IT’S TIME TO ESCHEW THE FAIRY TALE THAT ALL CULTURES ARE EQUALLY VALID: In terms of protecting the vulnerable, shielding the weak and providing opportunities for as many as possible, some cultures are objectively a horror show. Mass Muslim Immigration Will Bring Islam’s Problems Here.

IN OTHER NEWS, REALITY STILL RESISTANT TO WISHFUL THINKING: When Worlds Collide: Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam. 

I’VE WRITTEN A LOT ON THIS SUBJECT: But this is better than all my stuff. Understanding Socialism.

I’VE TOLD YOU WITHOUT A UNIFIED NEWS/ENTERTAINMENT/ARTISTIC COMPLEX THEY CAN’T CONTROL THE NARRATIVE:  Their “beliefs” are so fraught with self-evident contradictions only total control will sell them. The day circumventing the gatekeepers became possible is the day they lost.  They know that.  That’s why they’re fighting so hard to control corners of the entertainment complex like gaming and science fiction for just a little longer.  But they’re at best dead man persons creatures of self-proclaimed sentience walking.  This is just the first major sign of it.  There will be more. How Bill Quickly Went from Asset to Liability for Hillary’s Campaign.

MR. PRESIDENT, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME: Another Nail in The Coffin Holding Our Freedom.  And any presidential alerts will be replied to with a picture of a matched set of my middle fingers.  You can gaze lovingly upon them as you contemplate that we are Americans, and you are not the boss of us.  The media and our indoctrinated compatriots might have convinced you otherwise, but trust me, there’s still a lot like me around.

I BET YOU’D FORGOTTEN MY SHOCKED FACE! Sean Penn Interviews El Chapo for Rolling Stone… SHOCK: Magazine Gives Fugitive Drug Lord Editorial Control.  Okay.  Not really.  After all, the left is all about that nostalgie de la boue.

WALL TO WALL PROJECTION: When they call everyone racists, they’re just looking in the mirror.  Hillary Clinton assumes ‘Making a Murderer’ convicts are black.

HILLARY’S EMAILGATE GOES NUCLEAR. Does the latest release of Hillary’s State Department emails include highly classified U.S. intelligence?

SHOCKER: Internal Obama Administration Emails Reveal Deliberate Targeting of Catholics with Contraceptive Mandate. “Administration health policy officials were downright obsessed with figuring out which Catholic institutions would fit within the section 6033-based exemption. As early as October 2011, the White House was trying to figure out how to structure the exemption so that Catholic universities would be forced to provide student contraceptives in student health plans. In July 2012, emails show officials trying to make sure that the contraceptive mandate would treat the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – the spiritual leaders of Roman Catholic entities in the United States – differently from the colleges, charities, and other groups that they lead. The documents were originally discovered during congressional inquiries into the sharing of tax information between the IRS and the White House.”

Punch back twice as hard.

REMEMBERING WHEN OBAMA WAS ANTI-MUSLIM: Muslims barred from picture at Obama event. “Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate. The campaign has apologized to the women, both Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally.”

MARK PULLIAM: Legitimate Judicial Candidates Must Be ‘Judicious.’

TRUMP HEADQUARTERS VANDALIZED WITH WORD “PIG” SPRAY PAINTED ON WINDOW.

Flashback: My reporting from the bullet-riddled Bush-Cheney headquarters in 2004.

SCOTT ADAMS: Terrorists vs. Robots. “Changing topics slightly, I give you an image from today’s failed terrorist attack in Paris. To me, that looks like the future. You have a terrorist losing a fight to a robot inside a fenced zone. Eventually, the so-called Caliphate will become something like the Target Practice for Robots Zone, or TPRZ. The military needs a robot practice zone anyway, so we might as well kill two birds at the same time. And Robots could, in theory, become better at minimizing civilian casualties compared to whatever we’re doing now.” Though in the future, we may care about that less.

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JOHN FUND: Why the Left Is Up In Arms Over Clint Bolick’s Appointment to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Clint’s passion is to stand by the little guy or gal who is being oppressed by government regulation. He thinks that the Supreme Court got it wrong in the post–Civil War era when it failed to identify economic liberty as a fundamental civil right. In 1989, after a stint at the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights, he took on his first private client: a colorful shoeshine-stand owner who saw his business shut down by Washington, D.C., officials who invoked a Jim Crow–era law against sidewalk bootblacks.

Bolick won that case and, together with another former government attorney, Chip Mellor, founded the Institute for Justice. Soon it was filing suit on behalf of hair braiders whom arbitrary licensing requirements blocked from working, and of casket makers who couldn’t sell their wares except through a funeral home. Later, he and Mellor expanded IJ’s mandate, and it became the country’s leading legal advocate for school-choice programs designed to help inner-city children. IJ won a pivotal victory in that battle when, in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld Cleveland’s school-choice voucher program as constitutional. . . .

Liberals in Arizona with whom I spoke during a visit there last month were bemused by talk that Bolick was being considered for an appointment to the state supreme court. Larry Hammond, a Phoenix defense attorney and former Watergate prosecutor, praised Bolick to the Arizona Republic: “A thoughtful conservative is going to be less comfortable with accepting that the criminal-justice system always gets it right. It would be nice for a change to have a judge who’s not so sure about that.”

Things are different with liberals at the national level. The Politically Correct Legal-Industrial Complex reacted with horror. A post at ThinkProgress, a left-wing site founded by Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta, marked Bolick’s appointment with the headline “The Most Chilling Political Appointment You’ve Never Heard Of.” . . .

What worries the Left is that Bolick shares with Justice Clarence Thomas, a mentor of his, the view that the Constitution is not a “living document” subject to changes in public opinion. “Take the words of the Constitution literally,” he told KJZZ radio this week. “When judges stray from the text of the Constitution and supplant [it with] their own ideas, like changing the words ‘public use’ into ‘public benefit,’ they’re amending the Constitution. That, to me, is beyond the scope of proper judicial action.”

Bolick’s appointment will have national implications, as it sends a clear signal that a staunch advocate of limits on judicial power can also have a belief that the Constitution requires vigorous enforcement of such basic rights as the right to earn a living and the right to be free of arbitrary government power. When he becomes a judge, Clint Bolick will be putting away the legal six-shooters with which he happily sued bureaucrats for a living. But his opinions will mark him as one of the most interesting judges serving at a high appellate level — and as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice appointed by a future Republican president.

The rules are that lifelong lefty activists (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg) can be appointed to the bench because they have demonstrated a “passion for justice.” Righty activists, on the other hand, even if they’ve quite literally worked on behalf of the little guy, are “ideologues.”

MAGICAL THINKING FROM AMERICA’S ACADEMICS: MLA Attendees Stage Anti-Gun Protest In Austin.

At the Capitol, protest organizers made a circle of books to create what they called “a circle of safety” that should exist in classrooms where literature is discussed.

This from people who’d happily punish a student for badthink in one of those discussions. This is just embarrassing, even by MLA standards. But it will certainly provide fodder for the pro-gun side.

SAY IT AIN’T SO: It Might Be Time for the Toyota Land Cruiser to Go. “A Lexus lover would feel pretty at home in the modern LC’s cabin. Nice seats, nice leather, everything heated and cooled and sensor enabled. But there’s no excuse for the on-road behavior. The vehicle is an unconscionable 5,800-plus pounds, and you can feel every bloated ounce in every single turn.”

TO THE MAN I SAT NEXT TO ON THE TRAIN: I AM THE GUN OWNER YOU HATE.

FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU HASHTAG DIPLOMACY:

The administration’s memo acknowledged the effectiveness of the terrorists’ propaganda and asked for help from the tech companies because, it said, “there is a shortage of compelling credible alternative content.”

—“Obama Seeks Silicon Valley Help in Fight Against Terrorism,” Bloomberg, yesterday.

If you’re wondering why Bloomberg, home of the invariably “unexpected” bad economic news since January of 2009 is carrying water for the administration, instead of roaring their heads off laughing at the above premise, you need only read this tweet, promoting another of their articles:

As T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner responds, “This is a great headline. Just solid work all around.”

Related: If you really want to see focused social media in action, check out “The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb,” in which a run of the mill 2014 Bollywood movie received a pitiful 1.4 out of ten rating — worse then even Battlefield Earth! — thanks to some major pressure from a Bangladeshi nationalist movement:

But the film made a misstep that has doomed it to the bottom of the IMDb pile. “Gunday” offended a huge, sensitive, organized and social-media-savvy group of people who were encouraged to mobilize to protest the movie by giving it the lowest rating possible on IMDb. Of “Gunday’s” ratings, 36,000 came from outside the U.S., and 91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall — has a more even distribution of ratings, with only 71 percent of reviewers giving it one star. The evidence suggests the push to down-vote “Gunday” was successful, and that shows just how vulnerable data can be, especially when it’s crowdsourced.

* * * * * * * *

On Twitter, activists used the hashtag #GundayHumiliatedHistoryOfBangladesh to get the word out about the protests and to ask supporters to bury the film on IMDb. (By using a quarter of their character allotment on the hashtag alone, though, there wasn’t much room for the activists to elaborate.) Facebook groups were formed specifically to encourage irate Bangladeshis and others to down-vote the movie. (A sample call to action: “If you’re a Bangladeshi and care enough to not let some Indian crappy movie distort our history of independence, let’s unite and boycott this movie!!!”)

Fahmidul Haq, an associate professor of mass communication and journalism at the University of Dhaka, said that getting angry at Bollywood for over-representing India’s role in the 1971 war is something that even Gonojagoron Moncho’s opposition can agree on. “Pro-religious, pro-Pakistan and anti-Indian online users are very active in the cyberspace,” he told me. “For the IMDb case, I guess both groups gave lower ranking to ‘Gunday.’”

Marie Harf has nothing on this crowd when it comes to the bitter hashtag wars of the early 21st century.

BROADWAY BABIES SAY IT’S MORNING IN AMERICA: Mark Steyn, who knows a thing or two about theater and stagecraft, reviews Donald Trump’s rally in Steyn’s backyard, the perilously blue (David Brooks dubbed it “latte town” 20 years ago) Burlington, Vermont:

Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever’s on his mind. This can lead to some odd juxtapositions: One minute he’s talking about the Iran deal, the next he detours into how Macy’s stock is in the toilet since they dumped Trump ties. But in a strange way it all hangs together: It’s both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign.

It’s also hilarious. I’ve seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night’s entertainment I’ve had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He’s way funnier than half the stand-up acts I’ve seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing.

Just to be non-partisan about this, the other day I was listening to Obama’s gun-control photo-op at the White House, and he thanked Gabby Giffords, by explaining that her husband Mark’s brother is an astronaut in outer space and he’d called just before Mark’s last meeting at the White House but, not wishing to disturb the President, Mark didn’t pick up. “Which made me feel kind of bad,” said the President. “That’s a long-distance call.” As I was driving along, I remember thinking how brilliantly Obama delivered that line. He’s not usually generous to others and he’s too thin-skinned to be self-deprecating with respect to himself, but, when he wants to get laughs, he knows how to do it. Trump’s is a different style: He’s looser, and more freewheeling. He’s not like Jeb – he doesn’t need writers, and scripted lines; he has a natural instinct for where the comedy lies. He has a zest for the comedy of life.

To be sure, some of the gags can be a little – what’s the word? – mean-spirited. The performance was interrupted by knots of protesters. “Throw ’em out!” barked Trump, after the first chants broke out. The second time it happened, he watched one of the security guys carefully picking up the heckler’s coat. “Confiscate their coats,” deadpanned Trump. “It’s ten below zero outside.” Third time it happened, he extended his coat riff: “We’ll mail them back to them in a couple of weeks.” On MSNBC, they apparently had a discussion on how Trump could be so outrageous as to demand the confiscation of private property. But in showbusiness this is what is known as a “joke”. And in the theatre it lands: everyone’s laughing and having a ball.

Plus this:

The headline in Friday’s local paper read: “BURLINGTON TRUMPED”. That’s what his fans liked. In the liberal heart of a liberal state, the supporters streaming out of the Flynn Theatre, waving genially to the social-justice doofuses across the way, couldn’t recall a night like it. Not in Vermont. In New Hampshire, sure. In South Carolina. But not in Vermont. It felt good to be taking it to the other side’s turf. And they’d like a lot more of it between now and November.

As Kathy Shaidle writes in her link to Steyn’s article, “I’d add ‘read the whole thing’ but you won’t be able to stop anyhow…”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? This Portland Hippie Is Planning a ‘Peace Concert’ in ISIS-Controlled Syria:

James Twyman, ‘Peace Troubadour,’ is embarking on ‘the most important and dangerous peace mission’ of his life—to the Israel-Syria border and beyond, wielding his classical guitar.

ISIS generally doesn’t respond well to music.

But that isn’t stopping James Twyman, an author and musician based in Portland, Oregon, from planning a trip to ISIS-held territory in Syria later this month to help bring peace to the region through the power of a musical-prayer concert.

“Performing the peace prayers in ISIS Controlled Syria will be the most important and dangerous peace mission of my life,” the self-described “Peace Troubadour” blogged last month.

“Every peace mission I’ve been on has been dangerous, but this journey is without question the most perilous, and in my opinion—the most important,” Twyman wrote. “People everywhere are concerned about the escalating violence in the Middle East, especially with the rise of ISIS, but they don’t feel empowered to be part of the solution. That is what we are about to change.”

And if Twyman survives, he’ll totally lock-up that gig as James Taylor’s opening act in Branson and the Paris city hall.

THIS IS A GOOD IDEA: GM Asks Friendly Hackers to Report Its Cars’ Security Flaws.

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MARK STEYN: Checkpoint Charlie Hebdo.

A year ago, after the Charlie Hebdo bloodbath, Angela Merkel was walking directly alongside President Hollande in that hideous memorial parade at which the world’s leaders proclaimed that no such bloody acts of violence would ever kill free speech. No, sir, when it comes to killing free speech, leave it to smooth house-trained western politicians.

And so it was that Chancellor Merkel chose to commemorate the first anniversary of the Charlie massacre by clamping down on freedom of expression for her own benighted subjects. As The Washington Post put it:

Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants

Who doesn’t love Germans springing? Isn’t that in The Producers? Spring time for thought-crime in Germany… [UPDATE! Scaramouche completes the thought.]

The German state is apparently incapable of springing to action over organized mass sexual assault in at least five cities on a rape-out-the-old New Year’s Eve (oh, and Finland, too), but you’ve gotta be able to prioritize, right? Post reporter Anthony Faiola’s snide opening is a classic of the genre:

BERLIN — Donald Trump may be testing the boundaries of tolerance on the U.S. campaign trail. But here in Germany, the government is effectively enforcing civility, taking aim at a surge of hate speech against refugees and Muslims.

There’s actually nothing very “civil” about “enforcing civility”. Indeed, if civility (which derives from “civis” – citizen) has to be enforced, it is by definition no longer civility at all.

As a friend comments on Facebook: “This is why western countries are headed for one heck of a political debacle. We’ve developed political elites which routinely mishandle major crises, then try to silence anybody who notices. They act as if everything will work out if only we shut up about the problem. This is of course insanity. And we are all going to pay a severe price for it.”

Yes.

I HOPE THE RUSSIANS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN, TOO: Islamic State Fighter Executes His Own Mother for ‘Apostasy.’