Tuesday night round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesLots of good stuff and little time, so I’ll try to be brief.

John Hinderaker makes an excellent point about the appalling silence in the face of Meriam Ibrahim’s imprisonment, and impending lashing and execution, all for the crime of being a Christian woman born to an absentee Muslim father.  Ibrahim is married to an American citizen and has two children by him, one of whom, a toddler, is shackled in prison with her, and the other of whom was just born while Meriam was chained to the bed. The same people who were (appropriately) upset by the 300 Nigerian Christian girls whom Boko Haram kidnapped are completely silent about the American children imprisoned in Sudan, and this includes both the State Department and American Christians.

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With her usual class, Michelle Obama, faced with increasing unrest about her “healthy” school meals (meals that have seen tens of thousands of kids boycott the food), has declared that dissent is “unacceptable.”

Moreover, with a complete lack of irony, the wife of the president in an ostensibly free society insists that the people’s representatives can have no say in the matter: “The first lady said Congress shouldn’t even be setting the standard’s for nutrition. That should be up to experts, she said.”

If you ever wanted to see DemProgs in action, the above is as complete and comprehensive a summary as you will ever find.

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I’m pleased to see that the Financial Times is refusing to back off of its claim that Piketty didn’t just make mistakes when he wrote his book advocating communism (by another name), he intentionally fudged the data.

One of Piketty’s claims of innocence lies in the fact that he made his data available online. I’m not surprised. Hardcore liars seldom expect anyone to call their bluff when they inundate everyone with unwieldy amounts of material.

I worked on cases like that. The least honest lawyer would deluge counsel and the court with hundreds of case cites and thousands of record citations, secure in the knowledge that the sheer weight of this “evidence” would convince the court of his probity. It was very hard to overcome the court’s reflexive feeling that all those cites and documents must add up to something. Most of these cases weren’t won on the pleadings, but had to go to trial, where the facts and law were directly before the judge, instead of buried in mountains of paper.

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You know something’s going on when NPR — NPR! — runs a long story about a young couple that couldn’t find any doctors on Obamacare who would handle the wife’s pregnancy, who then dropped their insurance because it was expensive and useless, and had an old-fashioned home delivery without medical attendants. I can only say that they are very lucky that it was a straightforward birth. In the old days, mothers and babies died that way. It would have been tragedy for the family, but I’m betting that Nancy Pelosi would have been able to brush it off.

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Mass murderers become litmus tests. The feminists conclude he hates women (society’s fault); the entire DemProg party concludes it’s the NRA’s fault (not that Rodgers had any ties to it); and the Hollywood feminists conclude that the solution to gun violence is to let women direct more films. Thelma & Louise part II, anyone?

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Europe continues its forward march back to the 1930s. Americans are terribly naive when they think that the terms “left” and “right” in Europe mean the same that they do here. The European left is infinitely more malignant even than the DemProgs have gotten, while the right is as statist as the Left, and therefore entirely unlike American conservativism. Worse, both left and right in Europe hate Israel and the Jews, although the European right throws in hated for Islam, while the European left continues to invite sharia to come on in.

Things in Europe are bad. Absent a black swan, they will get worse.

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Simply Jews looks at medical tourism in Israel. It’s short and very, very funny.

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Walter Williams sums up some of the worst examples of the lunacy that takes place at the annual White Privilege Conference put on for American educators. These people sound like fringe nutcases, but they go back and infect America’s education system from root to branch.

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Your tax dollars at work: Columbia University spends millions on inciting climate hysteria, including fake voice mails that purport to be the words of people in the future dying from the effects of man-made climate change. No surprise. It’s a religion. As the actual, data-driven science disproves it with increasing frequency, the faithful must scream out more loudly to silence dissent. Meriam Ibrahim would understand.

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What do you get when you fuse a death cult religion with a primitive country that finds pleasure in suffering? Pakistan.

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Antisemitism at MSNBC isn’t a random accident.  It’s an ideological commitment.

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A week before anybody outside of his family and some creeped-out acquaintances had ever heard of Elliot Rodgers, Colion Noir uploaded a prophetic video about mass murderers: