NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Report: San Bernardino gunman’s pal spoke of “sleeper cells.” “There’s so much going on. There’s so many sleeper cells, so many people just waiting. When it happens, it’s going to be big. Watch.”
Archive for 2015
December 11, 2015
IT’S LIKE YIK YAK FOR HIGH SCHOOL: Millions of teens are using a new app to post anonymous thoughts, and most parents have no idea.
LAURENCE JARVIK: Mr. Steyn Goes To Washington.
HEY, YOU TRY INSTALLING ALL THOSE UPDATES TO THE EXOSKELETON’S FIRMWARE WHEN YOU’RE IN A HURRY! Video: Hillary 2 Hours Late to Rally, Audience Groans.
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Chicago pastors warn of political “friendly fire” as anti-Rahm battle continues:
Pssst, Democrats — they’re talking about you. A group of pastors in Chicago warned today that the battle for justice after the Laquan McDonald killing would be a political war in which “there are going to be casualties,” and that “friends of ours are going to go down.” They want a petition drive for a call of “no confidence” in Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and they also want the video of another police shooting released. So far, Emanuel’s administration has refused, but the community is organizing protests to push harder:
* * * * * *
That warning about “friends” wasn’t aimed at Rahm Emanuel. It’s aimed at Democrats who might be inclined to circle the wagons to protect him. It’s a warning to the state legislature not to bottle up the recall-election bill introduced this week for the specific purpose of ousting Emanuel. And at least to some degree, it’s a warning to Hillary Clinton to quit supporting the longtime family friend.
“Casualties”? “Friends of ours are going to go down”? Why are Chicago pastors using gun-related metaphors that MSNBC has deemed the equivalent of the N-word? Particularly after President Obama called for “a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics:”
“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” he said, “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. As legendary pacifist Alec Baldwin also asked of his fellow Democrats in 2011, “What Changes Will We Make After the Giffords Shooting?”
When will their fellow Democrats finally heed these idealistic cri de cœurs?
IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? U.S. Citizens in Geneva Warned of Elevated Terror Threat.
Related: Report: Obama Told NSC And FBI To ‘Downplay’ Terrorist Angle Of San Bernardino.
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WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE, GUYS? State Department Admits: Libya ‘Has Struggled’ Since Clinton Push for Intervention.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: This Satanic Temple Leader Is Blogging Her Abortion.
THEY ALREADY SEEM TO: Can the Left Learn to Love ISIS?
CAN THE LEFT LEARN TO LOVE ISIS? Daniel Greenfield posits that “The West is making many of the same mistakes with Islamism that it did with Communism. And it’s making them for the same reasons:”
Like Communist leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations base their operations out of the West. Lenin conducted his campaign out of Munich and London, Trotsky operated out of Austria, London and New York. Today the Muslim Brotherhood operates out of London and Austria. The Blind Sheikh ran the Islamic Group out of New York. The Ayatollah Khomeini organized the Islamic Revolution in Iran from a Paris suburb. ISIS draws on thousands of European recruits.
If the West had really wanted to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle”, as Churchill had urged, it had the key players living in its own cities. If the West really wanted to shut down the Jihad, it could do more by going after the Salafist networks in its own cities than by bombing Syria.
The United States is the fourth most popular country for ISIS tweeters. The UK is in the top ten.
The State Department is offering a $25 million reward for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of Al Qaeda and the man behind its ideology, but he visited mosques in California on a fundraising trip during the Clinton era. Abu Musab al-Suri, another key Al Qaeda ideologue, operated out of Spain. Anwar al-Awlaki lived comfortably in the United States until he was ready to step into a global role.
The West doesn’t really want to defeat Islamic terrorism. It responds to terrorism while ignoring the ideology. And then it roots around for root causes that coincidentally turn out to all involve progressive policy priorities like economic inequality and global warming.
And let’s face it — crushing ISIS would simply be giving them exactly what they want, as so many leftists remind us:
The Islamic State terrorist group wants nothing more than for the U.S. Armed Forces to destroy it, politicians and pundits say.
Dozens of thought leaders familiar with the terrorist group say that its members yearn for the day that close air support from an A-10 Warthog cuts them in half while coalition soldiers storm Raqqa.
“They are begging for U.S. troops on the ground,” former Obama administration official Van Jones said. “That’s what they want.”
“The one thing ISIS wants the most: American boots on the ground,” CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria said.
“As long as we’re relying on military force, this is the kind of terms [sic] that ISIS wants. This is what strengthens them,” Institute for Policy Studies scholar Phyllis Bennis said.
“More war is exactly what ISIS wants,” Sen. Angus King (I., Maine) said.
It’s comforting to know that America’s television studios are flooded with experts who know ISIS better than ISIS itself:
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Report: Campus Free Speech Might Be Spreading, But the Federal Government Wants to Stop That.
SPRINGTIME FOR RAHM? Shock Video: Chicagoans compare Rahm Emanuel to Hitler.
I’m not at all sure that’s a fair comparison — as Prussian playwright Franz Liebekind exuded in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, “You know, not many people knew it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer…he could dance the pants off of Churchill!” How do Rahm’s dancing chops hold up by those standards?
AS PEOPLE TALK ABOUT STAR WARS AGAIN, here’s my 2012 interview with Camille Paglia on that subject.
EZRA LEVANT EXPLAINS A CHINOOK TO A SCHNOOK: “Dumbass” Leonardo DiCaprio thinks a chinook is “global warming” — but what’s the Calgary Herald’s excuse?
James Delingpole adds, “Leo DiCaprio Now Officially a Joke in Canada: Confuses Chinook Wind with Climate Change.”
Meanwhile,”Harrison Ford hits out at global inaction on climate change, warns of ‘disastrous’ consequences,” ranting that “The planet will be OK, there just won’t be any damn people on it.”
So evidently in Ford’s mind, the situation is dire — but apparently, not dire enough for him to quit using his private plane to “fly up the coast for a cheeseburger,” as he admitted to a British publication a few years ago.
GOOD: President Obama Signs First Federal Free-Range Kids Legislation. Two things: (1) How pathetic is it that we need a federal statute to say that kids can walk to school; (2) It doesn’t preempt state laws so it doesn’t really do anything. Still, it’s modest progress.
ROGER SIMON: How Trump Can Win the General Election:
Love him or hate him, everyone wants a piece of The Donald. It’s the huge advantage he has as a mega-celebrity. Why should he stop now?
African Americans particularly may be surprisingly easy. They’ve had the most abysmal time of all under Obama, who acts as if his existence alone is enough to lift up the black community. And when he does log in, all he does is stir things up and make things worse. Have we heard of even one new program for African-Americans under Obama?
Trump has already been in the black community and received a surprisingly good response from African-American ministers. I would imagine that would have encouraged him to do more in the general election. The Donald seems to like praise (understatement of the year).
Latinos will present greater challenges for Trump, but even there he can make inroads. He’s got two potential Latino running mates (Rubio and Cruz) if he can restrain himself from insulting them too much in the next few months. Who knows?
At least at the moment, Cruz seems rather amenable to the prospect:
SO I’VE BEEN THINKING OF GIVING MYSELF A DRONE FOR CHRISTMAS, and this one looks pretty good. Any advice from readers with experience?
NEWS YOU CAN USE! SCIENCE: Drinking Tequila Can Help You Lose Weight.
“On a related note, my family hasn’t suffered a single case of scurvy since we introduced Margarita Fridays more than three years ago,” Steve Green adds. Can’t fault the man for being a Patrón of science.
ROGER SIMON: How Trump Can Win The General Election. Well, see the terrorism poll below. . . .
AND A MILLION POP-PSYCH THEORIES BITE THE DUST: Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds. “The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.”
Next we’ll discover that orgasms don’t prevent cervical cancer. But hey, until then, why take chances? . . .
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: U.S. confidence in protection from attack lowest in over a decade. “Confidence in the U.S. government to protect its citizens from militant attacks has fallen to its lowest in more than a decade after a pair of suspected militant Islamists gunned down 14 people at a holiday party in California, a poll released on Friday found. . . .The finding represents a drop of 12 percentage points since June and extends the gradual erosion in confidence that began soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by militant Islamists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. It is the lowest reading since Gallup began asking the question, following the 2001 attacks.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN FEMINIST EMPOWERMENT! “ISIS thinks female jihadis should stay in the kitchen. Tashfeen Malik disagreed,” A headline above an article by Yahoo’s Liz Goodwin notes:
Malik, a 29-year-old Pakistani citizen with an infant, pledged loyalty to ISIS on Facebook before the deadly attack. But her actions do not necessarily reflect the ideals and rules ISIS has laid out for women and their role in the caliphate.
ISIS has so far said publicly that Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, were “supporters of the caliphate” — refraining from calling them “soldiers,” as they have described followers in the past.
The group’s propaganda targeting Western women often features burka-clad girls toting AK-47s. ISIS’s message stresses the “empowerment” of women, according to Mia Bloom, a terror expert and professor at Georgia State University. It has been more successful in recruiting U.S. women than any other terror group, notes Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law. The group claims that feminism has failed women and that in the caliphate, they will be able to be their true, nurturing selves.
Smash the bonds of patrimony with pipe bombs! Plus this:
The strict rules for women inside the caliphate are also different from what ISIS encourages women to do in their home countries, Katz said. ISIS videos that call for lone wolf attacks in the West are addressed to Muslims in general instead of “brothers,” a semantic distinction that clearly includes women.
Well, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from college campuses throughout America this year, the wrong kind of language can really be “triggering” to the impressionable — and taking the uber-PC tone of the above article to its natural conclusion, who knows what sorts of violations to a “safe space” can occur next?
WHEN A CLINTON IS TALKING ABOUT LOVE, IT SELDOM ENDS WELL: Actual AP Headline: “As Trump rises, Clinton preaches love and kindness.”
But AP’s not in the tank for Hillary, oh no. They’re objective journalists, and only a hater would think that they’re Democratic operatives with bylines. In this case, the byline is by Lisa Lerer and Ken Thomas, though it was probably some anonymous editor who supplied the cringeworthy headline.
UPDATE: Oops, Ed posted this simultaneously. Oh, well.