.” By accepting the third choice, they became dhimmis – members of a “protected” class whose failure to submit to Allah was replaced by a compulsory submission to Muslims. Isolated and disarmed, insulted at every turn, and coerced into acknowledging their inferiority with regular self-abasement, dhimmis were expected to show humility and gratitude for their protectors.

The president’s approach to the Muslim world in general has been replete with gratitude, flattery, and apologies – especially for violence perpetrated by Christians a thousand years ago. He refuses to utter the words “Islamist terrorism” and wildly exaggerates Islam’s role in “saving” Western culture. At the UN he demanded that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” He even put one filmmaker in jail for doing so.

As predicted. Do watch the videos.

Following the stunning scenes of sucker-punching, flag-burning, spitting, and kicking from Mexican-flag-wearing anti-Trump protesters overnight, San Jose mayor Tom Liccardo – a Democrat and vocal Hillary Clinton supporter – told the Associated Press that Donald Trump was responsible for the violence.

As we detailed previously, a group of protesters attacked Donald Trump supporters who were leaving the presidential candidate’s rally in San Jose on Thursday night. A dozen or more people were punched, at least one person was pelted with an egg and Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground.

…

“Our police officers have done an extremely courageous and professional job so far,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told The Associated Press by phone. “We’re all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation.”

The mayor, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, criticized Trump for coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments had to deal with.

“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Liccardo said.

How long will it be before Trump supporters come to Trump rallies armed and expecting to fight back? And of course Trump will be blamed for that, too, for people merely defending themselves against Leftist and Latino violence.

Bear in mind that Hitler’s Brownshirts were organized to defend National Socialist meetings from Socialist protesters and thugs.

The future SA developed by organizing and formalizing the groups of ex-soldiers and beer hall brawlers who were to protect gatherings of the Nazi Party from disruptions from Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD) and to disrupt meetings of the other political parties.

Trump supporters are peaceful victims now, but that’s not going to continue. If they can’t depend on Democrat-machine cities and their police to uphold the rule of law, they’re going to take their defense into their own hands, and it won’t be Trump’s fault.

(“America was never great!” — Yeah, that’s a great campaign slogan for Hillary Clinton.)

Read it.

The day after a San Bernardino, Calif., couple killed 14 people in a rampage, federal investigators thought they had a crucial bit of evidence.

The childhood friend and neighbor of one of the shooters was believed to be accompanying his Russian wife to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services meeting that afternoon. Officials raced to the scene to bring the two in for questioning and to safeguard against the possibility of a second attack.

But when five agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), dressed in tactical gear, arrived shortly after noon, they were blocked from moving beyond the lobby of the building.

The agents were visibly anxious as they waited for up to 30 minutes before being able to speak to the field office director, who told them they could not make an arrest in the building. Only later was it discovered that the couple never arrived for their appointment.

…

“The contract security personnel at the facility should have immediately permitted entry to the [Homeland Security Investigations] agents once they identified themselves and explained their official purpose,” the report claimed.

And, contrary to the field office head’s claims, the report claimed that there is no policy against making arrests in Citizenship and Immigration Services buildings.

What’s more, the field office director initially refused to hand over the file on the couple, until they were given an order from Washington after the investigators had already left.

Repeat after me: Government employees are incompetent. Government employees are incompetent. Government employees are incompetent.

Read it.

UC-Irvine College Republicans are planning to distribute 100 infant pacifiers at a school-sanctioned “safe zone training” event taking place just hours before the Yiannopoulos event, UC-Irvine College Republicans said in a press release.

The Gerber Baby pacifiers will include an attached label with the caption, “I survived! Milo tour 2016.”

UC-Irvine Republican Club president, Ariana Rowlands told the Orange County Register she fears for her fellow students who seem “dominated” by political correctness and often only hear the left’s side of the story.

Refugee crisis: More than 100 bodies recovered after migrant boat capsizes off the coast of Libya

Iran is main state sponsor of terror, US state report finds

Isis bombers, bribery and endless checkpoints – the death-defying trials of an Iraqi trucker

Refugees hospitalised after huge fire and clashes at Lesbos detention centre amid warnings over more violence

Syria: Several feared dead after bombing outside mosque in government-controlled Latakia city

Isis terror plot in Germany: Four Syrian men arrested for allegedly planning suicide bombings in Düsseldorf

Woman, 19, burned to death for refusing marriage proposal in Pakistan

Refugee translator denied visa despite helping US forces fears being sent to die at hands of Taliban

Ukraine uncovers plot to smuggle ISIS sympathizers into Europe

Isis in Syria: US-backed government forces target jihadist stronghold on Turkish border

Saudi scholar issues fatwa against stealing WiFi

Parents of Isis suspect ‘Jihadi Jack’ Letts charged with terror offences

Teenager dies during illegal female circumcision procedure in Egypt

Al-Shabab Car Bomber Targets Hotel in Somali Capital, Kills at Least 10

Asylum seekers ‘sexually assaulted women at concert in Germany’

UN says 20,000 children trapped in Fallujah as Iraqi forces, ISIS battle for control

EU’s top judge backs workplace ban on headscarves

Iranian Students Lashed 99 Times Over Coed Party

Mass sexual assault reported at music festival in Germany

Former Miss Turkey Merve Buyuksarac convicted for ‘insulting Recep Tayyip Erdogan’ on Instagram. Free speech is not a Muslim value.

Isis digs in against attack on Iraq’s second city while brutally punishing those who rebel against them

Mali: Resisting Saudi Sponsored Terrorism

For Turkey’s Erdo?an, There Are Bad and Not-so-bad Executions

For Fleeing Germans, Hungary is the “Last Bastion of the Christian West”

Russian General: Turkey is Aiding and Supplying Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria

Iraqi special forces push into Fallujah, expect fierce fight from ISIS

Liwa al-Jalil: A New Pro-Assad Palestinian Militia

Hissene Habre: Chad former president guilty of crimes against humanity, rape and sexual slavery

Nigerian man killed in Saudi Arabia marks 95th execution carried out by kingdom in 2016

Syrian opposition’s chief peace negotiator resigns over failure of peace talks

Isis in Iraq: Up close to the battle as Peshmerga forces advance on Mosul

Iranians set to miss out on Hajj after country refuses to sign deal with Saudi Arabia

Pakistan bans contraceptive ads over fears that children will be exposed to sex

Facebook post suggests Isis fighters are attempting to sell sex slaves online

German bishop calls for Islam to be taught in all state schools. Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Pakistani men can beat wives ‘lightly’, say Islamic council. Well, that’s all right then.

Phony Kurds in Syria

US air strikes kill Isis leader Maher al-Bilawi in Iraqi city of Fallujah

Kurdish fighter who gave up being a student to fight Isis describes horrors she witnessed

Iranian woman dresses up as a man to sneak into a football match

Iranian students get 99 lashes for attending mixed graduation party

Life Sentences for Seven Men Convicted of 2010 Kampala Bombings

Islamic State Seizes Territory Near Turkish Border

Isis advance in Syria: Hospital evacuated and 100,000 feared displaced as militants move towards Azaz

Fallujah: ISIS’s Latest Failure

Read it.

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

Read it.

An Irish student who was arrested while on holiday in Egypt has been told he could be sentenced to death by the end of the month over a protest he attended in 2013.

Ibrahim Halawa, from Dublin, was 17 at the time of his arrest, and has detailed his horrific treatment at the hands of the Egyptian authorities in a letter handed to The Independent by the human rights charity Reprieve.

Just because you’re ‘from Dublin’ doesn’t make you an ‘Irish teenager’. Anyone who thinks that someone named Ibrahim Halawa is Irish needs professional help.

Read it.

It’s illegal in Scotland to shout homophobic slurs at murderers.

Because that might hurt their feelings, I guess.

Read it.

A woman refuses to shake hands with her (male) doctor. The doctor responds by refusing to treat her. The woman’s husband then sues the doctor for damages.

Such is the practice of medicine in Modern Multicultural Germany.

Read it.

Here we have Lanny Davis, a top Clinton consigliere for more than two decades, explaining how Hillary is innocent of any wrongdoing, citing five allegedly “indisputable” facts. Then follows the customary litany, cited by her defenders whenever EmailGate comes up. This was legal. Besides, everybody does it. Plus nothing was “labeled” classified at the time it appeared in Ms. Clinton’s private email. To those acquainted with Clintonspeak, the only thing missing is a discussion of the meaning of “is.”

Same Old Story.

This is deception of a special kind. In the first place, why has the Romanian hacker Guccifer pleaded guilty to hacking into Hillary’s server if he did not, in fact, do so? Moreover, the FBI has been in possession of said server for months, and they have uncovered several successful hacking efforts into it when it resided in an upstairs bathroom of the Clinton residence in Chappaqua, New York.

“We know it was hacked numerous times, it’s that simple,” explained a senior U.S. counterintelligence official who is privy some of the FBI’s findings. “If I were Vladimir Putin I’d fire the head of the SVR [Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service] if he didn’t get a good look at Hillary’s emails when they were sitting in plain sight online,” he added with a laugh.

Repeat after me: Hillary Is A Crook.

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And so it begins. Trans people will now be used as a wedge issue against colleges for people of faith.

Lion of the Blogosphere reveals some Inconvenient Truth.

I believe that the BORINGNESS factor plays a very important role. Girls find computer programming BORING. They also find math really boring, which could explain in part why they don’t do as well on the math SAT. This is not to say that there aren’t biological differences between the sexes, but is it that girls are biologically inclinded to do poorly at math (relative to boys), or are they biologically inclined to find math boring, which in turns demotivates them from studying and learning the material, which causes the lower math SAT scores? I say that it’s probably a little of both. And the BORING factor can run in the other direction, because people are naturally less interested in things they are bad at.

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We don’t live in a society where young people are normally told that they should persevere with boring material because it would lead to a higher paying, but boring, career. Young people are more often told the opposite. “Follow your passion.” “Do what you love and the money will follow.” You are ten times more likely to hear a high school commencement speaker say something like that rather than “study something BORING that pays well.” But in India, the opposite is true. Everyone in India wants to learn IT, not because they love it or have passion for it, but because they see it as a ticket for moving to America and getting a job here. (And I should add that American corporations seem happy to punch a lot of Indian tickets.)

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I’m not saying Yusuf Abdi Ali is a war criminal. But I am saying he’s an alleged war criminal, accused of murder, torture, arbitrary detention, and other crimes while a commander in the Somali National Army during the 1980s. He allegedly fled to Canada after the regime fell, claiming to be a refugee, but Canada deported him. Then he came here, but left “voluntarily” while we were getting ready to deport him. He later came back, apparently with a fake visa, but was arrested by INS agents in 1998 for lying on application forms about whether he had ever “participated in genocidal acts.” He wasn’t deported then, though it’s not clear why.  He’s being sued right now by someone who claims Ali detained, tortured, and shot him in 1987. Again, these claims haven’t yet been proven, I’m just saying that one who looked into his background to any extent might see a few red flags.

I’m also saying that neither the FBI nor the TSA apparently did that, because CNN just found him working security at Dulles International Airport.

Set a terrorist to catch a terrorist?

According to CNN, Ali and his wife have lived, under their real names, in the DC area for almost 20 years now, currently residing in Alexandria. That’s more than an hour by train and bus from Dulles, but you go where the work is, I guess. And to get this job, though he works for a private company and not the TSA, he still had to clear a “full, federally mandated vetting process” that included an FBI background check and a TSA assessment.

And Obama wants these people in charge of our health care and anything else he can get. Oy.

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It’s zombie time at campaign Hillary. Behold the dead men walking! It was with strangely slow, narcotized numbness that the candidate and her phalanx of minions and mouthpieces responded to last week’s punishing report by the State Department’s Inspector General about her email security lapses. Do they truly believe, in the rosy alternate universe of Hillaryland, that they can lie their way out of this? Of course, they’re relying as usual on the increasingly restive mainstream media to do their dirty work for them. If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.

Hillary is so dislikeable that even Voice of the Crust Salon.com is noticing.

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Interest in the state of Middle East Christians has largely focused on the quality of their lives in the Levant, Egypt, and Southern Sudan, predominantly Christian areas before the rise of Islam that still contain sizeable Christian minorities. By contrast, little attention has been paid to Christians in the Arabian Peninsula, which had no indigenous Christian presence in Islamic times.

However, the oil boom of the 1970s created a tremendous demand for foreign labor in the Persian Gulf rentier states. Un-surprisingly, the number of workers needed to drive the emerging economies of the Gulf states was bound to include significant numbers of Christians. There are now more than three and a half million expatriate Christians working in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, mostly Catholics from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. As their numbers increased, the question of how—or whether—to allow them to openly practice their faith became a significant issue.

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A story in the Los Angeles Times describes a cultural crossroads that would have sounded like science fiction 60 years ago. It’s about immigrants coming to California from Latin America, getting jobs in Orange County restaurants, and deciding to learn the language to get ahead. And by “the language,” I mean Vietnamese.

The basic reasons for this are simple enough. Orange County has more than 10,000 Vietnamese-owned businesses; a great deal of the available labor pool came from Mexico and other points south; the businesses hire who’s available; the workers know a useful skill when they see one. But there are a lot of culturally specific details as well.

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Working on a longer piece today, so to get something up quickly, let’s talk a bit about the phenomenon of aposematism in nature:

The function of aposematism is to prevent attack, by warning potential predators that the prey animal has defences such as being unpalatable or poisonous. The easily detected warning is a primary defence mechanism, and the non-visible defences are secondary. Aposematic signals are primarily visual, using bright colours and high-contrast patterns such as stripes.

Many have noticed this “warning sign” phenomenon in the characteristic costumes of Third Wave feminists of the “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW) variety — weirdly colored hairstyles, facial piercings, tattoos, etc. Quite often, we find this aposematic appearance accompanied by obesity (because “fat feminism” is an actual movement) and LGBT sexuality, so that a clichéd type can be discerned in the vicinity of “social justice” activism. Strange appearance is a way for disgruntled misfits to turn their maladjusted anti-social attitudes into a visible display, so everybody who sees them knows how much they hate Mommy and Daddy.

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Would it be wacist to point out that nobody ever got shot at a Frank Sinatra concert? Much less Mozart.