New Russian Fifth-Generation Stealth Fighter PAK T-50 at Aviadarts-2015 Air Show (VIDEO)

Here's the Russian Air Force's "Prospective Airborne Complex of Frontline Aviation" (PAK FA) at Aviadarts-2015, via Ruptly:



Nice jets.

Worrisome too.

See related, at London's Daily Mail, "The moment RAF intercept TEN Russian jets in a single mission over Baltic airspace as Putin’s sabre rattling increases."

Dana Loesch on Megyn Kelly's Show: Leftists Aren't Going to Criticize Their 'Gravy Train' Planned Parenthood (VIDEO)

Following-up from earlier, "David Daleiden: The 'Hardest Part' of Releasing Planned Parenthood Videos Was 'Reviewing the Footage of the Body Parts of the Unborn Children Themselves...'."

Plane Debris Confirmed as MH370

I can only hope this brings the beginning of some semblance of closure to the families of those lost.

It's been too long. Much too long waiting for word. Waiting for answers.

At Foreign Policy, "Malaysia Confirms Debris Comes from Missing Airliner."

At the Wall Street Journal, "MH370 Search: Plane Debris on Réunion Island Is From Vanished Malaysia Flight":

The plane debris that washed ashore on an island in the Indian Ocean last week was confirmed to be part of the Malaysia Airlines jet that went missing over a year ago, Malaysia’s prime minister said, making it the first concrete evidence of the plane that disappeared 17 months ago but leaving unanswered why it crashed.

“An international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Réunion Island is indeed from MH370,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said in Kuala Lumpur.

French authorities, who took possession of the part because Réunion is a French territory, were more cautious about its origin. Experts examining it at a French military lab near Toulouse in southwest France have determined there is a “very strong presumption” that the part comes from the missing plane, Deputy Paris Prosecutor Serge Mackowiak said Wednesday.

Mr. Mackowiak also said that the analysis of a tattered bag found near the wing part on the beach of Réunion was also underway, but didn’t announce findings.

The Malaysian announcement offered few details about the Flight 370 probe. Without taking questions, the Prime Minister vowed to “do everything within our means to determine what happened” to the Boeing 777.

French, Malaysian, Australian, Chinese and U.S. officials were present for the analysis that began Wednesday at a high-tech military lab near Toulouse in the southwest of France.

Examination of the debris now moves into a new stage, according to safety experts, as the French military technical team tries to extract clues from the part about how the plane may have crashed...

Read more.

Tennessee Movie Theater Shooting

Makes you not want to go to the movies, all these copy-cat murders.

At the Tennessean, "Police: Suspect in Antioch theater shooting dead."

And at CNN, "Cops: Shots fired at Tennessee movie theater," and "Tennessee theater shooting witness: 'It was very scary..."

So far no reports of fatalities, thank goodness.

Dominique Jane is Playboy's Miss August 2015

A lovely lady, on Tumblr.

Matthew McConaughey Shares Photo of Wife Camila Alves Obtaining U.S. Citizenship

Actually, it's McConaughey and the whole beautiful family, on Twitter.

He's a great guy, a true patriot.

Ku Klux Klan Tatoo Guy Confronted While Wearing Fubu Shoes

You know, FUBU stands for "For us, by us." The company was founded by black entrepreneurs, including Daymond John, one of the members of the "Shark Tank" on ABC.

Maybe the KKK dude doesn't like that show.

At NYDN, "WATCH: Georgia Stars and Bars proponent wears FUBU shoes at Confederate flag rally (WARNING: Contains graphic language)."

And at YouTube, "KKK member at Confederate flag rally confronted for wearing FUBU shoes."

Well, at least Stogie's not wearing FUBUs, or at least not that I know of.

Shirtless Crazy Man Claiming He's 'Tarzan' Arrested Near Monkey Exhibit at Los Angeles Santa Ana Zoo (VIDEO)

No doubt Obama's jobless recovery put him over the edge.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles, "AUDIO: 911 call from zoo official reporting a man seen climbing trees, saying 'he's Tarzan'."

And, "Shirtless 'Tarzan' Arrested In Bizarre Incident Near Zoo Monkey Exhibit."

UPDATE: It's the Santa Ana Zoo, not the Los Angeles Zoo.

David Daleiden: The 'Hardest Part' of Releasing Planned Parenthood Videos Was 'Reviewing the Footage of the Body Parts of the Unborn Children Themselves...'

I confess: I'm to the point where I can't actually watch these Planned Parenthood sting videos.

They're simply too graphic. And they're self-evidently too evil. It's terrible. In fact, I'm stunned at this entire discussion.

I have tremendous respect for Dana Loesch, who's been doing more than anyone else to expose this evil on a daily basis.

See Dana on Twitter, "Man behind Planned Parenthood videos tells @DLoesch the “hardest part” of undercover investigation," and on YouTube, "5th Planned Parenthood Video Dropped Today: Interview with David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress [CONTENT WARNING]."

ADDED: At Life News, "5th Shocking Video Catches Planned Parenthood Official Selling “Fully Intact” Aborted Babies."

"Shocking." Oh boy, is it ever.

The Mystery of ISIS

An "anonymous" source goes inside Islamic State, at the New York Review of Books:

In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

Nor have there been any more satisfying explanations of what draws the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar). Analysts who have argued that foreign fighters are created by social exclusion, poverty, or inequality should acknowledge that they emerge as much from the social democracies of Scandinavia as from monarchies (a thousand from Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey), and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria) or allowed an Islamist party to be elected. Tunisia, which had the most successful transition from the Arab Spring to an elected Islamist government, nevertheless produced more foreign fighters than any other country.

Nor was the surge in foreign fighters driven by some recent change in domestic politics or in Islam. Nothing fundamental had shifted in the background of culture or religious belief between 2012, when there were almost none of these foreign fighters in Iraq, and 2014, when there were 20,000. The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them. If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these men might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain—as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff. We are left again with tautology—ISIS exists because it can exist—they are there because they’re there.

Finally, a year ago, it seemed plausible to attach much of the blame for the rise of the movement to former Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki’s disastrous administration of Iraq. No longer. Over the last year, a new, more constructive, moderate, and inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, has been appointed prime minister; the Iraqi army has been restructured under a new Sunni minister of defense; the old generals have been removed; and foreign governments have competed to provide equipment and training. Some three thousand US advisers and trainers have appeared in Iraq. Formidable air strikes and detailed surveillance have been provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others. The Iranian Quds force, the Gulf states, and the Kurdish Peshmerga have joined the fight on the ground.

For all these reasons the movement was expected to be driven back and lose Mosul in 2015. Instead, in May, it captured Palmyra in Syria and—almost simultaneously—Ramadi, three hundred miles away in Iraq. In Ramadi, three hundred ISIS fighters drove out thousands of trained and heavily equipped Iraqi soldiers. The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed:

The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.

The movement now controls a “terrorist state” far more extensive and far more developed than anything that George W. Bush evoked at the height of the “Global War on Terror.” Then, the possibility of Sunni extremists taking over the Iraqi province of Anbar was used to justify a surge of 170,000 US troops and the expenditure of over $100 billion a year. Now, years after the surge, ISIS controls not only Anbar, but also Mosul and half of the territory of Syria. Its affiliates control large swaths of northern Nigeria and significant areas of Libya. Hundreds of thousands have now been killed and millions displaced; horrors unimaginable even to the Taliban—among them the reintroduction of forcible rape of minors and slavery—have been legitimized. And this catastrophe has not only dissolved the borders between Syria and Iraq, but provoked the forces that now fight the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen.

This is a great piece. Keep reading.

I only disagree on the question of our ignorance. It depends on whom you rely for information. Most mainstream analysts, at least those seen in outlets like the New York Times and CNN, are leftists. They're congenitally hindered by leftist cognitive dissonance. If you read people like Victor Davis Hanson, Ralph Peters, Dennis Prager, or Robert Spencer there's no confusion on the nature of the enemy. All one has to do is take a cold hard look at the problem. And one has to call up the moral resolve to confront evil face to face.

That's the problem we have with ISIS. It's no mystery.

We Got the Neutron Bomb

Obama just finished up his big national security speech on the nuclear agreement with Iran. I just hear: "Blah, blah, blah... blah, blah..."

Meanwhile, "We Got the Neutron Bomb," with the Weirdos:

We got the neutron bomb,
We got the neutron bomb
We got the neutron, gonna drop it all over the place
Yer gonna get it on yer face
Foreign aid from the land of the free
But don't blame me
We got the neutron bomb,
We got the neutron bomb
We got the neutron, don't understand you don't know what you mean
We don't want you we want your machines
United Nations and NATO won't do
It's just the red, white and blue
We got the neutron bomb,
We got the neutron bomb
We got the neutron, that's the way it's gotta be
Survival of the fittest is the way it's gonna be
We don't want it, we don't want it,
Don't blame me
We don't want it, we don't want it,
Don't blame me...

What's the Right Way to Teach Civics?

Just teach it, for crying out loud. But teach it a lot. Make it a central part of universal education, not just something that comes up in the 8th and 11th grades. And teach it well. I've had students change majors to political science after taking my class. It doesn't happen a lot, but if you connect and make history and politics come alive, it will happen.

In any case, see Vauhini Vara, at the New Yorker.

'Let Us Live' Peace Rally in South Los Angeles — #MyLifeMatters

I meant to post on this earlier. It's such a promising story.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles, "Spike In Shootings Prompts Peace Rally In South LA."

.@lamblock Anti-gang protest in Los Angeles: #MyLifeMatters pic.twitter.com/sLa3BIblGj

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 5, 2015

Also from Sandy Banks, at the Los Angeles Times, "#100days100nights fuels fear in South L.A."

More, "#100days100nights: Gang threats of violence on social media draw fear."

Mandy Moore and Minka Kelly in Bikinis

At Drunken Stepfather, "MANDY MOORE AND MINKA KELLY IN BIKINIS OF THE DAY."

How Far Down Can a Free Diver Go?

It's kind of freaky that I came across this story, at the New Yorker, from Alec Wilkinson, "The Deepest Dive."

Wilkinson mentions Natalia Molchanova, who as this post goes live is still missing in the Mediterranean. I blogged the story earlier, "Freewater Diving Champion Natalia Molchanova Presumed Dead."

And from his essay:

Modern free diving is a sport in which divers, on a single breath, descend hundreds of feet, into cold and darkness, and often pass out before they return. It is frequently described as the world’s second most dangerous sport, after jumping off skyscrapers with parachutes. There are eight disciplines, three of which are conducted in a pool; the rest are called deep disciplines. The pool disciplines are static apnea, which is holding one’s breath; dynamic with fins (swimming underwater as far as one can, sometimes with flippers or with a monofin, which looks like a mermaid’s tail); and dynamic without fins. The five main deep disciplines are free immersion, which involves pulling oneself up and down a rope in open water; constant weight, in which a diver wears fins and a small amount of weight; constant weight without fins; variable weight, in which a diver descends on a metal device called a sled and swims to the surface; and no limits, in which a diver rides a sled and is then pulled to the surface by an air bag. Competitions are not held in no limits or variable weight, because they are so dangerous; divers can only attempt records. No divers have died in free-diving competitions. (Death by free diving usually occurs when spear fishermen who dive alone stay down too long. A few years ago, one drowned when he speared a huge grouper that fled into a hole; the fisherman’s spear gun was tied to his wrist and he couldn’t get free.) Divers, however, have died trying to set records in no limits. The most famous case was that of a twenty-eight-year-old Frenchwoman named Audrey Mestre, who drowned in 2002, during a poorly supervised dive with her husband, when her air bag didn’t inflate, leaving her too deep to reach the surface.

The most prestigious discipline is constant weight—the diver must return to the surface with the weight that he or she wore to descend. The women’s record for constant weight is ninety-six metres, which took three minutes and thirty-four seconds. (The men’s record is a hundred and twenty-two metres.) For women, a hundred metres is a barrier something like the four-minute mile used to be, and the diver who is the first to accomplish the feat will have a prominent place in the annals of the sport. Only two women are thought to be capable of it. One is Sara Campbell, a British diver who lives in Egypt, and the other is Natalia Molchanova, a Russian who lives in Moscow. Campbell set the record of ninety-six metres in April, in the Bahamas, breaking Molchanova’s record of ninety-five, which had broken Campbell’s record of ninety. Five days after Campbell reached ninety-six metres, she dived to a hundred, returned to the surface, took two breaths, and passed out. (A safety diver caught her.) The rules governing record dives require that a diver remain conscious for sixty seconds after surfacing, so Campbell’s dive was nullified...

It's obviously a very dangerous sport.

More at the link.

Police Chiefs from Across the Nation Meet in D.C. to Discuss National Spike in Violence

A week or so back I saw the headline at the local Daily Pilot newspaper, "Serious crime surges 40% in Costa Mesa."

Orange County's economy is doing much better than statewide, and Costa Mesa is a generally affluent area in any case. So a 40 percent surge over the last year or so seemed pretty astounding. I'm convinced that California's Proposition 47 is playing a major role in the rise of crime, in Costa Mesa and elsewhere in the state. Nationwide, the Ferguson Effect is also causing a surge in crime, whereby police departments have backed off aggressive broken windows techniques amid the left's revolutionary assault on the nation's law enforcement. Frankly, things are out of control.

At CBS News Baltimore, "Police Chiefs Meet in D.C. to Discuss National Spike in Violence."

High-Tech Liquid Meals Called 'Soylent' Designed to 'Give You Everything Your Body Needs...'

Well, at least CBS This Morning mentions the origins of the name for this food drink, the 1973 science fiction film "Soylent Green."

I can't imagine a food product taking off with a name like that, but 1973's a long time ago, especially for our historically ignorant culture.

Watch: "Soylent liquid meals reimagine daily nutrition."

Plunder and Deceit is Out Today

I've got a lot of books on my plate, and I don't think I've got this Civil War bug out of my system quite yet. But I'm definitely picking up a copy of Mark Levin's new book.

Check it out, at Amazon, Plunder and Deceit.

Historian Robert Conquest Has Died

What a guy.

His books should be mandated reading for every freshman undergraduate in the United States.

He's that important a scholar.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98":

Robert Conquest, an Anglo-American historian whose works on the terror and privation under Joseph Stalin made him the pre-eminent Western chronicler of the horrors of Soviet rule, died Monday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 98 years old.

Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.

Mr. Conquest also was a much-decorated writer of light verse and a figure in the “Movement” poetry of 1950s England. He continued to publish into his 90s, applying an unyielding zest to poetry and prose alike.

Born in Malvern, Worcestershire, to a British mother and an American father, he served in World War II and then in Britain’s diplomatic corps before a series of stints at think tanks and universities, largely in the U.S. In recent decades he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, moving to emeritus status in 2007.

While a spirited combatant in academic debate, Mr. Conquest wrote for a wider audience. “The Great Terror” reached millions of readers and won him a following among leaders including Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher consulted Mr. Conquest on how to deal with the Soviet Union and her former advisers said she trusted him more than any other Soviet expert.

Throughout his career Mr. Conquest kept abreast of ivory-tower squabbles “but he eschewed what he saw as the arcane and parochial nature of some academic literature,” said Mark Kramer, a professor of Cold War history at Harvard.

Mr. Conquest gleefully attacked Western revisionist historians as dupes for Stalin. The 1937-1939 Stalinist show trials, in which Stalin’s political rivals all admitted to serious crimes and were shot, shocked many left-leaning intellectuals in the West. The lurid trials set off mass defections from Communist parties in Europe and the U.S. and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”

But the wider slaughter of Soviet citizens had largely gone undocumented until Mr. Conquest’s narrative. Citing sources made public during the thaw under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as well as émigré accounts, the Soviet census and snippets of information in the Soviet press, Mr. Conquest portrayed the trials as a mere sideshow to the systematic murder carried out by the Kremlin, which routinely ordered regional quotas for thousands of arbitrary arrests and shootings at burial pits and execution cellars. The latest data show that during a 16-month stretch in 1937 and 1938, more than 800,000 people were shot by the Soviet secret police.

These executions came on top of millions of earlier deaths amid the forced famines and collectivization of Soviet agriculture, which Mr. Conquest detailed in a later book, “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.” Mr. Conquest wrote that Stalin summarily executed millions of people by cutting off food to entire regions, particularly Ukraine.

While the opening of Soviet-era archives sparked some attacks on Mr. Conquest, his overall narrative of the purges was confirmed. “The Great Terror” was serialized in Russian newspapers and the revelation of mass graves, such as 20,000 in the Moscow suburb of Butovo, confirmed a wholesale execution system. Since then the debate among historians has been mostly settled over the immensity of the human toll exacted under Stalin’s rule.

Though Mr. Conquest’s body count was on the high end of estimates, he remained unwavering at the publication of “The Great Terror: A Reassessment,” a 1990 revision of his masterwork. When Mr. Conquest was asked for a new title for the updated book, his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis, proposed, “I Told You So, You F—ing Fools.”

Still more.

Meir Ettinger, Grandson of Meir Kahane, is Held in Israel

Israel's religious extremists are extreme, and a serious problem.

At the New York Times, "Israeli Court Orders Meir Kahane’s Grandson Held in Crackdown on Jewish Extremists":

JERUSALEM — He has the pedigree: Meir Ettinger is the grandson and namesake of Meir Kahane, the slain American-Israeli rabbi considered the father of far-right Jewish militancy.

He has the record: For years, Mr. Ettinger has joined the radical group of Israeli settlers known as the hilltop youth in clashes with Palestinians and Israeli forces, leading to a ban on his entering Jerusalem or the occupied West Bank.

He also has the ideology: In a series of Bible-quoting blog posts that amount to a manifesto, Mr. Ettinger calls for the “dispossession of gentiles” who inhabit the Holy Land and the replacement of the modern Israeli state with a new “kingdom of Israel” ruled by the laws of the Torah.

“The key is not to seek to delay the explosion,” he wrote on July 22, “but to try to bring it on as soon as possible and on our own initiative.”

Amid politicians’ promises to crack down on Jewish terrorism suspects after the fatal firebombing of a Palestinian home on Friday, Mr. Ettinger on Tuesday became the name and face of what critics call a scourge on Israeli society. An Israeli court ordered him held for five days; the police said he was accused of conspiracy, membership in an illegal organization and “other things,” including “nationalist” crimes.

Shlomo Fischer, a sociologist at Hebrew University, said Mr. Ettinger was representative of a band of “violent activists” who “conceive of themselves as having a sort of charismatic, prophetic authority.” He likened it to the Jewish underground that plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in the 1980s.

“He doesn’t accept the validity of Israeli law, he doesn’t accept the validity of civic morality — all the restraining factors are weakened or gone,” Professor Fischer, who is also a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, said in an interview. “When some religious, political ideal is violated, they believe that if they act as a spring to correct it or respond to it, then they have religious validity, they are duty-bound to act. Whatever it takes to correct the situation.”

It was unclear whether Mr. Ettinger was suspected of any connection to the masked men who witnesses said set fire to two homes in the West Bank village of Duma early Friday, killing 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsheh and leaving his parents and 4-year-old brother critically injured. That attack has been condemned worldwide and across the political spectrum in Israel, where the security cabinet on Sunday directed law enforcement agents to “take all necessary steps and to use all means at their disposal” to apprehend the arsonists and “prevent similar attacks.”

The cabinet specifically endorsed administrative detention — holding suspects for months without formal charges — a tactic used widely against Palestinians but rarely against Jews...

More.

The obvious comparison is to how Muslim society's round up their religious extremists who commit terrorist atrocities, or not.