Read it.

One of the many chilling moments in the terrorism trial in Minneapolis this past May was the presentation of a piece of evidence that passed in a flash without comment. The evidence was a photograph of one of the defendants dressed in the uniform he wore when he worked as a security guard (pretty much whenever he wanted) in the Twin Cities.

I think the photograph must have had the same effect on the jury as it did on me. It made me reflect on the the Alice-in-Terrorland world we have in Minnesota.

In the news today are the apparently jihadist stabbing attacks committed by a security guard in the Crossroads Center shopping mall in St. Cloud last night. (The afternoon the Star Tribune raised the possibility that the assaults were perpetrated against Muslims rather than by a Muslim. ISIS has claimed the perpetrator was “a soldier of the Islamic State.”)

The security guard was killed inside the mall by an off-duty police officer. The Star Tribune reports the story here. Eight people were taken to the hospital after the attacks; this morning, according to the AP, as many as three remain hospitalized.

The security guard seems to have declared the motivation for his attack by shouting “Allah” and trying to spare Muslims from his rampage. St. Cloud Chief of Police William Blair Anderson nevertheless refrained from hazarding a conclusion about the perpetrator’s motivation.

Read it.

African migrants who arrive in southern Italy aren’t interested in staying in Italy. Like most of the immigrants to Europe, they want to travel onwards to the Promised Land: Germany. The Italians ignore the Dublin rules and pass the new arrivals on to Switzerland. But the Swiss have decided to be sticklers about Schengen Zone protocols: if a migrant filed an asylum application in Italy, he has to return to Italy, as the rules require.

Some of the migrants treat the Swiss border as a revolving door, and show up again later. Others are camped out in Switzerland. And more are jammed up on the Italian side of the border.

Read it.

This has been the summer of “refugees” at German swimming pools. The following new report describes the dilemma faced by lifeguards and security staff when the culture-enrichers get a little rambunctious around the “uncovered meat” in the pool.

Read it.

A number of Chechen mujahideen from the Islamic State sneaked into Poland disguised as “refugees”, and several were recently arrested. The following brief article from the Polish news site prostozmostu.net describes two of those arrested in Podlasie, a region of Poland.

Read it.

Yeah, I’m always getting those two mixed up.

Read it.

Austrian cardinal Christoph Schönborn, speaking Sunday for the 333rd anniversary of the day Christians drove the forces of Islam from Europe, said the continent is now facing a renewed threat of Islamic conquest.

No shit.

Read it.

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

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Eye surgery.  Back presently.

Or maybe just sitting down somewhere and watching a movie….

Read it.

I am not making this up.

A scientific study hot off the presses of academia shows that students in the United States and several countries around the world are deeply concerned that their sex education coursework is “heterosexist” and places too much emphasis on the fact that sex frequently results in the creation of babies.

What goes around, comes around.

Read it.

It cost taxpayers an estimated $43.9 billion to educate illegal alien students in the 2015-2016 school year, and $59.2 billion for programs to educate voters lacking proficient English skills, according to a Wednesday report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

FAIR estimated that it cost an average of $12,128 per illegal immigrant student in the last school year and there were an estimated 3.618 million illegal immigrant students nationwide. In addition, it takes at least $1.7 billion to educate 119,000 unaccompanied alien minors. “From January 2014 to June 2016, the federal government placed 118,929 UAMs with sponsors in the United States, typically a relative or acquaintance. This figure does not include UAMs who may have slipped past the Border Patrol,” the FAIR report stated.

Taxpayers across the country spent nearly $60 billion on non-English proficient students and the vast majority of this taxpayer cost was borne by state and local taxpayers. These students also were among the worst classroom performers.

Read it.

Skraelings are the poster children for the deplorable effects of letting the government ‘take care of you’. The prototype of the Democrat dependency state.

Read it.

Recently, the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association has been aggressively lobbying Congress to ignore the Obama administration’s illegal diversion of tax dollars into the pockets of—you guessed it—health insurers.

At issue is funding for the “transitional reinsurance” program in section 1341 of the Affordable Care Act. In that section, Congress instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to collect $20 billion in “contributions” over three years from private health insurance plans, apportioned by enrollment, and then use those funds to defray the cost to insurers of their most expensive enrollees with Affordable Care Act compliant individual market coverage.

Read it.

People assume that Egyptian cotton is better because Egypt was an exotic place where cotton with long fibers was raised, beginning not in ancient times but in the early 19th century. Such cotton is known as long staple or extra-long staple, depending on the fiber length. It accounts for only about 2.5 percent of global cotton consumption. Longer fibers make for stronger, smoother thread, and “Egyptian cotton” sounds special, like Moroccan leather or French perfume. But it’s the long fibers, not some unique attribute of Egyptian soil or climate, that makes the cotton better.

Steve Sailer looks at the Hillary situation.

It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that if at the 9/11 memorial there hadn’t been a lone bystander with a videophone who alertly recorded Hillary’s alarming breakdown, we would still be getting lectured by the respectable press about how concerns over the Democratic nominee’s health are “conspiracy theories.”

…

My guess is that 2010-era JournoList-style secrecy is hardly necessary anymore. Twitter shows in real time how the hivemind operates, with pundits trying out hot takes for their peers and being shamed if they get off message.

Read it.

“I think the point I’ve made in the past is that these are significant vulnerabilities in the process itself, and the checks and controls,” Seto Bagdoyan, who will testify Wenesday to a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, explained. “We were able to overcome them, using the system’s own instructions.”

One set of instructions told GAO’s investigators to contact a representative by phone to gain insurance coverage. According to Bagdoyan, “We were able to talk our way into getting coverage and subsidies by engaging in a conversation with a representative on the other end of the phone. And this was consistent, year on year on year.”

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

Read it.

In 2010 the Swedish parliament, having decided it no longer needed the large armed forces that had for centuries defended the country, suspended the mandatory draft. The following year, so did Germany. Other European countries including France, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania likewise scrapped or suspended conscription as they concluded that large-scale defense was no longer necessary. But now the draft is making a comeback in Europe.

Read it.

Carbon-dating has shown that the rudimentary snow shoe, made of birch wood and twine, was made in the late Neolithic age, between 3,800 and 3,700 BC.

Read it.

This article doesn’t mention it, but anti-Chinese attacks in France are more and more frequently the work of Muslim culture-enrichers.

Read it.

Every single Pennsylvania Democrat who attended a recent voter-registration drive in a small western community pledged to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump.

“They think it is the celebrity of Trump,” Sheik Shannon, 55, told The Atlantic, referring to the political class’s understanding of why people like him are voting Trump. “It’s not. They think we’ve all gone mad. We’ve not. Communities like where I live do not need to shutter and die. We lead solid, honest lives, we work hard, we play hard, we pray hard … we love where we are from, and we feel a duty to make sure that it is here for generations.”

Read it.

Seventeen Obamacare co-ops have now failed. The Health Republic insurance of New Jersey yesterday announced it would close, leaving 35,000 members without coverage next year. The New Jersey co-op, which received almost $110 million in taxpayer loans now joins a list of 16 other Obamacare co-ops that have collapsed since Obamacare has been implemented. In all, failed co-ops have now cost taxpayers more than $1.8 billion in funds that may never be recovered.

Read it.

Moral: (1) Don’t trust Harvard. (2) Don’t trust the government.

Read it.

Not many athletes compete in mind-controlled computer games. Next month, however, more than fifty teams from around the world will meet near Zurich, Switzerland, to demonstrate their skills in manipulating computer characters, going up and down stairs in powered wheelchairs, and racing to pick up objects with their bionic hands. The events, which start on October 8, are part of the world’s first-ever Cybathlon, and will bring together the world’s best scientists and disabled prosthetic users.

Read it.

Today, a new high-tech rush is underway. This one is spurred by the grim reality of climate change and the ascendance of clean energy. But the technologies that promise to slow the rise in temperature will be sculpted not from ones and zeros. They will be forged from a handful of rare minerals sprinkled across some of the most remote places on Earth.

Read it.

Modern terrorist organizations have managed to flourish despite their enemies’ attempts to squash them and have often done so by hiding in plain sight behind a nominal disguise. The most successful groups have achieved a kind of parity with the countries they attack by masquerading as complicated and diverse establishments for which terror is but one facet of their true—and variegated—nature. Nearly all terrorist organizations operating today have learned to conduct effective subterfuge by pretending to diversify.

On the rhetorical level, the illusion is advanced when a terror organization claims for itself an ancillary “wing,” “arm,” or “branch.” Most often it is either a “charitable wing” that operates orphanages and hospitals and distributes aid to the poor, or a “political wing” devoted to achieving the group’s aims through negotiation. In reality though, the group and its newly-sprouted wings are never separate but rather integral, interdependent parts of a whole. The pose allows them to prosper by legitimizing their continued existence as aid providers or embryonic governments rather than terrorist groups.

Read it.

Which do better, blue states or red states? There is a veritable cottage industry devoted to obscure means of proving the superiority of the liberal tax-and-spend model, but when citizens vote with their feet, the result is clear: Americans are deserting blue states and moving to red states.

Texas is ready to welcome all immigrants who are already U.S. citizens.

Think about it.

Read it.

Vandals at Occidental College defaced a 9/11 memorial set up by a student Republican club on Sunday.

Of course, if vandals had done something like that to a ‘progressive’ demonstration, there would be an all-hands manhunt.

Read it.

Nice university you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it….

Watch it. Provided by Freeberg, who gets all the good stuff.

Best line: ‘Not every man is your ex-boyfriend.’

Read it.

The terrorists were about to execute the hostages, eight men and four women, with a flamethrower in northern Syria. The SAS sniper locked target 1,640 yards away and hit the flamethrower’s fuel tank with his Barrett .50 caliber rifle.

The blast allegedly turned the head executioner into a “human fireball.” Three other jihadis also died, while all hostages are believed to have escaped alive.

Read it.

The team’s press officer, Nick Birkin, agrees. “Reenactors are used to dink, dink,” he says, mimicking the prissy swordplay anyone who’s sat through a retelling of Agincourt will no doubt cringe to recall. Another weekend warrior sums up the distinction more succinctly: “Reenactment’s for pussies.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

I would say No, but that’s me.

Saying yes might invite some critical questions, starting with, well, “why?” Why should that position, and the office it heads, be funded and maintained? There’s no critical intelligence capability — at least not in public view — that would be lost; the four operational centers (National Counterterrorism Center, National Counterproliferation Center, National Intelligence Centers, and Joint Intelligence Community Council) could easily be transferred. And that might be a good idea.

No essential function or process would disappear; planning, budgets, and operations could evolve or devolve to other offices. Eliminating the DNI might increase efficiency, removing an entire layer of bureaucratic overhead and recovering for productive activity a good portion of the innumerable hours now spent in meetings and coordination and duplicative review and oversight.

In other words, it’s just another layer of bureaucracy that allows the government to appear to be doing something while spending more money.

Read it.

A federal agency may have just discovered cold fusion, according to unconfirmed reports.

A report from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) claimed government researchers had confirmed the existence of a cold fusion nuclear reaction. The report was allegedly authored by scientists from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command and the University of New Mexico.

Watch it.

Sounds as if Londonistan could use a dose of Melting Pot.

Read it.

Watching these films today, viewers under the age of, say, 45 would be struck by how alien Jake and Elwood’s Chicago seems and how familiar Ferris’s Chicago has become. The vibrant working-class culture, tough old nuns, SROs, and Maxwell Street Market of The Blues Brothers have all either disappeared or survive only as shadows of what they once were. With a bit of cultural updating to cars, hairstyles, fashion, music, and phones, however, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could be remade today, virtually shot for shot. Modern proto-hipsters might well still skip school to visit Wrigley Field, the lakefront, the Sears Tower Skydeck, or the Art Institute. Three decades after Ferris Bueller played hooky from the suburbs, the triumph of the gentrified city is complete.

Read it.

Germany estimates 520 potential Islamist militants could carry out attacks in the country, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told the newspaper Bild on Saturday.

An additional 360 “relevant” people are investigated for having close relations with the potential terrorists. De Maiziere said he fears terror “hit teams” have been smuggled into the country with the stream of refugees.

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

Read it.

I’ll take a gallon, please. I have a little list….

The Other McCain gives a shout out to all his peeps.

Speaking at an “LGBT for Hillary” gala in New York where the headliner was Barbra Streisand and the guests included millionaire entertainment industry moguls Barry Diller and Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton made it clear she hates me, and she hates you, too….

I never doubted it.

Read it.

Well, we can hope.

John Hinderaker at Powerline blog does the fisking.

So it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, or a spontaneous flight of fancy. It was part of Hillary’s repertoire of lies.

I am not a psychiatrist, and am not qualified to say what causes Hillary Clinton to lie constantly, with almost every breath she takes. My amateur guess is that she suffers from a deep-seated insecurity that comes from having been overrated through almost all of her life. She apparently feels a need to make up stories that put her in a heroic light–named after the world’s most famous mountain climber! almost shot down over Bosnia! turned down by the sexist Marines! left the White House dead broke and lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps! a pioneer feminist beset by baying male chauvinist hounds!

Far from these flights of fancy, the real Hillary is a small, unoriginal, not very talented woman who was fortunate enough (in some respects) to marry Bill Clinton. Pretty much everything else is a lie.

The Other McCain hears the sounds of chickens coming home to roost.

So, these two lesbians had been together about five years until they got married in 2015 and broke up barely a year later. But who, we are left to wonder, was the father of Ms. Wright’s two children? Were these babies the lesbian couple created through artificial insemination, or remainders from Ms. Wright’s heterosexual past? How does this affect the lesbian ex-wives in terms of visitation and child-support payments? So many questions, which nobody bothered to examine carefully before “marriage equality” was imposed on society by government fiat, must now be worked out in real life with real people. Someone should write a book: Heather Used to Have Two Mommies, But Now They Hate Each Other.

Read it.

Vikings! Those suckers really got around.

Read it.

“A molten-salt reactor [MSR] uses a liquid mixture of salts, some of which are salts of uranium and thorium, as the medium in which nuclear fission reactions take place,” Kirk Sorensen, president and chief technologist of the reactor company Flibe Energy, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Not with the eco-Nazis on the loose.

Read it.

German Federal police recommend: Women should wear sneakers so they can run away better from asylum seekers

The Other McCain reviews the state of the nation.

Christina Hoff Sommers is old enough to remember the 1960s, and must be amused by the absurd protests that erupt whenever she appears on university campuses. Back in the day, when students rioted over the Vietnam War and the governor sent in the National Guard, it was a serious thing. Nowadays? Fat white girls shouting “racist” at a speaker they don’t like — this is difficult to take seriously and yet, because young people themselves take this quite seriously, it requires our attention.