#335776

Hillary Clinton, now a private citizen after conceding the election to Donald Trump, wants in on the recount effort Green Party nominee Jill Stein launched Friday, even though she previously called su

#335777
#335778

Both an economy and a weather system are chaotic systems, where local interactions between their components dominate their behavior.

#335779

As the election recount push in three states progresses, news from Wisconsin says that the state may not be able to certify its electoral college votes in time.

#335780

"Desperate Venezuelans are streaming across the Amazon Basin"

#335781

Buxton School in Leytonstone, east London, which has pupils aged three-16 has installed unisex toilets for pupils aged eight and up in its new £12million building, to the outrage of parents.

#335782

A very nice liberal broadcaster asked me earlier this week whether I am worried about the future of the Republican party.
Funny question.
There are 25 states in which the state legislatures and governorships are controlled by Republicans, and two states with executive/legislative divides in which there are Republican legislative majorities large enough to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Sixty-eight of the country’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers are Republican-run. There are only four states with Democratic governors and legislatures; it is true that these include one of our most populous states (California), but the majority of Americans live in states in which there are Republican trifectas or veto-proof legislative majorities. Two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control. Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just won the presidency.
Democrats control the dean of students’ office at Oberlin.
And Democrats have responded to their recent electoral defeat with riots, arson, and Alex Jones–level conspiracy theories. Progressives have just raised $5 million to press for a recount in several states. Clinton sycophant Paul Krugman, sounding exactly like every well-mannered conspiracy nut you’ve ever known, says the election “probably wasn’t hacked,” but “conspiracies do happen” and “now that it’s out there” — (who put it out there?) — “an independent investigation is called for.”
Maybe it isn’t the Republican party whose future needs worrying about.
In one sense, what is happening in American politics is a convergence of partisan styles.
Beginning with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and thanks in no small part to the efforts of many men associated with this magazine, the Republican party spent half a century as a highly ideological enterprise. But highly ideological political parties are not the norm in the English-speaking world, especially not in the United States, and the conservative fusion of American libertarianism, social traditionalism, and national-security assertiveness probably is not stable enough to cohere, having now long outlived the Cold War, in which it was forged. Trump’s lack of conservative principle is unwelcome, but it points to an ideological looseness that is arguably more normal, a return to the model of party as loose coalition of interest groups.
As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way.
For the moment, the stylistic convergence — the Republicans becoming a little more like the selfish-coalition Democratic party, and the Democrats becoming a little more like the ideological Republican party — works to the Republicans’ advantage, though there is no reason to believe that always will be the case. The GOP had a very good run of it as a highly ideological enterprise.
The longer-term problem for the Democrats is that they are finding out that they have to play by their own rules, which are the rules of identity politics. This is a larger problem for the Democratic party than is generally appreciated. The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union. They are more likely to be cutting the grass in front of Elizabeth Warren’s multi-million-dollar mansion than moving into one of their own. They roll their eyes at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s risible “abuela” act, having actual abuelas of their own.
#related#As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democratic base is not made up of little old liberal white ladies with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure bank balances, but the party’s leadership is. It is worth noting that in a year in which the Republican candidate painted Mexican immigrants with a rather broad and ugly brush, Mrs. Clinton got a smaller share of the Hispanic vote than Barack Obama did in 2012. She got a significantly smaller share of the black vote, too. Interestingly, Mrs. Clinton’s drop in the black vote came exclusively from black men. Many black Americans had very high hopes that an Obama administration would mean significant changes in their lives and in the state of their communities, but that has not come to pass. There is nothing about Mrs. Clinton that inspired similar hopes. “She’s not right, and we all know it,” the comedian Dave Chappelle said.
It is far from obvious that Senator Cherokee Cheekbones or anyone standing alongside Debbie Wasserman Schultz will feel more “right” to Democratic voters who have almost nothing in common with them. A coalition in which elderly rich white faculty-lounge liberals have all the power and enjoy all the perks while the work and money come from younger and browner people is not going to be very stable.
Especially when it has been stripped of the one thing that has held that coalition together so far: power.
— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been emended since its publication.

#335783

Some newly discovered columns shed light on the shocking views expressed by one of the Democrat’s favorite politicians. Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, now in the running to be DNC Chair, has at

#335784

Infowars reporters Rob Dew and Darrin McBreen discuss what they think the first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency will look like. Help us spread the word...

#335785

President-Elect Donald Trump is vowing to unleash American energy and begin scrapping burdensome regulations on his very first day in office, announcements welcomed by the energy industry, although it still has other goals it wants the new administration pursue. In a short video, Trump outlined several directives he will issue on his first day in office [?]

#335786

Since liberals want a recount. And many are protesting this election I thought it would be fun to take a break from Trump and the election and remember Jorge...

#335787

Two decades of “Castro-is-dead” rumors are finally at an end. And the race is on to see which world leader can most fulsomely praise Fidel Castro’s legacy, while delicately averting their eyes from his less savory characteristics. Two dul -elected leaders of democracies who should know better, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American president Barack Obama, are leading the way. Mr. Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation.” Mr. Obama offered his “condolences” to the Cuban people, and blandly suggested that “history will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure.” Now, he added, we can “look to the future.”
With all due respect to Mr. Obama, the 60 years Fidel Castro spent systematically exploiting and oppressing the people of Cuba provide more than enough history to pass judgment on both Fidel and, now more importantly, his brother Raul.
My own family’s experience is a case in point. My father, Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista — and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba. Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold. In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn.
The betrayal and violence experienced by my father and aunt were all too typical of the millions of Cubans who have suffered under the Castro regime over the last six decades. This is not the stuff of Cold War history that can be swept under the rug simply because Fidel is dead. Consider, for example, the dissidents Guillermo Fariñas and Elizardo Sanchez, who warned me in the summer of 2013 that the Castros, then on the ropes because of the reduction of Venezuelan patronage, were plotting to cement their hold on power by pretending to liberalize in order to get the American economic embargo lifted. Their model was Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia (Sanchez called it “Putinismo”), and their plan was to get the United States to pay for it. It worked. The year after I met with Fariñas and Sanchez, Mr. Obama announced his famous “thaw” with the Castros, and the American dollars started flowing. As we now know, there was no corresponding political liberalization. Last September, Mr. Fariñas concluded his 25th hunger strike against the Castros’ oppression.
Then there is the case of the prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya, who in 2012 died in a car crash that is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Castro regime. His daughter, Rosa Maria, has pressed relentlessly for answers, and thus become a target herself. When, just three years after her father’s death, the United States honored the Castros with a new embassy in Washington, D.C., Rosa Maria tried to attend the related State Department press conference as an accredited journalist. But she was spotted by the Cuban delegation, who demanded that she be removed if she dared ask any questions. The Americans complied, in an act of thuggery more typical of Havana than Washington.
Finally, I had the honor last summer to meet with Dr. Oscar Biscet, an early truth-teller about the disgusting practice of post-birth abortions in Cuba who has been repeatedly jailed and tortured for his fearless opposition to the Castros. I asked him, as I had asked Senores Farinas and Sanchez, whether his ability to travel signaled growing freedom on the island. He answered just as they had three years earlier: “No.” In fact, he said, the repression had grown worse since the “thaw” with America. Didn’t we realize, he wondered, that all those American dollars were flowing into the Castros’ pockets, and funding the next generation of their police state?
That is the true legacy of Fidel Castro — that he was able to institutionalize his dictatorship so it would survive him.
There is a real danger that we will now fall into the trap of thinking Fidel’s death represents material change in Cuba. It does not. The moment to exert maximum pressure would have been eight years ago, when his failing health forced him to pass control to his brother Raul. But, rather than leverage the transition in our favor, the Obama administration decided to start negotiations with Raul in the mistaken belief that he would prove more reasonable than his brother (an unfortunate pattern they repeated with Kim Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, and Nicolas Maduro). Efforts to be diplomatically polite about Fidel’s death suggest the administration still hopes Raul can be brought round.
#related#All historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Raul is not a “different” Castro. He is his brother’s chosen successor who has spent the last eight years implementing his dynastic plan. Unlike Cuba, however, the United States has an actual democracy, and our recent elections suggest there is significant resistance among the American people to the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement towards hostile dictators. We can — and should — send clear signals that that policy is at an end. Among other things, we should halt the dangerous “security cooperation” we have begun with the Castro regime, which extends to military exercises, counter-narcotics efforts, communications, and navigation — all of which places our sensitive information in the hands of a hostile government that would not hesitate to share it with other enemies from Tehran to Pyongyang. And we should insist that no United States government official attend Castro’s funeral unless and until Raul releases his political prisoners, first and foremost those who have been detained since Fidel’s death. I hope all my colleagues will join me in calling for these alterations.
A dictator is dead. But his dark, repressive legacy will not automatically follow him to the grave. Change can come to Cuba, but only if America learns from history and prevents Fidel’s successor from playing the same old tricks.
— Ted Cruz represents Texas in the United States Senate.

#335788

Less than two weeks after an election that sent liberals desperately searching for a dwindling number of safe spaces where they'll be shielded from opinions they don't share, the top editor at the reliably leftward Boston Globe has told his staff they must be "open" to new ways of covering President-elect Donald Trump and his administration. Globe editor Brian McGrory sent out a message Friday to the paper's reporters and editors, with a full copy making its way to media critic/Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy and his widely read blog, Media Nation.

#335789

Steve Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, landed in hot water Wednesday after admitting that he used his administrative powers to secretly edit user comments that were critical of him on r/The_Donald - a popular, pro-Trump forum (or "subreddit"). He swapped all mentions of his own username with the names of the pro-Trump group's leaders, meaning that expletive-laden posts aimed at him looked instead as if they were insulting the group's leaders.

#335790

“Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!”

#335791

From the very first day, the man who has become one of the most controversial advisers to Donald Trump, made an impression.

#335792

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says President elect-Donald Trump offered him the job of education secretary, but that he turned it down for personal reasons.

#335793

“Why would Hillary Clinton—who conceded the election to Donald Trump—want #Recount2016? You cannot be on-again, off-again about democracy.”

#335794

Two decades of “Castro-is-dead” rumors are finally at an end. And the race is on to see which world leader can most fulsomely praise Fidel Castro’s legacy, while delicately averting their eyes from his less savory characteristics. Two dul -elected leaders of democracies who should know better, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American president Barack Obama, are leading the way. Mr. Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation.” Mr. Obama offered his “condolences” to the Cuban people, and blandly suggested that “history will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure.” Now, he added, we can “look to the future.”
With all due respect to Mr. Obama, the 60 years Fidel Castro spent systematically exploiting and oppressing the people of Cuba provide more than enough history to pass judgment on both Fidel and, now more importantly, his brother Raul.
My own family’s experience is a case in point. My father, Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista — and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba. Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold. In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn.
The betrayal and violence experienced by my father and aunt were all too typical of the millions of Cubans who have suffered under the Castro regime over the last six decades. This is not the stuff of Cold War history that can be swept under the rug simply because Fidel is dead. Consider, for example, the dissidents Guillermo Fariñas and Elizardo Sanchez, who warned me in the summer of 2013 that the Castros, then on the ropes because of the reduction of Venezuelan patronage, were plotting to cement their hold on power by pretending to liberalize in order to get the American economic embargo lifted. Their model was Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia (Sanchez called it “Putinismo”), and their plan was to get the United States to pay for it. It worked. The year after I met with Fariñas and Sanchez, Mr. Obama announced his famous “thaw” with the Castros, and the American dollars started flowing. As we now know, there was no corresponding political liberalization. Last September, Mr. Fariñas concluded his 25th hunger strike against the Castros’ oppression.
Then there is the case of the prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya, who in 2012 died in a car crash that is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Castro regime. His daughter, Rosa Maria, has pressed relentlessly for answers, and thus become a target herself. When, just three years after her father’s death, the United States honored the Castros with a new embassy in Washington, D.C., Rosa Maria tried to attend the related State Department press conference as an accredited journalist. But she was spotted by the Cuban delegation, who demanded that she be removed if she dared ask any questions. The Americans complied, in an act of thuggery more typical of Havana than Washington.
Finally, I had the honor last summer to meet with Dr. Oscar Biscet, an early truth-teller about the disgusting practice of post-birth abortions in Cuba who has been repeatedly jailed and tortured for his fearless opposition to the Castros. I asked him, as I had asked Senores Farinas and Sanchez, whether his ability to travel signaled growing freedom on the island. He answered just as they had three years earlier: “No.” In fact, he said, the repression had grown worse since the “thaw” with America. Didn’t we realize, he wondered, that all those American dollars were flowing into the Castros’ pockets, and funding the next generation of their police state?
That is the true legacy of Fidel Castro — that he was able to institutionalize his dictatorship so it would survive him.
There is a real danger that we will now fall into the trap of thinking Fidel’s death represents material change in Cuba. It does not. The moment to exert maximum pressure would have been eight years ago, when his failing health forced him to pass control to his brother Raul. But, rather than leverage the transition in our favor, the Obama administration decided to start negotiations with Raul in the mistaken belief that he would prove more reasonable than his brother (an unfortunate pattern they repeated with Kim Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, and Nicolas Maduro). Efforts to be diplomatically polite about Fidel’s death suggest the administration still hopes Raul can be brought round.
#related#All historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Raul is not a “different” Castro. He is his brother’s chosen successor who has spent the last eight years implementing his dynastic plan. Unlike Cuba, however, the United States has an actual democracy, and our recent elections suggest there is significant resistance among the American people to the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement towards hostile dictators. We can — and should — send clear signals that that policy is at an end. Among other things, we should halt the dangerous “security cooperation” we have begun with the Castro regime, which extends to military exercises, counter-narcotics efforts, communications, and navigation — all of which places our sensitive information in the hands of a hostile government that would not hesitate to share it with other enemies from Tehran to Pyongyang. And we should insist that no United States government official attend Castro’s funeral unless and until Raul releases his political prisoners, first and foremost those who have been detained since Fidel’s death. I hope all my colleagues will join me in calling for these alterations.
A dictator is dead. But his dark, repressive legacy will not automatically follow him to the grave. Change can come to Cuba, but only if America learns from history and prevents Fidel’s successor from playing the same old tricks.
— Ted Cruz represents Texas in the United States Senate.

#335795

A new NASA study, released on Friday, admits that ice is accumulating in Antarctica. Satellite measurements show an 82-112 gigaton-a-year net ice gain. That’s 82-112 billion tons per year! Nine zer…

#335796

BBC Horizon - Dr. Money And The Boy With No Penis David Reimer (birth name: Bruce Reimer, born: August 22, 1965 -- died [suicide]: May 4, 2004) was born as a...

#335797

Two decades of “Castro-is-dead” rumors are finally at an end. And the race is on to see which world leader can most fulsomely praise Fidel Castro’s legacy, while delicately averting their eyes from his less savory characteristics. Two dul -elected leaders of democracies who should know better, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American president Barack Obama, are leading the way. Mr. Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation.” Mr. Obama offered his “condolences” to the Cuban people, and blandly suggested that “history will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure.” Now, he added, we can “look to the future.”
With all due respect to Mr. Obama, the 60 years Fidel Castro spent systematically exploiting and oppressing the people of Cuba provide more than enough history to pass judgment on both Fidel and, now more importantly, his brother Raul.
My own family’s experience is a case in point. My father, Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista — and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba. Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold. In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn.
The betrayal and violence experienced by my father and aunt were all too typical of the millions of Cubans who have suffered under the Castro regime over the last six decades. This is not the stuff of Cold War history that can be swept under the rug simply because Fidel is dead. Consider, for example, the dissidents Guillermo Fariñas and Elizardo Sanchez, who warned me in the summer of 2013 that the Castros, then on the ropes because of the reduction of Venezuelan patronage, were plotting to cement their hold on power by pretending to liberalize in order to get the American economic embargo lifted. Their model was Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia (Sanchez called it “Putinismo”), and their plan was to get the United States to pay for it. It worked. The year after I met with Fariñas and Sanchez, Mr. Obama announced his famous “thaw” with the Castros, and the American dollars started flowing. As we now know, there was no corresponding political liberalization. Last September, Mr. Fariñas concluded his 25th hunger strike against the Castros’ oppression.
Then there is the case of the prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya, who in 2012 died in a car crash that is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Castro regime. His daughter, Rosa Maria, has pressed relentlessly for answers, and thus become a target herself. When, just three years after her father’s death, the United States honored the Castros with a new embassy in Washington, D.C., Rosa Maria tried to attend the related State Department press conference as an accredited journalist. But she was spotted by the Cuban delegation, who demanded that she be removed if she dared ask any questions. The Americans complied, in an act of thuggery more typical of Havana than Washington.
Finally, I had the honor last summer to meet with Dr. Oscar Biscet, an early truth-teller about the disgusting practice of post-birth abortions in Cuba who has been repeatedly jailed and tortured for his fearless opposition to the Castros. I asked him, as I had asked Senores Farinas and Sanchez, whether his ability to travel signaled growing freedom on the island. He answered just as they had three years earlier: “No.” In fact, he said, the repression had grown worse since the “thaw” with America. Didn’t we realize, he wondered, that all those American dollars were flowing into the Castros’ pockets, and funding the next generation of their police state?
That is the true legacy of Fidel Castro — that he was able to institutionalize his dictatorship so it would survive him.
There is a real danger that we will now fall into the trap of thinking Fidel’s death represents material change in Cuba. It does not. The moment to exert maximum pressure would have been eight years ago, when his failing health forced him to pass control to his brother Raul. But, rather than leverage the transition in our favor, the Obama administration decided to start negotiations with Raul in the mistaken belief that he would prove more reasonable than his brother (an unfortunate pattern they repeated with Kim Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, and Nicolas Maduro). Efforts to be diplomatically polite about Fidel’s death suggest the administration still hopes Raul can be brought round.
#related#All historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Raul is not a “different” Castro. He is his brother’s chosen successor who has spent the last eight years implementing his dynastic plan. Unlike Cuba, however, the United States has an actual democracy, and our recent elections suggest there is significant resistance among the American people to the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement towards hostile dictators. We can — and should — send clear signals that that policy is at an end. Among other things, we should halt the dangerous “security cooperation” we have begun with the Castro regime, which extends to military exercises, counter-narcotics efforts, communications, and navigation — all of which places our sensitive information in the hands of a hostile government that would not hesitate to share it with other enemies from Tehran to Pyongyang. And we should insist that no United States government official attend Castro’s funeral unless and until Raul releases his political prisoners, first and foremost those who have been detained since Fidel’s death. I hope all my colleagues will join me in calling for these alterations.
A dictator is dead. But his dark, repressive legacy will not automatically follow him to the grave. Change can come to Cuba, but only if America learns from history and prevents Fidel’s successor from playing the same old tricks.
— Ted Cruz represents Texas in the United States Senate.

#335798

THIS is some kind of juxtaposition.

#335799

NEW YORK — An unknown person has taken Donald Trump's name out of the midtown building's label on Google Maps.
If you search for Trump Tower on Google Maps, you won't find that exact name there. Instead, you'll find "Dump Tower."
Users began noticing the Fifth Avenue building's name change on the mapping service Saturday. It's unclear when the switch occurred, but people on Twitter began tweeting about the new "brand identity" about 2 p.m.

#335800

Radical preacher sentenced at Old Bailey along with acolyte Mohammed Rahman after being convicted of terrorism offences
