OUR HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES HAVE A PRICE: China ‘Disappears’ Its Minorities, Silences World With Cash.

HMM: Mandatory Sanctions Imposed on Russia After State Dept. Confirms Chemical Weapons Use in UK. “There are a number of carve-outs that we are making under the sanctions that are required by the act. Not everything that is mandatory under the act we will be proceeding with at this time. The carve-outs will include a – we will have a waiver for the provision of foreign assistance to Russia and to the Russian people. Our provision of foreign assistance is a tool of U.S. power and influence, and we’re not going to foreswear that just because we have the obligation to impose some sanctions against Russia. So that is going to be a carve-out under this – under these new sanctions.”

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T: Twitter Bans Conservative Author For Tweet Supporting Sarah Jeong And Opposing Deplatforming.

Elizabeth Kantor:

They deplatformed me—for a tweet deploring deplatforming. Here’s the full text of my offending tweet, a full-throttle defense of New York Times editorial board hiree Sarah Jeong’s freedom of speech and included a self-deprecating reference to my own race: “@sarahjeong This whitey is cheering you on as you fight off the Twitter mob. Down with deplatforming! Plus, it’s clarifying abt. what kind of paper the NYT wants to be . . .” 5:24 AM – 3 Aug 2018.

Honestly, I thought that was a pretty gracious response to someone who had tweeted out “#CancelWhitePeople” and speculated that people like me are natural cave-dwellers unfit for life on the surface of the planet. But according to Twitter it’s me, not Jeong, who has engaged in “hateful conduct” that violates Twitter’s terms of service: “Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin…”

Twitter’s rules are whatever Twitter wants them to be in the moment.

IT’S KAFKAS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Smith College investigates employee for following its own procedures on ‘suspicious behavior.’

Report all incidents, ‘no matter how insignificant’

If you see something, say something.

It’s not only an annoying but toothless order from the Department of Homeland Security – it’s the official policy of Smith College.

And the elite women’s school may punish an employee for doing exactly what it tells employees to do.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe notes the cognitive dissonance at Smith in response to an incident where a school employee saw what appeared to be a young man (at a women’s college) lounging in a common area (during the summer, when students are gone) in an otherwise empty building.

As the world knows by now, because the slightest alleged racial element of any interaction makes it international news, the employee called the campus police to see who this black person was. There’s nothing remotely racial about the report, as evidenced by the transcript, which ends with the officer reporting back that the person was “a student relaxing in the living room.”

Indeed, Smith has not said what race the employee is.

Student Oumou Kanoute is actually female, but you can see from her hairstyle on her Facebook page how the employee could have mistaken the sophomore Kanoute for a young man with a quick glance and not a lingering glare. She looks young enough to be in high school.

With no evidence, the teaching assistant and residential advisor claimed on Facebook last week that the incident was an example of racism.

Kanoute said the staffer was white, which will be embarrassing if she’s also wrong. She even acknowledged that she was identified as a young male – at a women’s college during the summer, in an otherwise empty building – in the call to campus police.

She’s demanding that Smith identify this person who accidentally misgendered her in a police report, in a transparent attempt to sic a vicious mob on this poor soul … who was following Smith College policy.

The Globe‘s Jacoby notes what utter BS this is. . . .

Smith’s response was, of course, measured and nuanced: It put the employee on leave and will most likely surrender to the mob by firing or paying off this person to leave campus. To handle its investigation, it hired a law firm whose founder has a curious definition of sexual assault.

President Kathleen McCartney’s statement to the community makes clear that the outcome of the investigation is predetermined and it will ignore its own safety policies.

Why are lefty organizations so awful to their working class employees?

NEWS ABOUT BREWS YOU CAN USE: States without laws requiring brewers to use middlemen to distribute their products have more breweries than those without. Whodathunkit?

DOWN BUT NOT OUT: Islamic State fighters numbers increase in Syria.

BRIT BOYS REJECT UNIVERSAL UNIVERSITY: At Samizdata, Natalie Solent notes that British boys are rejecting the credentialist Blairite ideal of university for all. Why? Well,

The boys have evidently cottoned on earlier than their sisters. It could be that they are smarter, or it could be that British universities show signs of following the US example and becoming places where males are scorned and treated unfairly.

It’s an open question.

YOU MEAN SHE PREDICTS THAT TRUMP SUPPORTERS WILL ACT LIKE HILLARY SUPPORTERS HAVE SINCE 2016: Prof predicts Trump voters will riot when Trump leaves office.

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PAUL SPERRY: Dianne Feinstein was an easy mark for China’s spy.

As vice chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been investigating allegations of President Trump’s “collusion” with Russia.

But now we learn Feinstein may be the one compromised by a foreign power.

Turns out that Communist China had a spy in her office. A 20-year employee of Feinstein’s, the agent had been reporting back to China’s Ministry of State Security for well over a decade before he was caught in 2013, according to the FBI.

A Chinese-American who doubled as both an office staffer and Feinstein’s personal driver, the agent reportedly was handled by officials based out of the People’s Republic of China’s consulate in San Francisco, which Feinstein helped set up when she was mayor of that city. He even attended consulate functions for the senator. . . .

In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.

The warning proved prescient.

One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.

After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.

Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein.

We probably need an independent counsel to investigate Washington officials who might be compromised by this foreign meddling.

FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S BERKELEYTOWN: Antifa Prof Who Bashed Trump Supporter in Head with Bike Lock at Berkeley Given Slap on Wrist.

WELL, YES: Andrew Cuomo is now at war with the Bill of Rights.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Erdogan’s Ottomania.

Islam—both as a religion and as a foundational civilization—lies at the center of this identity. Some might argue that the new Ottomanism came of age with the rise of political Islam; indeed it is difficult to see precisely where Ottomanism begins and Islamism ends. As far as a new conservative bourgeois class and ascendant pro-Erdoğan journalists and public intellectuals are concerned, at least, appeals to the Ottoman identity are more welcome than those to the Golden Age of Islam.

This Ottoman imaginary represents an unprecedented restructuring of the country since 1922. It embodies a new political legitimacy that plumbs the depths of identity desires in ways apparently not fulfilled by the modernizing Kemalist project. Indeed some conservative intellectuals blame the country’s current identity crisis on the secularizing reforms instituted at the founding of the Republic. And after the 1980 military coup, the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” emerged as an antidote to the growing appeal of socialism and to Kurdish secessionist claims.

The Ottoman past has thus become the foundation upon which to build a future once viewed as so far gone that it was impossible to reinvigorate. But exactly what sort of future worth building is a matter of contention, and the country’s current political struggle reflects a deeper conflict between two competing neo-Ottoman imaginaries. On the one hand, there is the Özal variety, which is cosmopolitan, pro-European, and religiously pluralist, even while it recognizes a special role for Islam in society. By contrast, the increasingly dominant vision of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu is exclusivist, anti-Western, and Islamist in both a political and social sense.

Turks have their choice of arsenic or strychnine.

NIGHT SKY OVER HAWAII, WITH AN OCCASIONAL FLASH OF HIGH EXPLOSIVE: Aussies, Kiwis and Marines pause during a field exercise, and watch.

CHANGE: Blacks’ approval of Trump reaches a high of 21% and NAACP charges ‘racism.’

President Trump continues to show improvement among African-Americans, but the NAACP Tuesday called him a racist.

In fact, in a new poll released by the group today, Trump’s approval rating among blacks has reached 21 percent, more than double what it was in an April Reuters poll.

But in its analysis, the NAACP slammed Trump and even went as far as claiming that Trump is setting race relations back, a charge that echoes recent media criticism of the president for slamming hoops star LeBron James.

Bad news for Democrats.

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Lockheed-Dynetics team and Raytheon locked in battle to build 100-kilowatt laser for US Army.

The effort will culminate in a test of the entire system in 2022 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The Army began its effort to get a more powerful laser onto a vehicle less bulky than a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck in 2016.

Raytheon announced last month that it had won a $10 million contract to develop a laser for the Army’s High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstration program.

Dynetics released a statement Aug. 6, just ahead of the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, revealing it had won, along with its partner Lockheed Martin, the second $10 million development contract to build a laser for the HEL TVD program.

All I want for Christmas is a stealth laser tank — preferably one that hovers.

“FINDS.” Ohio race just got closer after county finds hundreds of uncounted votes.

WHAT DO YOU CALL AN IMPEACHED STATE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE? A GOOD START. This State Is Impeaching Its Entire Supreme Court, Maybe They’re Onto Something.

TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION HAS STILL NOT WITHDRAWN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICY: Still waiting. But in the meantime, here’s an explanation of why the Obama-Era policy was outside the scope of the Department of Education’s powers. More complete version here.

RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: New York City Council Votes to Cap Uber and Lyft.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has championed the measures, is expected to sign the legislation in the coming weeks.

Council members approved a package of bills after months of protests from taxi drivers and others in favor of them and a campaign by the ride-hailing companies urging customers to oppose the bills.

The firms warned that the cap would lead to reduced service in the outer boroughs and to higher fares at a time when the city’s subway and bus systems are struggling.

“The city’s 12-month pause on new vehicle licenses will threaten one of the few reliable transportation options while doing nothing to fix the subways or ease congestion,” a spokeswoman for Uber, Danielle Filson, said in a statement.

Ms. Filson added, “Uber will do whatever it takes to keep up with growing demand.”

Joseph Okpaku, vice president of public policy for Lyft said, “These sweeping cuts to transportation will bring New Yorkers back to an era of struggling to get a ride, particularly for communities of color and in the outer boroughs.”

De Blasio and the City Council are not unaware of this, but forcing gig drivers out of work and forcing minorities and outer boroughs dwellers to shell out more for less service is a small price to pay to protect their buddies in the taxi business.

GOOD LORD: Man at filthy New Mexico compound was training kids to commit school shootings, prosecutors say.

The father of a missing 4-year-old Georgia boy was training children at a filthy New Mexico compound to commit school shootings, prosecutors alleged in court documents Wednesday. The documents say Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was conducting weapons training with assault rifles at the compound near the Colorado border.

It was at that compound in Amalia where authorities found 11 hungry children living in squalor when they raided it Friday.

Prosecutors Timothy Hasson filed the documents while asking that Wahhaj be held without bail after he was arrested last week with four other adults facing child abuse charges.

Prosecutors did not bring up the school shooting accusation in court Wednesday during an initial appearance by the abuse suspects.

Authorities have also said they discovered remains of a boy at the compound. Medical examiners are working to determine a positive identification.

Plus this tidbit CBS News didn’t bother to report:

Sheriff Hogrefe of the Taos County Sheriff Department said in a statement, “We had learned the occupants were most likely heavily armed and considered extremist of the Muslim belief. We also knew from the layout of the compound they would have an advantage if we didn’t deploy tactfully and quickly.”

Good work by the Taos County Sheriff Department, but I suppose Wahhaj’s true motive will never be known.

JOHN HAWKINS: The Liberal Hate for White People Should Cost Them Big at The Ballot Box. “Why vote for someone who defends people who hate you because of the color of your skin?”

That’s exactly what happened in 2016, but will history repeat in the midterms?

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