Ben Carson to the MSM: "The American People Are Waking Up to Your Games"

Ben Carson strikes back at the press:
"You see, what you're not going to find with me is somebody who just is going to sit back and let you be completely unfair, without letting the American people know what's going on."

Challenging Queries from the Mainstream Media

Amazingly enough, this Wizard of Id cartoon appeared in July, over three months before the first Democratic debate.

Hundreds of federal employees, including officials at the State and Justice departments, have been found to hold qualifications from a bogus diploma mill operation

Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire

writes Declan Walsh in a major New York Times report:

hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.

Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

That company, Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.

Axact does sell some software applications. But according to former insiders, company records and a detailed analysis of its websites, Axact’s main business has been to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an Internet-era scheme on a global scale.

 … In academia, diploma mills have long been seen as a nuisance. But the proliferation of Internet-based degree schemes has raised concerns about their possible use in immigration fraud, and about dangers they may pose to public safety and legal systems. In 2007, for example, a British court jailed Gene Morrison, a fake police criminologist who claimed to have degree certificates from the Axact-owned Rochville University, among other places.

Little of this is known in Pakistan, where Axact has dodged questions about its diploma business and has portrayed itself as a roaring success and model corporate citizen. …/…

Real-Life Troubles

Many customers of degree operations, hoping to secure a promotion or pad their résumé, are clearly aware that they are buying the educational equivalent of a knockoff Rolex. Some have been caught.

In the United States, one federal prosecution in 2008 revealed that 350 federal employees, including officials at the departments of State and Justice, held qualifications from a non-Axact-related diploma mill operation based in Washington State.

The effects have sometimes been deeply disruptive. In Britain, the police had to re-examine 700 cases that Mr. Morrison, the falsely credentialed police criminologist and Rochville graduate, had worked on. “It looked easier than going to a real university,” Mr. Morrison said during his 2007 trial.

In the Middle East, Axact has sold aeronautical degrees to airline employees, and medical degrees to hospital workers. One nurse at a large hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, admitted to spending $60,000 on an Axact-issued medical degree to secure a promotion.

But there is also evidence that many Axact customers are dupes, lured by the promise of a real online education.

Left's Journalism Hero Becomes France's Foremost Anti-Immigration Mayor

In a past life he was France’s leading advocate for journalists, fighting to spring them from dictators worldwide, a fearless defender of freedom of the press on four continents and a hero to free-speech advocates

writes Adam Nossiter in the New York Times.

That was then. Now, Robert Ménard, the man who founded Reporters Sans Frontières — Reporters Without Borders — has become a symbol of right-wing extremism in France.

No longer a journalists’ advocate but the mayor of the largest city under far-right control in France, he says there are too many immigrants in his town, too many veils, too many Muslim children and too much culture that is not French.

Mr. Ménard has ordered the laundry off the window ledges, the satellite dishes off the roofs and Syrian refugees out of public housing. He has counted the Muslim children in schools here — a strict no-no in secular France — and increased police patrols on horseback in this whitewashed old Mediterranean city of 70,000 people, high unemployment, high poverty, narrow stone streets and medieval churches.

“People feel like they are being replaced,” Mr. Ménard said an interview inside the 18th-century City Hall. “Immigration has become massive.”

For the far right in France, his tenure as mayor of Béziers has become a laboratory of sorts, watched with fascination by the country’s media, chagrin by liberal-minded opponents and glee by the National Front party of Marine Le Pen.

 … “We are the avant-garde of change in France,” Mr. Ménard, 62, declared in the interview.

  … to Mr. Ménard, it is all straightforward. He wants most if not all of the immigrants to go somewhere else.

“I don’t want this city to be majority-Muslim, at all,” he said. “There is a majority of the Muslim population that is incapable of living within the norms of this country.”

“I love this country,” he said, ticking off France’s prowess in literature, art and architecture, even its “way of looking at women. I am as attached to them as to my own eyes,” he said.

“The identity of this city is not a Muslim identity,” Mr. Ménard continued. “This is a problem of numbers. When you’ve got two-thirds of the kids in a school with Muslim names — that’s a disaster. Impossible. There’s no way you could want this.”

In September, he strode into public housing here, wearing his tricolor official sash — the French national colors — and accompanied by a retinue of aides, to accost a Syrian refugee wearing a Berkeley T-shirt.

In his carefully enunciated diction, Mr. Ménard told the bemused-looking refugee, “Sir, you are not welcome in this city.”

The episode was filmed and posted on YouTube by the City of Béziers.

 … Mr. Ménard founded Reporters Sans Frontières in 1985 with friends, and until he left it in 2008, was an uncompromising defender of free speech, becoming ever more so as the years went on, and even speaking up against the law silencing French Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson.

Mr. Ménard was born in French Algeria and was forced to leave with his family, along with millions of other Frenchmen, when the country gained independence in 1962 — a background critics say explains his hostility toward Muslim immigrants.

More on Robert Menard

Diversity compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency

We can now add Halloween parties to the list of things we can’t do because we live in a diverse society

notes one Benny Huang, who knows a thing or two about racial diversity.

Advocates of diversity ought to familiarize themselves with a little thing called “truth in advertising.” Like all ideas, diversity is “sold,” in a manner of speaking. Great efforts are made to get the public to buy into the concept that the optimal model for society is a heterogeneous jumble of people who share nothing in common. The fewer commonalities we have, the better! That’s what diversity means—differentness. It’s enough to make you wonder what the benefits of diversity are; besides the race riots and lack of social cohesion, I mean. As many condescending liberals have explained to me, the benefits of living in a diverse society include a panoply of ethnic restaurants right in our own neighborhoods…and not much else. I guess that’s a good enough selling point for some people.

But is it too much to ask of diversity’s booster club that they at least disclose the price of diversity before we decide it’s something we want? They never do. Diversity is promoted as an unqualified good, something that only a crazy person wouldn’t like. It’s all roses, no thorns.

Until the bill comes due, that is, and then we find out that diversity isn’t free. With a myriad of cultures comes a limitless set of traditions, social norms, prickly sensibilities and hot button issues. Someone is always bound to take offense or to feel excluded, which requires us to reinvent our culture from the bottom up. Now that we live in a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and even multi-gendered (!) society, our old ways are no longer appropriate.

I could easily write a book filled with examples of stuff that the diversity enforcers won’t allow us to say, do, and think. I would call it “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”

Read the whole thing™ for "a short list of 'nice things' that people living in diverse environments can’t have." Benny Huang adds that he

could go on and on with dozens of more examples. Far from being a bonus, diversity looms as a pagan god that demands the constant sacrifice of everything we hold dear. In exchange for a few benefits—exotic restaurants, I guess?—it compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency. The terms of the Faustian bargain are never spoken aloud of course because no one would ever accept it if they were. Diversity’s salesmen will tell us that there is much to gain and nothing to lose though experience should tell us that they’re lying. It first demands that we give up the small stuff, things that seem insignificant when considered in isolation, such as silly high school musicals. What’s the big deal if we ditch West Side Story for the sake of racial harmony? But it doesn’t stop there because diversity’s hunger is never sated. A precedent has been set and will inevitably be followed from there on out.

When will regulators be held to the same standard as VW executives?

Martin Winterkorn lost his job as Volkswagen’s boss because the carmaker cheated emissions tests

writes Andrew Morriss, Dean of the Texas A&M School of Law, to The Economist (“Dirty secrets”, September 26th).

Yet the heads of the environment agencies in America and Europe are still at their desks. This is despite the fact that the only way they wouldn’t have known that engine software might be detecting test conditions and adjusting the engine was if they had spent the past two decades on another planet.

 … It is impossible for any competent regulator to have been unaware of what was going on with other diesel engines after 1998.

You called for criminal prosecutions of executives that engage in this sort of behaviour. When will you start to hold regulators to the same standard?

Glenn Kennedy adds that the

VW scandal raises questions about a 1970s-era regulatory regime that is based on a one-size-fits-all emissions standard set at a national level, when the reality is that air quality is largely an urban, regional and sometimes seasonal problem.

Indeed, preferring a reduction in NOx emissions at the expense of lower efficiency and therefore higher carbon emissions has a possibly negative environmental benefit for a car driving along a deserted interstate in Montana, compared with a stop-start commute through smog-choked and densely populated Los Angeles.

But if VW’s technically brilliant “defeat” software is able to discern the purpose of the car’s operation and adjust its pollution output accordingly, then surely with GPS technology it should be able to detect its location and make the same adjustments. Feed real-time atmospheric condition data to the vehicle and it might dynamically adjust this trade-off in urban environments, preferring efficiency on clear, windy days, and lower NOx emissions on still, smoggy ones.

Put to a nefarious purpose, VW’s algorithms could well lead to its demise. But combined with updated, technology-driven regulation, this same code could contain the seeds of a smarter, more efficient approach to reducing transportation emissions.

Finally, Hovione's Guy Villax points out that

in Europe our regulators are asleep at the wheel. Football and diesel cars are small in America and big in Europe, but it is the American authorities who have taken action in those two scandals. How much longer will Europe allow non-compliance to be a competitive advantage?

Why All the Tears?

Women Unharmed By Men Touching Their Posterior, Says Danish Expert

DON'T TELL THE FEMINISTS!  After a Danish student made a huge public stink about "sexism in night life" — due to the fact that she got "insanely furious" that a couple of men had patted her behind in a Copenhagen bar (the bartender refused to obey Renna Rose Agger's remark to him, "that's illegal, throw them out") — Dr. Karin Helweg-Larsen told BT's Berit Hartung that there is no harm in that type of incident; for either men or women.

The expert on violence in society added that, yes, there might be cause for concern if it happened on a dark forest lane, but that she would never feel attacked if anyone pinched her buttocks.

If a woman is incapable of signaling where her boundaries lie, she said, that woman should refrain from going out on the town.

The Healer Who Would Make America Respected Again Seems to Often Get the Cold Shoulder From the Leaders of the World He Is Supposed to Be Saving

 … the two bruising encounters [with President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia] in such a short span underscore a hard reality for [President Obama] delivered as he heads deeper into a second term that may come to be dominated by foreign policy.

Thus wrote Mark Landler and Peter Baker about the Apologizer-in-Chief in the New York Times a couple of years ago, before spelling out the harsh reality in question:

his main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties.

Even his friends are not always so friendly. On Wednesday, for example, the president is to meet in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has invited him to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But Ms. Merkel is also expected to press Mr. Obama about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, which offend privacy-minded Germans. 

For all of his effort to cultivate personal ties with foreign counterparts over the last four and a half years — the informal “shirt-sleeves summit” with Mr. Xi was supposed to nurture a friendly rapport that White House aides acknowledge did not materialize — Mr. Obama has complicated relationships with some, and has bet on others who came to disappoint him.

 … Even with friends, however, there is tension. President François Hollande of France was initially thrilled with Mr. Obama because he saw him as an ally against Ms. Merkel on economic issues. 

But by the time they met at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, the relationship had soured, according to French analysts, because France is frustrated that the United States did not do more to help with the war in Mali and resisted a more robust response to Syria. 

Mr. Obama differs from his most recent predecessors, who made personal relationships with leaders the cornerstone of their foreign policies. The first George Bush moved gracefully in foreign capitals, while Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush related to fellow leaders as politicians, trying to understand their pressures and constituencies.  

“That’s not President Obama’s style,” said James B. Steinberg, Mr. Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s deputy secretary of state. …

Have U.S. Relations with Russia Reverted to The Same Type as Those During the Cold War That Obama Once Mocked Romney For?

… the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe … the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War

write David Sanger and Éric Schmitt in the New York Times.

    Am I the only one who thinks that the world seems to be a far more dangerous place in 2015 than a decade ago (Russian Ships Near Data Cables Are Too Close for U.S. Comfort, October 26)?

    I remember when Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, telling him "the Cold War's been over for 20 years."  I also remember him furtively asking Vladimir Putin's protégé for "space" that year, whispering that after said election he would "have more flexibility" with regards to making the U.S. missile defense more palatable to the Kremlin.

    Finally, I remember the enthusiasm in 2008 for getting that dumb, war-mongering cowboy Bush out of the White House, and replaced by a visionary who would make the United States loved and respected again, bringing an unprecedented measure of peace to the world in the process.

    Besides Moscow annexing Crimea (with Russian fighters routinely violating EU airspace), we have Beijing saber-rattling in the China Sea and ISIS capturing one Middle East stronghold after another.  (Yes, I also remember Joe Biden calling the 2011 return of all U.S. combat troops from Baghdad "one of the great achievements of this administration", with Obama declaring "I ended the war in Iraq, as I promised.")

    One might be excused for speculating that far from appreciating the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate's overtures, his numerous apologies, and what Democrats call "smart diplomacy," all sorts of actors have become emboldened and, if anything, are itching for a fight with Uncle Sam.

    During the previous administration, we kept hearing—far from inappropriately—how the latest batch of troubles of the time was "on Bush's watch."  Will no media outlet point out the obvious, that the leftists' feel-good, smiley-face fairy tales about the world ("be nice and talk to everybody, we can all live together") might be at least partially responsible for the the current perilous state of events?

When Hillary attended the funeral of a former Navy SEAL who gave his life at Benghazi, she told the victim’s father she would seek retribution—not against the barbarians who killed his son, but against the video maker

The mainstream media is loath to admit it but Hillary Clinton had a very bad day testifying before the Benghazi committee

opines U.S. Army veteran Benny Huang at Brian Kolfage's Wounded American Warrior.

The emails concern the motive for the attack and its perpetrators. It was never about “The Innocence of Muslims,” a Youtube video that portrayed the historical Mohammad as a truly villainous character. Nearly everyone now admits that the video did not spark the great Benghazi conflagration that left four Americans dead and a consulate in ruins—and by “everyone,” I mean members of the Obama Administration. It was like pulling teeth to get them to concede the point but they apparently have. Their current position is that they made an honest mistake in the Clausewitzian “fog of war.” As difficult as it was to defend the “honest mistake” narrative before Clinton’s emails were uncovered, it is now impossible—or at least it’s impossible for people who care about facts.

Three emails discovered on Mrs. Clinton’s illegal private email server—the one she wiped to stymie investigators—reveal that the secretary never believed the Youtube yarn for a moment. The night of the attack she confided in her daughter Chelsea via email that the compound had been besieged by an “al-Qaeda like group.” She said something similar to the president of Libya, and to Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil she wrote: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to with the film. It was a planned attack not a protest.” These words were written approximately twenty-four hours after the attack.
 
Being the skilled liar that she is, Clinton actually tried to deny that she had ever claimed otherwise. Clearly it was a terrorist attack, not a spontaneous protest gone awry, and she had said so all along!

Okay, not really. On the night of the attack, she addressed the nation, saying:

“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

So there are two lies in that brief statement—that our government values religious tolerance (LOL!) and that the attack was spurred by a video. I’m sure her defenders, weasels that they are, will argue that Clinton never definitively blamed the video but only claimed that “some” sought to justify the attack on those grounds. Who those “some” are is unclear, especially when one considers that the rumor was spawned at the highest levels of the US government. In any case, it’s weak sauce. She was clearly blaming “The Innocence of Muslims,” just as the rest of the administration did. They had their talking points coordinated and they spoke with one voice—blame the video!

 … It would be prudent at this point for Mrs. Clinton and her former boss to apologize to the American public for misleading them. It’ll never happen, I know. But there’s another person, a non-American, who also deserves an apology. His name is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula and he produced the video under the pseudonym “Sam Bacile.” Mr. Nakoula was the administration’s sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter so that the administration could appease the mob, escape blame, and win reelection. Besides the four dead Americans and their families, of course, no one has suffered more than he.

When Mrs. Clinton attended the funeral of Tyrone Woods, a security contractor and former Navy SEAL who gave his life trying to hold back the angry hordes, she approached Charles Woods, the victim’s father, and told him that she would seek retribution—not against the barbarians who killed his son, of course, but against Nakoula Bassely Nakoula. According to Mr. Woods, Clinton said “We’re going to make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Yikes!

 … The Benghazi attack’s death toll ought to include the names of four dead Americans, of course, but also the first amendment, which died a little that day in September 2012.

About Ben Carson: "He really is as nice a man as he seems"

We got a message from N-Joe, the No Pasarán webmaster who wrote for years for the weblog. 

He was at an event of Ben Carson's and sent the above photo along with the following text:

He really is as nice a man as he seems

If, like me, you want Joe N to come back and return to regular blogging, tell him so in the comments b'low.

Marching in the Columbus Day Parade

So, the blog has been on the back-burner for the past week, due to my travel to New York City.

Whilst in the Big Apple, I came upon some kind of parade one Monday, and figured out quickly enough that it was the Columbus Day Parade (what with the Italian flags galore), which I proceeded to join. I was marching right behind some big shot politician, and it turns out it is Bill de Blasio.

So I asked for a selfie, and the mayor acquiesced.

There’s something recognizably American about Jim Webb, and that doesn’t sit well with the Democratic base

Is it any wonder then that Webb, a gun-owning Marine Corps veteran of Scots-Irish descent hailing from a southern state, doesn’t fit in? There’s something recognizably American about Webb, and that doesn’t sit well with the Democratic base. Many of their recent candidates have had a European air about them, and a few have seemed like extraterrestrials.

Thus notes Benny Huang laconically.

Part of [Jim] Webb’s problem is that his party is obsessed with identity politics. When seeking the Democratic nomination it helps to belong to some kind of victim class—to be a woman, a minority, or to sleep with people of your own sex. Being white and male doesn’t get you any points. Working class roots counts for something, though less and less with each passing year.

If you don’t fall into one of the recognized victims categories, the only way to create buzz among Democrats is to veer way, way left.

 … Jim Webb has no future in this party because wing he represents—the blue collar whites—is shriveled and dying. He’s made a point to stick up for that demographic group, arguing for example that affirmative action should consider economic circumstances rather than race. He contends that Democrats aren’t attuned to poor people’s problems when those poor people are white. 

 … But much like the late Rodney Dangerfield, Jim Webb “don’t get no respect!” in today’s Democratic Party. It’s almost as if their famed “big tent” is a sham, as if they apply “purity tests” to their candidates.

The problem with Jim Webb is that he’s outlived his usefulness and no one has the heart to break the bad news to him. The poor schlub made his entrance in 2006 when the Democrats desperately needed real life war heroes. They had had two bad election cycles in 2002 and 2004, due in part to the fact that fresh memories of 9/11 made many Americans unwilling to trust national security to the Democrats. Luckily for them the political winds were starting to shift as Americans’ patience wore thin with the sputtering Iraq War. The Democrats knew that if they were ever to turn an unpopular war to their advantage they would have to field candidates who could never be accused of being wimps and whose admiration for the military was beyond reproach. They needed square-jawed, red-blooded American men with honorable military service and the medals to prove it. In short, they needed Jim Webb.

But that was nearly ten years ago. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both kinda-sorta over, the Democrats are free to be themselves again—angry women, effete men, elitist northeasterners, and gun grabbers.

 … Welcome to the Democratic (Socialist) Party.

For MSM Members: Media Narrative Chart for Reporting Violent Crime

Ricochet has the Media Narrative Chart for Reporting Violent Crime (thanks to B A Duffy):

I created a chart to ensure that budding journalists understand how to properly frame a story involving any type of shooting, terror attack, or other violent crime. Remember that the job of the Objective Journalist™ is not to tell the audience what happened, but to expand the event into an indictment of Western culture. 

Verbally impotent in France

When I arrived on French soil six years ago, I could order an orange juice in a café and purchase a bus ticket, 

bemoans the Telegraph's Gillian Harvey,

but that was about it.

 … While I do have the language skills required to organise my finances at the bank, arrange a play-date for my children and have a parent-teacher meeting at the school (although my brain often aches after such encounters), it’s the subtleties of language that I miss.

Ranger School: Everything in the Obama administration is make-believe and subordinated to the agenda—even truth

Something about the story of the first two women ever to graduate from the Army’s prestigious Ranger course seemed hokey

notes Benny Huang, one army veteran who is always suspicious of “firsts.”

Our society is so fixated on them that it creates an incentive to fudge facts and lower standards.

Liberals will of course contest my assertion, though these are the same people who don’t really object to lowering standards in academia to get more minorities in the door, lowering them again to get them to graduate, then lowering them a third time to hire them as faculty members. Liberals don’t really oppose lowering the bar in order to create “firsts.” They just don’t like to call it “lowering the bar” because that tarnishes the accomplishment. As it should.

General Martin Dempsey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed his doublethink in 2013 when announcing long-term plans to open combat positions to women. In the vey same press conference in which he stated that women would be allowed the opportunity to prove themselves under the same standards as the men, he also stated, “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?”

So the standard will remain the same…unless women can’t reach it. Then elite units will have to justify their standards to the service secretaries, who will probably not be swayed. So why even debate with the service secretaries if disagreement itself signals a career-killing reluctance to get with the program?

In any case, isn’t “we like being awesome” justification enough? Apparently not. General Dempsey’s pronouncement set the tone—we’re going full speed ahead with women in combat. There’s nothing you can do to stop it and you will only be crushed if you try.

It should come as no surprise then that some Ranger instructors now say that the first women ever awarded the Ranger tab, Kristen Griest and Shaye Haver, received plenty of assistance.

 … When it was all over, several anonymous Ranger instructors contacted Congressman Steve Russell (R-OK), a combat veteran and former Army Ranger, to tell him that they had been pressured to go easy on the women. They “got special treatment and played by different rules.”

 … This is all par for the course in Obama’s military. Everything in his administration is make-believe and everything is subordinated to the agenda, even truth. Especially truth. Just think of the Solyndra and “shovel ready jobs.”

Congressman Russell has requested to see the women’s training reports, though I doubt very much that he will find anything there. No one would be stupid enough to document the women’s failures and then graduate them. If the course was fixed, so were the records.

 … These Ranger instructors cared enough about the truth to speak out through the only channels available to them. The real crooks in this sordid tale are the Pentagon brass, the Secretaries of Defense and the Army, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the president. They’re the ones who pressured people beneath them to graduate at least one woman. Am I calling them liars? You betcha! As an Army veteran myself, I’ll tell you that general officers are very much political animals. They lie as much or more than politicians and they’re lying now. 

How to Respond If Someone Calls You a Racist or Says "You Are Full of Shit"

How do you respond to someone who tells you "You are full of s--t" or to someone who calls you a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a hater, a fascist, a Nazi, a troll, a reactionary, a crank, or a clown?

Simple.

You thank them.

Profusely.

Very profusely.

Tell them:

I am touched by your words and I wish to thank you very much for calling me a racist/a hater/a sexist (and/or for saying that I am full of shit), in view of the fact that that shows that you have run out of arguments and that you now have no choice but to resort to ad hominems and insults.

If you wish to elaborate:

Of course, being liberals, people like you have no rational arguments to begin with, that is, none beyond your self-serving (and never-ceasing) statements of self-praise, such as that you are the most intelligent people that ever lived, that you are the most compassionate people who ever lived, that you are the most loving people who ever lived, that you are the most generous, most humanitarian, most peaceful, most tolerant people who ever lived, and that nobody before you has been as open as you are to debate and to discussion.

Related: Americans Anonymous

Mocking Americans as Obese May Have to Become a Thing of the Past in Europe

Americans may soon lose the title of the world’s most obese people if Europeans maintain their habits of heavy drinking, smoking and overeating

reports the Daily Caller's Guy Bentley (thanks to B A Duffy).

A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that the majority of Europeans are now obese or overweight.

According to WHO, 59 percent of Europe’s population is either overweight or obese. Furthermore, the report found that Europe had the highest level of tobacco and alcohol use in the world, with dependency running at 4 percent.

This insane fear we have of offending Muslims is getting people killed—and raped

After reading more about the incident, I’m nearly certain that this kid knew exactly what he was doing

says Benny Huang of the Texas teenager who planned to bring a suspicious device to school as part of a deliberate self-victimization hoax.

What [Ahmed Mohamed] was doing, very likely with the help of CAIR, is called desensitization. It’s the processes of conditioning people to ignore what they know to be dangerous. Most people, when they encounter a briefcase with protruding wires will trust their instincts and report it to authorities. As the old saying goes, “If you see something, say something.” But if ordinary people can be made to keep mum out of fear that they will be called names—racist, Islamophobe, etc.—then terrorists can operate without nosy people flubbing up the operation.

Frontpage Magazine aptly coined a new adage for this era of tolerance and diversity: “If you see something, say something—unless the suspicious person is Muslim.” Yeah. Then shut up or you’re racist.

The classic desensitization operation is the “flying imams” incident of November 2006, in which a group of six Muslim clerics (imams) seemed to go out of their way to alarm passengers on a flight to Phoenix. Three of the imams also triggered “red flags” by buying only one-way tickets and not checking baggage. Several passengers quietly complained to flight attendants that they found the imams’ behavior suspicious.

The righteously indignant imams struck back with lawsuits against the airport, the airline and an anonymous passenger who passed a note to a flight attendant. The imams were represented by CAIR, of course. Eventually the suit against the passenger was dropped but the one against airline went to court. The case was eventually settled for an undisclosed amount through court-supervised mediation, which CAIR touted as a civil rights victory. The judge wrote that the imams had done nothing illegal and discarded as irrelevant the fact that reasonable people, lacking the benefit of hindsight, did what they thought prudent to keep people safe. Airlines were put on notice—if you see Muslims doing something that looks suspicious, you’d better be right.

Many observers, myself included, believed that the whole incident was a pre-meditated attempt to provoke exactly the reaction that they got—just like Ahmed Mohamed’s stunt. If you think that sounds crazy, consider for a moment that one of the imams worked for a Hamas front group before it was shuttered by the Treasury Department.

What CAIR will never admit is that people in western societies are socialized to treat Muslims with kiddy gloves. In their world, Muslims are given extra scrutiny. In reality, they are given less. In their world, the innocent actions of Muslims are interpreted as threatening by demented, Islamophobic minds. In reality, people pretend not to find their actions threatening even when they clearly are.

Can anyone dispute that the 2009 Fort Hood shooting could have been prevented if anyone had had the cajones to report Major Nidal Hassan before he started killing people? It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the Palestinian-American psychiatrist was hot for jihad. Major Hasan went off topic at a military psychiatry conference to deliver a lecture that many in the audience perceived as pro-radical Islam and anti-American, in which he approvingly quoted radical clerics and even Osama bin Laden. A classmate of his says that Hasan later mentioned his support for suicide bombers.

As someone who has served in the Army, I can tell you that career officers are some of the most risk-averse people you will ever meet because the worst fate they can imagine is having an Equal Opportunity (EO) complaint filed against them. There’s nothing worse than being accused of an “-ism” or a “-phobia.”

 … Our reluctance to identify Muslim malfeasance goes beyond terrorism. Try to imagine a society so paralyzed by fear of being labeled Islamophobic that people will look the other way while school-aged girls are raped. That nation really exists. It’s called England.

Between 1997 and 2013, a group of mostly Pakistani men in and around Rotherham, England were luring white English girls as young as eleven into what can only be called sex slavery. A conservative estimate of the victims is 1,400. The pervs managed to keep their little operation secret until 2001 when a Home Office worker named Jayne Senior began interviewing victims and compiling a report which she eventually turned over to authorities…who did nothing for fear of being perceived as racist. Ms. Senior was pressured to remain silent and even ordered to attend an “ethnicity and diversity course.”

 … This insane fear we have of offending Muslims is getting people killed—and raped. I don’t care for a moment if some kid in Texas feels bad because a teacher mistook his bomb-like object for a bomb. He was likely baiting the teacher, and even if he wasn’t, the teacher did nothing wrong. The madness has to stop.