Joan Baez and Judy Collins 2016 performance

h/t Gerard

"Mr. Obama’s presidency was a joyride for the ruthless, well-funded left."

Monica Crowley writes in the Washington Times,

It turns out that President Obama’s promised “fundamental transformation of the nation” was not what it was cracked up to be — and it instead cracked up his party.

Now, the party appears to be committing further suicide in real time by considering far-left radicals such as Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee and keeping crusty old-guard liberals such as Nancy Pelosi in other leadership positions.

This year, however, without Mr. Obama on the ticket, Americans finally felt free to reject another four years of high unemployment, anemic economic growth, unsustainable spending and record-breaking deficits and debt, unpopular and bankrupting socialized medicine, record numbers of people on food stamps and living in poverty, and the escalating threats of nuclear and other proliferation and Islamic fundamentalism.

The left’s multidecade grand plan — to change the very nature of the country by moving it toward European-style socialism — reached its pinnacle with Mr. Obama. And yet, those statist policies are — paradoxically — greatly responsible for Donald Trump’s win.

Mr. Obama had three main goals: to expand government as fast and as widely as possible; the ultimate objective of that was to expand the number of people dependent of government as fast and as widely as possible; and the ultimate objective of that was to leverage it into a permanent Democratic voting majority.

To achieve those goals, he chose to pit Americans against each other in order to make it easier to slide in his radical redistributionist agenda. He divided us by class, gender, race and age. He turned the American motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”) upside down and into “Out of One, Many.” The American experiment could not go on as it once did if it were driven by divisions and envy rather than uniting values and common goals.

The other thing Mr. Obama believed was that if you expand government and dependency on it as quickly as possible, you take the sting out of a bad economy. The more government aid and programs to “take care” of you during an economic crisis, the less likely you are to throw the bums out who caused — or who are prolonging — the economic crisis.

...Mr. Obama’s presidency was a joyride for the ruthless, well-funded left. But it’s now come to a screeching halt, thanks to the American people, who aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel on this grand experiment in human liberty.

Read more here.

"Banning flag burning dilutes the very freedoms that make the flag worth revering."

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes in the Washington Times,

Is flag burning protected speech? This old issue returned front and center earlier this week after President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that he found it so reprehensible, it should be criminal. He even suggested a punishment — loss of citizenship or one year in jail. Is the president-elect correct? Can the government punish acts that accompany the expression of opinions because the government, or the public generally, hates or fears the opinions?

For the sake of this analysis, like the U.S. Supreme Court, which has addressed this twice in the past 27 years, I am addressing whether you can burn your own American flag. The short answer is: Yes. You can burn your flag and I can burn mine, so long as public safety is not impaired by the fires. But you cannot burn my flag against my will, nor can you burn a flag owned by the government.

The First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from enacting laws infringing upon the freedom of speech, has consistently been interpreted in the modern era so as to insulate the public manifestation of political ideas from any government interference, whether the manifestation is by word or deed or both. This protection applies even to ideas that are hateful, offensive, unorthodox and outright un-American. Not a few judges and constitutional scholars have argued that the First Amendment was written for the very purpose of protecting the expression of hateful ideas, as loveable or popular ideas need no protection.

...The amendment was also written for two additional purposes. One was, as Justice Jackson wrote as quoted above, to keep the government out of the business of passing judgment on ideas and deciding what we may read, speak about or otherwise express in public. The corollary to this is that individuals should decide for themselves what ideas to embrace or reject, free from government interference.

...Justice Jackson also warned that a government strong enough to suppress ideas that it hates or fears was powerful enough to suppress debate that inconveniences it, and that suppression would destroy the purposes of the First Amendment. The Jacksonian warning is directly related to the amendment’s remaining understood purpose — to encourage and protect open, wide, robust debate about any aspect of government.

All these values were addressed by the Supreme Court in 1989 and again in 1990 when it laid to rest the flag burning controversies by invalidating all statutes aimed at suppressing opinions.

...The American flag is revered because it is a universally recognizable symbol of the human sacrifice of some for the human freedom of many. Justice Scalia recognized that flag burning is deeply offensive to many people — this writer among them — yet he, like Justice Jackson before him, knew that banning it dilutes the very freedoms that make the flag worth revering.
Read more here.

Democrats hope to beat up Jeff Sessions

Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner,

...Republicans have a 52-48 advantage in the Senate and will likely have a one-vote advantage when the Judiciary Committee is formally organized in January. A party-line vote would win for Sessions. But that hasn't stopped Democrats from looking back to the Ashcroft precedent when, without a majority, they managed to beat up one of the new president's nominees.

...The Democrats — Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, Chris Coons and Richard Blumenthal — demanded that the committee hear from witnesses who will discuss Sessions' views on "immigration; violence against women; civil rights; including LGBT protections; racial justice, and hate crimes; workers' rights; national security and civil liberties; voting rights; criminal justice; and government conflicts of interest, transparency, and oversight."

Read more here.

When do facts matter?

Scott Adams reminds us that

...emotion-free decisions are unusual. You rarely see emotion-free decisions when it comes to politics, relationships, or even your career.

...I hope you see the pattern already. Trump ignores the things that don’t matter – even to the point of looking the fool – and pays deep attention to what DOES matter. That’s what made him our next president.

...Once in office, facts and reason do matter more. Trump is moving from the job of talking about issues to the job of doing something about them. In his new role, he will pay attention to details and facts and reason as much as humanly possible, with the help of advisors. You already see this transformation happening as Trump moderates his positions on waterboarding, prosecuting Clinton, and even climate change.

...The Persuasion Filter predicted Trump’s win when most other models did not. Now I use the same filter to predict that Trump will turn from totally ignoring facts (because facts don’t matter to elections) to embracing the facts that do matter to the country.

Read more here.

"There is abundant evidence that admitting Muslim refugees is a jihad risk."

Robert Spencer writes,

... If Trump’s proposal becomes American law, Abdul Artan would never have entered the United States, and Monday’s jihad attack at Ohio State University would never have happened.

...There is abundant evidence that admitting Muslim refugees is a jihad risk. In February 2015, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. And the Lebanese Education Minister said in September 2015 that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country. Meanwhile, 80% of migrants who have come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t really from Syria at all.

All nine of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. And now the same murderous impulse has come to Ohio State University, courtesy of another “refugee.” How many more such jihad attacks must there be before the wisdom of a moratorium on immigration from jihad hotspots is universally recognized?

Read more here.

Pelosi wins another term as House Minority Leader

Nancy Pelosi has won another term as House Minority Leader. CBD writes at Ace of Spades,

She is a San Francisco millionaire whose husband is a rent-seeking businessman. She is completely out of touch with the electorate, but has remained in power because she is completely in touch with inside-the-beltway money and influence. If Trump's victory taught them nothing else, it should have taught them that after many years of status quo leading to our current mess, voters sort of like change, even when that change is Trump.

Read more here.

"...welcome in Hope. And He has a name."

At A Holy Expeerience Ann Voskamp reminds us that

We all need to believe that things can change.

“And then sometimes — the impossible unfolds into the possible.”

...Tears are never a sign of weakness. Tears are always the sign of an open heart.

...No matter how we’re hurting — it’s only when we lose hope that the real horror happens.

...and there’s Christ who comes to give us the gift every one wants more than anything — a future and a hope.

...The very least you can do with your life is welcome in Hope. And He has a name.

And the very best you can do with your life is build a life with Hope.

And the very best you can do with your life is build a life with Hope.

Read more and view photos here.

"Cynicism, disgust and frustration deepen."

ambisinistra writes at Flares into Darkness,

The eight steps of the newest news cycle:

1. - There is an attack, using a gun, knife, car, etc., against multiple people in a public space.
2 - I think to myself, "Crap. The Mohammedans are at it again."
3 - Officials warn me not to jump to conclusions about the nature of the attacker.
4 - The media speculates it may be the work of a right-wing gun nut.
5 - It turns out that the attackers name is Mohamed, Abdul, Faisal, etc.
6 - They are reported to have yelled, "Allahu Akbar" while attacking.
7 - The news media puzzles over what their motives could have been.
8 - My cynicism, disgust and frustration deepen.

McConnell's wife and a former Soros employee nominated to cabinet level positions by Trump

The dealer appoints Elaine Chao to head the Transportation Department. She is Senate Majority Leader McConnell's wife, and served eight years as George W. Bush's Labor Secretary.

From Wikipedia:

...Chao's parents had fled to Taiwan from Shanghai on mainland China after the Chinese Communists took over after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. When she was 8 years old, in 1961, Chao came to the United States on a freight ship with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship.[7]

Next, the dealer appointed . . . Former Goldman Sachs and Soros Fund Manager for Treasury Secretary! Tyler Durdin reports,

Steven Mnuchin became finance chair for the Trump campaign. Having succesfully helped to raise 10s of millions of dollars for the campaign, the former Goldman Sachs partner and Soros Fund management employee is now positioned for something much larger as Donald Trump reportedly told his aides today that he wants Mnuchin to serve as his Treasury Secretary.

Ironically, Trump has often criticized Clinton (and his former competitor Ted Cruz) for their links to the big banks:

Did you see that word Soros?

Homeland Security?

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has issued thousands of duplicate green cards to immigrants, including many that include incorrect information and allow these individuals to stay longer than permitted in the United States, according to a new government oversight report that warns the Department of Homeland Security is incapable of tracking immigrants who may pose a security risk to the United States.

USCIS, which handles immigration cases and the distribution of green cards, was found to have produced at least 19,000 green cards during the past three years that were duplicates or contained incorrect information, according to a new report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.

During the same period, more than 200,000 green card holders reported their cards missing and an increasing number of cards were sent to incorrect addresses, posing a risk to national security.

“In the wrong hands, Green Cards may enable terrorists, criminals, and illegal aliens to remain in the United States and access immigrant benefits,” according to the oversight report, which disclosed that green card errors cost taxpayers $1.5 million in 2015.

“Responding to card issuance errors has also resulted in additional workload and corresponding costs, as USCIS spent just under $1.5 million to address card related customer inquiries in fiscal year 2015,” according to the report.

Read more here.

How is it a good deal for us?

The oil producing companies have agreed to cut production, beginning in January. Stock prices of energy companies rose sharply. What about us, the fools who are paying at the pump? How is it a good deal for us?
Read more here.

Phillip Morris plans to stop killing people some day.

AFP reports that tobbacco giant Phillip Morris is planning to

stop selling conventional cigarettes and replace them with a less harmful product, its chief executive said Wednesday.

As the firm launched its smokeless iQOS cigarette in Britain, Andre Calantzopoulos told BBC radio that the company would try to move smokers over to the new product.

The iQOS heats tobacco rather than burns it and it is claimed that smokers get the same hit of nicotine, but 90 percent less of the toxins present in cigarette smoke.

It is already available in Japan and Italy, and in Switzerland where Philip Morris International (PMI) is based.

...Marlboro maker Philip Morris is the world’s second-biggest cigarette producer by market share, after the state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation.

Worldwide, smoking claims around six million lives annually, mostly in low-income countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

what I want to know is who came up with the name IQOS?
Read more here.

I think they are both being stupid.

Kellogg's is pulling all ads from the Breitbart sites. Kellogg's says that those of us who read Breitbart don't share their values. Breitbart, claiming to be pro-freedom of speech, is asking us to boycott Kellogg's products.

Well, he turned around the Chicago Cubs!

For Deputy Secretary of Commerce, President-elect Trump has chosen to nominate Todd Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs. Trump once again overlooked the fact that the Ricketts family opposed him in the primary election.
Read more here.

"The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence.

...Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions.She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

...It was hard to know who was more cynical: the moralist DNC heads Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile, who conspired to rob Bernie Sanders of the nomination, or Bernie Sanders himself, who (after WikiLeaks confirmed his suspicions that Hillary Clinton was a shill for Wall Street, that the Democratic establishment had tried to rig the primaries, and that even the debate questions were compromised) ended up singing Hillary’s praises as he retreated to his new lakeside estate.

...Progressive outrage should not be taken too seriously because it is not intended to be serious. When Barack Obama invites rapper Kendrick Lamar into the White House and announces that his “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the president’s favorite song of the year — whose album cover shows the corpse of a murdered white judge, with Xs in place of eyes, on the White House lawn, as African-American youth toast his demise with drinks and cash — do we really assume that progressives like Obama believe in stopping hate speech and imagery, or perhaps even believe in anything at all?

...The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. So affirmative action ends up providing high-cheekboned Elizabeth Warren entry into Harvard Law School, the same way that progressive investigative journalism is reduced to Politico’s “hack” Glenn Thrush (who asked the Clinton campaign to fact-check and approve his article), and in the manner that philanthropy is reduced to the Clintons’ piling up of millions by selling influence. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s working classes.

The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

Read more here.

"identity politics, cultural wackiness, boutique environmentalism, the new progressive rich, and redistributionism"

Victor Davis Hanson asks at National Review,

Where does the Republican party go after the election of Donald Trump? Trump ambushed Republican establishmentarians and grabbed the party’s nomination by winning over the white working and middle classes — and Democrats and independents who were sympathetic to their plight. The opening was given to him, first, by the Democratic party that long ago ignored blue-collar workers in favor of identity politics, cultural wackiness, boutique environmentalism, the new progressive rich, and redistributionism — as it became a political pyramid of a plutocratic capstone atop a broad subsidized base — with not much in between.

This article will be published in National Review Magazine on December 5.

Assimilation Academies

David French writes at National Review,

Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion?

At 9:52 a.m. on Monday morning, a silver Honda jumped a curb at Ohio State University and plowed directly into a crowd of students, sending bodies flying through the air. As students rushed to help, a young Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Ratan, got out of the car and began attacking horrified students with a butcher knife. All told, eleven people were wounded before a university police officer shot and killed Ratan, ending the attack.

Ratan is the third Muslim immigrant to mount a mass stabbing attack in 2016. The first occurred at an Israeli-owned deli in Columbus, Ohio, the second at a mall in Saint Cloud, Minn., and the third Monday at Ohio State. The attacks together wounded 25 people. The latest stabbing comes on the heels of Afghan immigrant Ahman Khan Rahami’s September bomb attacks in New York and New Jersey that left 29 injured.

The toll continues. Muslim immigrants Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev killed five Americans and wounded 280 in the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent shootouts. Muslim immigrant Muhammad Abdulazeez killed five men and wounded two in attacks on military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, Tenn. Muslim immigrant Tashfeen Malik accompanied her first-generation Muslim-American husband to attack a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 and wounding 22. First generation Muslim-American Omar Mateen — son of Afghan immigrants — carried out the deadliest domestic terror attack since 9/11, killing 49 and wounding 53 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

...For every successful attack, there are multiple unsuccessful plots, including attacks that could have cost hundreds of American lives.

After all these incidents, can we finally have an honest conversation about Muslim immigration — especially Muslim immigration from jihadist conflict zones?

...If the Democrats wish to maintain immigration from jihadist conflict zones, they need to rid their rhetoric of the language of “Islamophobia” and tell the truth. If they want to continue admitting refugees from jihad zones, they need to make the case that meeting the humanitarian needs of an an extremely small fraction of the world’s Muslim refugees is worth the cost of importing a small number of mass murderers. They must make the case that the human toll in America is the price we must pay for national compassion. Of course no Democrat wants a terror attack to occur, but Democrats must understand and acknowledge that under present policies, such attacks will occur — despite our best efforts to stop them.

Rea French's specific proposals here.

Bookworm has a different idea:

f we truly believe that we have a moral obligation to protect civilians from the ravages of civil war and social breakdown in their own countries, we can allow them to immigrate subject to a law requiring high-risk Muslim refugees to spend one year into American-based internment camps where (a) they can be taught American laws and values and (b) they can be monitored for terrorist tendencies.

We’ve used internment camps before to protect Americans. During WWII, the Democrats unconstitutionally stripped Japanese-Americans of all of their rights, wealth, and freedom without due process. Before people get their knickers in a twist about “imprisoning” innocent people, what I’m proposing is legally and practically different.

In the case of incoming Muslim refugees, the people placed in these camps would not be American citizens. Moreover, they would enter the camps voluntarily. They would be told that, as a condition of immigrating to America from a country that’s associated with radical Islam and high rates of terrorism, they must first spend a specific amount of time (say, a year) in a residential “assimilation Academy.”

At this camp, the immigrants would be taught English, America’s law customs and practices, and job skills. They would also be screened for the pretty nasty diseases that are par for the course in the poverty-stricken, no-infrastructure places in which these refugees originated. Assembling them in one place for an extended period of time, in addition to teaching them “America 101,” would also allow the government to have agents mixed amongst the refugees to monitor them for radical Islamist ideas and terrorist plans.

The expense? Well, I don’t know that it would be that much. After all, we taxpayers already feed, house, clothe, and educate Muslim immigrants. At least this way, we’d be able to include with the package a heavy dose of American assimilation, along with more information about who the refugees are and about their future plans once they graduate from the Assimilation Academy and are officially allowed to enter America.

Again, these Muslims are not citizens deprived of their rights and imprisoned. Instead, they are non-citizens entering into a voluntary exchange with the American people: In exchange for being allowed to enter this country and benefit from its largesse, they must spend a year learning how to be Americans and putting aside their radical, non-democratic, anti-American beliefs and habits.

Read more here.

First snow, then late day sun

When I woke up this morning, snow was on the ground. Our first snow of the season. It snowed pretty much all day after the morning sunrise.

Then, about 4 o'clock, it ended. The sun came out, and I knew we were going to get a beautiful sunset.

Sure enough, the sky gave us a pink smile.

"I couldn’t have asked for a better send off into the brave new world of conformity, comfort, and consumerism."

Brandon Christensen has been living on the "extreme margins of society." He writes,

Now, before I segue into describing what the average line cook in Texas is like, I want to remind you all that I have long hair, a bandanna, and a nasty-looking beard. I have these things for a reason. I got this specific job for a reason. I don’t want to settle down in a suburb yet. I don’t want to work in an office and be tied down to a health insurance policy or a decent 401k package. I don’t want to spend my nights alone (or with a pet dog), watching TV, and waiting patiently to fall asleep so that, tomorrow, I can repeat the same mundane tasks I performed earlier in the day. In order to avoid adulthood, then, I have to wallow in the filth that is America’s food service sector.

This recognition is what sets me apart from most of my fellow line cooks, I think. Drug use is rampant in the trailer and behind the bar. Many of my fellow co-workers show up to work with booze on their breath. Their pupils are almost always dilated or their eyes glazed over. If they are not buzzed when they show up for their shift, they are in a bad mood. Attitudes toward the job in particular and life in general are poor, to say the least. Cooperation is viewed as a sign of weakness in the minds of many line cooks. Short-term incarceration is a frequent occurrence. The turnover rate at my place of employment is astronomical. It’s higher than the phone-based “student fundraiser” job I had in college, and it’s a normal rate here in the ATX.

History, law, and art are not discussed in private conversations. Jokes about penises, flatulence, and women govern comradely ties. This is the culture I wanted to re-immerse myself in. This is high school (and church) in Old Hangtown. This is what keeps me hungry and competitive. (It also pays my bills, of course.)

Working shitty jobs has enabled me to travel all over the country and all over the world in a unique and almost legendary manner. Working shitty jobs has given me a perspective on life that few people in my position, as a relatively privileged white boy, are able to have. Working shitty jobs has helped me to be grateful for the opportunities that I have earned for myself over the years. Working shitty jobs has shaped my sense of self, my sense of humor, and my sense of soul in a deeply profound manner. Working shitty jobs has opened up social networks to me that are otherwise inaccessible to American WASPs. Working shitty jobs has reinforced with grit my stubborn, indomitable dignity.

Making gourmet donuts for drunk people in Texas is easily the worst job I’ve ever had. It would have been the worst job I’ve ever had even if it wasn’t based out of a trailer. I am truly thankful to my entrepreneurial employers, their management team, and my co-workers for their hospitality, generosity, and patience over the past five months. I couldn’t have asked for a better send off into the brave new world of conformity, comfort, and consumerism.

Read more here.

h/t American Digest

Pizzagate

Have you heard about Pizzagate? Apparently there was something in the Podesta emails about sexual abuse of children. A journalist wrote about it, and his/her writing was banned at Reddit. A website called Living Resistance published what the journalist wrote. Here are some excerpts.

To honestly decide whether that’s what we are seeing in the Podesta emails, please have a look at this one example. Look at the invitation at the end of the thread. Ms Luzzatto is inviting people (among which are John and Mary Podesta) to a farm in Lovettsville. This is what she says:

We plan to heat the pool, so a swim is a possibility. Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in that pool for sure.

...“cheese pizza” is a known euphemism for “child porn” (and there are abundant examples in the Podesta emails where that term is used in very strange and out-of-context manners).

How about the fact that John and Tony Podesta are old friends of Jeffery Epstein, Dennis Hastert and Clement Freud, three convicted child molesters? Who has so many child rapists as friends? Who stays friends with child rapists after they’re exposed and convicted?

How about the Katy Grannan photos plastered around the Podestas’ mansion, depicting naked teenagers?

How about the underground vault on the Podestas’ property which admittedly allows them to watch “very complicated video pieces”?

...In terms of national systemicity, the statistics are eloquent. The International Centre for Missing Children (ICMEC) estimates that 8 million children are reported missing each year around the world.

Of that number, according to U.S. Department of Justice research, an estimated 800,000 children will go missing in the United States alone — a rate of over 2’000 missing children each day — with 466,949 of those cases entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database in 2014.

With a current child population(aged 0 – 17) of around 74 million in the United States, the U.S. Department of Justice figures equate to around 1 child in every 92 going missing in the United States each year.

This looks like a systemic problem indeed. Childhood disappearancesoutnumber cancer deaths in the United States by one third.
Therefore, given the sheer amount of leaked emails, and the suspected phenomenon’s scale and repartition, it is likely the data dumps (Podesta and other Wikileaks, Guccifer 1/2, DNCLeaks, etc.) provide some clue to the problem.

Therefore, they should be investigated thoroughly under than particular lens, and suspicions need to be corroborated with other (and previously) known facts.

Read more here.

"If you are a normal person, the mainline Protestant churches have nothing to offer but endless lectures about the joys of liberalism."

The Z Man writes,

Part of what has destroyed the mainline Protestant churches is their full-throated embrace of Progressive lunacy. At my friend’s ordination, three of the people ordained were woman. Judging by the haircuts, all three were lesbians. Gay marriage is a huge issue in these churches, driving off the sensible and leaving only those who see Christianity as a vehicle for Progressive activism. Many of these churches are no longer Christian, as a theological matter. They are just Progressive meeting houses for the deranged.

If you are a normal person, the mainline Protestant churches have nothing to offer but endless lectures about the joys of liberalism. It’s a familiar pattern. First the women take over, then the men leave, except for the guys willing to take orders from the gals. Then the normal women bolt. This boiling off of the sensible eventually leaves the crazies in charge of the organization. Before long the freak flag is hoisted and it is the bar in Star Wars. It’s the pattern we saw with Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the US.

A similar thing seems to be happening in the Catholic Church, which had managed to resist the same fate until recently. The turning point appears to have been the sex scandals, which have been used by the lunatics to push out the sensible. It’s also emptied the pews in many parts of the world, as parishioners simply could not tolerate the handling of these cases. The conservatives in the Church should have gone on the offensive to purge the pink monasteries and the buggerers. Instead they surrendered.

It is hard to know if the Red Pope will live long enough to destroy the Church, but he will certainly cripple it. There is only one good response to the death of Fidel Castro and that is “enjoy hell.” That’s true for the Pope, as well. It’s perfectly fine for the religious to pray for the souls of the wicked, but it is not required. The Pope should be the one guy making that point, but instead he took the opportunity to celebrate the life of a homicidal maniac. The reason is Fidel belongs to the same Church as the Pope – the Communist Church.

What’s happening with the Catholic Church is it is following the same path as the Protestant churches. They are inviting in people from other religions, thinking they will be Catholic first and communist or Progressive second. It never works that way. The secular faith always comes first, which is why you can never find a liberal Catholic, who is pro-life. Their liberal faith will never tolerate opposition to abortion and their liberalism trumps everything else. A man cannot have two religions; one must be dominant.

The demise of the high church in the West was inevitable. Big, highly organized organizations need protection from the state to survive. McDonalds cannot exist without government protection. This is especially true of churches, which often challenge the wishes of the rulers. It’s why the Catholics were willing to cut deals with both communists and fascists. It is why the Orthodox Church supports Putin. No above ground church can exist at war with the ruling class. They always have to cut a deal.

When the the ruling classes of the West began to abandon their Christianity, it was just a matter of time. Students of the French Revolution know that the radical’s hostility to the Church started with economics, but quickly became ideological. As the religion of the Western ruling classes became one version of leftism or another, hostility to the high church was inevitable. It took longer in the US than Europe, but we are well on our way to see the elimination of the main churches.

Read more here.

"When I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like Fidel Castro, not screaming in terror, like his victims."

Mark Steyn notes the words used by Barack Obama on the passing of Fidel Castro:

At this time of Fidel Castro's passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans - in Cuba and in the United States - with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives...

Indeed. He "altered the course of individual lives" by ending them. Of those he didn't end, 20 per cent of the population fled the country. Some made it to Miami, others had the course of their lives altered by winding up in a watery grave. Among the many "individual lives" he "altered" was Mercedes Fernandez's, who before taking up residence in Castro's prison had never before had to "defecate parasites six centimeters long". As the Swedish author Johan Norberg remarked:

When I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like Fidel Castro, not screaming in terror, like his victims.

Read more here.

What would you do about a cobra in your toilet?

Cara Giaimo reports in Atlas Obscura,

Last Tuesday, around 9 a.m., an apartment-dweller in Pretoria, South Africa went into the bathroom and found a surprise. An enormous cobra, several feet long and the width of a human forearm, was poking his hooded head out of the toilet.

OK, fine. The resident did what you do in such situations—called the snake catcher, Barry Greenshields, who arrived promptly. Greenshields, who has years of wrangling experience, was impressed by the snake. In a video posted on News24, he lifts it with snake prongs, whistling, “How long is this thing!” It rises endlessly out of the bowl, as if charmed.

But his best efforts couldn’t dislodge it—it seemed to be clinging to something. The snake, now angry, disappeared into the toilet, and Greenshields went knocking around different apartment doors, trying to find his quarry.

No dice. When he left the building that day, he advised residents to keep their toilet lids closed. Later, he returned to put cameras in the pipes, to track it.

Read more here.

h/t Gerard

Carrier to keep most of its jobs in the US.

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis. The company had previously announced plans to move 2,000 factory jobs from Indiana to Mexico. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Nelson Schwartz reports in the New York Times,

From the earliest days of his campaign, Donald J. Trump made keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States his signature economic issue, and the decision by Carrier, the big air-conditioner company, to move 2,000 of them from Indiana to Mexico was a tailor-made talking point for him on the stump.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor and the vice-president elect, plan to appear at Carrier’s Indianapolis plant to announce they’ve struck a deal with the company to keep a majority of the jobs in the state, according to officials with the transition team as well as Carrier.

Read more here.

"No squaring that circle"

Z Man writes,

...patriotism and multiculturalism can never coexist. The former assumes a set of value judgments based on nationality and ethnicity. The latter explicitly rejects those values. In fact, multiculturalism is nothing more than the nullification of patriotism and nationalism. There’s no squaring that circle.

...if anyone dares notice diversity in public, the people in charge will land on him like Puritan witch hunters. One of the hilarious parts of reading crime stories is how the reporters go to great lengths to conceal the race of the criminal. We end up with stories about a “tall man with a red cap” being jailed for murder. The result of this absurd contradiction is that diversity has become synonymous with danger and the promotion of it erodes trust in the people promoting it.

The fact is, the meritocratic system that supports the managerial class is ruthlessly authoritarian. If you don’t check the right boxes, you cannot advance. This system is by design intended to boil off anything resembling dissent or innovation. It is why the Buckley Right locked shields with the Left in opposition to Trump. Their loyalty is to a system that has bestowed credentials and honors on them, along with a lifestyle they could never achieve outside in the dreaded private sector. Political ideology is just a decoration.

A system that cannot tolerate dissent and makes war on anything that challenges it, cannot be made compatible with popular resistance to its polices. The managerial class can search about for tactics and language to try and square this circle, but they are faced with an irrepressible conflict. We either have normal countries with popular governments, responsive to the will of the people, or, we have an authoritarian, technocratic managerial state. It’s one or the other, but not both.

Read more here.

Sleeper cells

Jim Geraghty analyzes the writings of the Ohio State student who attacked and killed people for Allah.

He’s convinced he and his fellow members of his faith are victims of an aggressive, malevolent West. He believes this while attending class at Ohio State University. Nobody’s oppressing him. No one’s imprisoning him without charges, trial, or appeal. Nobody’s trying to kill him. No one’s closing his mosque, or banning his faith. He’s got a better life with more opportunities, freedom, and material abundance than probably 90-some percent of his fellow Muslims around the world. And he still thinks he’s a victim of a malevolent America, and that everyone around him is a legitimate target for retribution.

He’s convinced that every Muslim around him privately agrees with him, but hides their true views from the non-Muslim world around them. He acknowledges that his fellow believers are carrying out “lone wolf attacks” and even taunts, “every single Muslim who disapproves of my actions is a sleeper cell, waiting for a signal. I am warning you, Oh America.”

Read more here.

Are you still "appalled," Hillary? And what about that "direct threat to democracy?"

The high must face the same legal process as the low in any society that even pretends to justice."

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media,

...astoundingly, after receiving what many are calling a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, Clinton joined forces with Stein in her crusade. I don't think I've ever seen a dopier, more self-destructive example of "poking the lion," especially since there are so many areas in which she could be liable from a mere obstruction of justice charge on to a full RICO investigation that could literally implicate dozens of members of her already-reeling political party.

...Who recommended this to Hillary among that flotilla of supposedly smart lawyers surrounding her? What a mistake they and she made. Many people on the Republican side had approved of Trump's magnanimity. I doubt many are now.

Speaking only for myself, I originally, though somewhat reluctantly, agreed that Trump was right and moving on was the best approach, even though it would have left a stain on the rule of law in our country forever. The high must face the same legal process as the low in any society that even pretends to justice.

No longer. I don't say "lock her up" -- yet. I say we need a full and transparent investigation of everything from the email scandal to Benghazi to the Clinton Foundation. Let it all hang out. Let even-handed justice be served.

Mr. Sessions, you have a job to do. I'm sure there are many already in place in the FBI who will be delighted to help you....Rage, envy, and entitlement seem more at play here - not that she doesn't have plenty to be guilty about, not the least of which is leaving her political party the shadow of its former self.

Read more here.

Trump's pick to head Health and Human Services looks like a good one!

Georgia Representative Tom Price is Trump's pick to head Health and Human Services.

Robert Pear reports in the New York Times,

If President-elect Donald J. Trump wanted a cabinet secretary who could help him dismantle and replace President Obama’s health care law, he could not have found anyone more prepared than Representative Tom Price, who has been studying how to accomplish that goal for more than six years.

Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon who represents many of the northern suburbs of Atlanta, speaks with the self-assurance of a doctor about to perform another joint-replacement procedure. He knows the task and will proceed with brisk efficiency.

In debate on the Affordable Care Act in 2009, Mr. Price railed against “a stifling and oppressive federal government,” a theme that pervades his politics. His most frequent objection to the law is that it interferes with the ability of patients and doctors to make medical decisions — a concern he will surely take with him if he wins Senate confirmation.

“The practicing physician and the patient could not have a better friend in that office than Tom Price,” said Representative Michael C. Burgess, Republican of Texas, who is also a physician.

Read more here.

Drone helps catch crooks

Emory Bryan reports,

TULSA, Oklahoma - Two men were arrested Monday morning after a business burglary - and a short chase - by a drone.
An eyewitness saw the break-in happening.

That eyewitness was talking to a drone pilot outside The Vault, where the break-in happened, so when the suspects took off, the drone did too.

David Bell flies his drone downtown often, mainly just to get beauty shots.

"Pretty amazing little thing," Bell said.

Before today, he's never needed to chase down burglars.

He was outside the Vault, upstairs at what's called the Tom Tom Room, when he and another man saw someone come out of a broken window with two bottles of scotch.

It's not the first time business owner Libby Billings has dealt with a burglar.

"Maybe they're a little drunk or need a fix, I don't know, but all three times, they've been caught because I have cameras," Billings said.

This time, the cameras were inside, and overhead.


When the burglars left the vault, they walked across the street to a park bench and started drinking. What they didn't know was that they were being followed overhead, by a drone.

"He's oblivious of it, never heard it I guess," Bell said. "[He] went down to a park bench, sat down and started drinking the bottle of liquor he stole."

With Bell watching the live feed, the police were guided right to them.

Officers arrested two men, one for public intoxication and the other for the break-in.

"They were busted, but they kind of didn't believe that," Billings said. "'What? You have a drone?' Yes, we do."

Billings figures the damage is about $1,000, the investment in cameras worth it to catch criminals, but the added advantage of a drone was something even she hadn't counted on.

Happy Thanksgiving? Not so much.

AWR Hawkins reports at Breitbart,

Violence raged in gun-controlled Chicago over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, with 62 people shot and wounded, another eight people shot and killed.

...According to the Chicago Tribune, the Thanksgiving holiday weekend violence brings Chicago to nearly 4,000 shooting victims for the year. That figure includes fatal and non-fatal shootings.

...Chicago has long been a gun control experiment gone awry. The city enacted a ban on handgun ownership in 1982 and the Tribune reported that the next 10 years witnessed “murders [jump] by 41 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.” And this jump made sense. After all, when bans are enacted only the criminals remain armed.

The ban was overturned in 2010 via the Supreme Court ruling in McDonald v Chicago, but city leaders have worked diligently to preserve the vestiges of the ban at every turn in road. And municipal and county limits on the number of gun stores allowed in Chicago, together with rules on the locations of those stores and a ridiculous amount of regulation on acquiring and carrying guns for self-defense, have coalesced to guarantee that criminals maintain an advantage similar to what they enjoyed when the ban was in place.

The latest proposed requirement for Chicago is to mandate serial numbers be placed on all bullets and bullet casings. This is being pushed by state representative Sonya Harper (D-6th) as way to combat crime. In the real world such a requirement will not do anything to stop crime, but it will drive up the cost of ammunition, thereby making it even more difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire the tools they need to defend themselves and their families.

Read more here.

Trump meeting with Romney again today

Which one is an alpha male?

Trump is meeting again with Romney today. According to Breitbart,

The other meetings are with:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
CEO of Concerned Veterans for America Pete Hagseth
President and CEO of Rolls-Royce America Marion Blakey
Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN)
Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)
Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA)
President and COO of Goldman Sachs Gary Cohn
The President-elect and Vice President-elect have held a total of 68 meetings with people to discuss the administration and share ideas. They have also spoken with more than 41 world leaders.

Trump announced early on Tuesday morning that he tapped Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) to head the Department of Health and Human Service and Seema Verma for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

Trump’s spokesman Jason Miller told reporters there will be another announcement later on Tuesday.

“We’ll have another cabinet level appointment coming later this afternoon,” Miller stated on Tuesday morning.

That's the gal she knows

Linda Tripp, a woman who knows Hillary Clinton oh so well, writes,

As Donald Trump faced the enormity of his win, he gave a heartfelt, humble and gracious victory speech, one which in its inclusiveness was clearly meant to begin our national healing. Hillary’s voters across the country finally went to bed, monumentally let down by all of it. Their mistake was in believing she actually cared about all of them.

...Countless Presidents and Prime Ministers, world leaders all, have been and are women. Some going back decades. For the sake of argument, we won’t even consider the female surgeons, pilots, astronauts, CEOs, elected officials and diplomats to name just a few both here and around the world who years later are still picking shards of glass out of their hairdos. Women have long since arrived at the pinnacle of power, they are just named something other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Apparently they don’t count.

...So as the President-elect conducts a well-disciplined transition and prepares to lead the nation in a matter of weeks, the country will simply have to endure Hillary’s behind-the-scenes temper tantrum. With strains of “Hail to the Chief” echoing silently in her mind, all else pales for Hillary. Unity be damned. She’s going for it. Not for the good of the country. Never for the good of the country. It is for personal achievement, for personal gain, for personal riches. And that’s the gal I know.

Read more here.

Consequences

President-elect Donald Trump suggests that there ought to be a penalty for burning the American flag, as several Massachusets students did this weekend. Trump suggests a year in jail or loss of citizenship. Read more here.

Do you see who is eating all the hay?

Castro admirer Kaepernick gets flattened by the son of Cuban immigrants

Olaf Ekberg writes at The Mirror,

It was, perhaps, a bit of poetic justice that found the son of a Cuban immigrant tackling the communist dictator-loving San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to end the game.

Kaepernick, who recently showed his affection for now-dead Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, was dashing for the end zone in the final seconds of the game against the Miami Dolphins when Kiko Alonso, the son of a Cuban immigrant, absolutely flattened him.

Read more and watch the video of Alonso flattening Kaepernick here.

Foreign policy

At the American Interest Nial Ferguson writes,

Obama’s foreign policy has been a failure, most obviously in the Middle East, where the smoldering ruin that is Syria—not to mention Iraq and Libya—attests to the fundamental naivety of his approach, dating all the way back to the 2009 Cairo speech. The President came to believe he had an ingenious strategy to establish geopolitical balance between Sunni and Shi’a. But by treating America’s Arab friends with open disdain, while cutting a nuclear deal with Iran that has left Tehran free to wage proxy wars across the region, Obama has achieved not peace but a fractal geometry of conflict and a frightening, possibly nuclear, arms race. At the same time, he has allowed Russia to become a major player in the Middle East for the first time since Kissinger squeezed the Soviets out of Egypt in the 1972-79 period. The death toll in the Syrian war now approaches half a million; who knows how much higher it will rise between now and Inauguration Day?

Meanwhile, global terrorism has surged under Obama. Of the past 16 years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with 93 countries experiencing an attack and 32,765 people killed. 2015 was the second worst, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths from terrorism: ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. In this context, the President’s claims to be succeeding against what he euphemistically calls “violent extremism” are absurd. Much opprobrium has been heaped on Donald Trump in the course of the past year. But there was much that was true in his underreported August 15 foreign policy speech on the subject of Islamic extremism and the failure of the Obama Administration to defeat it.10

The “Obama Doctrine” has failed in Europe, too, where English voters opted to leave the EU in defiance of the President’s threats, and where the German leadership he recently praised has delivered, first, an unnecessarily protracted financial crisis in the European periphery and, second, a disastrous influx to the core of migrants, some but not all of them refugees from a region that Europe had intervened in just enough to exacerbate its instability. The President has also failed in eastern Europe, where not only has Ukraine been invaded and Crimea annexed, but also Hungary and now Poland have opted to deviate sharply from the President’s liberal “arc of history.” Finally, his foreign policy has failed in Asia, where little remains of the much-vaunted pivot. “If you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea,” the President boasted in an interview published in March, “we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances.”11 The new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, apparently did not receive this memorandum. In October he went to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to announce his “separation from the United States.”

Kissinger’s recommendations to Trump may be summarized as follows:
Do not go all-out into a confrontation with China, whether on trade or the South China Sea. Rather, seek “comprehensive discussion” and aim to pursue that policy of dialogue and “co-evolution” recommended in World Order. Kissinger sees the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, quite regularly. When he says that Xi regards “confrontation as too dangerous” and thinks that “adversarial countries must become partners and cooperate on a win-win basis,” he speaks with authority. The questions the Chinese want to ask the new President, according to Kissinger, are these: “If we were you, we might try to suppress your rise. Do you seek to suppress us? If you do not, what will the world look like when we are both strong, as we expect to be?” Trump needs to have answers to these questions. The alternative, as Kissinger has said repeatedly, is for the United States and China to talk past each other until they stumble into 1914 in the Pacific, not to mention in cyberspace.

Given a weakened, traumatized, post-imperial Russia, the recognition Putin craves is that of “a great power, as an equal, and not as a supplicant in an American-designed system.” Kissinger’s message to Trump is well calibrated to appeal to his instincts: “It is not possible to bring Russia into the international system by conversion. It requires deal-making, but also understanding.” The central deal, Kissinger argues, would turn Ukraine into “a bridge between NATO and Russia rather than an outpost of either side...

...Treat Brexit as an opportunity to steer the continental Europeans away from bureaucratic introspection and back to strategic responsibility.

Make peace in Syria rather as we made peace in the former Yugoslavia nearly twenty years ago. Kissinger now recommends a “cantonization” of Syria similar to the federalization of Bosnia under the Washington and Dayton agreements, with an “off-ramp for Assad” lasting around a year, all under the “supervision” of the interested outside powers. Iran must be contained, much as the Soviet Union was in the Cold War, because it poses a similar threat, acting as both an imperial state and a revolutionary cause. But keep the Iran agreement because to abandon it now “would free Iran from more constraints than it would free the United States.” And finally take advantage of the new-found, albeit tacit, anti-Iranian and anti-ISIS alignment of the Arab states with Israel to achieve a new kind of Arab-sponsored peace deal that would “improve the lives of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible, perhaps including quasi-sovereignty . . . that is, de facto autonomy without a legalistic superstructure.”

Okay, I admit it. This article just went on and on, and I lost interest. but you can read much, much more here.

Would Trump really appoint Romney Secretary of State?

So, is Trump going to offer the Secretary of State job to Romney? Chateau Heartiste offers this analysis:

everyone needs to remember the force of nature that is Trump. He is a good-hearted, magnanimous alpha male (with a horny level for the ages) who never forgets a backstabber. I believe he enjoys planning his revenge on his enemies as much as executing it.

Given these premises, think about what you would do in Trump’s position to maximally and publicly humiliate someone who had betrayed you at your weakest moment? You’d invite Romney to your gilded hotel headquarters, promise him SoS, release him on a fume of hope and greed, and the next day have Conway issue a few tweets revealing how many Trump supporters loathe the idea of Romney receiving a position in Trump’s Cabinet.

Romney now thinks Trump really wanted him, against the wishes of his base and the advice of his campaign team. Suddenly, without warning, on a day of his choosing, Trump announces Dana Rohrabacher for SoS. Romney suffers a public humiliation so profound his power to influence anyone in Trumpworld is reduced to zero.

I could be off-base. Maybe Conway really did go rogue, and is in her special way trying to get Trump to rethink the wisdom of selecting Romney, while Trump for his part perhaps views Romney as cuck-approved insurance against a GOPe insurrection during his reign.

We’ll find out when Trump makes his SoS choice and announces it on Twitter and YouTube, bypassing the legacy media and adding insult to the parade of humiliations that the media have rightfully endured this past year.

Are we forgetting that Obama appointed his rival Hillary Clinton to the same post? Do you see any similarities?

What was Trump saying to Romney?

The dollar figures

Frosty Woolrich reports at US Defense Watch,

Each year, illegal Mexican migrant workers send $24,000,000,000.00 (billion) back to Mexico in cash transfers. American employers paid them under the table and off the books with fraudulent identification. They never paid taxes, FICA or Social Security on that money. Their employers wrangled financial murder for the past 40 years. (Source: Annual cash transfers to Mexico, www.PolitoFact.com)

While illegal alien workers transfer THAT much money annually, all legal and illegal immigrants account for $120,000,000,000.00 (billion) sent back to Mexico, South America, Africa and Asia. In other words, immigrants from all countries bleed America financially to death. (Source: Worldwide cash transfers out of America, www.dailymail.co.uk)

At the same time, Mexico smuggles $50 billion annually of drugs into America across a non-guarded, non-existent border. I’ve traveled the 1,952 mile Mexican-American border three times to witness that it allows anyone at any time to enter the USA in thousands of unguarded locations. (Source: www.DrugAbuse.net)

A wall-impregnable fence system would stop 500,000 illegal aliens from violating our borders annually. A wall-impregnable fence system would stop them. (Source: www.cis.org, Dr. Steve Camarata, “500,000 illegals cross border annually”)

It would also stop illegal alien costs across 15 federal agencies for education, medical care, food stamps, etc. at $113,000,000.00 (billion) annually. (Source:www.TheSocialContract.com, Costs of illegal immigration.)

Read more here.

Which party racializes our politics?

Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal,

Democratic pundits are calling on their party to court working-class and non-coastal whites in the wake of this month’s electoral rout. But the Democratic Party is now dominated by identity politics, which defines whites, particularly heterosexual males, as oppressors of every other population in the U.S. Why should the targets of such thinking embrace an ideology that scorns them?

She adds that police

have been living through two years of racialized hatred directed at them in the streets, to the applause of many Democratic politicians. Black Lives Matter rhetoric consists of slogans like: “CPD [Chicago Police Department] KKK, how many children did you kill today?” “Fuck the police,” and “Racist, killer cops.” Officers have been assassinated by Black Lives Matter-inspired killers who set out to kill whites in general and white police officers in particular. Gun murders of law enforcement officers are up 67 percent this year through November 23, following five ambushes and attacks over the November 18 weekend that left a San Antonio police officer and a U.S. marshall dead. A few days before those weekend shootings, anarchist wannabes in Austin led a counting chant based on the template: “What’s better than X dead cops? X + 1 Dead Cops.”

President Obama welcomed Black Lives Matter activists several times to the White House. He racialized the entire criminal-justice system, repeatedly accusing it of discriminating, often lethally, against blacks. At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July 2016, Obama declared that black parents were right to fear that “something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be shot by a cop simply for being “stupid.”

...claims of “structural racism and institutional oppression,” in the words of Brown University’s allegedly threatened black students, overlook the fact that every selective college in the country employs massive racial preferences in admissions favoring less academically qualified black and Hispanic students over more academically qualified white and Asian ones. Every faculty hiring search is a desperate exercise in finding black and Hispanic candidates whom rival colleges have not already scooped up at inflated prices. Far from being “post-racial,” campuses spend millions on racially and ethnically separate programming, separate dorms, separate administrators, and separate student centers. They have created entire fields devoted to specializing in one’s own “identity,” so long as that identity is non-white, non-male, or non-heterosexual. The central theme of those identity-based fields is that heterosexual, white (one could also add Christian) males are the source of all injustice in the world. Speaking on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show in the wake of Trump’s election, Emory philosophy professor George Yancy, author of Look, A White!, called for a nationwide “critique of whiteness,” which, per Yancy, is at the “core side of hegemony” in the U.S.

...When Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it” who belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” she was speaking the language of the academy, now incorporated into the Democratic worldview.

...Trump’s sally during the first Republican primary debate that “this country doesn’t have time” for “total political correctness” sent a signal that the reigning presumptions about oppression were finally vulnerable. The message resonated. Democrats will have to do much more than invoke traditional Democratic class warfare to convince non-elite white voters that the party does not see them as one of America’s biggest problems.

Read more here.

But they have strict gun control regulations!

Shut up and pay for it!

Yep!

What's good for the gander is good for the goose!

How the Left created the Trump voter

It didn't take long!

Staying true to the people who helped him win Florida!

Wikileaks releases more than half a million US diplomatic cables from 1978.

What were the key world events of 1979? Julian Assange writes,

If any year could be said to be the "year zero" of our modern era, 1979 is it.
In the Middle East, the Iranian revolution, the Saudi Islamic uprising and the Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords led not only to the present regional power dynamic but decisively changed the relationship between oil, militant Islam and the world.

The uprising at Mecca permanently shifted Saudi Arabia towards Wahhabism, leading to the transnational spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the US-Saudi destabilisation of Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden would leave his native Saudi Arabia for Pakistan to support the Afghan Mujahideen.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR would see Saudi Arabia and the CIA push billions of dollars to Mujahideen fighters as part of Operation Cyclone, fomenting the rise of al-Qaeda and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 1979 current of Islamification spread to Pakistan where the US embassy was burned to the ground and Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed.

The Iranian hostage crisis would go on to fatally undermine Jimmy Carter's presidency and see the election of Ronald Reagan.

Saddam Hussein? Took power in 1979....

Assange goes on to list key events month by month. Then, he announces

WikiLeaks releases more than half a million US diplomatic cables from 1978.

Go here to read more.

Conway says there is huge resistance to Romney. Priebus says there is not a problem. Which is it?

Already we have public disagreement among top Trump advisers. Kelleyanne Conway told CNN's Dana Bash yesterday that Trump supporters would feel "betrayed," if Trump picked Romney as Secretary of State. She said "the volume & intensity of grassroots resistance to Romney is breathtaking.”
Read more here.

Meanwhile, on Fox News Sunday Trump's incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus denied there was “open warfare” between Trump advisers and loyalists.

“It’s not about warfare,” he continued. “Yes, there is a lot of opinion about this. This is sort of a team of rivals context if he does go with governor Romney, but that should tell Americans where President-elect Trump’s head is, which is a place that will put the best possible place together for all Americans, whatever your religion, whatever your opinion is. He wants to move forward looking through the windshield and not the rear view mirror, and that’s where the president-elect’s head is at. And I think it’s a great place for Americans.”

Why the comment about religion? Is romney's Mormonism part of the reason some are opposing him?
Read more here.

Fighting back!

Anatonaia Okafor reports,

Conservative student organization, Turning Point USA, has released a new project called the Professor WatchList. The website enables students and parents to research professors that have a history of promoting a radical liberal agenda in their classrooms. The organization and new project is the brainchild of Charlie Kirk, the 23-year-old founder and president of Turning Point USA.

Boasting 1000 plus chapters nationwide and a presence in all 50 states, the four-year-old organization prides itself on developing conservative activists who stand up to big government in and out of their universities. The Professor WatchList is a culmination of years of information gathering from conservative students who feel that radical leaning professors give no space for unpopular thinking in the classroom. Think of the website as the new ratemyprofessor.com but for conservative, libertarian-leaning students.

Charlie Kirk told Independent Journal Review the site is merely a tool for students to help them make informed choices. Kirk writes:

“Alumni, donors, parents, and students deserve to know the biases that exist in our universities. This is an awareness tool, not calling for termination or action. We simply seek to educate the public on the radical behavior that has taken over our colleges and universities.”

The mission of the project is simple:

“...to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Kirk said that the website is entirely based on past real-life incidents of professors with a history of spreading radical liberal bias in their classes.

“Professor watchlist is an aggregated website focused on educating students, parents, and alumni on the biases that exist in college with specific, cited examples. This website will continue to gather examples citing each of them with news clippings and evidence.”

Read more here.

The Liberator and the Ghostgunner

"Where is the middle ground between liberty and tyranny?"


h/h Mike Miles

Fidel and his thugs

Ana Quintana writes in The Daily Signal,

...My grandfather would often tell us of how he would hide indoors while Fidel’s firing squads would slaughter innocent people nearby.

Religion was criminalized, dissent was violently punished, and Cuban citizens became property of their communist state. Fidel’s rule brought the world to its closest point of nuclear war during those fateful 13 days in 1962. He indoctrinated hate and pushed millions out of their country.

...As a first-generation Cuban-American who grew up in Miami, I know this story all too well. My family was forced to leave Cuba after not bowing to the regime. They and hundreds of other families sought refuge at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana and for over a week they lived in squalor there, attempting to figure out their next steps.

Returning to their home was not an option; Fidel’s thugs had declared the families persona non grata and vandalized their property. After some time, they were able to flee to the U.S. as part of the Mariel exodus in 1981. While they temporarily lived in a refugee camp upon arrival, they are now thriving Americans, like the rest of the Cuban exile community. To this day, my family has never returned to Cuba.

In reality, it is not that important to me whether Fidel is alive or dead. What matters is that the same repressive government and hostility toward freedom he created remains strong.

Now more than ever, America needs to shift back to a policy of empowering the Cuban people. Supporting freedom-loving dissidents in their efforts to salvage their country should once again be a priority for the U.S.

Yet since Dec. 17, 2014, America has been on the wrong side of history. While well intentioned, President Barack Obama’s policy of engaging the Castro regime clearly has not been working.

Instead of pushing for freedom, the U.S. has legitimized the Western Hemisphere’s longest military dictatorship. Emboldened by U.S. complacency, the regime in the past two years has produced historic levels of political and religious persecution.

As a Christian, I am enjoined to pray that Fidel Castro finds the absolution in death he denied millions throughout their lives. However reluctantly, I will do so.

But as the daughter of Cuban political refugees, his death is a reminder of our duty to continue bearing witness of the horrors committed in the name of Fidel’s revolution.

Read more here.
h/t Mike Miles

"That’s populism: Doing what you know is wrong, heedless of harmful consequences — some unintended, others easily foreseeable — because the masses will perceive it as empathy."

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...conservatives are quite good at perceiving problems — especially problems demagogically manufactured into crises for the purpose of rationalizing populist solutions of the statist variety. In reality, the chief political weakness of conservatism is that modern Americans are conditioned to expect that government can — or must at least try to — solve all our problems. It is the lot of conservatives to resist ill-conceived solutions. Populism cannot change the fact that government is incapable of solving problems upstream of government — problems of culture and complexity that government amelioration efforts, however well-intentioned, often make worse.

...Stephen Moore, by contrast, is telling conservatives to abandon their principles entirely: Surrender to the zeitgeist, deep-six the GOP’s image as the (highly imperfect) vehicle of Reagan conservatism, and become “Trump’s populist working-class party.”

He reportedly told some fairly aghast congressional Republicans that it means helping Trump deliver on his campaign promises . . . even if lawmakers think some of them are dumb ideas — just as Moore does. Trump, for example, wants an Obama-like stimulus of a trillion dollars for roads, bridges, etc. Moore’s response? “I don’t want to spend all that money on infrastructure. I think it’s mostly a waste of money. But if voters want it, they should get it.”

That’s populism: Doing what you know is wrong, heedless of harmful consequences — some unintended, others easily foreseeable — because the masses will perceive it as empathy.

In the United States, it is the states, not the public at large, that elect the president. Absent that arrangement, the Constitution would not have been adopted, and the nation would not have been founded. Our republic has become more democratic, but honoring the original understanding ensures that elections remain national in the sense that candidates must court all the states and be responsive to their varying concerns.

Read more here.

We may not be done with Obama

David Greenfield writes at Doug Ross @ Journal,

Obama can no longer be commander-in-chief. Instead he’s plotting to become organizer-in-chief.

...In his post-election conference call with his OFA troops, Obama told them, “I’m giving you like a week and a half to get over it”. Then it would be time to “move forward not only to protect what we’ve accomplished, but also to see this as an opportunity”. What opportunity could there be in Trump’s win?

...Obama is now the only major national figure still standing among the Democrats. After Hillary’s defeat, he’s worked hard to attribute the loss to her shortcomings, not his policies and decisions. That’s not just to soothe his ego. If he’s going to dictate the future of his party, he can’t afford to be blamed for its latest disaster. And Obama is still determined to dictate the future of the party and the country.

He’s an organizer and a campaigner at the vanguard of a radical movement that seeks to control traditional institutions, but doesn’t feel bound by them. Unlike Bill Clinton, his plans don’t begin and end with the White House. As an organizer, Obama is equipped to build bases of power outside traditional institutions. And that is exactly what he is doing.

The demoralization of the Democrats is, as Obama put it, an opportunity. Social chaos is a time for the left to overthrow and undermine traditional institutions. Fear, anger and despair are radicalizing. The left has always operated by throwing bombs and then profiting from the fallout. That’s Obama’s agenda. Having wrecked the country and the Democrats, he sees that not as a setback, but as an opportunity.

While the leftist rioters in the streets are garnering the most attention, the real threat comes from the network of staffers dubbed Obama Anonymous which are beginning to organize and coordinate. OFA is Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons built Clintonworld around staffers, but its goal was harvesting money. Obama Inc. is being built around organizing and activism. Like Clintonworld, it will be a network encompassing a variety of political and non-profit institutions. Unlike them, it will be much less focused on directing money to its bosses in preparation for an election. Instead it will function like a traditional leftist movement, merging influence operations with crowdsourced mobilization.

OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was. The Clintons hoped to ride back to power on a giant wave of money. Obama is taking a much more radical course.

The staffers exiting government are being wired into Obama Inc. whether or not they take jobs directly working for him. The OFA alumni are building networks across organizations while taking their marching orders from him. They expect Obama to lead them back from the wilderness and into the halls of power.

He’s told them so.

“I'm going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen. But that's not so far off,” he assured them. “I'm still fired up and I'm still ready to go.” His next comments promised that radical political change could and would take place.

Obama isn’t going to retire. He’s not going to spend years puttering around with a presidential library. He’s not even going to set up a Clintonesque slush fund and try to make his wife president. Instead he wants to force radical change from outside the White House by using the network he’s built.

Obama believes that he can rule America from outside the White House. And he might be right.

...The Democrats didn’t respond to their defeat, one of a sequence, by trying to move to the center. Instead there is every sign that they are moving further to the left. Keith Ellison, a radical leftist with an anti-Semitic past, is tipped to head the DNC. Schumer still has the Senate, but Elizabeth Warren may have it before too long. Combine that with Obama as the president-in-exile and the Dems will be more radical and extremist than they were even when Obama was sitting in the White House.

The Democrats are ceasing to be a national party. Instead they are becoming a nationalizing party. They are losing their presence in much of the country, from state legislature to state legislature, and becoming the party of major cities and the national government. Their agenda is to move power from local areas to central ones, from the villages and the suburbs to the cities, from states to D.C. and from locally elected legislators in D.C. to the satellite bureaucracies of the Federal government.

Obama sees Hillary’s defeat as an opportunity to burn the Dem’s last bridges with the larger country and its “bitter clingers”, to double down on nationalizing power and to define the political narrative around the agendas of urban elites.

...Obama will move to consolidate the left. And then the Democrats. He will function as a president-in-exile heading up the opposition to Trump. When it comes to verbally challenging Trump, Obama will be more likely to be interviewed and heard than Ellison or Schumer. And his people will coordinate responses across the left from street level organizing to think tanks and policy moves. ...The election was a catastrophic disaster for the Democrats, but it opened all sorts of doors for Obama.

Obama believes that he can find the key to beating Trump in the traditional tactics of the left. But most is ideology and power. Obama is not done transforming America. And America isn’t done with him yet.

Read more here.

Some theories about voter fraud

The next topic Bookworm takes up is voter fraud.

...Part One of my universal theory is that Obama won in 2012 because he had two advantages over Romney: (1) a superb “get out the vote” infrastructure in urban areas and (2) in those same urban areas, a superb “get out the illegal vote” infrastructure. This second machine reached out to all the urban illegal immigrants, dead voters, felons, and unregistered or irresponsible millennials — that is, all the people who make up the Democrat cohort and who would vote heavily in urban pockets during federal elections, if they could vote legally, if they weren’t dead, or if they weren’t sitting around in a pot haze and clinging to their safe spaces.

I think this poster gives an idea of the kind of voters I mean:


...You see, this year it turned out that the candidates weren’t fighting for control over urban voters, which the Dems have locked up both legally and illegally. Instead, they were fighting for control over the entire nation of voters . . . and the Democrats had never bothered to put either legal or illegal “get out the vote” systems in place in non-urban America. Trump, however through his rhetoric, and through his orthodox Jewish son-in-law’s smarts, reached the formerly sleeping red counties, not through fraud, but through messaging that roused them from their torpor.

And this theory explains why Obama managed to win in 2012 and why, no matter how many recounts Soros and Clinton channel through Jill Stein, Trump will still win in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Very simply, the Dems copied their 2012 strategy and didn’t bother to gin up a new batch of fraudulent voters.

Now, having put forth my silly but satisfying theory, please feel free to go to town shredding it!

Read more here.