Shop Today's Deals!

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Today's Deals.

And, Amazon Echo - Black.

BONUS: Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865.

Also, Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics.

The Most Politically Dangerous Book

It's Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

The most politically dangerous book you’ve never heard of https://t.co/urHQbA9z61 via @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/k6hCeijH2A

— POLITICO (@politico) December 12, 2016

Cuirasse du Carabinier — Waterloo

Here's the story, "Cuirass with Cannon-Ball Hole":

Armour of a cuirasse du carabinier holed by a cannonball at the battle of Waterloo pic.twitter.com/TBJ7rGPIVf

— History In Pictures (@historyepics) January 15, 2017

This is a French cuirass, a breastplate worn as body armour by French cavalry. The hole is from a British cannonball that smashed through the unlucky soldier’s chest. The Waterloo campaign was the first occasion that British troops found themselves face to face with Napoleon’s armoured cavalry, whose cuirasses and metal helmets made them a daunting foe.

Yet as the British would discover, even these armoured troopers were by no means invincible as this breastplate brings home with shocking force.

More.

'Alexa, stop!'

At WSJ, "Alexa, Stop Making Life Miserable for Anyone With a Similar Name!":

“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot.” https://t.co/w5mG5rsj0A

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 27, 2017

“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.

Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.

“What, mom? I’m taking the laundry down,” human Alexa shouted back. “What do you need?”

“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot,” says Alexa Sussman, a recent New York University graduate who works in marketing.

The artificial-intelligence invasion is upon us, in the form of disembodied personal assistants we can give orders to, query and, in some cases, try to converse with. In hopes of getting us used to our new artificially intelligent family members, the technology companies behind them have given the machines mostly female names to go with their soothing voices.

Apple Inc. picked “Siri.” Microsoft Corp. chose “Cortana.” ( Alphabet Inc.’s Google opted to keep its software nonhuman, calling it “Assistant.”) Amazon.com Inc.’s choice, as it happens, was the 39th most popular girl’s name in the U.S. in 2006. That means in some homes the plan has backfired: The effort to make a gadget more humanlike has earned it human enemies.

In the Sussmans’ household in Levittown, N.Y., the confusion cuts both ways. Last week, when human Alexa’s father, Dean, asked her to grab some water from the kitchen, Amazon’s Alexa wanted to help, too. “Amazon’s choice for water is Fiji Natural Artesian Water, pack of 24. It’s $27.27, including tax. Would you like to buy it?”

When he told his daughter to move the living-room chair, Amazon’s Alexa yelped, “Ready to pair!” Robo-Alexa had a command for Mr. Sussman himself: “Go to the Bluetooth devices on your mobile device.”

The microphones in the $180 Amazon Echo and the smaller $50 Echo Dot are always listening for “Alexa,” which is their default “wake word,” the phrase causing it to start paying attention to commands. Amazon lets users change the wake word to “Echo,” “Amazon,” or, starting this week, “computer.”

But many users aren’t aware. The Sussmans found out about the setting a year after buying the device. They have decided to keep “Alexa” because they say they find it funny.


Amazon has sold more than 11 million Echos and Dots since 2015, Morgan Stanley estimates, and it is working with partners to put Alexa into other products, including Ford Motor Co. cars and General Electric Co. lamps.

Some human Alexas want nothing to do with her.

“Oh, your name is Alexa, like the Amazon thing?” Alexa Duncan, 33, says she hears all too often these days. She refuses to buy the Echo.

Amazon says it named its Alexa after the ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria. The company hasn’t offered any formal apologies to the human Alexas.

Michelle Malkin Slams the Media's Thin-Skinned Reaction to Being Called the Enemy (VIDEO)

From Hannity's last night:

ICYMI: Scott Greer, No Campus for White Men

At Amazon, No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination.

The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist

This is one of the best reasons we have Donald Trump. He repudiates these losers like nothing. Besides, conservatism is the new counter-culture. These idiot socialist progs are uncool.

From Joel Kotkin, at the Daily Beast, "The Depression and WWII shaped the greatest generation, and postwar prosperity shaped the Baby Boomers. Millennials, battered by capitalism, move ever leftward":

Roughly half of Millennials have positive feelings about socialism, twice the rate of the previous generation https://t.co/ofqRdNCJpD

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 19, 2017

Increasingly American politics are driven by generational change. The election of Donald Trump was not just a triumph of whiter, heartland America. It also confirmed the still considerable voting power of the older generation. Yet over time, as those of us who have lived long enough well know, generations decline, and die off, and new ones ascend.

In this past election, those over 45 strongly favored Trump, while those younger than that cast their ballots for Clinton. Trump’s improbable victory, and the more significant GOP sweep across the country, demonstrated that the much-ballyhooed millennials simply are not yet sufficiently numerous or united enough to overcome the votes of the older generations.

Yet over time, the millennials—arguably the most progressive generation since the ’30s—could drive our politics not only leftward, but towards an increasingly socialist reality, overturning many of the very things that long have defined American life. This could presage a war of generations over everything from social mores to economics and could well define our politics for the next decade...

Hey, bring it on, lol.

And keep reading.

Playboy Playmate Elizabeth Elam (VIDEO)

Following-up from last week, "Playboy Magazine to Bring Back Nude Women."

Watch, "What Turns on March Playmate Elizabeth Elam?"

Milo Yiannopoulos Crashes

Well, I guess it was inevitable.

Milo's a modern Icarus who tried to fly too high and far, only to meltdown amid the onslaught of the politically correct masses.

Here's the second of his two Facebook posts today, attempting to save face (and save his career). Alas, the fury over his pedophilia comments is just too ferocious. See, "I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim" (at Memeorandum). And his earlier attempt at contrition, "A note for idiots (UPDATED)."

Not only has CPAC disinvited him, but Simon & Schuster cancelled his book contract. And if he gets the boot from Breitbart, which website staffers are pushing, it'll be the fastest fall of a political iconoclast I can remember.

Milo says he does not support pedophilia. https://t.co/8g2Q5klGw9

— Heat Street (@heatstreet) February 20, 2017

Simon & Schuster Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos's Book. Our full story. https://t.co/eDwpnx3qEf

— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) February 20, 2017

And believe me, the left's fingerprints are all over this. See, Conservative Treehouse, "It’s Not About Milo – It’s About The Existential Threat That Milo Represents…"

Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890

Here's another traditional historian worth a read.

See Robert M. Utley, at Amazon, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890.

Also, Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891.

Far-Left Michelle Goldberg Says of the Trump Administration: 'It's Bad'

Years ago, I read Michelle Goldberg's book, The Means of Reproduction, and was horrified. She's about as far-left as you can be while still declaiming adherence to communism (as she does). And because of that background, anything of Goldberg's is automatically suspect. She's frankly a nutjob IMHO.

In any case, make what you want of this. Naturally, I think Trump's been about as awesome as you can get, for precisely the actions that have people like Goldberg pulling their hair out. Trump takes it to the left, and for that he's rightly considered a savior of our country.

So, FWIW, at Slate, "The First Month of Trump’s Presidency Has Been More Cruel and Destructive Than the Majority of Americans Feared." (Via Maggie's Farm and Memeorandum.)

https://t.co/ahgP88gDkf #PresidentsDay

— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) February 20, 2017

Allan Eckert, The Frontiersmen

Following-up from my last entry, "Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder."

This is the kind of "heroism, ingenuity, and perseverance" I was talking about. See Allan Eckert, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative.

Eckert published a whole series of books, called "The Narratives of America."

See also, The Conquerors; Wilderness Empire: A Narrative; The Wilderness War; Gateway to Empire; and Twilight of Empire.

The point here is balance. I actually enjoy reading the radical leftist diatribes against racist, hegemonic "settler colonialism." It's just you need to have the intellectual firepower to fight back against the leftist haters. They're mostly communist who want a revolutionary destruction of the American regime. A lot of them (if not all of them) are simply exploiting the tragic Native American narrative for their own nihilist designs. So, again, just keep an open mind, read widely, and then hammer them back mercilessly when you have to.

(I'm going to read and nap all afternoon now; check back later for more blogging.)

Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder

Years ago I picked up a copy of William C. Davis', The American Frontier: Pioneers, Settlers, and Cowboys 1800-1899. The book provides the most gung-ho account of the peopling of the West than anything else I've read, and it's a fantastic counterpoint to the dreary leftist academic hatred of racist "settler colonialism."

I'm reminded of the Davis tome as I see Hampton Sides' book, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West.

I love stories of the West, especially proud, unabashed stories of American heroism, ingenuity, and perseverance. I think those are exactly the things leftists hate most, which makes me thrill to them all the more.

David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality

Garrow's book is cited at the Los Angeles Times, "Norma McCorvey, once-anonymous plaintiff in landmark Roe vs. Wade abortion case, dies at 69."

The L.A. Times obituary, by the way, is much better, way more honest, than the New York Times's. A key point: McCorvey never had an abortion.

In any case, here's Garrow's book, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.

How the Southern Poverty Law Center Faked an Islamophobia Crisis

At FrontPage Magazine, "Fake News About Fake Group's Report About Fake 'Hate'":

Look out!  It’s another fake Islamophobia crisis.

“Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report,” wails NBC News. “Watchdog: Number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015,” FOX News bleats. ABC News vomits up this word salad. “Trump cited in report finding increase in US hate groups for 2nd year in a row.”

The SPLC stands for the Southern Poverty Law Center: an organization with slightly less credibility than Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and without the academic degree in greasepaint.

And you won’t believe the shameless way the SPLC faked its latest Islamophobia crisis.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate group” sightings claims that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016.”

That’s a lot of folds.

And there is both bad news and good news from its “Year in Hate and Extremism.”

First the good news.

Casa D’Ice Signs, the sign outside a bar in K-Mart Plaza in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is no longer listed as a hate group. The sign outside the bar had been listed as a hate group by the SPLC for years. The owner of Casa D’Ice had been known for putting politically incorrect signs outside his bar. So the SPLC listed the “signs” as a hate group. (Even though there was only one sign.) Not the bar. That would have made too much sense.

Since then Casa D’Ice was sold and the SPLC has celebrated the defeat of another hate group. Even if the hate group was just a plastic sign outside a bar.

But the bad news, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is that anti-Muslim hate groups shot up from only 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016.

What could possibly account for that growth? Statistical fakery so fake that a Vegas bookie would weep.

President Trump is on the cover of the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report: a misnomer of a title from an organization whose intelligence gathering led it to list a bar sign as a hate group.

But there’s actually another phenomenon responsible for this startling rise reported by the SPLC.

The SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America as separate groups.

How do you get a sudden rise from 34 to 101 hate groups? It helps to suddenly add 45 chapters of one group. Act for America isn’t a hate group. It’s also just as obviously not 45 groups.

And it didn’t come into existence last year.

Act for America was only listed as one group in the 2015 list. It shot up to 45 now.

The SPLC this year listed the Los Angeles chapter of Act for America as a separate group. But the chapter has been around for quite a few years.

Furthermore Act for America boasts not 45, but 1,000 chapters across the country. Why list just 45 of them? Look at it from the SPLC’s perspective. Next year, it can add 200 chapters and claim that anti-Muslim hate groups once again tripled. And then it can do the same thing again the year after that.

That way the Southern Poverty Law Center can keep manufacturing an imaginary Islamophobia crisis.

Also added to the list is Altra Firearms: a gun store that ran an ad declaring that it wouldn’t sell firearms to Clinton supporters or Muslims. Like Casa D’Ice, this is another case of the SPLC demonstrating that it has no idea what distinguishes a store whose owner says politically incorrect things from a “group”.

The list has added Bosch Fawstin: an artist who was the target of the first ISIS terror attack in America during the assault on the Draw Mohammed cartoon contest. The SPLC announced that it was adding the Eisner nominated artist to its list of hate groups after he survived the attack.

The SPLC’s actions were obscene.

After the attack, Heidi Beirich, in charge of adding targets to the SPLC’s hate map, announced that she would be adding Bosch to the list because the Center now knows his location.

Indeed the SPLC makes a point of highlighting the locations of likely terrorist targets. And the Southern Poverty Law Center’s map of hate has been used by terrorists before.

Floyd Lee Corkins opened fire at the headquarters of the Family Research Council. The conservative Christian organization had been targeted by Corkins because of its appearance on the SPLC’s list.

"Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online,” Corkins later confessed to the FBI.

When Leo Johnson, the building’s African-American manager, attempted to stop Corkins, the SPLC shooter told Johnson that he didn’t like his politics and opened fire. The SPLC gunman had planned to kill everyone in the office, but Johnson’s heroic actions saved their lives. The African-American building manager was forced to undergo painful surgeries because of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate list.

Despite its role in the terror attack, the SPLC continues to target the Family Research Council.

None of the so-called “Anti-Muslim hate groups” listed by the SPLC have shot anyone. The SPLC has...

Still more.

President Trump's Agenda Includes Hitting Back — Hard

From David Horowitz's new book, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

Excerpt from Big Agenda in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: https://t.co/ROAQl98P0V

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) February 19, 2017

Ironically, it was a billionaire businessman who broke the mold in the 2016 presidential campaign and brought a new voice into Republican politics. Donald Trump took up the cause of the forgotten working class, promising to restore America's industrial prowess and bring back the jobs that a corrupt elite with a globalist outlook had negotiated away in reckless trade deals that sent Americans to the back of the bus and squandered the prosperity they had created over generations.

Equally groundbreaking was Trump's bluntness in confronting the corruption of both parties for participating in a rigged system that left their constituencies out in the cold. The failure to secure the borders was a national disgrace in which both parties were complicit. In focusing on the criminal aliens who had not been blocked at the borders and were not deported, he broke the silence imposed by the politically correct party line. In calling Clinton a "crook," a "liar," and the enabler of a sexual predator, he took her off the pedestal on which her gender and the Democrats' fantasy of a Republican "war on women" had placed her. By speaking out against the Democrats' rape of the inner cities and their treatment of their black constituents as second-class citizens, Trump burst a bubble that had protected Democrats from the consequences of their actions and opened the ranks of the Republican Party to "people of color."

Trump's readiness to go for the Democrats' jugular rallied Republican voters frustrated by their leaders' long-running deference to Democratic outrages and their willingness to keep their party on the defensive. It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a "movement." It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats' collectivism and in defense of individual liberty. Perhaps Trump's most significant innovation as a Republican candidate was the moral language he used to indict his Democratic opponent. Previously, Republicans would have been too polite to call their opponents liars and crooks - even when the evidence clearly showed that they were. If their opponent was a woman, they would never have dreamed of using such language, so deferential were they to the stringent rules of political correctness. Trump broke free of this constraint. But Republicans need to take this a step further and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance with which they can characterize their opponents and level the political playing field.

That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom. Compulsory public schools are not a service to minorities and the poor but are infringements on their freedom to choose an education that will allow them to pursue the American dream. Obamacare is objectionable not only because its mandates drive up the costs and diminish the quality of health care, as Republicans have argued. Far more important is that government-controlled health care takes away the freedom of individuals to manage their own health and secure their life chances. Onerous taxes and massive government debt are not accounting problems; they are a war on the ability of individuals to work for themselves instead of the government and are therefore an attack on individual freedom. This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda...

Most excellent.

RTWT.

How Bureaucrats Are Fighting Voters for Control of Country

From Matthew Continetti, at Free Beacon, "Who Rules the United States?":

Who Rules the United States?: How bureaucrats are fighting the voters for control of our country https://t.co/FKo760mAiu pic.twitter.com/QxtRlb7Txd

— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 18, 2017

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation's capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. "What truly matters," he said in his Inaugural Address, "is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year's election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. "I can't think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this," a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women's March.

But here's the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief...

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "Obama's Shadow Presidency."

President Trump Invites Supporter on Stage During Florida Rally

Amazing.

How half this country feels about @realDonaldTrump.

Pure love and gratitude ❤🇺🇸💙#LoveTrumpsHate pic.twitter.com/efeqXEtQV8

— Steph (@steph93065) February 19, 2017

Why Isn't Norma McCorvey's Obituary Trending at Memeorandum, or Anywhere Else?

She's not trending because leftists couldn't care less about "Jane Roe," of the Supreme Court's notorious Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

Leftists don't care because they used McCorvey like so many sanitary napkins stuffed down the throats of conservative activists. McCorvey was used, chewed up, and spit out. She had become a pro-life activist who spent the last couple of decades seeking to overturn the decision that bore her name. For that, McCorvey became essentially a non-person, no longer useful to a movement responsible for at least 50 million abortions since Harry Blackmun hellish ruling outlining a "woman's constitutional right" to terminate a "fetus" in the first three months of pregnancy. It's been a holocaust of "unwanted" pregnancies ever since.

McCorvey's death is frankly big news, important news. But you wouldn't know it by looking at Memeorandum, which is covered with all kinds of stories detailing treasonous leftist designs to bring down the democratically-elected government of Donald J. Trump.

Here's the New York Times' obituary, "Norma McCorvey, 'Roe' in Roe v. Wade, Is Dead at 69."

And at Memeorandum, crickets:



Her obituary's not trending on Twitter either.

She was thrown away by the left like a piece of trash. And that tells you something about the non-value of human life to anyone who proclaims they're a "progressive."

Report: Senior White House Officials Favor John Bolton for National Security Adviser.

At Instapundit, "I’D BE QUITE HAPPY WITH THAT MYSELF."

Me too.

PREVIOUSLY: "Trump to Interview Candidates for National Security Advisor."

(No word yet as to Trump's pick.)