THE COLOGNE SEX ASSAULTS: A Failure By Germany’s Elite.

What is apparent is that, during and since, there has been a widespread failure on the part of German authorities and elite institutions. The police failed to protect its citizens, the press dawdled in holding anyone to account (and see, too, those unanswered questions just above), and at least one politician even now seems to struggle to address the issue without suggesting that young women must somehow accommodate the possibility of assaults and “confusion.”
This all carries echoes of the Rotherham scandal, in which British authorities had for years turned a blind eye to a child abuse ring among Pakistani men in the north of England, seemingly at least in part for fear of looking racist. By the time anyone put a stop to it, an estimated 1,400 kids had been abused, often horrifically. Like the German police and politicians in this case—albeit on a much longer and larger scale—the British authorities may have put the need to appear sensitive over the need to enforce core values and basic human rights.

Western liberal elites see themselves both as feminists and as advocates for refugees, immigrants, and minorities. (As a sign at a protest in Cologne on Wednesday, photographed by Reuters, read, “Gegen Sexismus, Gegen Rassismus”—or, “Against Sexism, Against Racism.”) As principles, all of those are fine sentiments. But in the real world, Europe has just admitted large numbers of young men from cultures with aggressively different attitudes towards women. Authorities in Germany and elsewhere, as well as politicians, feminists, and other elites, are going to have to figure out, fast, how to talk and act about the clash of Western absolutes (the ability of women, dressed as they wish, to walk wherever they wish without fear is not up for debate) with immigrant cultures, or many more problems may lie ahead.

The problem is that these “elites” — not just in Germany, but throughout the West — are, for the most part, horrible human beings who must cover up their horribleness with virtue-signalling. And virtue-signalling is inconsistent with constructive action.

UPDATE: How out of touch are they? This out of touch: Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants.

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TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Substitute teacher ‘busted for sex with her children’s 14-year-old friend after his concerned parents found condoms and raunchy Instagram messages.’

DO ANDROID WAITRESSES DREAM OF ELECTRIC SOUVLAKI? N.Y. Restaurant Owners Plead for Mercy as Gov. Cuomo Tightens Screws on Wages.

Related! Protesters Aren’t Going to Like How McDonald’s is Reacting to Their Minimum Wage Concerns.

As William Gibson once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And Gov. Cuomo is doing his part to make this November 2014 AP photo of robot waitresses serving customers in a China’s Zhejiang province restaurant a reality in New York as well.

UNREALITY ALL THE WAY DOWN: Shaun King tries to salvage Daily News piece based on fake Ammon Bundy tweet.

RIP, FLORENCE KING: “Can a non-believing misanthrope rest in peace? I hope so.”

To be fair, that sounds like it would be far too boring an afterlife for someone like her.

UPDATE: From 2012, the American Thinker’s salute to King: “While Miss King’s political thoughts will be missed, her disgust with a world gone mad will be more so.”

CLAY AALDERS: Blade-wielding bad-ass from history: Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming “Mad-Jack” Churchill. “Upon coming to a halt onshore, the soldier jumped from the craft, hucked a grenade at the Germans, then drew a full sword and ran screaming into the fray. That maniacally fierce soldier was 35-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, and his stunts at this battle, known as Operation Archery, were hardly the most bizarre and semi-suicidal of his life. Over the course of World War II, ‘Mad Jack,’ as he came to be known, survived multiple explosions, escaped a couple of POW camps, captured more than 40 Germans at sword point in just one raid, and in 1940 scored the last recorded longbow kill in history.”

But today’s not entirely decadent: Woman Uses Knife To Fight Off 3 Home Invaders.

WELL, WE DID IN THE 1970s, BUT WE DIDN’T LIKE IT: Can Americans Accept a Tiny Engine in a Medium Car?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

THIS JUST IN. NBC’s Parks and Recreation Was Not Popular:

In other words, Parks and Rec was not a “popular” show as the word is commonly understood (“The Big Bang Theory” is “popular”; NCIS is “popular”), but it was “popular with younger, urban, professional, mostly liberal types.” Yuppies, in other words. Parks and Rec was a show beloved by a narrow slice of yuppies, and not really anyone else.

Hence the URL of Sonny Bunch’s article at the Washington Free Beacon: “you-live-in-a-bubble-you-precious-things-you.” But why was it beloved within its tiny leftwing urban bubble?

Leslie Knope, the tinpot dictator of Pawnee who thought it was her business to tell the people what size sodas they should drink and successfully turned a vacant lot into useless park land where a job-creating burger franchise could have gone. Parks and Rec (which I enjoyed quite a bit!) was always an ad for bigger and better government. The show’s final insult was turning hardcore libertarian Ron Swanson into an employee of the federal government, closing his run with a shot of his smiling face as he worked his new gig on federal land. Some might think this outcome absurd. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Sister.*

How politically correct did TV become over the past decade? It’s so bad that even Norman Lear, who arguably did more than anyone in Hollywood to drive the industry to the left in the 1970s, can now see it.

WE KINDA FIGURED THAT ABOUT YOU, JOY. The View’s Joy Behar: I’d Vote for a Rapist as Long as They’re Liberal.

Shades of Nina Burleigh.

BUILDING BRIDGES: Lesbians touch a penis for the first time in hilarious video.

HARD-HITTING DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE WAR ON TERROR: The Washington Post squees giddily over “The subversive feminism of two Obama staffers’ Secret Service codenames:”

Secret Service code names tend toward the masculine, if for no other reason than the majority of people who need them are of the dude persuasion. President Obama is “Renegade.” President George W. Bush is “Trailblazer.”  Even many women’s names, though typically far less aggressive, skew androgynous. For example, Michelle Obama is “Renaissance,” while Laura Bush is “Tempo.”

So the decision by two top Obama staffers to go by names that sound more like twee kittens than the latest SUV models was a departure from the norm. Nancy-Ann DeParle and Alyssa Mastromonaco, who served together as deputy chiefs of staff from 2011-2013, intentionally went for the ultra-feminine when selecting their monikers: Peaches and Popsicle, respectively.

As revealed in “Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing The Way America Works,” the just-out book by Time correspondent Jay Newton-Small, the duo eschewed their male predecessors’ presumably alpha-male-appropriate code names and picked ones that poked the patriarchy. The women “delighted in watching the mostly male, macho Secret Service agents announce the arrival of Popsicle and Peaches,” Newton-Small writes.

Related: “SecNav Bans Marine Job Titles With Term ‘Man’ to Ensure Gender Neutrality.”

Meanwhile, as the White House continues to fight hard on the the language front, ISIS’ “jihadi technical college” in Raqqa is teaching eager students how to build surface-to-air missiles.

Don’t worry — I’m sure the correct gender-neutral pronouns will protect us.

NEW YOU CAN USE: How You Pronounce ‘Muslim’ Says A Lot About Your Politics:

Those on the Left pronounce these two words the way a native Arabic speaker would, as a way of signaling their sympathy for the American-Muslim population. They are indicating they identify with this population and they have their backs.

In other words, they aren’t like those nasty, Muslim-hating Republicans. They understand Islam and respect it, and they know it has nothing to do with jihad and terrorism. This pronunciation is code for “I’m not Islamaphobic.” The Left is making their opinions and politics known with the simple shift in pronunciation of these two key words.

So leftwing virtue-signaling, to coin a phrase. But then, the left has been in this habit long before BHO began uttering words like Pock-eeee-staaaahhhhn; recall how the earlier, funnier Saturday Night Live used to mock the media for endlessly drawing out words like Nicaragggggggggua and Sandooooooneeeeeeesta back in the late 1980s:

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: The Days of human driving are numbered as big bucks and partnerships flow in a race for the self driving car.

NEW BLACK PANTHERS WITH GUNS, LOTS OF THEM: “President Obama claimed he was very concerned about the wrong people having guns,” Christian Adams writes. “He wasn’t always so concerned about the wrong people having guns.”

Of course, that all depends on your definition of “the wrong people.”

THE REAL REASON AMERICANS OPPOSE GUN CONTROL: Obama, Pelosi, Boxer, and the rest have no right to strip us of our last line of defense from their incompetence.

SENIOR WRITER FOR NEWSWEEK SMEARS TED CRUZ AS HITLER, IOWA VOTERS AS NAZIS:

When called on his Godwin’s Law violation, Twitchy notes that Newsweek’s Alexander Nazaryan then deleted his tweet, of course. But I’m not sure why Nazaryan chose that particular angle, or got upset when at Twitter users questioning it, considering the magazine that employs him gave their blessings to socialism on a nationalistic scale in 2009…

At NewsBusters, Tim Graham notes that “yesterday, Nazaryan also tweeted ‘Ted Cruz is an atrocity of a human being,'” adding that “before joining Newsweek the monthly, Nazaryan was an editorial-page staffer at the New York Daily News, the NRA-are-terrorists paper, so the acorn didn’t fall far from the tree.”

SPEAKING OF NEWT, “Obama needs a Gingrich,” Kevin D. Williamson writes, in much the same way that the pro-Clinton media demonized Newt on his behalf in the mid-1990s:

If you are wondering why the president is, at the eleventh hour, using probably illegal executive fiats to start a national fight over gun control — a fight that will do nothing to reduce ordinary crime, terrorism, or mass shootings — it’s because he’s still looking for his Gingrich, and he believes that the NRA may be it. That is a grave and uncharacteristic political miscalculation for a man whose only documentable talent is for political calculation, and one suspects that his administration and his party will suffer for it between now and November.

Read the whole thing.

NEWT GINGRICH: “We are at the end of the 70 year strategy of attempting to contain the spread of nuclear weapons:”

The sobering reality is that we are at the end of the 70 year strategy of attempting to contain the spread of nuclear weapons and at the beginning of a dangerous new era of coping with the threat of nuclear weapons. The gap between the new dangers and the old thinking can be seen in the totally inadequate design of the Department of Homeland Security. As originally proposed in the Hart-Rudman Commission’s work in 2000 this department should be sized to handle simultaneous nuclear events in three different cities. Today, 15 years later, it could not adequately handle one nuclear event. Yet the spread of nuclear capability to North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere virtually guarantees weapons could be used in the near future. We now have to develop a two prong strategy which both focuses diplomatically on minimizing their spread and the danger of their use and focuses national security and homeland security assets on surviving nuclear events if diplomacy fails.

Read the whole thing.

“MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION EVER” IS ALSO THE MOST SUED FOR FOIA GAMES: An analysis of court records between 2001 and 2015 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that a record number of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits were filed against federal agencies during 2015. The combined total of 421 in 2014 and 498 in 2015 represents a 54 percent increase over the two-year total for 2009 and 2010. Such suits are typically only filed after months of delays, dickering, threats and negotiations between federal officials and requesters seeking government documents the FOIA says are owned by taxpayers.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why half of the life you experience is over by age 7. I remember in law school, the first three weeks of my first year seemed subjectively about as long as the rest of the three years.

But as for age, I think that time is actually going faster every year — probably because of cosmic inflation — but you don’t notice that until you’re older because it takes a while to have enough years of experience to have perspective. I eagerly await my vindication by physicists.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should The Navy Go To A Big Fleet / Small Ships Doctrine?

NEW YORK TIMES WHITEWASHES TERROR-SUPPORTERS AS ‘HIPSTER PALESTINIANS:’ Haifa Arab who publicly called for Israel’s destruction complains Times misrepresented him as a ‘cool yay hipster.’