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NBC execs had a plan to time the release of the Donald Trump audio to have maximum impact on both the 2nd presidential debate and the general election … sources connected with the network tell TMZ.

Multiple sources connected with NBC tell us … top network execs knew about the video long before they publicly said they did, but wanted to hold it because it was too early in the election. The sources say many NBC execs have open disdain for Trump and their plan was to roll out the tape 48 hours before the debate so it would dominate the news cycle leading up to the face-off.

As we reported, Billy Bush was bragging about the tape — in front of NBC execs at the Rio Olympics — in early August. NBC says it’s only known about the tape for a little more than a week.

We’re told the plan was to edit the tape to keep the focus on Trump and not Billy. “Access Hollywood” we’re told was not going to air the portion where Trump and Billy got off the bus and Billy goaded Trump and the soap star to hug. Our sources say the tape was going to be “sanitized” to protect Billy as much as possible.

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

“There are so many pussies around your Presidential campaign on both sides, that I prefer not to comment about this.” — Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

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As Britain starts extricating itself from the European Union, bureaucrats in Brussels continue to hand ammunition to Brexit supporters.

Last week, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) saw fit to advocate British journalists undergo some type of sensitivity training because—get this—they write too much about radical Islamist terrorism.

Sounds like Brexit was a bullet dodged.

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Really? I never heard tell of a slave who could quit any time he wanted to. Or one who could eventually wind up making millions of dollars a year.

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Despite internet hype, a prototype of the solar “road” built in Idaho couldn’t be driven on, didn’t generate any electricity and 75 percent of its panels broke within a week of installation. Of the panels installed to make a “solar footpath,” 18 of the 30 were dead on arrival due to a manufacturing failure. A short rain shower caused another four panels to fail, and only two panels appear to be presently functional.

If it had worked, the panels would have powered a single water fountain and the lights in a restroom, after more than half-a-million dollars in installation costs provided by a grant from the state government. The U.S. Department of Transportation initially handed $750,000 in grants to fund the research into the scheme, then invested another pair of grants worth $850,000 into it. The plan, dubbed, “Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways” raised another $2.2 million dollars in crowd-funding even though several scientists publicly debunked the idea.

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Four churches filed a suit in federal court on Tuesday challenging a Massachusetts law that they say is forcing them to speak and act contrary to their Christian faith.

The Massachusetts legislature passed a law last year requiring all public accommodations to implement policies that are properly “inclusive” of transgender individuals.

Steve Sailer looks at politics.

Late last week, the respectable media was shocked, shocked to discover that Donald Trump is a horndog of almost the same caliber as his golf buddy Bill Clinton.

One advantage of being old is that current events become more amusing the more of the past you’ve endured. For example, the sanctimony of Hillary’s run for the White House seems less humorless if you can remember the last Clinton presidency.

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Not, I wager, a headline you ever expected to see.

Our mental model of the world shapes our behavior at fundamental levels in ways we often can’t even recognize. I was struck by this when reading two books almost back to back, Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Peter Thiel’s Zero to One.

Both authors lay out a schema for modeling the future and how to behave relative to it, but come to very different conclusions.

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Sirte is no longer controlled by ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) but the city still has some ISIL men fighting to the death. In most of the city government forces are carefully searching for bombs, landmines and other deadly traps ISIL tends to leave in areas it expects to lose control of. These bombs have been causing most of the casualties lately. ISIL stored ammo and explosives in dozens of hidden locations. For most of these ammo stockpiles there are no ISIL men left alive who know the locations. Then there are all the mass graves of deal ISIL members as well as those they killed for resisting ISIL rule.

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The Washington Examiner claims President Obama is on the verge of stitching up a deal to pass a massive raft of green pork tax credits in the final weeks of his Presidency, after the November Presidential election.

Of course he will.

Read it. And watch the video.

‘Activist thug’ is a redundancy.

Steve Sailer scratches his head.

As evidence, here in the San Fernando Valley with a half-million or more Latinos, there’s virtually zero demand for Hollywood movies dubbed into Spanish. Latino teens want to hear Captain America speak English. They now have no problem following rapid-fire English language dialogue in comic book movies.

Being able to speak English, the world’s economically dominant language, is the single most fundamental blessing public schools can bestow on Latinos.

…

Yet, now the ethnic activists are planning their revenge.

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The Navy’s overwhelmingly unpopular decision to eliminate its time-honored job titles was conceived and advocated by its former top enlisted sailor who, with the backing of its top two admirals, pushed for the controversial change despite having gathered very little input from the rank-and-file personnel principally affected, Navy Times has learned.

Ultimately, the decision was made by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, whom multiple sources described as eager to announce the new policy before his impending departure after more than seven years atop the the sea service. Mabus, the first to broadcast this new policy Sept. 29, was motivated by a fervent desire to promote gender neutrality across the Navy and the Marine Corps, which he also oversees. He was presented with four options for removing the word “man” from nearly two dozen job titles — what the Navy calls ratings — and opted for the most extreme option.

Disgraceful. I remember suffering under the uniform changes made by Admiral Zumwalt, all of which were eventually reversed. The same process gave us the recent change from the traditional working uniforms to a form of ‘blue-toned’ camouflage, which is worse than useless if somebody is lost overboard at sea. The problem is that all it takes is one very highly placed individual to propagate a stupid decision across hundreds of thousand of people at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Read it.

Criminal laws and regulations in the United States have increased to absurd proportions in the past few decades, posing a growing threat to our constitutional liberties.

There are nearly 5,000 criminal laws and an estimated 300,000 or more criminal regulations at the federal level alone. In fact, there are so many possible criminal offenses that Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney, contends the average American probably commits at least three felonies a day, most without knowing it.

In April, the perils of overcriminalization were on full display when Brian Everidge traveled to Michigan with more than 10,000 bottles and cans, seeking to capitalize on Michigan’s generous 10 cents-per-bottle refund program. He stood to make $1,000.

Everidge was pulled over for speeding and found himself facing a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison after the state trooper discovered his cargo. As it turned out, transporting more than 10,000 bottles into Michigan with the intent to collect a deposit is a felony.

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I am not making this up.

Barnard College is hosting “The Barnard BLUE Collective” this October, a weekly “social justice education” themed dialogue series.

Barnard College is one of the ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges, the one that is attached to Columbia University.

On October 17, attendees will discuss the supposed role exercise classes have in “cultural appropriation” with the topic: “Health at the Cost of Cultural Appropriation: Yoga and Zumba.”

I’m curious as to how long its going to take before ordinary people rise up and tell these clowns to Just Shut Up.

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The head of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) hammered Donald Trump’s “shackles” comment on Tuesday, saying the comments were “reckless” and harken back to the age of slavery.

Which is, of course, horseshit. It’s a standard metaphor that has been used for hundreds of years and has nothing whatever to do with slavery except in the minds of those who have victimhood on the brain.

(Funny how much the head of the Congressional Black Caucus looks like a white guy. I guess it’s enough to ‘identify’ as black.)

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I am not making this up.

This is why the economy sucks: Stupid government mandates.

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In the past month, the real specter of a European Union-controlled army has finally appeared. At his European State of the Union address in Strasbourg on September 14th, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared that Europe needs to “toughen up.” He proposed that Europe create a single headquarters for military operations, and consider common military forces one of the aims of the “ever closer union” which is the EU’s longstanding goal. The governments of Europe’s largest military powers—France, Italy, and Germany—have publicly expressed support, and added proposals for a single EU military research budget in the name of efficiency, among others.

My world, and welcome to it.

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Now there’s a scary thought.

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The various scroll fragments record parts of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Ruth, Kings, Micah, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Joshua, Judges, Proverbs, Numbers, Psalms, Ezekiel and Jonah. The Qumran caves ? where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered ? had yet to yield any fragments from the Book of Nehemiah; if this newly revealed fragment is authenticated it would be the first.

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First World Problem: The poor people are fat and the rich people are thin.

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Typical ‘some immigrants are awesome so open up the borders!’ non-sequitur thumbsucker. Nobody objects to potential Nobel-prize winners coming into the United States. We’ll take all the advanced-degree-holding STEM workers we can get. (Can you say ‘H-1B Visa’? I’m sure you can. Certainly Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg can.)

Unmentioned: Not one of these guys hired a ‘coyote’ to sneak him across the border so that he could take lawn-care day-labor jobs and send money ‘back home’.

The Identity Politics movement has gotten people trained to think that if you can find a collective noun to describe a group of people, it thereby converts all of those people into exactly identical clones of each other … AND the typical exemplar of that group is whichever one feeds the Narrative about that group.

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That would explain a lot.

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I guess that’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care Act’.

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Earlier this year, we reported on how President Obama’s much-ballyhooed executive clemency program was releasing felons who had been convicted of using firearms in drug trafficking crimes. We noted then the jarring inconsistency of this program with Obama’s executive gun control measures, which targeted hobbyists and collectors making occasional gun sales, licensed dealers, and even Social Security recipients.

But Obama is nothing if not hypocritical. Not only has he increased the scope of his pardons and commutations, but – according to an article in USA Today – he has shifted his strategy to reach more serious and violent offenders. “Before last month, 13% of inmates receiving clemency had used a firearm in the offense,” the article states. “For those granted presidential mercy last month, it was 22%.”

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As if one were needed.

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Our cognitive elites dislike the very idea that Los Angeles, as Dorothy Parker once supposedly described, has long been “72 suburbs in search of a city.” Yet, Southern California, as I discuss in a new Chapman University report, has from its early emergence grown around a “post-suburban” model of dynamic, smaller clusters. This urban form has become common in many major metropolitan areas as automobiles have replaced transit as the primary means of getting around.

This model worked here brilliantly for most of the last half century — until planners, real estate speculators and California bureaucrats decided that we needed to emulate New York City and other older monocentric core cities. Like the provincials they consistently prove themselves to be, our leaders have generally complied.

So, after nearly 15 years spent in pushing this direction, what have we accomplished? A transit system that barely serves as many people as it did before we started building trains, housing prices among the highest in the nation, super-high poverty rates and a population that continues to seek to go somewhere else, including some 1.6 million net domestic migrants who have left the L.A. and Orange County area since 2000.

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In the United Kingdom, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has directed restaurants to cut the portion sizes or reduce the sugar in desserts and other sweets. Their efforts will be tracked on a government website and those who don’t comply with the government’s demands will be publicly named.

I presume so that you can find those places and patronize them. (Heh.)

Note: Jeremy Hunt is a member of the Alleged Conservative Party in Britain, which hasn’t had a real conservative party since the Marquess of Salisbury died in 1903.

Read it. And watch the video.

… another interview with the French political commentator Eric Zemmour. This one was recorded in Switzerland.

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The Associated Press reports on Donald Trump’s talking about Hillary Clinton’s role in her husband’s rape and sexual harassment scandals. Perhaps recognizing that some people might consider being an accessory to rape and sexual assault more serious failings than talking crudely about women, the AP doesn’t take any chances. You almost have to read between the lines to extract the story from the spin.

Freeberg nails it again.

I’ve noticed the #NeverTrump crowd has gotten desperate since Trump’s YUGE embarrassment this weekend, the “hot mic moment” from 2005 where he talked about grabbing pussies. You can see it in their blog postings, the comments they leave upon the blogs, their social media postings, their “tweets.” This is their moment to be right. Trump has to lose this thing, or they’re going to look like asses and they know it. It’s like the guy who decides not to get involved in a mugging, or to help a woman and her infants stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire. Or, not to fight a house fire. If it all turns out to be a lost cause, looks almost reasonable, but if someone happens along to stop the mugging, save the mom with the flat tire, extinguish the fire…there’s no way to look good if you’re the guy who took a pass. Can’t look cool doin’ that.

Read it.

A Mexican cartel teamed up with local police in a border town close to Texas and killed hundreds of people, a report revealed Sunday.

Los Zetas cartel members embarked on a killing spree in Allende, Mexico back in 2011. The killing spree was prompted by the cartel suspecting that some of its own operatives had pocketed $10 million in profits and this thievery could not go unpunished.

Forty-two people were reported missing, but a Zetas operative previously admitted in a U.S. court in 2013 that 300 people were killed. It is unclear if the 300 died in one massacre or in multiple massacres.

Sure, let’s open up the border! Let everybody in! What could possibly go wrong?

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This is what happens when the government no longer institutionalizes the mentally disturbed.

During the Progressive Era (Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Sanger) these people would have been involuntarily sterilized.

I think you can see why.

Retirement is like being Bilbo Baggins with air conditioning and Internet access and without crusty old fart wizards dragging you off into adventures.

Wouldn’t mind an elf or two, though.

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Internal documents leaked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign reveal which reporters had cocktails with the campaign and a then-Politico (now New York Times) reporter that Clinton’s staff described as a “friendly journalist.”

The list won’t surprise you if you’ve been paying attention.

Another document in the leak, titled “Earned Media/Next Steps,” describes the Clinton campaign’s strategy for placing stories. The January 2015 memo states, “We are all in agreement that the time is right place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.” The Intercept reports that according to the document’s metadata it was created by traveling Clinton campaign press secretary Nick Merrill.

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We report, you decide.

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Just in case you were wondering.

This is what happens when you read California tech blogs.

I’d suggest staying away from California.

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That was quick thinking.

Wisdom from the man with the tall forehead.

Google (company motto: “We know what you’re doing, pal”) has announced a new personal assistant. It’s called “Assistant.” It sits on your countertop, answers questions, takes commands. If you have a Google dongle on your TV (and you should, because it’s fun to say “I have a Google dongle, ” just to see who blushes), you can say, “Play Season 43 of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ on Netflix,” and voilà.

Check it out.

Meet me up in the Classical bubble….

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Everyone who supports Hillary should be made to watch this interview of Juanita Broaddrick in which she describes how Bill Clinton raped her, and how three weeks later Hillary Clinton threatened her.

Trigger warning: It’s pretty intense. And Bill Clinton is more of a pig than Donald Trump ever thought of being.

There is a refusal of the mainstream media to have an honest discussion about what it really means that a former president, and one who is much loved by the mainstream media, is actually a rapist. You can be sure that if Reagan or a Bush had raped a woman, we’d never hear the end of it. And maybe Bill Clinton isn’t running for president, but Hillary wouldn’t be running for president and would never even have been a senator were it not for whom she married.

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The newspaper claimed emails from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used local police officers in Southern California to drive around the parking lot of a large gun show to “collect all of the cars’ information.”

You never can tell, somebody might try to exercise his Constitutional rights or something equally suspicious.

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Overall, keeping a king’s treasures is a bad idea.

Good advice.

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The electric vehicle of the future will be carbon negative (reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide) not just carbon neutral (not adding CO2 to the atmosphere), say researchers at Vanderbilt University and George Washington University (GWU).

The trick: replace graphite electrodes in lithium-ion batteries (used in electric vehicles) with carbon nanotubes and carbon nanofibers recovered from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The new technology could also be used in sodium-ion batteries, currently under development for large-scale applications, such as the electric grid.