MORE REFUGEE FALLOUT: Poland lurches to right with election of Law and Justice party. “Poland has consolidated its rightwing shift after exit polls showed voters had handed an absolute majority in its parliamentary election to Law and Justice, a Eurosceptic party that is against immigration, wants family-focused welfare spending and has threatened to ban abortion and in-vitro fertilisation.”

IF A CORPORATION DID THIS, HEADS WOULD ROLL. SINCE IT’S THE GOVERNMENT, PROBABLY NO ONE WILL EVEN BE FIRED. BLM illegally sold thousands of wild horses for slaughter. “Between 2009 and 2012, rancher Tom Davis purchased the horses through the agency’s Wild Horse and Burro Program (WH&B) and wrongfully sent them to slaughter, according to the report from the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General. According to the allegations and news reports, Mr. Davis also had farming and trucking connections with former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.” Culture of corruption.

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WATCH WHAT THEY DO, NOT WHAT THEY SAY: Reader Alfred Harbich writes:

Here is a link to an interesting article out of my home country you might find interesting:

http://www.oe24.at/oesterreich/chronik/Oesterreicher-decken-sich-mit-Waffen-ein/209555400

It is in German, but the interesting points are:

> There are now 900,000 (legal) weapons in Austrian households, out of a population to 6 – 7 Million
> In the state of Upper Austria, all shotguns have been sold out
> Women are the fasted growing group buying weapons

Also, the refugee crisis is quoted as a direct cause of the rush to buy guns.

Here’s the Google Translation.

MIKE STOPA: A “Broken Windows” Approach To Illegal Immigration.

12 TIMES THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT KICKED THE CONSERVATIVE BASE IN THE TEETH.

IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year. But don’t worry, we’re bringing in lots of immigrants who’ll be happy to work for less than even that.

Hey, it means cheap gardeners and car washes for the one percent!

YOU’RE GONNA NEED ANOTHER DECIMAL PLACE: E.U. leaders agree to add capacity for receiving 100,000 more migrants.

THE FALLACY OF MOOD AFFILIATION, as spotted by Kevin D. Williamson, who writes in a study in contrarianism, “From Polio to Poverty, We Are Winning:”

The world isn’t ending.

To the economist Tyler Cowen the world is indebted for the phrase “the fallacy of mood affiliation,” which he explains:

It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.

This is a more eloquent version of what I sometimes refer to as the black-hats/white-hats school of political analysis. Examples of that are the fact that a great many people with an interest in Israeli–Palestinian issues begin and end consideration of any particular fact by asking whose fault it is (in the case of negative developments) or who gets the credit (in the case of positive developments). You know the type: If a hurricane should come crashing into the Holy Land, the imams and the progressive columnists will find a way to blame it on the Jews.

The Right engages in a fair amount of mood affiliation: The country must have suffered ruination, because the Obama administration, abetted by the hated “Republican establishment,” can have done nothing but ruin the country. But then you visit New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago, or you drive across northern Mississippi or the Texas Panhandle and see all those splendid farms and technology companies and factories producing all the best things that mankind can dream of, and, well, it certainly doesn’t look like a ruined country. In the past few years, I’ve been to the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and a few years further back India, Colombia, the Dominican Republic — it doesn’t look like ruined world. Of course there are unhappy corners: Haiti, Pakistan.

Francis Fukuyama was mocked for declaring “the end of history” as the Cold War came to a close, but he wasn’t really wrong. Haiti and Pakistan, and the territories currently held by the so-called Islamic State, do not represent the emergence of a credible competitor to liberal democracy; they are only failed states, and failure is something of which there is, alas, to be no end.

Read the whole thing.

R.I.P. AMAZON’S TOP REVIEW, HARRIET KLAUSNER: “Klausner, who died on October 15th at age 63, had published over 31,000 book reviews.”

NARRATIVE FAIL: More Americans Support Gun Rights Than Gun Control, Think Lax Mental Health Laws A Bigger Cause of Mass Shootings Than Gun Law Loopholes. “By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws (63 percent to 23 percent).”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: New York Times: A Majority Of Law Schools Are Scamming Students And Taxpayers.

If this sounds like a scam, that’s because it is. Florida Coastal, in Jacksonville, is one of six for-profit law schools in the country that have been vacuuming up hordes of young people, charging them outrageously high tuition and, after many of the students fail to become lawyers, sticking taxpayers with the tab for their loan defaults.

Yet for-profit schools are not the only offenders. A majority of American law schools, which have nonprofit status, are increasingly engaging in such behavior, and in the process threatening the future of legal education.

Why? The most significant explanation is also the simplest — free money.

In 2006, Congress extended the federal Direct PLUS Loan program to allow a graduate or professional student to borrow the full amount of tuition, no matter how high, and living expenses. The idea was to give more people access to higher education and thus, in theory, higher lifetime earnings. But broader access doesn’t mean much if degrees lead not to well-paying jobs but to heavy debt burdens. That is all too often the result with PLUS loans.

The consequences of this free flow of federal loans have been entirely predictable: Law schools jacked up tuition and accepted more students, even after the legal job market stalled and shrank in the wake of the recession. For years, law schools were able to obscure the poor market by refusing to publish meaningful employment information about their graduates. But in response to pressure from skeptical lawmakers and unhappy graduates, the schools began sharing the data — and it wasn’t a pretty picture. Forty-three percent of all 2013 law school graduates did not have long-term full-time legal jobs nine months after graduation, and the numbers are only getting worse. In 2012, the average law graduate’s debt was $140,000, 59 percent higher than eight years earlier.

When you subsidize something, the price goes up. This is true for all of higher education, not just law schools.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Is Trump Our Napoleon?

For a decade and a half Napoleon wrecked Europe. He hijacked the platitudes of the French Revolution to mask his own dictatorship at home and imperialism abroad. Yet today, two centuries after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he remains an icon for many in, and a few outside, France. Why? How could geniuses like the novelists Victor Hugo and Stendhal both acknowledge Napoleon’s pathologies and the damage that he did to the early 19^th century European world, and yet enthuse that he made the French feel both politically and morally “great?” Most French even today believe that he did.

Of course, for a while at least, Napoleon really did “make France great again,” at least in terms of territory and power.  At its pinnacle between 1806-11, Imperial France ruled the continent in a way not seen again until the Third Reich’s briefer rule between 1940 and 1942 from the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga River. It threatened to do away with the incompetent and reactionary regimes in every European country and replace them with a supposedly meritocratic class of social reformers, beholden to a natural Napoleonic hierarchy.

Moreover, Napoleon’s own political agenda was a mishmash of conservative authoritarianism and populist social justice. So effective was the strange brew that even to this day scholars fight over whether Napoleon was a proto-Hitler whose unhinged ambitions led to millions of innocent European, Russian, Caribbean and North Africa dead, or was a loyal defender of the French Revolution, whose eleventh-hour iron hand alone kept alive the threatened ideals of fraternity and egalitarianism.

Donald Trump is not going to invade Russia, but he is starting to sound a lot like Bonaparte, well aside from a similarly-narcissistic convergence of America’s future with his own Napoleonic persona.

Though how can Trump be Napoleon, when, at least according to Newsweek, our current one is still in office? And note, much like rival Time magazine comparing Obama to FDR in November of 2008, Newsweek meant this November, 2012 cover to be a compliment:

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Stamp Out Cultural Marxism In A Single Generation, from Brandon Smith at the Zero-Hedge econoblog:

Maintain your rights; they do not hurt other people: PC cultists will invariably argue that every person, whether he knows it or not, is indirectly harming others with his attitude, his beliefs, his refusal to associate, even his very breathing.  “We live in a society”, they say, “and everything we do affects everyone else…”.  Don’t take such accusations seriously; these people do not understand how freedom works.

Say, for instance, hypothetically, that I refuse to bake a gay wedding cake for a couple and I am accused of violating their rights in the name of preserving my own. I would immediately point out that no one is entitled to a gay wedding cake, baked by me or anyone else and I have every right to choose my associations based on whatever criteria I see fit. Now, a corrupt government entity may claim I do not have that right. But the fact is I do, and no one — not even government — can force me to bake a cake if I don’t want to. Also, I would point out that the gay couple in question has every right in a free society to bake their OWN damn cake or open their own cake shop to compete with mine. This is how freedom works. It is not based on collective entitlement; it is based on personal responsibility.

Refuse to deny the scientific fact of biological gender: Gender is first and foremost a genetic imperative. Society does not determine gender roles; nature does. A man who chops up his body and takes hormone pills to look like a woman is not and will never be a woman. A woman who tapes down her breasts and gets a short haircut will never be a man. There is no such thing as “transgendered” people. No amount of social justice or wishful thinking will ever allow them to reverse their genetic proclivities. Their psychological and sexual leanings do not change their inborn biological reality.

By extension, we should refuse to play along with this nonsense. I will never refer to a man in a wig and dress as a “woman.” I will never refer to a woman with identity issues as “transgendered.” They are what nature made them, and we should not police our pronouns just to falsely reassure them that they can deny nature.

Be prepared for the inevitable hard pushback, however. Notice for example how quickly this BBC “interviewer” goes on the offensive, rebutting every response from fellow leftist Germaine Greer, when she states men such as the former Bruce Jenner who have undergone transgendered procedures are “not women.” And of course, the inevitable banning and cries of “transphobic” has already begun in response.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

JEB VAN WINKLE: At NRO, Henry Olsen writes that Jeb Bush is the perfect Republican candidate — for the 1996 or 2000 presidential race:

Bush has, in effect, awakened from a ten year plus political sleep to discover America has changed. His difficulties are directly tied to his inability so far to adapt to the changed environment.

If this seems harsh, consider the facts. Jeb has not run for office since his easy re-election in 2002. He has not had a tight, competitive race since 1998, and he has not run in a GOP primary since 1994. When Jeb ran his tough races, his brother had not yet won the Presidency; 9/11 had not happened; economic growth was both plentiful and widely shared. Latino immigration had not yet reached the level that has sparked the immigration wars of the last decade, and the Republican base had not exploded in anger over the sense that its leadership, including his brother, had betrayed them time and time again.

And, of course, Barack Obama had not yet been elected. Obama’s ambitious agenda has moved the country much farther to the left than when Bush was active in politics.

One can see how Bush has struggled with these changes time and time again. His two policy passions seem to be education and immigration reform. These were state of the art conservative priorities in 2000 when W ran, but have long since stopped being animating features of the movement. NCLB is widely derided on the right and Common Core is seen as the further federalization of education in the same vein as his brother’s landmark effort. Doubling down on these priorities, as Bush has done, has simply reinforced the notion that he is running on yesterday’s platform.

Additionally, “Neither Jeb nor his bazillions of staffers have any improvisational wit,” Mark Steyn adds. “Which is why Trump has amused himself all summer needling him as ‘low-energy’ and then, when Jeb displays a flash of anger in return, congratulating him: ‘More energy! I like it:’

Whatever one feels about Trump and Carson, they have exposed how totally hollow and worthless the conventions of presidential politicking are, at least on the Republican side. Murphy dismisses Trump – and now presumably Carson, too – as a “zombie frontrunner” because they’re not behaving the way they’re supposed to: You’re meant to hire guys like Murphy and bulk up your payroll with a seven-figure campaign HQ operation that blows through millions of dollars on soft-focus campaign ads about how you had a tough but inspirational upbringing as the son of a mailman or, in Jeb’s case, the son of a one-term president. The consultants get a percentage of the bazillion-dollar ad buy, and the super-donors admire it because it looks like all the other cookie-cutter ads they fondly recall from the Romney campaign, and the McCain campaign, and the Dole campaign…

Then Donald Trump turns up. He has an issue, but it’s the one the consultant class advise you to go nowhere near with a ten-foot pole, so he snaffles it up all to himself. He spends nothing on ads, because he’s sucking up all the free airtime in the 15 minutes between the stupid irritating soft-focus commercials. His biggest expense is hats and T-shirts. He has no endorsements from former senators and former congressmen and former this and former that, because they’re losers and nobody remembers who they are. Not being a career politician, he feels no need to pretend to be an average working stiff, because he’s not.

And the consultants’ response to all this is to complain that Trump’s not doing it right.

Then Ben Carson comes along.

Read the whole thing.

THE PRICE OF CRONYISM: Joel Kotkin: How Big Government And Big Business Stick It To Small U.S. Businesses.

Rather than a new age of democratic capitalism imagined by Reagan era conservatives, we increasingly live in a world dominated by large companies. The overall revenues of Fortune 500 companies have risen from 58 percent of nominal GDP in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013. At the same time, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth, from 50 percent in the early ’80s to 35 percent in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report (PDF) revealed that small business “dynamism,” measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century. Only 35 percent of small business owners, according to a recent survey by the National Small Business Association, express optimism about the economy.

This decline in entrepreneurial activity marks a historic turnaround. Start up rateshave fallen for young people in particular, dropping to the lowest levels in a quarter century. At the same time the welfare state has expanded dramatically to the point that nearly half of all Americans now get payments from the federal government, notably through Medicare and Social Security. At the same time, the lack of grassroots economic activity may contribute to labor participation rates, now the lowest in almost four decades.

The Obama administration’s progressive-sounding rhetoricmay offend some of the thinner-skinned members of the oligarchy, but his economic policies—the bank bailouts, super-low interest rates, and growing federal power—have also improved the balance sheets of the corporate hegemons and the super-rich. In contrast, these policies do little, or less than little, for the yeoman class. Money today is made far more easily today by playing games with the market than making or selling on Main Street.

Hey, they don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.

Luckily, if we elect Hillary things will be completely different! See:

AMERICAN SOCIALISM, THE EARLY DAYS: Sometimes, one picture really is worth a thousand problematics.

WASTING AWAY AGAIN, IN AN OBAMAVILLE: Homeless in Hawaii: Governor Declares State of Emergency — Many are people who decide to leave the mainland with dreams of paradise, but not enough money.

WHAT? MITT ROMNEY DECRIES RISE OF CONSERVATIVE MEDIA, END OF LIBERAL MEDIA DOMINANCE: “And Establishment Republicans are still wandering around wondering why Romney isn’t president?”

ON CAMPUS SOCIAL-JUSTICE POSTURING, CBS’s Blue Bloods gets real.

MSNBC TOUTS ‘LIVE’ INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY CLINTON — THAT WASN’T, UH, LIVE:

Even though Maddow only moments earlier had said she came back to her office “as soon as we were done” with the interview, and after Hayes had described watching it, after all of that the caption in the lower right corner of the screen inexplicably remained in place — “LIVE MSNBC.” Where it stayed for the entirety of Maddow’s predictably schmoozy interview with Clinton, even after both Hayes and Maddow had established that the interview could not possibly be “live” at that point.

How difficult would it have been for the network to replace the bogus “LIVE MSNBC” caption with an indisputably accurate one reading “RECORDED EARLIER TODAY”?

Live, prerecorded, who can say under the tenets of postmodernism, who also grants NBC the belief that Brian Williams and Al Sharpton are honest journalists.

IS THERE A CURE FOR TRUMPOPHRENIA? Roger Simon asks, can you see the real Trump?

I am not a schizophrenic (not yet anyway).  But… I cannot tell a lie… I am a Trumpophrenic.

Some of the time I really like the guy — especially when he mocks the asinine political correctness that has infected every inch of our nation from the mountaintops to the ships at sea.  I’m also with him in a big way when he talks about reviving America and making her great again.

Other times, when he acts like a kindergartner throwing mud pies at classmates, I want to bang my forehead on the desk until he goes away or at least retires permanently to one of his golf clubs.

Read the whole thing.

CONGRESSWOMAN (PARTY OF SCIENCE, CALIF.) WANTS TO SHIP WATER FROM ALASKA TO END DROUGHT:

Coincidentally — and we know you didn’t see this coming — Rep. Hahn’s district in California includes the Port of Los Angeles, where all of these giants bags of water would probably be unloaded. Isn’t it amazing how idiotic, expensive projects always seem to benefit the member of Congress proposing them, heh?

If only there were simple solutions available nearby — and if only the Party of Science didn’t block them from becoming a reality decades ago.

SOME ADVICE THAT THE GOP WOULD BE WISE TO TAKE.

A GOOD THING AS WE PREPARE TO WALK INTO MORDOR: Bookstore Finds a Rare Map of ‘Middle Earth’ Annotated by Tolkien Inside Copy of ‘Lord of the Rings’.