Read it.

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

Nearly two hundred flights have taken off from airfields in the Islamic Republic of Iran to land in Syria since the Iran nuclear deal was announced one year ago, according to publicly available flight-tracking data. These commercial aircraft have almost certainly been ferrying troops and arms that, in conjunction with Russian air strikes and the deployment of thousands of Iranian forces, have staved off defeat for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The planes belong to Iran Air, the country’s flag carrier, and Mahan Air, a private airline associated with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force.

In the context of these documented military operations with commercial aircraft, Boeing and Airbus recently announced multibillion-dollar plans to sell around two hundred planes to Iran. Here’s the problem: the Islamic Republic has used its commercial fleet to ferry weapons, supplies, and paramilitary operatives to its proxies and allies in the region since the creation of Lebanese Hezbollah by the IRGC in the early 1980s. The United States has repeatedly sanctioned Iran Air and Mahan Air for transporting military equipment to the Assad regime since then. A Western intelligence report leaked in 2012 fingered both Mahan and Iran Air for transporting everything from “communications equipment to light arms and advanced strategic weapons” to Syrian forces. And none of these activities appear to have stopped.

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For a while I thought we were re-living the 1970s, with Carter era stagnation and weakness. Now we seem to be moving back in time to the 1960s. That was when the Democrats first tried to claim that “law and order” is code for racism. The Democrats lost that one. It turned out that Americans really do care about upholding the law, and really are opposed to crime.

So now the Democrats want to re-enact their losing strategy, believing, apparently, that this time it will win for them. If I were a Democrat, I would attempt an intervention. But I am not a Democrat, so I am happy–well, not happy, since the whole thing is inexpressibly sad–but willing to let them go down the same sterile path to defeat.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.’

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

And the hits just keep on comin’….

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

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Good. Let’s see whether they can get past RINO Ryan.

Read it.

Sounds make to order for a disgruntled old fart candidate.

The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign has reportedly been collecting a wide variety of donated canned and dried beans in its Philadelphia office, with the intention of feeding the flatulence-inducing vegetables to willing Bernie Sanders supporters before they enter the convention hall. Organizers of the “fart-in” won’t provide the names of those delegates who have pledged to participate, but they have indicated that at least “a bunch” are inclined to make their gaseous protest heard.

Now that’s entertainment … if you’re a college sophomore, as I suspect a lot of such people are.

Read it.

Sounds like a typical government program to me.

Uncle Sam has tried everything — grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits and deductions. Result? The price of tuition, room, and board at an in-state, public college has soared from $1,405 in 1971 to $19,548 today — an increase of 1,300 percent. Unlike food, clothing, and energy, the cost of college has raced far ahead of inflation. As economic studies, including recent work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have repeatedly shown, the government aid meant to quell the flames has succeeded only in fanning them. If the Clinton/Sanders pledge becomes law, it is virtually certain that college will become even more costly. Perhaps that explains why 20 out of 22 economists surveyed by NPR judged Sanders’ proposal a bad idea.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … oops….

Read it.

He has wiped out Hillary Clinton’s lead in Florida; is on the upside of too-close to call races in Florida and Pennsylvania and is locked in a dead heat in Ohio,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

Not bad for somebody who hasn’t been spending any money on ads, in the face of Hillary spending millions.

With Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson included in the new poll, Mr. Trump’s lead improves to 5 points in Florida and 6 points in Pennsylvania, and he jumps ahead by 1 point in Ohio.

Which models the actual election.

Read it.

According to the New York Post, FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State were required to sign unprecedented non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from disclosing anything about their investigation of Hillary.

A former FBI chief told the New York Post that such a requirement is “very, very unusual.”

While FBI agents are typically required to sign vanilla non-disclosure agreements as part of their security clearances, law enforcement sources say they’ve never heard of a “Case Briefing Acknowledgment,” the agreement agents investigating Clinton were reportedly required to sign.

“FBI agents believe there was an inside deal put in place after the Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting,” a source told the Post.

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

Read it.

Almost eight years after Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president –an event that engendered a sense of optimism among many Americans about the future of race relations¹ – a series of flashpoints around the U.S. has exposed deep racial divides and reignited a national conversation about race. A new Pew Research Center survey finds profound differences between black and white adults in their views on racial discrimination, barriers to black progress and the prospects for change. Blacks, far more than whites, say black people are treated unfairly across different realms of life, from dealing with the police to applying for a loan or mortgage. And, for many blacks, racial equality remains an elusive goal.

I guess electing a black President didn’t have the desired effect. Two terms of Barack Obama and things have only gotten worse.

The reason why ‘racial equality remains an elusive goal’ for black is because of all of the sob-sisters and grievance-mongers in their own community, if I can use the word loosely. When everybody you listen to keeps drumming in the ‘You’re a victim! They’re oppressors!’ 24/7, pretty soon you start to believe it.

Read it.

On Tuesday, during the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas police officers, President Obama began the speech eloquently. But it sadly once again became a political dividing tool when he made the absolutely outrageous statement that teenagers can get a hold of a Glock more readily than a book or a computer.

Harmony, brief as it was, immediately became a social media free-for-all. He just could not help make it about his political beliefs with a whopper of a lie. Has he never heard of a library? Did he think politics really belonged at a memorial service? With an entire nation grieving and watching an entire city and police force grieving in front of him, for some odd reason, he felt the need to go there.

Yeah, well, that’s all he knows how to do.

Civil Rights icon Bob Woodson has little respect for the Black Lives Matter provocateurs. He finds them morally bankrupt, whose only determination seems to be fifteen minutes of shame rather than concrete resolutions to problems.

“I would never equate one moment of the Civil Rights movement to anything that BLM has orchestrated,” he said.

“They are no different than the Black Panthers,” he said of the often violent Black Nationalist party that thrived in the 60’s until the early 80’s.

Well, yeah.

Woodson said, “I think people in power in both the left and right are profiting from this divide; because the left can use it politically and so can the right. The left can use it to turn out the base and the right can use it to turn out voters who would not normally vote for them but do out of fear,” he said.

“Some of us who have standing as civil rights people need to have a voice,” said Woodson; “The media always gives a camera and a microphone to the disruptors but not the people who are trying to find solutions.”

“We need to get these hustling black preachers out of the way, and give voice to people like the Dallas police chief. That is someone who is showing leadership,” he said.

Hear, hear.

Woodson doesn’t just blame BLM for inflaming racial tensions. “Look at what Fox News is doing,” he said. “It is what pisses me off with conservative broadcasters; they will have on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and then Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham become the foil,” he said.

“In short, the face of opposition to BLM is O’Reilly and Ingraham,” Woodson said.

“Fox should not be using Sharpton or Jackson or these other race hucksters,” he said. “All they are doing is continuing the divide and I am forced to conclude that some people on the right have begun forming their own grievance industry in reaction to BLM,” Woodson said.

Well said.

Read it.

Already in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun pointed out in his House of Intellect, people were beginning to say “I feel that…” instead of “I think that…” in common discourse. This terminological ferment marked a change in how people were engaging the world as the Modern Ages passed away. Reason, which had been enjoying a free pass and a table close to the orchestra ever since the Middle Ages (when it was virtually the only kind of thing taught in the universities), and which even later modestly named a time period after itself, butted heads with sentiment… and lost. This “triumph of the will” gave us Romanticism, Nietzsche’s philosophy, impressionist paintings, and self-esteem classes like “Me Studies.” The heart wants what it wants.

The Sixties then were less a youth revolution than the aftermath of an adult abdication. Commenting on Barzun, R.R. Reno wrote that “the adult world of achieved self-discipline” gave way to “an adolescent world of spontaneity and desire” as the epigones of the old Bourgeois threw in with the Bohemian project, a “royal road to self-discovery through the alchemy of self-expression.” Barzun predicted that the then-emerging Bohemian Era would be anti-intellectual: characterized by an “externalized and collective sense of purpose” (Everything is political! Everything is a Movement!) and an “undifferentiated, amorphous inner life” (The triumph of the will! If it feels good, do it!). After all, the Bourgeois Era was repressive, patriarchal, and logocentric, wunnit?

Read it.

Illinois has one of the more aggressive asset forfeiture programs in the country. Ben Ruddell, criminal justice policy attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, pointed out in April that the “state’s laws in this area currently are grossly unfair. As preposterous as it seems, you can lose your property—including your car, cash, or even your home—without ever being arrested or charged with a crime.”

The ACLU records cover only two years, but they provide a wide-angle snapshot of what kind of property Illinois police seized, how much it was worth, and where the proceeds flowed. They are also rare among records on asset forfeiture because they show the disposition of seized property.

Of the $72 million seized in those two years, the state only officially arranged for the full forfeiture of $16 million. About $5 million was not ultimately kept.

When government employees are allowed to steal people’s stuff, they will do so.

Steve Sailer explains the world.

Last week, on his way to Warsaw on Air Force One, President Barack Obama was looking at social media. According to The New York Times, he alerted his press secretary that:

He had decided to make a statement himself as soon as they landed, and had told his aides to collect statistics demonstrating racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Now, you might think that’s putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the administration should objectively evaluate the evidence first, rather than order its media flacks to dredge up some data justifying the president’s prejudices?

But that would be wrong. Everybody knows that culture or evolution can’t have anything to do with hereditary racial differences in performance. If you even consider those possibilities, you must be one of the bad white people you’ve been warned about.

Instead, we know that science has proved that statistical differences among the races are all due to a vast conspiracy to plunder blacks. Nothing makes 21st-century people who think they are white richer than having a lot of black bodies around. Just ask MacArthur genius Ta-Nehisi Coates. He’ll tell you.

Read it.

Six years ago, March E. Ratney was arrested after neighborhood residents told police he was riding a bike and firing a gun. When officers responded to the 911 calls, court documents say, Ratney called them pigs. He called one officer a “cracker.” The documents say he threatened to go to the officers’ homes and kill their families.

Ratney, 27, is now accused of trying to carry out a similar threat.

Ratney’s words from 2010 echo eerily now after police say he went to the home of an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officer early Tuesday and fired more than a dozen shots at the officer’s home and police car.

The neck tattoo suggests what a fine, upstanding citizen he is.

Riggs said Ratney wore a T-shirt that, on the front, had the words, “F— the police.” On the back, he said, the shirt read, “Black Lives Matter,” a social justice movement that protests police shooting deaths of black men. The movement was born out of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was accused in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen.

Somebody is trying to start a race war in America, and it ain’t white people.

Read it.

Hopefully the American military is working on this as well.

Read it.

Hey, it’s all about him.

Read it.

No wonder they call her Notorious RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just declared war against Donald Trump, announcing that if he is elected president, she’d consider moving to New Zealand.

It would be a good place for her. I haven’t done a double-blind study, but it’s hard to recall — or find on the web — an instance of another Supreme Court justice diving into politics quite the way Ginsburg has just done.

Ginsburg’s comment came in an interview with the New York Times’ Supreme Court scribe, Adam Liptak. He was so astounded that he warned his readers before he reported her comments that normally justices “diligently avoid political topics.”

‘Progressive’ judges, of course, feel no urge to counterfeit an appearance of impartiality.

On the other hand, we ought to encourage her to move to New Zealand in any event — it would free up a Supreme Court slot for an actual impartial judge.

Watch it.

Bernie Sanders droning on about the terrible income inequality in America while endorsing a woman who made $20 million during the last two years making speeches to the very Wall Street bankers that he is castigating.

Truly, Democrats do not live in the same world as the rest of us.

Read it.

Censorious antics of ‘snowflake’ students have regularly made front-page news here in the UK. No longer. The momentous political fall-out from the June 23rd referendum, when a majority of citizens voted in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, has swept all other concerns aside. Whatever occurs in the coming months, whether ‘Brexit’ actually happens, or, as looks increasingly likely, the democratic will of the people is kicked into the long grass, the response to the referendum from within universities has had a devastating impact on academic freedom.

…

It would be difficult to imagine universities, in the run up to a general election, publicly articulating a preference for one party over another, or urging staff and students to vote a certain way. But this is what happened in the run up to the referendum. Universities UK (UUK), an umbrella group representing the collective interests of the British higher education sector, launched its Universities for Europe campaign in July 2015. Its aim was to demonstrate how ‘the EU strengthens our already world-class higher-education system’ and to ‘promote powerful evidence and highlight compelling stories about the benefits of European Union membership’.

Steven Hayward of Powerline blog shares his experience.

I spent the day in Chicago yesterday, where I lucked into my first ever up close up encounter with a Black Lives Matter march. (Photos nearby.) The throng blocked the intersection at Wacker Avenue and the Chicago River downtown right at the beginning of the evening rush hour. The police did nothing to disperse the crowd; to the contrary, they police enabled the march to proceed. One fellow got up in my face and said that my “silence is violence.” I suggested to him that he didn’t really want to see me when I’m noisy. I’ve got some video, too, but I have to board an airplane in a few minutes and it takes a while to post.

Chicago is, of course, run by Democrats, and has been time out of mind. If it’s a hotbed of racism, who’s to blame?

Read it.

Yesterday, as normal Americans were wrapping up their work day, gearing up for baseball’s home-run derby, or playing cell-phone video games in the park, 19 senators from the Democratic Party began taking to the floor of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body to express their collective “disapproval” of the way 33 organizations speak about climate change, and to urge these allegedly “interconnected” groups to cooperate maximally with various ongoing government investigations into their uncorrect opinions. The purpose of this two-day name-and-shame exercise, the senators bragged in a press release, is “to call out Koch brothers- and fossil fuel industry-funded groups that have fashioned a web of denial to block action on climate change.”

Kathy Shaidle doesn’t like Justin Trudeau very much.

We rightly bitch about Obama’s two-term international “apology tour,” but what to call Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s compulsive peregrinations? The “frivolity tour,” perhaps?

Sure, conservatives can lamely joke that as long as PM Zoolander’s not in Parliament, he can do less harm. (Just ask the female MP he elbowed in the tits.) But is even that true? Every time he attracts media attention abroad, Trudeau accidentally advertises Canada’s sheer stupidity for voting for him.

Not all of us, obviously, but it’s hard to explain to Americans how a dude who won less than 40 percent of the popular vote gets to form something call a “majority” government. And you guys aren’t helping, by the way: handing True-dope fake awards, inviting him to all the global one-percenter confabs, and going gaga every time he shows his stupid face.

Read it.

For a fail-safe indicator of media bias, it’s hard to beat labels. The little words the reporters stick in to describe institutions often turn out to tell more about the bias of the reporters and news organizations than about the institutions to which they are being applied.

A good recent example — a good example, but bad journalism — of this phenomenon comes in a news article by Patricia Cohen that appears in the business section of the New York Times under the headline “What Trump and the G.O.P. Can Agree On: Tax Cuts for the Rich.”

Ms. Cohen mentions three research organizations or think tanks in her article. One, the Tax Policy Center, is a joint venture of two center-left organizations, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Ms. Cohen refers to it as “the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.”

Two others, the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, are also nonpartisan, but they are on the center-right of the ideological spectrum. Ms. Cohen refers to them as “the conservative American Enterprise Institute” and “The conservative Tax Foundation.”

Got that? The Times describes the center-left think tank as “nonpartisan,” but it describes the center to center-right think tanks as “conservative.”

Read it.

Jermaine Schofield was gunned down in Baltimore on Sunday, one of three murder victims in the city that day. Today, Schofield’s family held a vigil for him.

During the vigil, a gunman fired at attendees. Five were hit. Thankfully, all are expected to survive.

These events are not an aberration. Baltimore has descended into chaos since, in the aftermath of Freddy Gray’s death, the city failed to back its police force.

Murders surged a staggering 63 percent in 2015, with 344 people killed. This year hasn’t been quite as bad so far, but the murder rate remains abnormally high.

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

Read it.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on shivving.

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Why has the West been so supportive of Palestinian nationalism, yet so reluctant to support the Kurds, the largest nation in the world without a state?

Perhaps because the Kurds aren’t making it a policy to blow up Jews and other pro-Western people.

With an estimated worldwide population of about 35 million (including about 28 million in the KRG or adjacent areas), the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East (after the Arabs, Persians, and Turks), and have faced decades of persecution as a minority in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.

That’s the point. A Kurdistan would take parts from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, all of whom would scream bloody murder.

Read it.

Canadian “Star Trek” fans have been paying tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy through “Spocking,” or drawing in the character’s sharp eyebrows, bowl-shaped hair and pointy ears on look-a-like former Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, who’s featured on the $5 bill.

I am not making this up. But I can’t really blame them.

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Kosher foods are disappearing from grocery stores in Vermont due to the fact many small manufacturers and suppliers do not want to bother with complying with the Green Mountain State’s new requirement that foods made using ingredients from genetically modified crops (GMOs) be labeled. Vermont’s law imposes a penalty of $1,000 per day per genetically modified product that is not labeled. Since the Vermont market is so small, it’s just easier to to stop shipping their grocery goods to that scientifically benighted state.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … oh, wait….

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed legislation would mandate federal GMO labeling and pre-empt state laws like Vermont’s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have two years in which to work out the implementing regulations. Activists have been pushing for mandatory federal labeling for years now and when they finally get it, they hate it. Why? Because they fear it will not be onerous enough to scare consumers away from foods made with modern biotech crops. The House is expected to pass the Senate’s version of the bill, but will President Obama veto it?

Read it.

After Thursday’s terrorist slaughter of policemen in Dallas, it’s fair to say that Barack Obama might well be the worst president in U.S. history. Here’s why.

…

Central to the nation’s Herculean effort to end the wrongs of racism was the new determination of police departments, led by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton, to restore law and order to ghetto neighborhoods, so that civil society could come back to life there, and people wouldn’t have to pay tribute to armed thugs controlling their lives. The old policing had ignored all but the most heinous ghetto crimes. Its spirit was: If they want to kill each other uptown, fine, as long as it stays up there. But for the new policing, all victims deserved police attention, regardless of race. All neighborhoods deserved police protection, regardless of the color of their residents. And since the perpetrators of crime are overwhelmingly young minority men, they properly received a very large proportion of police scrutiny. The alternative, to repeat, was to let them kill each other.

But unlike Lincoln, America’s first black president didn’t bind up the nation’s wounds but scratched them open every time police killed a black man—rightly or sometimes wrongly, because when society arms men with guns and authority, it will inevitably attract some bullies, making a police chief responsible for policing his own men vigilantly, as the NYPD especially has striven to do, and as Plato told us was statecraft’s thorniest problem. Anytime a non-black man killed an African-American, Obama cried racism and said it could have been him or his son, if he’d had one. Every time a cop, white or black, killed a black American, Obama’s reflexive instinct was to blame the cop. About the mayhem of black-on-black murder in the nation’s ghettoes, he gave only a single speech.

Read it.

Not that you’d know that from listening to the Drive-By Media….

Read it.

Much of her life seems like classic soccer-mom material, which makes her destination all the more astonishing: she is heading to Charles Town, West Virginia, to spend the week in an old country villa speaking no language other than Latin. A group called SALVI (Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum, the North American Institute for Living Latin Studies) rents a secluded space large enough for thirty-odd people to spend a week without any outside contact: no phones, no internet, no stores.

…

Forget the books. It has to be people talking to people. Once you lose that, it will never be the same.

Read it.

The Labor Department only classifies people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work. All those who don’t have a job and aren’t looking are lumped together under the fishy-sounding classification “not in the labor force.” The share of Americans not in the labor force has been climbing for nearly 15 years, a development that even many economists and demographers failed to anticipate.

It may sound like a giant mystery: What are these 92 million Americans doing? Actually, we do have some idea.

I notice that there’s a large contingent in the 16-20 year-old range who want work and can’t find it. Thank you, minimum wage.

Read it.

A close look at the data (American Community Survey table B25071) reveals that renters are hardest hit in Florida, Hawai’i, California, and Oregon, all states with strong growth-management laws. (Florida weakened its law in 2011, but few if any regions have weakened their growth-management plans since then.) Meanwhile, rental housing is still very affordable in states such as Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Hawai’i and California aren’t surprising, but it is a bit surprising to see Oregon near the top of the list. Oregon’s “smart-growth” policies were supposed to avoid this problem by building a lot of multifamily housing in place of the single-family housing that has been made unaffordable by the urban-growth boundaries around every city in the state. But this clearly hasn’t worked.

Read it.

“I’m one of those displaced old Democrats. I’m not an ideological Conservative at all, I see a decent role for government. But I think that what’s happened to the Democratic Party is that it’s become the Downton Abbey party – of the very rich and the very poor. You have these very powerful, very wealthy people who for whatever reason subscribe to a particular worldview. As the working class are deserting the Democrat Party, it becomes less responsive to them.”

What Kotkin identifies is a fastidiously politically-correct middle class – one that’s characterized by its bossiness and intolerance. This class lives in its own virtual reality, and lectures everyone else. This has historical roots, he writes. The rise of a middle class that was removed from everyday concerns was predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1976 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

…

Kotkin borrowed an even older term for this new virtue-signalling elite. 180 years ago, the poet Samuel Coleridge described an educated middle class that sought for itself a priestly function in society, “serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth” as the “clerisy”. And that’s what we’ve now got: a New Clerisy .

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Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

I’m not sure whether this is a parody or not, but it’s certainly an entertaining read.

Read it.

Hundreds of Black Limes Matter rioters shut down Highway 94, a major interstate that connects Minneapolis and St. Paul, for several hours last night. The rioters bombarded police with chunks of concrete, pieces of rebar and other hard objects, injuring 21 police officers. One policeman suffered a broken vertebrae when a concrete block was dropped on his head from above. Around 100 rioters were arrested.

Read it.

If you relied on accounts by the mainstream media of the Chilcot Report regarding Britain’s decision to participate in the toppling of Saddam Hussein, you might easily conclude that it supports the “Bush-Blair lied, people died” narrative so cherished by the left. You wouldn’t know that the Report actually rejects this claim.

This account by Steven Erlanger and David Sanger of the New York Times doesn’t say so. Neither does this account by Geoff Witte of the Washington Post. He claims that the Report “offer[s] official validation to the views of the Iraq War’s most ardent critics.” But those critics insist that Bush and Blair lied. The Report finds otherwise.

Witte also asserts that “the report will give ample ammunition to the war’s toughest critics, including those in Britain who have called for war crimes charges to be brought against Blair.” Witte doesn’t even try to explain how the Report’s finding might support a war crimes charge. Witte is simply indulging in leftist rhetoric (and, perhaps, wishful thinking).

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrativ e, it’s not really ‘news’.

Read it.

Quit being fooled by the people behind the curtain and listen to reality.

Watch it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Read it.

Well, then, obviously we need to ban ‘assault weapons’, especially the AR-15, because ignorance.

Read it.

On Friday, in speaking of the previous night’s atrocity, President Obama said, “I believe that I speak for every single American when I say that we are horrified over these events and that we stand united with people and the police department in Dallas.” One need only wade ankle-deep into some of the more septic regions of the Internet to know that not all Americans share this sentiment, and that indeed there are those who have no qualms about taking to Twitter and elsewhere to laud the killer and celebrate his crimes. But why?

Perhaps it is because they have been led to believe the lies peddled by the Black Lives Matter movement, to wit, that the greatest menace to black people in America is that posed by racist and trigger-happy police officers looking for the merest excuse to gun them down. Just before the shooting began in Dallas, marchers were repeating what has become the standard chant at such events: “Hands up, don’t shoot.” This of course is what Michael Brown is falsely claimed to have said before he was shot to death in Ferguson, Mo. When the truth finally emerged, that Brown had committed a robbery and attempted to disarm the officer who shot him, it was too late to stop the lie that persists to this day.

Read it.

With printed books,

• You can buy one with cash, anonymously.
• Then you own it.
• You are not required to sign a license that restricts your use of it.
• The format is known, and no proprietary technology is needed to read the book.
• You can give, lend or sell the book to another.
• You can, physically, scan and copy the book, and it’s sometimes lawful under copyright.
• Nobody has the power to destroy your book.

Contrast that with Amazon e-books (fairly typical):

• Amazon requires users to identify themselves to get an e-book.
• In some countries, including the US, Amazon says the user cannot own the e-book.
• Amazon requires the user to accept a restrictive license on use of the e-book.
• The format is secret, and only proprietary user-restricting software can read it at all.
• An ersatz “lending” is allowed for some books, for a limited time, but only by specifying by name another user of the same system. No giving or selling.
• To copy the e-book is impossible due to Digital Restrictions Management in the player and prohibited by the license, which is more restrictive than copyright law.
• Amazon can remotely delete the e-book using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984.

Even one of these infringements makes e-books a step backward from printed books. We must reject e-books until they respect our freedom.

Readyman Hostage Escape Survival Credit Card.

Bagel Smart Tape Measure.

Umbrella Hat. They look goofy but in the rain they prove their worth.

AutoMicroFarm.

Himalayan Salt Therapy Dome. Hey, it might work….

The Clever Cutter.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Thursday’s attack that killed five police officers in Dallas — inspired by the hate group “Black Lives Matter” — was part of an ongoing wave of violent racial terrorism targeting American law enforcement. In Tennessee, a police officer was wounded Thursday in a gun battle with a man who went on a shooting spree that apparently targeted white people, in which one woman was killed and two other people were injured.

Read it.

“The turning ability of the MiG-17 is fantastic,” one F-4 flier recalled later. “It must be seen to be believed.”

But the Air Force had assumed that wouldn’t be a problem?—?that its then-brand-new twin-seat F-4s would never even get into a close-range dogfight. Instead, the F-4s?—?and other Air Force and Navy fighters?—?would always destroy their enemies from long range, using the Sparrow and other air-to-air missiles.

It was a flawed and dangerous assumption that got scores of American aviators shot down over Vietnam. But many years later, the Air Force is assuming the same thing … with regards to its new F-35 stealth fighter.

In January 2015, the flying branch pitted a radar-evading F-35A against a 25-year-old F-16D in mock air combat. The F-35 proved too slow and sluggish to defeat the F-16 in a turning fight, according to the official test report that War Is Boring obtained.

Read it.

Congress enacted the ethanol mandate about a decade ago because it feared the United States was too dependent on foreign oil. The lawmakers hoped ethanol, which is mostly made from corn, and other homegrown biofuels, would replace some of the imported oil. But they did not anticipate that drilling companies would solve the problem of extracting oil from shale rock, making the United States the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

Now the U.S. is awash in domestic oil and stuck with an ethanol mandate that forces consumers to pour ethanol into their tanks. Not only is the ethanol mandate wasting corn that should be consumed as food, but also it is wasting the money consumers use to purchase fuel.

Ethanol reduces mileage. E10, the common form of gasoline available today, contains up to 10 percent ethanol. But a gallon of ethanol contains only two-thirds of the energy in a gallon of gasoline. In fact, it takes 1.52 gallons of ethanol to replace the energy content of a gallon of gasoline. This means drivers who use E10 must fill up more often.

Gavin McInnes connects the dots.

As the chaos unfolded late Thursday night in Dallas, I was struck by how many members of the media insisted the protest was peaceful and we have to remain calm. Who are these people, my high school teacher? I’m tuning in to learn how many cops are dead. My reaction to it is none of your business.

The reason these reporters were acting like teachers is that’s how they see themselves. They don’t just report the news, they Voxplain it. Of course, the problem with thought control is you need to keep correcting the course. First they tell us “racism is alive and well” and we should be disgusted with our country, but when that starts a riot, they backpedal and tell us we’re overreacting. This is how socialism works. You circle-kick the pendulum away from a problem and when it goes smashing through the cuckoo clock, you scramble to swing it back the other way. The clowns on TV went to Cultural Marxism school so they’re not trained journalists. They’re trained socialists. This means they’re experts at propaganda and controlling the populace while having little or no interest in the truth.