RICH LOWRY: The Refugee Crisis Is Exposing Europe’s Folly.

The scale of the crisis is mind-boggling.

About a million people left Russia after the 1914 revolution. In Syria alone, about 4 million people have fled the country, and another 7 million have been internally displaced.

Refugees and migrants are also coming from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other hopeless places, adding up to potentially tens of millions of migrants.

The locus of the migrants’ hopes, more than anywhere else, is Germany. It is expected to get 800,000 asylum claims just this year.

The government is talking of taking 500,000 migrants annually for the next several years, and Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the crisis “the next great European project.” The reaction of the rest of Europe should be, no thanks.

What Germany is proposing is undertaking a vast social and demographic experiment, with the rapid, bulk importation of Muslim immigrants into a country with an aging population.

Other European countries could be forgiven for not being so adventurous. The experience of the French banlieues, home to generations of unassimilated Muslim immigrants, hasn’t been a happy one.

This is what happens when a country is governed by elites who don’t feel any special love for the country they govern.

FEMINISTS OUTRAGED AT ADOBE FOR DEMOING PHOTOSHOP ON A WOMAN: As I tweeted to Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist earlier this week, in contrast to the Twitter outrage mob pounding their high chairs* after Apple added a new feature to broaden smiles in photos and demonstrating it (quelle horreur!) on a photo of an attractive model, I don’t recall a word of anger — or any comment whatsoever — when Adobe quietly introduced their similar “Puppet Warp” feature as part of Photoshop CS5 back in 2010. On Twitter, I linked to this how-to video from Adobe back then explaining how the application worked:

Mollie was kind enough to add my tweet at the end of her article the Federalist today; as she writes:

That’s not a woman! That’s a hot black dude!

Oh dear, what should we take away from this? Is it that the bad white man is telling the black man to smile? Or is it that Adobe is a product marketed using pictures of both attractive men and attractive women, and that retouching is not a patriarchal plot.

Heh. As Mollie tweeted on Wednesday, “Congratuls to Apple for successfully trolling feminists into making everyone aware of Adobe’s iPad Pro capabilities. Everyone gets a raise.”

* “I remain awed by the capacity of people to be outraged at ‘outrage culture.’” We apologize for any outrageously outrageous outrage this phrase may have triggered within you.

CARNAGE IN MECCA: AT LEAST 101 PEOPLE KILLED AFTER BIN LADEN FIRM CRANE COLLAPSES ON GRAND MOSQUE DURING FREAK LIGHTNING STORM: “Pictures taken before the disaster show the crane being struck by a bolt of lightning and authorities are in little doubt extreme weather was to blame…The crane belongs to a German crane company operated by the Bin Laden family’s consortium, who are heading the expansion of the Holy Mosque. Saudi BinLaden Group was founded by Osama’s Bin Laden’s billionaire father Mohammed and the sprawling construction conglomerate runs a large amount of major building contracts in the Sunni kingdom.”

RICK PERRY SUSPENDS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: Perry continued GWB’s successful governorship of Texas. As Jonah Goldberg quipped in 2010, given Perry’s role in propping up the Obama economy, “if Obama’s policies are responsible for job creation, shouldn’t we be seeing some more uniform job growth across the whole country? Why is the job-creator-in-chief so playing favorites in Texas?”

Why couldn’t he translate that success into a meaningful presidential bid?

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: I hate my mother because she likes Donald Trump.

I HAD HIGH HOPES FOR HIM, BUT ONCE AGAIN HE JUST COULDN’T GET ANY TRACTION: Rick Perry Ends White House Bid.

TRUMP’S FANTASTICAL DEPORTATION TIME FRAME FOR ILLEGALS: “‘Papers, Please’: Trump to Deport 11 Million Illegals in 2 Years:”

On the call, Mr. Trump was asked for details about how long it would take to round up illegal immigrants living in the U.S., with the questioner asking if five or ten years was an appropriate timeframe. Mr. Trump said his two year benchmark could be met with “really good management.”

“We have to get them out. If we have wonderful cases, they can come back in but they have to come back in legally,” Mr. Trump said in an audio clip posted on YouTube Thursday night by a person on the call.

Mr. Trump’s plan has been denounced by Democrats and many rival Republicans, who have called it impractical and immoral, among other criticisms.

Mr. Trump said he would remove illegal immigrants from the country “so fast that your head will spin,” and long before he could embark on his plan to build a wall spanning the 1,900 mile border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Mr. Trump also attacked Mr. Carson, and said the neurosurgeon couldn’t achieve the same results on immigration.

“It wouldn’t work for him because he has absolutely no management capability,” Mr. Trump said.

So how would it work? Bob Zubrin has a chilling forecast, as he asks, “What if Trump Wins?”

A few years ago I had the pleasure of hearing the recollections of a conservative gentleman who, in his youth, had spent some time as an ardent supporter of a radical movement, only to become disillusioned when the group failed to gain any political traction. “But it all turned out for the best,” he reflected philosophically. “I mean, really, what if we had won?”

This brings us to the ultimate issue posed by the Donald Trump candidacy. Many Republicans are concerned that if Trump were to take the GOP nomination he would almost certainly lose the general election, thereby surrendering the White House to four more years of Democrat governance. To be sure, that would be a very bad outcome for the 2016 election. But there is another possibility, which could potentially be much worse. What if Trump were to win?

If Trump were to win, he would certainly need to act on his signature issue, which is mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Across the nation, businesses, neighborhoods, homes and churches would be subject to raids by federal agents seeking to find and arrest the intruders. To facilitate the round-up, the creation of networks of paid informers would no doubt prove invaluable, as would a national-citizen identification system, both of which, without question, would remain part of the American political landscape forever afterwards. Those ferreted out would probably end up gathered in reeking collection facilities resembling those that the federal government established for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, before being forcibly packed en masse into buses and dumped off, with or without their American-citizen children, on the southern side of the border.

Which sounds like something out of Europe’s national and international socialist past* — but I’ll bet there are plenty of Americans who would go along with such proposals. That’s what can happen when your legitimate concerns on an issue are completely ignored for years by both parties.

* Not to be confused with their transnational future. Or the possible lack thereof.

INSIDE THE BRAINS of happily married couples.

WHY WSJ STAFFERS WERE PROUD TO HAVE STILL PUBLISHED THE DAY AFTER 9/11: Bill Power, news editor of the Wall Street Journal tweets today photos of “our offices across from the WTC:”

In early October of 2011, my first trip back to the New York area after 9/11 to visit friends and family, I visited the offices of the bond rating company Moody’s, located a block away from the World Trade Center. Their building was still closed at the time and you need police permission to walk down the block it located on, but a friend who was employed there gave me a tour of the offices. Every room was still covered with what seemed like an inch of that same dust.

UPDATE: In contrast, apparently the New York Times doesn’t consider the anniversary of 9/11 fit to print on the front page:

LAST KNOWN LIVING 9/11 RESCUE DOG GETS EPIC 16th BIRTHDAY IN NEW YORK CITY.

STUDY: NOPE, ‘FOOD DESERTS’ PROBABLY DON’T CONTRIBUTE TO OBESITY:  Well, that’s good to hear — but the real breakthrough for the left, which invented the goofy phrase “food desert” in the first place, will be when it figures out why high-end supermarket chains are reluctant to open new stores in certain areas.

SPACE: The First Pluto Photos From New Horizons’ Massive Data Dump.

ON 9/11, LET’S BE CLEAR ABOUT WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE A REAL ROGUE COP PROBLEM, AND WHY: “Last week, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took the unusual step of criticizing the police’s failure to intervene in the case of a couple, Shahzad and Shama Masih, who were murdered by a lynch mob in Kot Radha Kishan, Punjab, in November 2014. Five police officers stood by and did nothing while a frenzied mob murdered the Masihs,” Robert Spencer writes. “Why didn’t they step in and stop the lynching? Because the Masihs were Christians, accused of blasphemy.”

As Spencer adds, “Most troubling, the problem of cops protecting Muslim perpetrators has been occurring in Western countries, too.”

See also: the British town of Rotherham.

AT AMAZON, Save $90 on the Dyson AM09 Fan Heater. Winter is coming.

Plus, Save Over 30% on the Brother XL2610 Sewing Machine.

THOUGHTS FROM 14 YEARS AGO:

WHEN WILL WE GET BACK TO NORMAL? A colleague asked me that today. “This is normal,” I replied. For most of human history, wondering when somebody from another tribe was going to try to kill you was the standard activity. In much of the world, it still is. Three million people have died in the Congo in the past couple of years. Before that, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Middle East, Cambodia, — you get the idea. It’s only in comparatively strong and wealthy Western nations that we can pretend that safety is normal. It really isn’t all that normal for us, either. In the past hundred years we’ve had two world wars and a bunch of others. In the 19th Century we had the Civil War, the War of 1812 (in which most of DC was burned), etc., etc.

“Normal” is what we call those brief periods when something normal isn’t happening.

Well, that’s held true, alas.

ANOTHER NARRATIVE COLLAPSES: People Who Watch Porn Hold More Feminist Views. Well, it’s more likely to make you feel kindly toward women than watching, you know, feminists. . . .

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: REP. POLIS O.K. WITH EXPELLING INNOCENT STUDENTS [VIDEO]. As Glenn mentioned earlier today, Congress held a hearing yesterday on “Preventing and Responding to Sexual Assault on College Campuses.” FIRE’s Legislative and Policy Director, Joe Cohn, testified about the importance of preserving the due process rights of accused students during investigations of campus sexual assault.

During an exchange with Joe, Representative Jared Polis (D-CO) suggested that the “preponderance of the evidence” standard—which requires only that fact-finders be 50.01 percent certain in order to find an accused student guilty—may be too high of a bar for campus sexual assault cases. Though Glenn already posted this quote, it bears repeating: “If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people.” [Emphasis added.]

So I guess Sir Blackstone had it wrong with his formulation that “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” It seems the new logic is “better kick ten out rather than that one (or maybe two) run free.”

What’s funny about all this is FIRE’s radical position is that we’d like to see rapists go to jail, not prey on girls at the community college down the road or at the local bar. But, yes, you should be pretty sure they are actually guilty.

You can watch this exchange in the video below, and check out FIRE’s coverage over at The Torch.

FLYNT, PRINT AND THE VIRTUAL FUTURE OF PORN: Bill Whittle of PJTV interviews Larry Flynt. At the PJM mothership, Susan L.M. Goldberg explores the world of virtual reality porn that Flynt advocates in his interview with Bill and responds, “Flynt [told Whittle] that he regarded his failed marriages and lack of attention paid to family life to be his greatest mistake. The irony shouldn’t be lost on the advocates of porn, virtual or otherwise.”

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Olympian Turned Vegas Escort Suzy Favor Hamilton: Why I Was Having Sex for Money. For the money? Of course not. “I know for a matter of fact I would never have become an escort if I wasn’t on the drug that made me hypersexual. There’s no way possible.”

COOKING THE INTELLIGENCE ON ISIS: As Arthur Herman writes at NRO’s Corner blog, the Daily Beast, “(no conservative Koch brothers mouthpiece) is reporting that some 50 intelligence analysts working at the military’s Central Command claim their reports on ISIS are being doctored to fit the Obama party line that we’re winning the fight against ISIS, when we’re not:”

Is anyone really surprised by this? Remember all the complaints Democrats made about how the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in order to get us into war with Iraq over non-existent WMD’s?

Official investigation after investigation showed they didn’t, but the false claim that “Bush lied and people died’ still haunts the memory of that war–and the sacrifice Americans made fighting and dying in it.

Now we know why Democrats were so insistent somebody had to be cooking the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s.  It’s because that’s what they would have done themselves to fit their policy line.

And, the Daily Beast suggests, that’s what they’re doing now, so they can avoid having to make the kind of military commitment we need, in order to eradicate the ISIS plague once and for all.

Read the whole thing.

NOT PLAYING WELL WITH THE FOLKS AT F.I.R.E.: The Polis plan: make it way easier to expel students for sexual assault, let them be some other college’s problem. Jared Polis (D-CO) really seems to have become the face of the Democratic Party’s new war on colege-aged men.

FLASHBACK: George W. Bush – 9/11 Bullhorn Speech.

LIFE IN THE OBAMA/CLINTON ERA: ‘It feels like a decade’: Benghazi victim families demand justice, 3 years after attack.

UPSIDE: POLITICIANS GET TO KEEP THEIR BRIBES. Red light fail: Cleveland sued for millions after voters reject camera tickets. “The red light cameras and speed cameras were at first favored by city officials — bringing in $9 million in revenue — but residents later voted by a 78 percent margin to ban the use of them in 2014.”

So Xerox wants to be paid after foisting something off on voters who hate it by a huge margin. Which, by the way, voters do pretty much everywhere they get to vote on it. Meh. People should avoid doing business with Xerox, which not only offers a hated product, but then sues its customers.