Read it.

After all the jihad slaughter, we’ve been wondering when some German mosques would get peeled open and their doings exposed for public view. I’ve been RILLY pondering this question ever since the eighteen year-old jihadi was found to have employed a Glock in his carnage. Not to mention the three hundred rounds of ammunition he was carrying. Obviously the boy didn’t go to his local department store for the materiel.

Read it.

Key escrow — the process of keeping a set of keys for yourself “just in case” — has always been the U.S. government’s modus operandi when it comes to security. From the disastrous Clipper chip to today, the government has always wanted a back door into encryption and security. That plan backfired for the TSA.

The TSA, as you’ll remember, offers a set of screener-friendly locks. These locks use one of seven master keys that only the TSA can use — until 2014. In an article in The Washington Post, a reporter included a shot of all seven keys on a desk. It wasn’t long before nearly all the keys were made available for 3D printing and, last week, security researchers released the final key.

Don’t you feel more secure now?

And these are the people that Hillary and the Democrats want to trust with our health care … and, indeed, our whole economy.

Read it.

The Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals issued an alarming bulletin today, warning residents of the home county of both Biffy Clyro and Nicola Sturgeon that at least one of the large flightless birds was on the loose.

Specifically the beast – more usually found roaming the African Savannah – was spotted around the village of Patna, in the east of the county. Which has left authorities puzzled as there are no ostrich farms, or other potential sources of the mega-bird, in the area.

Animal Rescue Officer Alistair Hill said, “It is unclear where the ostrich has come from but we think it may also have young with it.”

Must be related to African swallows.

Apparently, ostriches in captivity can survive well into their early 60s – putting them about a decade behind the average Glaswegian male. They can outrun most predators, but if cornered will deploy a flurry of powerful kicks. Ostriches, that is, not Glaswegian males.

The 2013 film Under the Skin featured Scarlett Johansson as mysterious alien adopting the form of an attractive young woman to prey on unsuspecting men in Glasgow and the Scottish countryside. We suppose it’s possible some actual aliens have completely gotten the wrong end of the stick.

Hmmm.

Read it.

In Dances With Wolves, the teepee scene where the Lakota are discussing what to do about Kevin Costner (not the first such discussion, I’m sure) is one of the most entertaining I’ve ever seen, and almost makes up for the rest of that wretched movie.

Read it.

‘Coded racist language’ is Academic for ‘he hasn’t said anything racist so we have to make it up’.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can read the code, then you’re the racist.’

Read it.

This is the kind of headline you couldn’t make up: “Gang of Muslims storm nudist pool in Germany yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ and threatening to ‘exterminate’ women for being ‘sluts.’”

Yeah, you know it isn’t and I know it isn’t but what would the mainstream media (not to mention the lefty kooks) say about that if a Republican did it? Oh, wait, they already did….

Read it. Or just watch the video to get the full effect.

Time to remind everybody of the Pillars of Progressivism:

1. Progress is inevitable (per Marx).
2. Progress is impossible without change (obvious to the most casual observer).
3. Since progress is impossible without change and progress is inevitable, any change will produce progress (eventually).
4. Since any change will eventually produce progress, constant change is mandatory (otherwise no progress).
5. Since any change will eventually produce progress, any resistance to change is Bad and the people who resist change are Stupid or Evil.

Hence the emphasis on Hillary as ‘bringer of change’ (and hence the lack of specification as to what exact changes she had delivered).

This also underlies Barack Obama’s whole ‘Hope and Change’ schtick.

If you read the lyrics of the Fleetwood Mac song Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, they express perfectly the progressive mindset: The past is unimportant because it had less progress, and tomorrow will be better because it will have even more progress, and if I’ve harmed anybody I didn’t mean it so therefore it doesn’t count.

‘Oh, don’t you look back.’ This is the Clinton playbook in a nutshell. This is the life they live. This is what allows them to lie and lie and lie and never feel any remorse or even admit to it. That was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Wakey, wakey, sweet pea — you’ve already got a ‘religious war’, it’s just that so far only one side (the Muslim) is fighting.

If you’ve got a war in which only one side is fighting, guess which side wins.

Steve Sailer looks at crime, unlike most at the DNC.

Trump’s carefully documented Republican convention speech came as an unwelcome intrusion into this new elite consensus against law and order, which helps explain the agonized yelps in response to Trump’s “dystopian” picture.

The ThoughtCrime of ‘noticing’.

During the mayoral terms of the liberal Republican social justice warrior John Lindsay (1966–73), the body count soared to 986 in 1968. As the WASP mayor fought for the rights of blacks and Puerto Ricans against the largely Irish NYPD, the cops retreated to the doughnut shop.

It would be nice if policemen didn’t tend to be divas who sulk and slack off when political leaders demonize cops as racist murderers and encourage black rage, but that’s the way they are.

Read it.

Earlier this month the government resumed negotiations with the CNTE (education union). The negotiations are not working and this is not a surprise. CNTE is not really a union. Rather it is the armed wing of the SNTE (national teachers union). For decades the national union has been criticized because it had become corrupt and anti-education. Parents saw SNTE as an obstacle to their children’s education because too many teacher jobs were not for teachers but for whoever could afford to pay a bribe to get a no-show job. You were paid but you did not have to teach or do any work. That was a job worth fighting for. The state-supported schools had become useless and the CNTE would be called out to stage violent protests whenever local or national governments tried to change this. CNTE claims to have popular support but beyond the families of teachers the CNTE is hated and feared. Open criticism is often violently suppressed. CNTE and SNTE supported whichever political party would help them and was part of a larger corrupt system that most Mexicans want gone. The current reform effort by the federal prosecutors centers on former SNTE head, Elba Esther Gordillo Morales. In 2013 she was indicted on embezzlement and theft charges and arrested. Gordillo allegedly embezzled $160 million in union and education funds and was notorious for her luxurious lifestyle. The government is now trying to clean up the union. To aid with that the government passed a law that gives the federal government control over education. Who had controlled education policy before that? The teachers union did so, with minimal government oversight. Based on the embezzlement scandal, there was also minimal financial oversight. Until the new law was passed, the SNTE determined who was hired and fired. The new law says hiring will be based on qualifications and merit. The teachers union has been one of the most powerful (and allegedly most corrupt) unions in Mexico. It has around 1.5 million members and most of them are not qualified to be teachers. Currently the union maintains roadblocks in Oaxaca state and threatens widespread protests throughout Mexico. The union continues to demand that the government repeal the 2013 laws that required routine evaluations of teacher efficiency. The union also want the government to free two union leaders currently under arrest.

John Hinderaker pulls back the curtain.

The Associated Press was once a straightforward, relatively nonpolitical news source, but those days are long gone. Now some of the most hard-core Democratic Party advocacy comes from the AP. Thus, it is no surprise that the AP is trying to advance the Democrats’ narrative that Trump is a bigot.

…

“Coded racial language” is big on the left, but note that so far, the AP hasn’t quoted a single word that Donald Trump actually said. Not one. The AP goes on in the same vein, quoting Trump’s far-left critics, but never citing any of Trump’s own words.

…

There is much more along the same lines; read it for yourself if you like. The next day, July 23, the AP came out with another anti-Trump racial smear: “Energized white supremacists cheer Trump convention message.” It is more of the same: Trump doesn’t actually say anything about race, but we liberals will tell you what he really means.

Read it.

The Democratic convention has arrived. If they only go positive, they can get a bigger bounce than the small one it looks like Republicans got. That’s before considering their news media advantages, which the WikiLeaks emails in last week prove are just as intentional as the Right has thought for years. They weren’t just feeding stories to impressionable journalists, but the more enthusiastic partisans were sending stories to the Democratic National Committee for pre-publishing approval.

Take a deep breath and try not to be distracted by the phrase ‘a media’. (These people went to college, although you’d never know it.)

Read it.

In the run up to almost every presidential election, partisans on both sides of the political spectrum threaten to move to a country like Canada or Ireland if the other side wins. But this election is different.

If all the people who said they’d move to Canada if X got elected would just DO IT, we wouldn’t have these problems.

“There’s far less trust in the federal government and major institutions than there was 50 or 60 years ago,” says Jason Sorens, author of Secessionism and a lecturer in government at Dartmouth College. “A lot of people don’t feel represented in D.C. and they’re definitely open to radical solutions like secession because they feel as if that’s a way to get control back over their political destiny.”

That’s because statist trends in government are worse then they’ve been at any time since President Wilson.

Read it.

PHILADELPHIA — Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the embattled outgoing chair of the Democratic National Committee, was forcibly driven out of her own state delegation’s breakfast Monday amid vocal and unwieldy protests by Bernie Sanders’ supporters.

Schultz, who announced Sunday she would resign her chairmanship after emails showed top staffers at the Democratic National Committee worked to undermine Sanders’ primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, attempted to talk over a chorus of heckles and boos at a downtown hotel hosting the Florida Democratic Party.

But the Florida congresswoman, who faces a newly emboldened primary challenge in her home state, could barely be heard over the ruckus. As soon as she took the stage, attendees donning Sanders shirts and holding signs that read “Email” began to disrupt her remarks. The delegation breakfast, normally a calm, sleepy, mundane affair, devolved into outright chaos.

My. How distressing.

Read it.

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

This is what the Democrats want to  bring to America. Feel the Bern!

Read it.

Police have charged 36-year-old Jeannie Chapman of Brewer, Maine, with aggravated assault – a class B crime.

Taking exception to the news reports, a Pokémon player posted in the same Facebook group: “They have been reporting us as moronic zombies walking into traffic without paying attention to where we’re going and that’s simply not true.”

Pokemon Go players should ask themselves: ‘Why do they hate us?’

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Some of Hillary Clinton’s contemporaries who helped shatter glass ceilings in their own professions are exasperated that their female friends aren’t planning to help elect the country’s first woman president.

“I am never going to speak to you again unless you vote,” lifestyle entrepreneur Martha Stewart said she told a female friend in her 60s who plans to stay home Election Day.

You’d think it was the Miss America contest. Apparently it doesn’t occur to these ‘glass-ceiling breakers’ that the Presidency is an actual job with actual requirements and actual duties that are actually important. Just having two X chromosomes isn’t enough.

“We as women should be so proud that there is a strong and viable candidate,” said Ms. Stewart, a Clinton supporter. “Yet there are women who are not even thinking about her as a woman. They are just listening to criticisms of her that she is a liar.”

Perhaps whether she is a liar is more significant than whether she is a woman? Just maybe?

Read it.

Day one of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was all about healing, but the patients in need of therapy seemed to prefer their condition to treatment. The procedural portion of the day was devoted to an airing of grievances among Sanders supporters while the night was designed to provide them with catharsis and a means by which they could reconcile their remaining objections to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. To facilitate that purification process, Clinton brought in the biggest progressive guns she could: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders himself. Their performance was, to say the least, underwhelming, and it underscores the extent to which their reputations are utterly undeserved.

Read it.

There were numerous reports last night that it was impossible to find any American flags displayed in the Democratic convention hall, even though Michelle Obama conspiciously reversed her 2008 position that she was proud of her country for the first time, to saying now that America was always great. (Or maybe the text said she thought America was always grate?) Anyway, while the American flag was missing, apparently the Palestinian flag showed up….

Read it.

Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.

Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list.

Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce.

The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps. After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.

Read it.

Angela Gibbins, Head of Global Estates for the cultural relations organisation, which is partially funded by the taxpayer, made the comments in response to a photo on social media captioned: “I know he’s only two years old [sic], but Prince George already looks like a f****** d***head”, according to The Sun.

Posting a message beneath the picture of the young prince, she reportedly wrote: “White privilege. That cheeky grin is the innate knowledge he’s royal, rich, advantages and will never know any difficulties or hardships in life”.

Feel the love.

In response to criticisms online, the 52-year-old Ms Gibbins is said to have responded: “I’m sound in my socialist, atheist and republican opinions.

Yet another right-wing hater. Oh, wait….

Now, imagine what would have happened had she said that about some black kid.

Read it.

Sometimes the system works.

Read it.

Anything the gives Susan Sarandon a bad time certainly has my wholehearted support.

Let’s hand her over to ISIS and see whether that recalibrates her meter.

Read it.

Does anyone believe incoming students at Amherst College are racists? Amherst College does, apparently.

‘Welcome go college. Here’s why you ought to be ashamed that you can afford to come here.’

Read it.

Very few of us have enjoyed the thrill and convenience of a supersonic flight. This is partly due to economics: Both the Concorde (1,350 mph) and the Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-44 (1,200 mph) faced early retirements for financial reasons.

But this does not explain why top airplane speeds have lagged behind for so many decades. Today, most airlines cruise at altitudes well below the speed of sound, with a standard Boeing 747-B clocking in at a ho-hum 570 mph cruising speed. My Mercatus Center colleagues Eli Dourado and Michael Kotrous recently dug into airspeed data compiled by Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), an international sports aviation measurement and standard-setting body. Their finding: Innovation in air travel speeds came to a grinding halt after Joerz’s still-unbroken record-setting feat in 1976.

You can thank the FAA for this continued mediocrity in air travel. In 1973, amid ample developments in supersonic flight, the FAA bizarrely decided to prohibit supersonic travel (SST) over the US. Why? When an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, it generates shock waves that become compressed into one super-loud “sonic boom.” The FAA and other civilian activists were concerned about the potential damage that SST flights could do to the environment or to civil infrastructure.

Unfortunately, evidence-based policy-making did not guide the FAA’s supersonic ban. Knee-jerk techno-skepticism did.

Read it.

A PRIEST has reportedly been beheaded and another hostage is ‘fighting for their life’ after two knife-wielding men two nuns and several worshippers hostage at a church in northern France.

A third suspect has reportedly been arrested outside the church after a pair of ‘bearded’ attackers were shot and killed after reportedly ‘creeping’ into a Catholic mass at 9am in the French town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen.

Local media claims Father Jacques Hamel, believed to be 86-years-old, was the priest who was slaughtered by the ‘extremist’ duo.

ISIS supporters are celebrating the horrific attack at the church which was reportedly on a terrorist ‘hit list’ which it is claimed French police have known about since April 2015 – following the arrest of an extremist in Paris last year.

Read it.

One reason so many people are going hungry in conflict zones is because too much of the donated food and other supplies are not reaching those who need it. The UN, Red Cross and thousands of other foreign aid organizations are having a harder time raising money mainly they are having an even harder time dealing with the growing revelations about the extent to which foreign aid is stolen after arriving in the countries where it is needed. The plundering has gone on for so long that the thieves have gotten greedy and sloppy. For example, the refugees from the 1960s-70s war in southern Morocco (West Sahara) decades ago are still sitting in Algeria supported by foreign aid. But it’s become increasingly obvious that, while the aid organizations are regularly providing aid for 120,000 refugees there are only about 40,000 real refugees in the camps. The rest of the aid goes to make a few Polisario (the rebel group that runs the camp) leaders and Algerian officials millionaires and many more underlings wealthier. For years people who lived in the camp have casually told outsiders, including reporters, details of how aid is stolen and resold and deals made with air officials to keep the loot coming. It was not long before donors were informed.

Read it.

Though they haven’t yet completed covering things up, Hillary Clinton’s journalistic defense team at the Associated Press has swung into gear at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Read it.

If you are watching the Democratic National Convention at home, you may notice that most any time a new speaker talks about why we should unify behind Hillary Clinton, or merely say her name out loud, there is a minority chorus of boos emanating from the side of the stage. That’s about 30 percent of the California delegation, and I just spent an hour sitting next to them, and boy do some of them despise Hillary Clinton.

Who could hate Hillary Clinton? She’s America’s sweetheart!

“I was lucky a couple of weeks ago: I shot a squirrel to bring home for meat,” said Brian Seligman, a former Marine on Social Security disability from a car wreck, who recently moved from the Los Angeles area to Victorville. Seligman says his wife can’t find a job, and when the food stamps run out at the end of the month he needs to find creative way to feed his children.

“This isn’t just my family,” he said, voice welling with emotion, tears beginning to pool in his eyes. “There are 15,300,000 children STARVING in this country, and this woman wears a jacket worth more than I get in a year, while she goes out talking about how she’s going to blow up other people’s children for another trillion dollars. My kids are dying and she wants to murder other people’s kids with my money!”

This is a Democrat? He sure sounds like a Republican to me.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Who hasn’t wanted to do that? Although I would have thought it more proper to pull the gun on the parent.

Read it.

A firefighter told the Aftonbladet tabloid the man had been trying to sneak into the stadium while he was playing the game.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

The movie’s treatment of Jones’ character Patty was not satisfying as it resorted to the sassy black woman stereotype. However, as Jones often plays the type of character she did in the film in comedy sketches, I can only give the film’s makers the benefit of the doubt and hope they were riding on Jones’ comedy character that she has built for herself, as Patty did have some of the best lines.

I guess having a fat ugly black woman as one of the ‘scientists’ wasn’t empowering enough. Oh, well.

Read it.

Read it.

Rioting in the culturally enriched French tradition — burning cars and garbage containers, vandalizing buildings, etc. — occurred recently in several suburbs north of parents. The youths who took to the streets were unhappy because one of their fellow youths had died in police custody, and the police were suspected of beating him to death.

Read it.

The Washington Post isn’t good at being subtle when it comes to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It’s quite easy to figure out which one is the Democrat, simply from the photos and photo illustrations they chose on the last two Sundays.

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

Sol Stern illustrates the New York City behavioral sink.

I can still recall the shock I experienced one morning in September 1991 after dropping my boys off at P.S. 87’s schoolyard. I lingered for a few minutes, chatting with some other parents, when I noticed a bent man in dirty, tattered clothes, wandering around the yard as if in a stupor. Wondering if a derelict had gotten into the schoolyard, I asked one of the parents if she recognized him. She responded with an ironic grin: “Don’t you know? That’s Malcolm, one of our new teachers.”

Incredulous, I headed off to Principal Jane Hand’s office. It was all true, Hand confirmed. Malcolm was now a teacher in good standing at our K–5 school. She had to hire this deeply troubled person because of the seniority-transfer clause in the labor agreement between the city and the United Federation of Teachers. The contract required principals to post half of their schools’ teacher vacancies at the end of each year and offer the positions to applicants with the greatest seniority in the system. Hand didn’t even have the right to interview Malcolm (who had transferred from a Bronx elementary school) before he showed up on the first day of school.

Read it.

Guess it didn’t work.

“Officers arrived on scene and found multiple victims suffering from various levels of gunshot wounds,” Fort Myers Police Captain Jim Mulligan said in a statement. Police say three people have been taken into custody related to the shooting but did not say why.

The problem with ‘gun free zones’ is that only law-abiding people leave their guns outside. Those aren’t the people from whom one needs protection.

Read it.

One big victory Bernie Sanders supporters won when the Democratic Party wrote its platform was including his call for a $15 minimum wage.

But this week in Philadelphia, Democratic delegates and other convention-goers will get a series of stark reminders that the union organizers who have been among the loudest advocates for a $15-per-hour wage floor have also sought carve-outs to allow companies to pay their own members less if they hire union workers, giving unions a key bargaining chip.

Jim Goad does a reality check.

If you were to note every manmade item within your field of vision, chances are that nearly every last gadget and trinket was invented by a white man. According to Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, whites have historically dominated the fields of physics, math, chemistry, medicine, biology, and technology.

What’s grossly ironic is the specter of people using white computers hooked up to white electricity sent across white power grids to criticize the very white people who made their whining possible. Even worse is the ubiquity of white people pejoratively using the word “white people” as if it somehow doesn’t apply to them. That right there is a collective mental illness for the ages.

White technology has doubled lifespans across the globe and yanked several human subgroups out of the Stone Age. This makes certain white people feel guilty. It also apparently makes lots of nonwhite people resentful.

I am not making this up.

I was safely ensconced in the Navy and college during this period, and so thank God missed most of it.

Read it.

I’ve written before about the study of Arthur Webb and Paul Kench regarding the fact that coral atolls are not being swallowed by rising seas. Their conclusion in that study was that the claims of sinking atolls were contradicted by the actual measurements of the islands in question. The measurements showed the islands were mostly either growing in size or staying the same (emphasis mine)….

Read it.

In light of the recent terrorist attacks in Muslim nations, the argument is again being made that, say what they will, the terrorists are obviously not acting in the name of Islam—a religion which bans the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Muslims.

Yet is it that simple? Since the Medieval era, Islamic clerics have justified the killing of other Muslims—intentionally, for they’re not “real” Muslims (e.g., Shias), or unintentionally, as collateral damage (who become “martyrs” and receive Islam’s highest paradisiacal rewards)—in the name of jihad.

Even so, it’s clear that, whenever they can, the jihadis do make an effort to preserve the lives of Muslims. This was the case in the recent terror attack in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. On July 1, 2016, six Islamic militants shouting Islam’s ancient war cry opened fire on a bakery in Dhaka, the nation’s capital. The assailants entered the Bakery with crude bombs, machetes, pistols, and took several dozen hostages.

Read it.

At a lively Sunday march in support of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, chants of “lock her up,” “Hillary for Prison” signs and t-shirts and calls for indictment were common among the most ardent supporters of Mr. Sanders, who arrived in Philadelphia to make their voices heard to the delegates attending the Democratic National Convention.

Seems like a trend.

Read it.

Bavaria is getting more than its share of excitement this month. The latest incident occurred tonight, and involved a heavy explosion in the town of Ansbach that was not an accident. It killed one person and wounded ten others, some of them seriously.

Read it.

A ringing endorsement. What else do you need?

Can’t say that I blame him God knows I wouldn’t vote for my brother for President, the communist….

Read it.

The greatest minds of humanity used to believe in a static universe, phrenology, and many more things that we might find ridiculous today. So if skepticism is so demonstrably useful and deserved, why do people demonize each other for failure to follow the herd?

It’s politics, stupid.

Like basically anything today, science often finds itself mired in the ostentatious game of political signaling. Opinions and interpretations of scientific research are as much a part of political identity as a bumper sticker or a lawn sign. This is hugely unfortunate because it leads people to adopt dogmatic approaches to a process that should be objective.

Politics ruin science (and pretty much everything else) because everything is reduced to a zero-sum game: an us versus them scenario where concession is likened to defeat. They also reduce diversity of opinion and promote groupthink.

‘Progressives’, of course, don’t have a problem with groupthink; their whole world depends on it.