Archive for April, 2017
14th April 2017
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Another fraudulent case of alleged Trump supporter racism has occurred in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Justin Lamar Coleman, an African-American man, has pled guilty to “mailing threatening communications,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported Thursday.
In the letters, Coleman pretended to be another man named Jeff McCown. After an incident occurred between Coleman and McCown all the way back in 2010, Coleman apparently never let the incident go.
Funny how all the hate comes from the Official Victim Groups these days.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Another Hoax: African-American Man Pretended to Be a Racist Trump Supporter, Sent Threatening Letters
13th April 2017
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The capital of Michigan was a self-designated “sanctuary city” for just 10 days before it rescinded the decision Wednesday under pressure from business leaders concerned the status would draw unwanted scrutiny from the federal government.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Michigan Capital Ditches Sanctuary City Status After Pushback From Local Businesses
13th April 2017
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Hey, after a hard day of protecting the environment, you need to relax.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on EPA Staffer Uses Government Credit Card To Buy $15K Gym Membership
13th April 2017
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Executive Summary: All your money belong to us. Sometimes we let you keep some, but don’t depend on it.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax
13th April 2017
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Long Sordid Tale of the American Income Tax
12th April 2017
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Protests broke out at the International Affairs Symposium at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College Tuesday when radicals outside, frustrated at being stymied, started pounding on the door of a debate on immigration, as if trying to break in. But the true hero of the event was a black Muslim student from Sudan, a country included in Trump’s travel ban, who heroically grabbed the bullhorn from one of the screaming yahoos and lambasted them for disrupting the event.
He told them that because of them, the event ended abruptly, robbing him of an opportunity to ask his question. He pointed out that if they want change and reform, they are going about it the wrong way if they won’t even let people talk—showing that, ironically, a foreigner, has a better grasp of free speech, tolerance, pluralism, and open dialogue than the protesters speaking on his behalf.
The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. Yet Trump is the New Hitler.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Portland Resistance Radicals Trying to Disrupt an Anti-Immigration Speaker Thwarted by Lewis & Clark Students
12th April 2017
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Well, I’ve always thought so.
Considering what I’ve seen of Clemson’s student body, they may be right.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Public University’s ‘Diversity Training’: Expecting People to Show Up on Time Is Racist
12th April 2017
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Now that Facebook and more recently Google have designated it as one of several approved “fake news” identifiers, the profile of Snopes.com, a website which has been using “fact-checking” as a shield to advance a left-supporting, right-bashing agenda for over two decades, has risen.
Its quality certainly hasn’t. Recently, the website shamelessly used the same sensible argument others have used for decades about the gender-based “pay gap” myth to defend Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who rejects that very same argument.
Gitcher scorecard! You can’t tell who’s Left without a scorecard!
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | 8 Comments »
12th April 2017
Daniel Pipes discovers that You Can’t Go Home Again.
I grew up around a university (my father Richard is a professor emeritus) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in medieval history, so I initially expected the campus ever to be central in my life. Then, because it radicalized and I did not, my connection to the academy withered. Now, on occasional returns visits to it, I invariably feel alienated by the left-wingery, the jargon, and the arrogant irrelevance. While glad I escaped its clutches, I worry about the future of American (that word again) higher education. So, yes, Campus Watch has it right.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | 2 Comments »
12th April 2017
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Fly over a major city and what do you see? Not well defined centers and sub-centers. More likely, an amazing complexity. We argue that what is actually down there, but hard to actually see, is a large number of superimposed and spatially realized supply chains.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Economy of Cities
12th April 2017
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When one starts to worry about ‘racism in food’, it’s time to step away from the Identity Politics Kool-Aid.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on A Is for Africa: Southern Restaurant Tackles Racism in Food With an Encyclopedic Menu
11th April 2017
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It’s so important to be a Victim that it justifies cheating if necessary.
Kind of like Democrats and elections.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on HATE HOAX: Black Suspect Arrested for Damaging Store, Writing Threat From Trump-Supporting ‘White America’
11th April 2017
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The fate of reform measures hangs on ballot language written by the state attorney general, usually a Democrat elected with strong union support.
When you’re buying votes using Other People’s Money, there is no incentive to stint.
As California becomes more and more Democrat, i.e more and more socialist, it comes closer and closer to the point where it will just collapse. See Venezuela for how this works in a place that doesn’t have so much Other People’s Money as California.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Cost of California’s Public Pensions Is Breaking the Bank. Here’s One Reason This Problem Is So Hard to Fix
11th April 2017
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In their most recent article published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Eren and his co-authors from Southern Methodist University (Brett A. Story, David J. Meltzer and Kaitlyn A. Thomas), University of Tulsa (Briggs Buchanan), Rogers State University (Brian N. Andrews), Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri (Michael J. O’Brien) explain the flint knapping technique of “fluting” the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention. This singular technological attribute, the flake removal or “flute,” is absent from the stone-tool repertoire of Pleistocene Northeast Asia, where the Clovis ancestors came from.
Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.
“It was risky and couldn’t have been easy to learn how to do this effectively,” Eren explained. “Archaeological evidence suggests that up to one out of five points break when you try to chip this fluted base, and it takes at least 30 minutes to produce a finished specimen. So, though it was a time-consuming process and risky technique, successfully fluted Clovis points would have been extremely reliable, especially while traveling great distances into unknown regions on a new continent. They needed points that would hold up and be used over and over again.”
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Archaeologist Explains Innovation of ‘Fluting’ Ancient Stone Weaponry
11th April 2017
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On Friday, New York decided to become the first state to offer four years of tuition-free public college to its residents.
Starting in the fall of 2017, any student from a family who is making less than $100,000 annually can qualify for free tuition, under certain conditions, such as a requirement to maintain a minimum grade point average and commit to living and working in New York for four years after graduation.
Like all tuition-free proposals, this policy kicks the can down the road, leaving taxpayers and future generations with the bill.
Not to mention the fact that New York state will now be even more of a magnet to low-income people than it has been because of its generous welfare benefits. So the tax burden on New York residents will grow ever larger, and middle-class people will be squeezed out to other less expensive states (welcome in Texas, guys, really). So eventually New York state will contain only very rich people, very poor people, and very stupid people — the very definition of a Democrat utopia! Win-win!
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
11th April 2017
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Is a conflict of interest behind some of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ strong criticisms of President Trump’s immigration policy, in particular his two temporary travel bans? That’s the question being raised by a number of experts in foreign policy and Catholic charitable work, including a former adviser to President Bush and a leading figure in conservative Catholic media.
These critics are pointing out that in Fiscal Year 2016, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) received more than $91 million in government funding for refugee resettlement. Over the past nine years, the USCCB has received a total of $534,788,660 in taxpayer dollars for refugee resettlement programs, reported Ann Corcoran, editor of Refugee Resettlement Watch.
Doing well by doing good.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
11th April 2017
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Rather than inch upward from $10 per hour to $10.25 per hour in January 2016, as the rest of the state was doing, San Diego jumped its minimum wage to $11.50 per hour. In the year and three months since then, the number of food service jobs in San Diego has dropped sharply, with perhaps as many as 4,000 jobs lost, or never created in the first place.
Isn’t that amazing? If you raise the price of something, people buy less of it. Somebody ought to teach a course on that or something.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
11th April 2017
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Well, you can imagine the conniptions on Capitol Hill when it was realized that the political class wasn’t exempt from such terrible health coverage. Faced with the howls of congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle, even the most ardent Obamacare supporters raised their hands in supplication and cried: “Please protect us from the monster we created!”
And, lo and behold, the White House heard their pleas and, in clear defiance of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, announced in 2013 a special bailout for members of Congress and their staff. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) allowed members of Congress to get healthcare through the D.C. Small Business Exchange, normally limited to businesses with less than 50 employees (combined, there are 535 Congressmen and Senators). The requirement to go through Obamacare magically disappeared.
The Crust take care of their own.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on How Obamacare Affects Congressional Families (It Doesn’t; They’re Exempt)
11th April 2017
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Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Fresno State Launches Investigation Into ‘Trump Must Hang’ Professor
11th April 2017
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We’ve known it all along.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Ruth Bader Ginsburg Refers to Lindsey Graham as One of The ‘Women of the Senate’
11th April 2017
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The latest wrinkle in the United debacle is that the airline’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, sent a letter to company employees laying most of the blame on the victim: the doctor who was dragged off his flight by Chicago aviation police. This passenger “defied” officers after being “politely asked to deplane” and became “disruptive and belligerent,” according to the letter.
How dare he! You’d think he’d paid for that seat or something.
But while United’s treatment of the passenger in the video was stunning and uniquely awful, let’s not forget that the entire airport experience is oriented toward misery—and that’s the fault of government policies that treat every passenger like a potential security threat. Paying customers aren’t people with rights and dignity, according to this model: they are nails to be hammered into place.
Which is why I don’t fly.
We live in an age of transportation security theater, and the party responsible for much of the flying-related misery is the Transportation Security Administration. Created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this federal agency is solely responsible for screening passengers for contraband and dangerous items as they enter airport terminals. In practice, this means subjecting people to intrusive pat-downs and body scans while rifling through their personal items. There is no boundary too private for the TSA to cross. That this incredibly inconvenient, dehumanizing system routinely fails to prevent illicit items from actually entering the airport is almost beside the point, since the TSA provides little actual security. Indeed, the dirty secret of airport safety is that the materials necessary to construct an explosive can be found inside the terminal, beyond the security checkpoint.
Nobody ever accused government employees of being intelligent. Otherwise, they’d have gotten a real job.
United is not the TSA. And many airlines have better customer service track records than United. But it’s no accident that flying has become one of the most stressful and uncomfortable recurring experiences for millions of Americans. It’s the result of policy choices, enacted by government agents, and propelled by overwhelming safety paranoia. Until and unless some basic level of sanity prevails, customers should expect further “re-accommodations” at the hands of overzealous police officers and security officials, no matter which airline they fly.
Don’t hold your breath….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on United Did a Bad Thing, But the TSA Has ‘Re-Accommodated’ Airline Passengers for Years
11th April 2017
Political Correctness kills.
A male student who was accused of sexual harassment committed suicide just days after the University of Texas at Arlington ignored its own policies in order to punish him.
UPDATE: Father Sues UT Over Son’s Suicide That Followed Sex Assault Accusation
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Student Commits Suicide After LGBT Activists Use Title IX to Punish Him
11th April 2017
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San Bernardino seems to be a good place to avoid unless you want to be involved in a shooting.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
11th April 2017
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While Federal politicians bicker, South Australia, the world’s renewable crash test dummy, has wasted no time demolishing their last viable coal power station, to lock in their pursuit of an energy free future.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on South Australia Demolishes Its Last Coal Power Station
11th April 2017
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The New York Times broke a story Sunday revealing that the former administration “knew” Syria’s president Bashir-al-Assad had more chemical weapons hidden, despite John Kerry, President Obama, and Susan Rice telling the American people that they had destroyed all of Assad’s chemical weapons. Yet the networks have ignored these reports, not giving any airtime since the first story broke.
And yet Trump is the Great Liar.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Ex-Obama Officials Admit Admin Lied About Chemical Weapons Knowledge; Nets Ignore
11th April 2017
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When it comes to countries, there really isn’t any dispute. No country has ever gotten rich through high taxes, big government and onerous regulation. And yet, these are the very prescriptions that often are promoted by international organizations and left-wing politicians.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
11th April 2017
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I’ve mentioned before that the New York Review of Books has been suffering a complete freakout meltdown since Trump’s election, and I gleefully look forward to every issue to microwave another bag of popcorn.
The latest issue offers a long review entitled “Lessons from Hitler’s Rise,” by Christopher Browning. Although it is a review of a translation of a book about Hitler by a German scholar published before Trump’s election, how long do you think it takes Browning to roll out the Trumpenfuehrer analogy? Yup—first paragraph….
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on More Meltdowns at the NYRB
10th April 2017
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The end of California’s multi-year drought spurred a “super-bloom” of wildflowers, that’s drawn record-setting crowds of tourists. But those same people have ended up trampling so many flowers, local officials closed hiking trails to save what’s left of the rare flora.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on California Eco-Tourists Trample Rare Wildflowers to Get Photos
10th April 2017
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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, otherwise the place would look like Texas.
Of course, this is what you get when you elect Democrats to run your city.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Chicago Judge Gunned Down In Shooting
10th April 2017
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A United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked, so the airline sought 4 passengers to voluntarily give up their seats in exchange for cash and a free night in a hotel.
When no one took the offer, the airline used a computer to choose “volunteers” at random. One man chosen refused, saying he was a doctor who had to see patients in the morning. That’s when police were called and the man was physically dragged down the aisle and off the plane.
United Airlines said they needed the seats for airline employees who had to be in Louisville on Monday for their jobs.
Yet another reason why I don’t fly. And only fools fly on United.
More: Jon Gabriel, Ed.: Fly the Unfriendly Skies
And more: A man wouldn’t leave an overbooked United flight. So he was dragged off, battered and limp.
And still more: Why Should Police Help United Airlines Cheat Its Customers?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
10th April 2017
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
10th April 2017
Adam Gopnik is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, actually, it’s not that hard.)
Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. Thomas Friedman is concerned.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?
10th April 2017
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Well, to be fair, the Democrats don’t want to burn books that point out how unscientific the global warming scare is. They want to recycle them.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Democrats Lose Argument, Try to Burn Books
10th April 2017
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As part of Ted Kennedy’s not very successful efforts to import more Irishmen to vote for Kennedys, America has had since the 1990s a diversity visa lottery that lets in 50,000 lucky winners per year from obscure countries that don’t send all that many immigrants through other channels. It establishes beachheads for, say, Nepalese who can then launch the chain migration process.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The World’s Dumbest Immigration Program
9th April 2017
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California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.
Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”
…
Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
9th April 2017
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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Drilling Into the Chicxulub Crater, Ground Zero of the Dinosaur Extinction
9th April 2017
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One of the disadvantages (among many) of the statist myth ‘intellectual property’.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
9th April 2017
Lileks.
For years, the key to weight loss has been obvious and simple: Eat less and move around more. Run 12 miles each day while licking a carrot and the pounds just melt away.
Kidding! Everyone on the internet knows that you can lose weight fast with This One Simple Trick, or This One Weird Trick. It’s either a diet so rich in fiber you might as well eat a plank of particleboard, or it’s a magic pill that makes the pounds fall off. Yes, a team of Actual Doctors (OK, podiatrists, but still doctors) have discovered a special substance called gullibilium. It increases your metabolism so high the food actually disappears on your fork before you eat it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Take a Hot Bath and Lose Weight. Or Is That Notion All Wet?
9th April 2017
Read it. And don’t fail to watch the video.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | 1 Comment »
9th April 2017
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Let that be a lesson to us all.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on British Police Poisoned While Investigating Fatal Poisoning of Russian Defector
9th April 2017
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
8th April 2017

Welcome to the MBA Program.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
8th April 2017
Stair-Climbing Wheelchair.
Wazer desktop waterjet cutter.
Ravin R9 Crossbow. Review here.
Kevlar Cut-Resistant Sleeves. I got yer knife fight, right here.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on USEFUL STUFF SATURDAY
7th April 2017
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Old Books Actually Smell Like Chocolate and Coffee
7th April 2017
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It means good eatin’, I can tell you.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The Complete Guide to Jewish Food, and What on Earth That Means
7th April 2017
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Those looks might strike you dead, but in the Victorian period, wallpaper could–and did–kill. In one sense, it wasn’t that unusual, writes Haniya Rae for The Atlantic. Arsenic was everywhere in the Victorian period, from food coloring to baby carriages. But the vivid floral wallpapers were at the center of a consumer controversy about what made something safe to have in your home.
The root of the problem was the color green, writes art historian and Victorianist Lucinda Hawksley for The Telegraph. After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, “Scheele’s Green” became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic.
But I’ll bet it was gluten-free.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
7th April 2017
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Science marches on.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Knife-Wielding Stabbing Machine Could Help Solve Violent Crimes
7th April 2017
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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
Posted in News You Can Use. | 1 Comment »
7th April 2017
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Imagine the reaction if a white coach had said that about black players.
UPDATE: Big Media Won’t Go Near ‘R’ Word on Ball’s Racist Remarks
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on LaVar Ball: UCLA Lost in the Tournament Because It Has Too Many White Players
7th April 2017
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A leading Islamist party recently demanded punishment for bloggers who “insult” Islam and condemned the execution of the murderer of a prominent politician who spoke up against his country’s rigid blasphemy laws. The Islamist party also blamed the U.S.-led war on terror for the rise in global jihadism and the destruction of Islamic civilization.
For those of you wondering, the Islamist party in question is not the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, or Muslim Brotherhood (MB), whose designation as a terrorist organization is currently a hot topic of debate in Washington. Rather, it is the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a South Asian Sunni revivalist movement that has an active network in North America and the West.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Should the Muslim Brotherhood Debate Include Another Rogue Islamist Party?