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Hey, you work with what you’ve got.

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

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Well, one must have standards. But surely this transgresses some sort of civil rights legislation?

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Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

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Because if Toronto (Canada) has a crying need for anything, it’s a program to study Ethiopics.

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

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During Monday’s edition on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect, co-host Mark Halperin and guest Donny Deutsch tackled one of the day’s hard hitting questions, “Okay Mark, when it comes to the publishing industry, why is this counterintuitive in certain ways, why are Clinton bashing books out there versus zero Trump?” Deutsch was curious about it because, “At this moment, the top three nonfiction books on the New York Times Best Seller list are all [about Hillary Clinton].” And neither one of them could figure it out.

Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher, all right.

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Of course they did. After all, Trump is such an unusually bad person that they are justified in any trick they can think of, including flat lies.

When the Washington Post’s notoriously inconsistent fact checker Glenn Kessler feels he has to defend Donald Trump against a false claim, you know it must be a whopper. That was the case with the meme which arose last week that Trump, in words found at the New York Daily News, “booted a fussy baby from a rally Tuesday because the tot was wailing over the businessman’s speech.”

However, instead of giving several media outlets and the Hillary Clinton campaign the formal Four-Pinocchio “whopper” evaluation, Kessler merely gave Trump a “Geppetto checkmark” for telling the truth, and gave those who reported it and Team Hillary an unwarranted pass: “We can see why some reporters ran with this tale, based only on the videotape.”

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The other day I wrote: “Black Lives Matter is not about black lives; it’s about the fact that ‘Occupy Wall Street’ fizzled, requiring the radical left to find another hobbyhorse, this time one with a racial hook.” Now I learn, via Jack Fowler at NRO, that this the finding of a detailed report by Anne Sorock of The Frontier Lab.

Read  it. And watch the video.

Clare Lopez of the Center for Security Policy discusses the history and recent ascendancy of the Islamic State, and how it fits into the timeline established by Al Qaeda back in 2005.

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Israelis live much closer to ISIS than do Americans. ISIS has pledged to conquer the Jewish state and incorporate it into its core caliphate. Yet surprisingly, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has rejected the option of taking the fight directly to ISIS. Instead, faced with an operational threat that could mean the death of hundreds of Israelis at any moment, it has embraced a strategy that has not even been on the U.S. policy menu. Adopting a page from the playbook the United States used to defeat revolutionary Soviet-led communism in the Cold War, Israel is preventing ISIS attacks through a strategy of patient, vigilant deterrence. Obviously, the United States cannot simply adopt the Israeli approach whole cloth. It operates in a different security environment than the Jewish state, which faces a multiplicity of terrorist threats on its borders. But there are important lessons that America can learn to enhance its national security.

Israel’s approach to ISIS is straightforward. Israel seeks to persuade ISIS not to attack it by credibly threatening to retaliate. If you attack us, the thinking goes, we will respond in ways that will impose pain that exceeds any gain you can hope to achieve. As Cold War strategists learned, making this work in practice is demanding. To be effective, deterrence requires three Cs: clarity, capability and credibility. Specifically, this means clarity about the red line that cannot be crossed, communicated in language the adversary understands; capability to impose costs that greatly exceed the benefits; and credibility about the willingness to do so. Failures occur when the deterrer falls short on any one of the three Cs. So, if I draw a red line, you cross it, and I respond with words rather than the decisive punishment threatened, I fail the third C. Whatever excuse I give for not executing my threat, and however earnest my claim that next time will be different, the blunt fact is that adversaries will find my threats less credible.

Steve Sailer reflects on priorities.

It appears that all three police officers involved — the two victims and the one who shot the terrorist dead — were women, which is perhaps not coincidental. But this WSJ follow-up article didn’t mention the sex of the cops.

Now, you might think that this incident has lots of currently interesting themes: a fatal police shooting, toxic masculine resentment of female authority figures, empowered women, a woman with a gun, etc.

But the press hardly has time for that kind of thing when Trump may have been mean to a baby.

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The University of Wisconsin-Stout has removed two historic murals from their places of prominence after members of the Diversity Leadership Team complained that they might make Native American students feel uncomfortable.

It’s hard to see why. Both murals are rather innocuous. One depicts fur trappers and Native Americans canoeing down a river. The other depicts an American fortress from colonial times. There’s no violence depicted in the works of art. Indeed, the white traders and natives seem to be getting along perfectly well.

Ah, but the murals could theoretically be offensive to someone, so they have to go.

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The time-travel trope of so many science fiction stories are hard enough to take, but what do you get when you cross time-travel with feminist theory?

In this article, I analyze a painting by Modoc/Klamath artist Peggy Ball through a Native feminist reading methodology. The painting, Vanport, is named after a city that disappeared in a flood in 1948. The artist survived that flood, and displacement as did thousands of others. The painting is a rememory map of dislocations and hauntings and disappearances. The painting remaps gentrified dislocations, telling stories that focus on the relationship of the present to the past and the past to the future. The painting itself is a Native feminist practice. The travel to places gone, to places that will reappear again; by people gone as well as by people presently alive; into times that existed, that never existed, that will exist again; to times made contemporaneous by time traveling dogs; with people co-present through desire—at the heart of all this time travel is recognition and survivance.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.

…

Borders—and the fights to keep or change them—are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a city-state to define where its own culture began and ended. The self-acclaimed “citizen of the cosmos” Socrates nonetheless fought his greatest battle as a parochial Athenian hoplite in the ranks of the phalanx at the Battle of Delium—waged over the contested borderlands between Athens and Thebes. Fifth-century Athenians such as Socrates envisioned Attica as a distinct cultural, political, and linguistic entity, within which its tenets of radical democracy and maritime-based imperialism could function quite differently from the neighboring oligarchical agrarianism at Thebes. Attica in the fourth century BC built a system of border forts to protect its northern boundary.

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Good to know that there’s still one Bush who’s actually a Republican.

Jim Rutenberg, proud Voice of the Crust, takes the mask off.

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

In other words, so-called journalistic objectivity is just a Clever Plastic Disguise that applies only when the ‘news’ doesn’t get too far beyond the Narrative.

It’s much dodgier for conventional news reporters to treat this year’s political debate as one between “normal” and “abnormal,” as the Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein put it recently.

In a sense, that’s just what reporters are doing. And it’s unavoidable. Because Mr. Trump is conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen.

In other words, it’s All Trump’s Fault for being such an outlier that it forces, forces ‘journalists’ to dump impartiality and support the Narrative. Yup. All Trump’s Fault.

For a proper fisking, go here.

Jim Goad understands the dialectic.

The transnational corporate and media elites who seek to smash borders and force 7.4 billion fundamentally incompatible human cattle together into a single inescapable One World Ranch claim that their motive is a lofty one—they seek to end perpetual conflict between nations.

That’s nice, but anyone with two unmedicated brain cells to rub together realizes that the end result of this daffy rainbow scheme would be perpetual conflict within what were formerly nations. It’s all unfolding with alarming speed before your lyin’ eyes at this very moment.

The leftist global elites—and there is no other kind of global elite—use the peasants like inanimate chess pieces in order to work out their own sick and warped guilt complexes. They live in all-white neighborhoods while smearing as “racists” the poor whites who have no choice but to live alongside a black underclass that is openly encouraged to resent them. They chatter and chirp about gun control while surrounding themselves with armed bodyguards. And they push a world-without-borders scheme while making sure they’re safely ensconced behind high walls and electronic gates.

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Criminal investigations into the Environmental Protection Agency’s disastrous handling of its Gold King Mine spill are under way. This is a laudable step toward accountability for the agency, which for one year has avoided accountability for conduct that would in all likelihood have resulted in criminal prosecution had the acts been performed by private parties.

Prediction: Democrats investigating Democrats — nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, black youth unemployment was slightly less than or equal to white youth unemployment. Today, black youth unemployment is at least double that of white youth unemployment. Would anyone try to explain the difference with the argument that there was less racial discrimination during the ’40s and ’50s than today?

Some argue that it is the “legacy of slavery” and societal racism that now explain the social pathology in many black neighborhoods. Today’s black illegitimacy rate is about 73 percent. When I was a youngster, during the 1940s, illegitimacy was around 15 percent.

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Since the appearance of the self-described Islamic State—formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—many analysts tried to trace its political, historical, and ideological genesis. In this article I will draw the attention to some striking parallels between ISIL and the Saudi Ikhwan, another group of terrorists who tormented large populations in the Middle East between 1912–1930, and finally turned against their own patron, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of today’s Saudi Arabia, after many years of working together to promote their mutual interests: Ibn Saud’s quest to subdue the Arabian Peninsula and the Ikhwan’s mission to impose their rigid interpretation of Islam on its defenseless communities.

Perennial favorites from Gates of Vienna.

So this Palestinian walks into a bar and sits down.

The bartender says, “What’ll it be, pal?”

The Palestinian goes, “BOOM!”

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What is going on here? Put simply, what’s happened is that the official unemployment number has grown increasingly useless as a reliable economic indicator, for the simple reason that millions of people have simply quit looking for a job. Since the unemployment rate is based only on those who are actively looking for work, the more people who drop out of the labor force, the lower the unemployment rate becomes.

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And why not? For all of their expertise in STEM, today’s techies are Children of the Crust: trained in the same academic propaganda mills, drinking the same multi-culti Kool-Aid, and professing the same Religion of Tolerance and Diversity as our ruling class in Washington. If they have any doubts, they listen to Saint Bill Gates and Saint Warren Buffett, and all doubts are dispelled.

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An old-fashioned Catholic martyrdom may be possible in a multicultural, late-modern society. But there is still a sense in which it is not supposed to happen here.

…

Some of the nervousness about calling Father Hamel a holy martyr reflects the limits of that imagination. After all, it would have seemed all but impossible, in the bright optimism of the 1960s, that a young priest of the church of Vatican II should, in his old age, die a martyr’s death in the very heart of Europe.

But it wasn’t, and he did.

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It’s the way he would have wanted to go.

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An Iranian nuclear scientist who returned to Iran from the US in 2010 after claiming he had been abducted by the CIA has been executed, his family has claimed.

Shahram Amiri’s body was returned to his family five years after he was purportedly arrested in Iran for treason.

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We all know that there are plenty of U.S. weapons the Chinese military would like to get its hands on. The Arsenal of Democracy churns out some of the best, most technologically advanced and versatile weapons in service anywhere. China is willing to steal American military technology to help advance its own military research and development programs.

The United States on the other hand…well, there is probably not a single Chinese weapon that, in a direct comparison, is better than its American equivalent and that probably won’t change for another twenty years. So if we want to talk about Chinese weapons for the American military, we have to think about holes in current American capabilities. There aren’t many, but here are Chinese weapons that might make the American military a little better.

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The experts told us that Brexit will not happen. It cannot happen. The consequences will be too severe. The economic fallout too great to even imagine. Yet, the unthinkable became a reality: The people of Britain voted “Leave,” against the experts’ advice. How could this be? Did they not hear the experts’ warnings? What went wrong?

Baffled, the experts searched for an answer. And they found one: the people went mad. They became mad from their anger at globalization. Globalization promised them riches, instead it made some of them unemployed. Or they became mad because of fear—fear from immigration and foreign people. Whatever the reason they went mad, the experts are sure of one thing: the fault is not with them. They gave sound advice. Their arguments were relevant. The fault is with the populace, not the leaders.

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In the liberal narrative, West Bank Palestinians are governed by the moderate Fatah, led by the moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s Partner For Peace of the moment. Gaza, on the other hand, is ruled by Hamas extremists. In practice, however, it isn’t easy to tell the “moderates” without a scorecard.

Isn’t that special.

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The only ultimate solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism is missionaries. In the meantime, the two remedies on the table are more gun control and less immigration. In recent months, experience in Europe has shown that strict gun control laws do not prevent terrorists from obtaining guns. Experience has also shown that terrorists don’t need guns to be effective; knives, bombs and trucks will do. That leaves immigration controls as the only proposal with even a slim chance of reducing Islamic terrorism–which is what millions of Europeans have now concluded.

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The barely veiled implication, whichever version you consider, is that the people undergoing these travails deserve relatively little sympathy — that they maybe, kinda had this reckoning coming. Either they are layabouts drenched in self-pity or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus toward the nonwhites passing them on the ladder. Both interpretations are, in their own ways, strikingly ungenerous toward a huge number of fellow Americans.

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Ha! Vindicated!

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ObamaCare was always going to be a questionable deal for taxpayers if the only people who signed up were poorer people whose premiums were largely paid by taxpayers. That was fine as far as insurers were concerned. They can make a profit even if taxpayers are the only ones paying.

For insurers, the problem lies elsewhere: ObamaCare policies have proved so unattractive that even customers eligible for subsidies are turning away unless they also happen to be seriously or chronically ill. That’s because deductibles and copays keep going up with each successive renewal period. For a family of four on a bronze plan, the deductible is now above $11,000. This is the equivalent, in the case of routine illness or injury, of not being insured at all.

And the problem only gets worse as insurers, to stem their losses, keep hiking premiums, copays and deductibles. With each turn of the wheel, ObamaCare becomes an insurance program that appeals only to those who already know they face large health-care costs.

Welcome to the Obamanation.

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Two Belgian police officers are wounded by a machete-wielding attacker who shouted Allahu Akbar before being shot.

What do they know that you don’t know?

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The CIAB declares it “was created to assist the industry in dealing with the erratic production cycle of red tart cherries and to improve returns to the growers and processors of red tart cherries in the United States.” Its “primary goal is to establish orderly marketing conditions by alleviating supply/demand imbalances,” reads a 1985 report issued by the GAO.

In service of this goal, the board oversees all cherry handling in at least seven states. It sets annual quotas for tart cherries, establishing the portion of each year’s cherries that may reach the marketplace.

A marketing order—and cherries represent just one of many enforced by the USDA—is just that: an order. “A marketing order, with or without handler approval, is binding on all handlers in the industry,” reads a 1975 USDA report on marketing orders. Compliance is not optional.

And the ghost of Franklin Roosevelt arises to jerk on your chains.

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History is apparently subject to revision without notice and without basis at the Associated Press.

In an outrageous report primarily dedicated to the notion that Donald Trump’s concerns about the November general elections possibly being rigged thanks to potential voter fraud “challenges (the) U.S. Democratic system” — but a whole host of leftist-inspired rigging efforts apparently don’t — Vivian Salama at the Associated Press informed readers in a later paragraph that Al Gore, according to “several post-mortem reviews,” “would have won” the 2000 presidential election if “undervotes” had all been counted.

Then maybe he’d not have gotten fat and would have stayed poor in the White House (like the Clintons) and not made hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘green energy’ scams.

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The Black Lives Matter movement has jumped the Atlantic, and British activists are duplicating the tactics that have made BLM unpopular in the U.S.

Perhaps they’ll succeed in bringing racial segregation to a country that never had it before. What an achievement.

Obvious or not, it isn’t hard to guess what most Britons will make of a coordinated series of demonstrations that mostly involve blocking highways and tramways.

It is hard to imagine how the protesters thought this would be a good idea. If I knew who organized and paid for the demonstrations, I would ask him.

Sure, protest hate by doing things that make people hate you. How is this a good plan?

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Steve Sailer looks a current immigration policy, of such it can be called.

“All-We-Have-To-Doism” is the conventional wisdom that it would be impractical and extremist to attempt to ameliorate social problems exacerbated by immigration, such as inequality and terrorism, by tightening up on immigration policy.

Instead, the bipartisan consensus is that All We Have To Do is fix the schools or monitor every single electronic communication made anywhere in the world and from that maintain foolproof psychological profiles of every human being’s future behavior, or many other undertakings that are unlikely to work.

For example, All We Have To Do to safely let in a Million Muslim Mob is … well, it turns out to be kind of complicated.

Read  it.

A protest group has cracked open vats of wine in a southern French town, sending thousands of litres into the streets, local media have reported.

Emergency services had to help bring the flood under control and prevent it spilling into underground car parks.

Those responsible said they belonged to the militant group the Regional Action Committee of Winemakers (Crav), France 3 reported.

Crav has been alarmed by cheap imports and has claimed previous attacks.

“Why this action? Because we are never listened to,” a Crav representative told France 3.

The attack happed in Sete, a port town in Languedoc-Roussillon, one of France’s biggest wine producing regions.

I believe that this is a Crime Against Humanity under French law.

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In fact, from the start of Islam, Muslims have been relying on the same rationalizations to justify the slaughter of other Muslims.

Will the Islamophobia never cease?

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f you’re concerned about climate change, it would be perverse to fight a technology that can supply copious quantities of no-carbon energy 24 hours a day—right? Well, when it comes to nuclear power, lots of leading environmental activists are indulging in just such perversion. For orthodox greens, the only untainted electrons are those jiggled free by sunlight or stirred by wind.

One battle in this intra-green war just played out in New York State this week. The good news is that the eco-modernist supporters of nuclear power were strong enough to win. The bad news is that the plan they were fighting for will lead to more government meddling in energy markets.

When ‘progressives’ turn everything into a political question, government is invariably involved.

What happened? Unable to compete with heavily subsidized wind and solar power or electricity generated using cheap natural gas, the operators of four upstate New York nuclear reactors were planning to shut them down. Closing the plants would be a significant setback for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ambitious plan to reduce the state’s carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector. Currently the state gets 32 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, 19 percent from hydropower, 3 percent from wind, and 0.1 percent from solar. Burning natural gas currently generates about 41 percent of the state’s electricity with the remainder from coal and oil.

In order to forestall these nuclear shut-downs, state regulators decided this week to subsidize nuclear power plants at a rate of $500 million per year. The deal was announced by the state’s Public Service Commission when it adopted a plan to mandate that 50 percent of the state’s electricity be produced using renewable energy by 2030. Under the new Clean Energy Standards, each nuclear plant will be allocated zero emissions credits, which utilities must purchase when buying power from them. It is estimated that the credits will sell for about $17.48 per megawatt-hour of electricity. That money will go to the bottom lines of the plant’s owners, Entergy and Exelon. Now everybody’s a subsidized rent-seeker.

Welcome to the Obamanation.

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Mao, in case you haven’t been paying attention.

Compared to Mao, Stalin, and Lenin, Hitler was an amateur.

Lion of the Blogosphere explains it all to you.

Thorstein Veblen explained that the more prestigious classes manipulate people while the less prestigious classes manipulate things. Thorstein Veblen called the prestigious class the “leisure class” because they didn’t have to do any unprestigious work. They are very similar to what I would call the value transference class, as the leisure class let other people do the boring value creation work, and transferred the wealth created to themselves so they could do more prestigious stuff with their lives.

In modern society, there are now three levels of prestige….