Read it. And watch the video.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it. And watch the video.

In this video of a weekly demonstration near Modiin Illit, shot yesterday, you see a Palestinian father urging his young son toward a group of IDF soldiers, yelling at them to shoot him, as explained here. What greater honor for a four-year-old boy than to be on the evening news as a “martyr”? The soldiers don’t take the bait; I interpret their reaction as one of disbelief. One of them shakes hands with the boy. The father yells at his son to throw rocks at the soldiers, but he can’t throw hard enough to do any damage.

Muslim Family Values.

Read it.

A man has killed his two sisters on the eve of their weddings because they had chosen their own husbands, in the latest case of so-called “honour killings” in Pakistan.

Nazir Hussain, 35, from the country’s central Punjab province, shot dead 22-year-old Kosar and 28-year-old Gulzar Bibi on Friday, as they prepared to marry men they had chosen themselves.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, nobody in his family has ever killed a female relative because they picked their own husbands.

Read it.

On college campuses, controversies surrounding free speech have reached an all-time high. While social justice warriors advocate for safe spaces and trigger warnings, critics accuse colleges and universities of restricting freedom of speech for the sake of saving students from having their feelings hurt by “hate speech.”

However, as Yiannopolous told CNBC, “Who’s to say what’s a civil level of discourse? If Twitter wants to start regulating how we can speak, the tone in which we can have debates, the language we can use, it’s going to find that all of the interesting people on its network … are going to leave.”

Such is the problem with regulating free speech. There is no real way of determining what classifies as “hate speech” and what does not. In fact, due to the absence of the term “hate speech” in the First Amendment, it could be argued, as Steven Crowder, conservative radio show host, has done, that it does not even exist. Feelings are not an appropriate barometer for measuring how much free speech should be allowed.

Those who are determined to suppress speech with which they disagree will do so whenever they have the power and can get away with it. The Left has carefully cultivated that power over the last 50 years and I don’t see any effective efforts to reverse that process.

‘Progressives’, of course, will say that this Change represents Progress and is inevitable, the ‘right side of history’, so complainers ought to Give Up And Get With The Program. It’s not strictly necessary to Love Big Brother so long as you kiss his butt in public.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Christina Hoff Summers, in usually-reliable Voice of the Crust Time magazine, draws the line.

Much of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new legislation and the focus of college programs. Here are five of the most popular myths that should be rejected by all who are genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women….

Read it.

My name is Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad. No, I’m not kidding. This is the name my parents chose for me 19 years ago and it is the reason I don’t go to Starbucks. Choosing a name for your baby can seem like a way to determine what type of parents you will become – many aim for trendy rather than traditional. However, faced with the resentment of your grownup offspring, who have endured a childhood of being embarrassed by their unusual name, you may wish you could turn back time.

Even the Hip and Trendy sometimes get their noses rubbed in reality.

Faced with an uncommon name, people think they have the right to voice an opinion. The worst is when a stranger feels it necessary to comfort me, having assumed (correctly) that my name is an affliction. “Oh, that’s different,” they say, or “How original.” I’ve learned that what people really mean by this is that they have no idea how to spell it.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Steve Sailer, of course, has an opinion or two.

Read it.

For the Jihad anarchy and war-economy are holy; the warlords are saints; the crimes are acts of mercy. Jihadism is heated by a religious and apocalyptic narrative, where the destruction of the infidel West and final victory of Islam is the focus. In reality all this serves economic interests while it creates an illusion of religious self-realization — says Abdessamad Belhadj, a social scientist from Morocco who teaches and does his research in Belgium and Hungary, to mandiner.hu (online magazine). Belhadj believes that Muslim migrants have the desire for the elegant West and its lavish lifestyle, but as the crisis of the second- and third-generation migrants shows, they can’t take possession of it. That is why violence can gain ground.

Read it.

We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.

The Other McCain is not surprised.

The feminist remake of Ghostbusters has predictably failed at the box office. After opening at No. 2 its first weekend ($46 million gross in the U.S., behind The Secret Life of Pets), last weekend the ‘busters went bust, tumbling all the way to No. 5 ($21 million). This was a one-week decline of 54% in ticket sales, and three new films, including Star Trek Beyond, joined The Secret Life of Pets ahead of Ghostbusters. In its third week, however, Ghostbusters slid further, falling to No. 8 Friday, according to a Box Office Mojo estimate. To understand just how bad of an overhyped flop this is, compare Ghostbusters to Hotel Transylvania 2.

What? You’ve never heard of Hotel Transylvania 2? This G-rated animated comedy sequel opened last September with $48 million in gross domestic receipts its first weekend, which made it No. 1 at the box office. For the next two weeks it was in second place, and Hotel Transylvania 2 remained in the top five all the way to early November. In its first five weeks, the film grossed more than $150 million.

Kevin Williamson has a very bad feeling about this.

In the event, the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist. Trump won his party’s nomination and Sanders ceded his to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is (arguably) a little bit more of a nationalist and (arguably) a little bit less of a socialist, but in many ways a much better distillation of the partnership between big government and big business that characterizes our current political moment.

In Germany in the 1930s, the people the National Socialists were most worried about were the real sociaists, the SDP.

The people who don’t like free markets and free people, who want to control who you can buy from and sell to, or regulate who can criticize a politician and when and how, don’t think that way simply because libertarians have never figured out how to translate the gospel into their language. They have other values and other agendas. The white nationalists in the Trump camp and the Black Lives Matters activists opposed to them do not secretly want to be libertarian individualists on the Randian model: They want their identities affirmed by state action. They want a politics of Us and Them. Populist movements cannot survive long without a Them.

And the people who run the country today are very much about suppressing Them.

Read it.

Environmentalism is a religion. Here’s the proof.

Star Trek Planetary Glassware.

RightGrip right-angle scissors.

The Simple Shower.

The Other McCain reads this shit so that you don’t have to.

In case you have forgotten atheist feminist Miriam Mogilevsky (@sondosia on Twitter), she is the “queer, gay, femme . . . homoflexible . . . lesbian with exceptions” who is “on the asexual spectrum somewhere” and does not “experience primary sexual attraction.” Ms. Mogilevsky’s confusing welter of identities is typical of Third Wave feminists, who are in favor of every kind of sexuality except normal sexuality.

Did I mention she’s into “polyamory”? That’s what we used to call “screwing around,” but when intellectuals screw around, they need a fact word for it, to make it sound clever. But I digress . . .

I have always found interesting the fact that evolution works even when you might not expect it to. For example, the sort of people who have abortions are the sort of people of whom you really wouldn’t want more (maybe Margaret Sanger was smarter than we think). Feminists probably fall in that category as well.

Read it.

Of course. Who ever heard of a right-wing comic? The best one could hope for is somebody like George Carlin who, while left-wing, poked fun at many of the pet tropes of the left like environmentalism.

Read it. And watch the video.

ABC’s World News Tonight on Friday revisited the health care scandal at the Veterans Administration and pointed out the recent revelation that the federal agency spent millions of taxpayer money on abstract art. Correspondent Mary Bruce spotlighted how the V.A. defending the spending by claiming that the art pieces foster “a healing environment.”

I see no reason why veterans require a separate ‘national health service’ system when their needs could easily be handled by existing programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Of course, as Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers….

Read it.

William F. Buckley Jr. used to speak of the “invincible ignorance” of liberalism, and there’s hardly a better example than the minimum wage. Generally the first thing you learn on the first day of Econ 101 is that if you raise the price of something, you’ll reduce the demand for that something. Including labor.

So it’s fun to notice this morning that the city of Seattle, which threw out both shoulders patting itself on the back for raising its minimum age to $11 an hour last year, is finding the results are . . . not so good.

Read it.

I’m saddened to announce the death of Jerry Doyle, who hosted a great nationally syndicated radio show out of Las Vegas that Reason staff appeared on dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of times over the years. Doyle was also a cast member of the fondly remembered science fiction show Babylon 5, on which he played “Mr. Garibaldi.” He also wrote at the site Epic Times, a treasure trove of commentary and links. Doyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, was 60 years old. The exact cause of death isn’t known.

Read it.

Every piece of evidence emerging after the failed putsch on July 15 indicates that President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an was the victim of a failed Gülenist coup d’état. But to get the picture right we must ask ourselves, perhaps ironically, what the victim and the perpetrator have in common. The answer is many years of staunch alliance and the same ideology: political Islam.

Read it.

As she fights to block a psychological examination by a government expert, convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Odeh added a new member to her defense team, one who shares her intense hatred for Israel.

Huwaida Arraf helped organize the 2010 flotilla aimed at breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza by delivering humanitarian supplies. The blockade was implemented to prevent the Hamas government and other terrorists from smuggling materials that can be used to make bombs and rockets. The flotilla, and similar convoys which claimed to be delivering aid to Palestinians in Gaza, worked closely with Hamas officials in Gaza.

I have a question.

Black people have been voting the straight Democrat ticket now for over 50 years.

How has that worked out? How much better is life now than before the Magic Negro sashayed into the White House?

I don’t see any improvement; quite the contrary.

So what the hell are they thinking?

Read it.

I can vouch for #3 and #7.

I found #8, on the other hand, a piece of cake.

And I disagree entirely with #25.

Read it.

…Fresh evidence is also being unearthed on the land reform that transformed the countryside in the early 1950s. In many villages there were no ‘landlords’ set against ‘poor peasants’ but, rather, closely knit communities that jealously protected their land from the prying eyes of outsiders – the state in particular. By implicating everybody in ‘accusation meetings’ – during which village leaders were humiliated, tortured and executed while their land and other assets were redistributed to party activists recruited from local thugs and paupers – the communists turned the power structure upside down. Liu Shaoqi, the party’s second-in-command, had a hard time reining in the violence, as a missive from the Hebei archives shows: ‘When it comes to the ways in which people are killed, some are buried alive, some are executed, some are cut to pieces, and among those who are strangled or mangled to death, some of the bodies are hung from trees or doors.’

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, speaks truth to stupid.

Here’s a comment, in full, from one “Bob” on this Marginal Revolution post by Tyler Cowen on Tyler’s receipt of Joel Mokyr’s new book, A Culture of Growth:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Bob likely believes that, with this single pointed sentence, he makes a profound point – a point that causes all but the most philistine of readers to pause and say “Omigosh!  Bob is so insightful!  Economic growth is cancerous.  We mindlessly bow to it – accept it – demand it even! – unaware that it will eventually destroy us.”

In fact, Bob is painfully sophomoric.  The reason is that the case for economic growth is not and never has been “growth for the sake of growth” (although misinformed best-selling authors such as Douglas Rushkoff continue to insist otherwise).  Instead, the case for growth is this: growth for the sake of human betterment.  The case for economic growth is founded on the fact that it improves human lives, and especially the lives of those who are currently worse off.

Read it.

But if you’re looking for a quintessential Obamacare failure story, you might also stick that pin directly in North Carolina. For the insurance companies doing business in the state–the ones issuing policies to those 600,000 people–Obamacare has turned into a financial sinkhole. UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurance company, is pulling out of the Obamacare business in North Carolina next year. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, which dominated the individual market with more than a half-million customers, reported that losses on its Obamacare business in 2014 and 2015 topped $400 million. The insurer said that figure includes government payments designed to shield insurers from big losses during the early years of Obamacare. The only other current competitor, Aetna, wants to hike rates by nearly 25 percent next year.

‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!’ Uh, no, that was a lie.

‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan!’ Uh, no, that was a bigger lie.

‘It’s called the Affordable Care Act because it makes care more affordable!’ Uh, no, that was the biggest lie of all.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

The poll looks at the upcoming race to replace retiring Democrat Barbara Boxer in the United States Senate. Because of this top-two primary system, voters are left with two Democrats, Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

Harris is better looking. We’ve already got enough ugly Senators. (Yeah, Mitch McConnell, I’m lookin’ at YOU.)

Read it.

The Swedish off-duty police officer has told The Local about the story behind this viral picture capturing the moment she wrestled a brazen criminal to the ground – while wearing a bikini.

Don’t mess with the Swedish Bikini Team.

Sarah Hoyt gives us the European perspective.

In a truly multicultural society, with REAL religious tolerance, the local church wouldn’t have been commandeered as a mosque (apparently this was a standard humiliation technique for captive populations.)  It was returned to use as a church, and has been such for centuries now, the interior having been ALMOST completely scrubbed clean of arabesque decorations.  ALMOST.  Why almost, you ask?  The wall near the door, around the door, where you can’t avoid seeing them as you leave, was left “decorated.”  It was left so that people would never forget.

…

Look, people with ancient cultures all in the same place REMEMBER.  They remember in ways that no academic gaslighting, no professorial assurances to the contrary can erase.  For instance, do you know how you can tell which Roman emperors were considered decent by the local people?  they give their names to their kids.  Still.  Trajan, for instance.  And then there are the bad ones, that are also still remembered, but whose names are given to dogs (Nero.)  And then there are the unspeakable ones.  Neither child nor dog is named Caligula.

Well, in the local area, you find some kids named Ibrahim (though that is a bit confusing since local custom does weird things to spelling) but NONE named Mohammed.  (This might be different now, since the Conquista II — this time we pretend to be inofensive — is in progress.)  But back then there were no Moes around.

Read it.

Hillary Clinton has made clear she intends to dramatically raise taxes on the American people if elected. She has proposed an income tax increase, a business tax increase, a death tax increase, a capital gains tax increase, a tax on stock trading, and an Exit Tax, and more (see below). Her planned net tax increase on the American people is at least $1 trillion over ten years, based on her campaign’s own figures.

Hillary has endorsed many tax increases on that would hit middle income Americans, despite her pledge not to raise taxes on any American making less than $250,000. She has said she would be fine with a payroll tax hike on all Americans, she has endorsed a steep soda tax, endorsed a 25% national gun tax, and most recently, her campaign manager John Podesta said she would be open to a carbon tax. It’s no wonder she said her $250,000 tax pledge was merely a “goal.”

Read it. And watch the video.

We reported yesterday on a recent culture-enriching incident from Germany, in which a surgeon named Attila Tan was threatened with beheading by the family of a dissatisfied patient. No ethnicities were mentioned, but the unhappy patient’s father was alleged to have cried “Allahu akhbar!” while brandishing his knife, which provides a clue.

As a follow-up, the TV news report below features an account about what happened from Dr. Tan, who says the man holding the knife claimed to be a Palestinian with ample on-the-job experience in butchering Jews. The fellow evidently assumed that since Dr. Tan was a successful surgeon, he must also be Jewish.

The most dismaying part of the story is that the four suspects have now been released, due to a lack of evidence. It seems that the testimony of the doctor, his two assistants, and a patient — four kuffar witnesses — carries less weight than that of the four Muslims waving knives. Sharia in action in Modern Multicultural Germany!

Watch Leon Panetta’s speech and see for yourself.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Unasked: How many of these are being stoned to death as homosexuals?

The images come in response to a call by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist and journalist living in New York, who urged men to support her campaign against enforced hijab.

Yeah, you can do that in New York. Just try it in Tehran.

Ms Alinejad runs the My Stealthy Freedom campaign and often shares pictures of women living in Iran who have enjoyed a moment of ‘stealthy freedom’ by taking their hijab off in public. She asked men to support her campaign with the #meninhijab hashtag and by sharing pictures with their heads covered while women pose without hijabs.

Not that the men aren’t doing this in public. The key concept here is ‘stealthy’.

Ms Alinejad has received 30 images of men wearing a hijab since issuing her call on 22 July. She told the Independent some men are also posting their images on their Instagram accounts.

Wow. A whole thirdy people. Out of a population of, what, 70 million? Yeah, that’s a game-changer. Maybe Hillary had something to do with it.

Read it.

Well, it is, except that the Danes aren’t fighting it. More accurately, Islam is at war with the Danes.

An Islam expert at the University of Copenhagen said the result was “worrying” .

The good news is that a third of respondents actually understand the situation. The bad news is that two-thirds (and all of the Crust) don’t.

The study found the majority of people who agreed with the statement were over age of 70 and typically only educated to high-school level.

Narrative: People who don’t get with the program are mostly old and dumb.

Read it.

‘Like your doctor? You can keep your doctor!’ Uh, no, that’s a lie.

‘Like your plan? You can keep your plan!’ Uh, no, that’s a lie, too.

‘Affordable Health Care Act gives you affordable health care!’ Uh, that’s the biggest lie of all.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee reveal that Nicholas Confessore suppressed information about Hillary Clinton’s victory fund in an article he wrote about Bernie Sanders. The New York Times political correspondent made the omissions at the request of Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Marc E. Elias, and DNC officials.

The emails, published by Wikileaks, also appear to show that Confessore made other edits to the article at the request of former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz. After Confessore’s revisions, DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach suggested that the DNC Chairwoman grant an off-the-record interview to a group of New York Times writers.

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

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

Just think of it as a really-late-term abortion. The rationalizations are the same.

David Cole is having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

In a normal election year, it would be big news: one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the U.S. fooled by a small cadre of internet trolls into publishing a completely false piece about a GOP presidential candidate. In a normal election year, a story like that would dominate the conservative news cycle for several days at least. Raging Glenn Beck types would demand that the editors explain the reason for the complete abandonment of journalistic ethics that led to the massive error, and there would probably be calls for the reporter responsible for the piece to be fired.

Hell, in a normal election year, a story like that might even seep into the mainstream news cycle, with “media critics” wailing like Björk over the decline of newsroom standards and practices.

But this isn’t a normal election year, as if anyone needs me to point that out.

Well, some people appear to need reminding from time to time.

Speaking of that, who is this intrepid sleuth wearing the fedora with an index card saying “press” neatly tucked into the fabric band? Why, it’s none other than ace millennial newshound Caitlin Dewey. Dewey is The Washington Post’s “digital culture critic.” She earned her bones as a star reporter through years of hard work—tiring nights walking a beat, pursuing leads that often went cold, uncovering graft and corruption at the highest levels of society. Just kidding; she won an essay contest sponsored by The New York Times in which college students were asked to describe their last breakup.

Wow. Here’s your replacement for the SATs. (And I’m sure she pronounces it ‘Kate-Lynn’ rather than the correct Irish ‘Kaht-leen’.)

Regarding U.S. presidential elections, what if everything we know is wrong? What if someone did everything the “wrong” way, and what if that person still won? If Trump wins, the rules will never again be respected as they were. An entire class of political hacks will lose their jobs, fatally exposed as naked emperors. So I don’t want Trump to start doing things the “right” way, or to become “presidential,” or coherent, or “kind and gentle,” or toned down, or “friendlier.” I want him to continue tweeting idiotic memes while pissing on the idea of creating a functioning ground game in swing states. I want him to continue to make funny faces, and to sling childish insults, and to say in an insulting way something that a more “serious” candidate would sugarcoat for wider acceptance. I want the son of a bitch to act as unpresidential as humanly possible. I want The Washington Post and every other “paper of record” to keep attacking him, and I want the conservative establishment to join in.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Dr Attila Tan, from Bonn, had just returned to work after a holiday when he was set upon by the crazed father of a 19-year-old he treated.

But what could his motive be? That’s a puzzle.

Read it.

So who cares?

We often hear that science has proved that race does not exist. But I alway ask, Don’t the same arguments about blurry boundaries and the like also apply to the proposition that species does not exist?

Ah.

Then I cite confusing cases regarding species that have big money implications under the Endangered Species Act.

Aha.

Are dogs, coyotes, and wolves one species or separate species? What about red wolves?

‘Dog lives matter?’

Read it.

Perhaps the true measure of how far a society has slipped into the abyss, is not by looking at what people say, but instead, looking at what people are not allowed to say.

Steve Sailer decodes the Freddie Gray case.

Black district attorney, black mayor, black judge, black cops, black corpse, black rioters, black Attorney General, black President … white people to blame.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Read it.

Read it.

Several French media outlets announced today that they will no longer broadcast the names or photos of terrorists. The rationale behind the decision is that to do so “glorifies” the despicable acts of the mujahideen, helps spread their violent propaganda, and encourages further radicalization.

As it happens, it also prevents the French public from learning that (a) the terrorists have a “Middle-Eastern appearance”, and (b) Muslim names, not infrequently including variants of the name “Mohammed”.

But I’m sure these last two are just side-effects of the editors’ high-minded decision. No one would want to deprive the public of such important knowledge, would they?

Read it.

One of the mujahideen who slaughtered the priest in Normandy yesterday was a known terrorist who had been previously imprisoned, and then released with an electronic bracelet.

Now, if they could push a button and make it explode remotely, that would be cool.

Read it.

It’s good that Bloomberg has quit pretending to be a Republican. I always thought that mask was rather skimpy.