Tomi Lahren's Epic Rant Against Obama's Cowardly Appeasement of Islamic Jihad (VIDEO)

I should have been posting this lady earlier. She's so smokin' on point it's ridiculous.



PREVIOUSLY: "Americans Don't Need to Throw and Burn Things to Be Heard."

Ashley Graham Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2016 Casting Call (VIDEO)

The smokin' hot plus-sized Ashley Graham, at Sports Illustrated, "SI Swimsuit 2015 Casting Call: Ashley Graham."

Plus, some video, "Ashley Graham loves skinny dipping."

Carl Dix, Spokesman for Revolutionary Communist Party, Boosts #BlackLivesMatter in New York (VIDEO)

He's a longtime hardcore communist. See his page at Discover the Networks.

At watch, at RT America, "‘Black Lives Matter will continue to protest police brutality’ – activist Carl Dix":

Musicians, activists and Black Lives Matter protesters joined the families of people who were killed by police in New York City’s Times Square to protest brutality in the American legal system and the media blackout of the deaths of African-Americans across the nation. Activist Carl Dix was there and talked to RT about how police departments have silenced members of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Also at the Blaze, "Top Activist's Response When Asked What He'd Like Obama to Do for the Black Lives Matter Movement."

Plus, "The Left Wants to Hide the Truth About #BlackLivesMatter's Marxist Revolutionary Agenda," and "Another Reminder That the #BlackLivesMatter Movement is Actually a Revolutionary Communist Program."

Americans Don't Need to Throw and Burn Things to Be Heard - UPDATED

Tomi Lahren's commentary on #BlackLivesMatter, making too much sense:

[VIDEO PULLED]

China's Devaluation Jolts Global Markets

At the Wall Street Journal, "China’s Devaluation of Yuan Jolts Global Markets: Greece and Its Creditors Agree Terms for a Third Bailout, But Some Details Remain Unresolved."

Also, "China Moves to Devalue Yuan":

BEIJING—China’s central bank devalued its tightly controlled currency, causing its biggest one-day loss in two decades, as the world’s second-largest economy continues to sputter.

Chinese authorities said the change would help drive the currency toward more market-driven movements. The move also signaled the government’s growing worry about slow growth. A shift toward a weaker currency could help flagging exports at a time when many other efforts to boost the economy haven’t proven very effective.

China’s yuan has been on an upward track for a decade, during which the country’s economy grew to be the second largest in the world and the currency gained importance globally. The devaluation Tuesday was the most significant downward adjustment to the yuan since 1994, when as part of a break from Communist state planning, Beijing let the currency fall by one-third.

China sets a midpoint for the value of the yuan against the U.S. dollar. In daily trading, the yuan is allowed to move 2% above or below that midpoint, which is called the daily fixing. But the central bank sometimes ignores the daily moves, at times setting the fixing so that the yuan is stronger against the dollar a day after the market has indicated it should be weaker.

With Tuesday’s move, the fixing will now be based on how the yuan closes in the previous trading session. As a result, the yuan’s fixing was weakened by 1.9% Tuesday from the previous day, leaving it at 6.2298 to the U.S. dollar, compared with 6.1162 on Monday. The yuan dropped as much as 1.99% from its previous close to 6.3360 against the dollar in Shanghai and fell as much as 2.3% in Hong Kong in early trading.

The central bank said in a statement posted on its website that the yuan’s midpoint has diverged quite a bit from the market rate for a relatively long time and that it was time to make the midpoint more market-based.

“The PBOC has astutely combined a move to weaken the yuan with a shift to a more market-determined exchange rate,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor and former China head of the International Monetary Fund.

China’s leadership has been urging the IMF to declare the yuan an official reserve currency on par with the dollar, euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound—a move that could raise China’s influence on the world stage just as Beijing increasingly challenges Washington in global affairs.

To that end, the leadership has been resisting an outright devaluation of the currency despite the country’s plunging exports, for fears that a move like that could jeopardize the yuan’s chance of joining the elite group of currencies.

Rather, it chose to do so by giving what the longtime critics of China’s currency policy have long been clamoring for: Let the market play a bigger role in deciding the yuan’s value.

This is literally the highest stakes in the international political economy. The leading great power, the U.S., enjoys enormous privileges with the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Clearly, China would like to knock the U.S. off its pedestal. But the yuan's collapse is showing just how unstable the Chinese economy is.

More.

See also, "China Currency Devaluation Another Sign of Growth Worries":

In the U.S. movie “The Wizard of Oz,” a mythical figure purported to have great powers suddenly loses his mystique when he is revealed to be no more than an aging silver-haired man pulling levers of a clunky oversized contraption behind a curtain. There is something happening in China which has a Wizard of Oz quality to it right now.

Chinese authorities awed the world during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis when they kept their economy growing at superfast speeds even when the rest of the world was nearing economic collapse. It seemed to be confirmation, after years of growth rates that allowed China to leap past rivals and become the world’s second-largest economy, that the Middle Kingdom and its leaders were special. Now, as the growth rate slows, the levers aren’t working very well and the image is losing its aura.

Chinese authorities on Tuesday effectively devalued the yuan by 2%. As currency devaluations go this was small. In 1994 China let its currency fall by a third, helping to breathe new life into an export explosion. Officials said this latest move was meant to allow the carefully managed currency move more in line with market forces. Yet it looked like a new step – albeit a small one -- by officials to boost flagging economic growth. A weaker currency might help boost exports by making them cheaper. On Saturday the government reported that exports fell 8.3% in July from a year earlier.

While a weaker currency might help exports on the margin (and also annoy China’s trading rivals) it doesn’t fix China’s underlying economic problems. The country’s economy appears to be suffering from the depleting after-effects of not one but three asset booms – an investment boom in industrial capacity which is weighing on global goods prices, a real estate boom which may have stretched domestic banks and more recently a stock market bubble.

Adjustments from bubbles rarely go smoothly and they almost always sap some economic vitality. As the wizard says in the movie, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Nazi 'Comments' Attacking European Migrants Voted Up at London's Daily Mail

I guess this was some kind of "experiment," by the leftist parody account The DM Reporter on Twitter.

And of course, this "experiment" proves absolutely nothing, as comment threads are completely unrepresentative of anything except perhaps unreconstructed stupidity.

At Medium, "We Were Upvoted for Posting Nazi Propaganda about Migrants in the Daily Mail."

And as I argued previously, it's not just "far-right extremists" who're reacting badly against the migrant crisis. Remember, the communists are in charge in Greece, and they've thrown migrants in the camps.

Libyan Jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar Now Leads 'al-Qaeda in West Africa'

I thought we took this guy out with airstrikes earlier this year? I guess not.

At Long War Journal, "Mokhtar Belmokhtar now leads ‘Al Qaeda in West Africa’."

Fresno SkyLife Helicopter Almost Crashes Into Drone

Boy, what is with all the drones!

Here's the latest from ABC News 30 Fresno, "UPDATE: Drone almost hits Fresno SkyLife helicopter."

And this made it all the way to the national media, at CBS News This Morning, "Sharp rise in close calls between drones and planes."

Rap Drummer Kiran Gandhi Runs London Marathon Without Tampon

She's a drummer with the rap performer M.I.A. Her about page is here.

I first saw this story last weekend on Twitter, at People Magazine, "Woman Runs London Marathon Without a Tampon, Bleeds Freely to Raise Awareness."

I showed my mom and my sister, and they were both all *SMH*. Definitely bizarre.

More here, "Runner Defends Letting Period Bleed Freely at London Marathon: 'Women's Bodies Don't Exist for Public Consumption'."

There's an interview at Dazed, "Why I ran for 26 miles on my period."

But see especially James Delingpole, at the Spectator UK, "Free bleeding’ and the stupidly clever feminists who fell for it: A ludicrous hoax trend that almost makes me pity its enthusiasts":

This week, the story broke in a media starved of anything else to write in the silly season. Most outlets had nothing but praise for Kiran’s principled stance against panty pad-related oppression. ‘Bring on the menstruation revolution: “Donald Trump is going to bloody love it”’, crowed the Guardian. ‘26-year-old woman bleeds proudly through her first marathon,’ exulted Cosmo, having apparently mistaken her for someone who’d climbed Everest blindfolded, with a shark strapped to her back. Better still, perhaps, from Kiran’s point of view, the right-wing media wrinkled its nose in typical phallocentric disgust. ‘Latest feminist craze: free bleeding’, thundered the US website Infowars.

But the readers of these publications — not even the righteous, socially conscious ones — weren’t quite so sure. ‘I’m a girl and even I find that what this woman did is just gross,’ said one. ‘Get a grip love,’ said another. ‘I’m going to do a marathon on Viagra to highlight the fact that some people with penile dysfunction don’t have access to the diamond blue wonder drug,’ quipped an unhelpful male.

Then the sorry truth emerged. Poor Kiran, and the liberal outlets which had applauded her gesture, were the victims of a cruel hoax. It originated last year on a mildly notorious website called 4chan — an internet chatroom favoured by the kind of irreverent pranksters and cynical youths who take unseemly delight in countering the pieties of the ‘social justice warriors’ of the earnest new left.

Already, these hoaxers had enjoyed some success with an earlier campaign, designed to cause division within the new feminist movement by trying to pit girls with skinny, attractive fit bodies against less conventionally beautiful diehards. They invented a concept called ‘bikini bridge’ — the phenomenon where bikini bottoms are suspended between a slim woman’s hipbones causing a dangerously revealing gap. ‘If your girlfriend doesn’t have a bikini bridge, why are you with her?’ asked the caption to a fake advert showing a seductive skinny model. Sure enough, this major new threat to the sensitivities of women worried about their bodies received widespread coverage from the Sydney Morning Herald to the New York Daily News.

So in 2014 — inspired by some crazy idea they’d read somewhere on the internet — the pranksters decided to fake an even more ludicrous trend designed to discredit the radical feminist movement. ‘What is free bleeding? It consists of us womyn bleeding with no restriction … Being able to menstruate is something that is a [sic] undeniably female characteristic. How DARE they try and oppress it,’ read their working notes.

A few helpful tweets later from fake Twitter accounts and ‘free bleeding’ had become an urgent new cause of radical feminism. Eventually word got out among some women’s interest websites that they’d all been had: ‘Free bleeding is not a thing,’ warned one. But it appears the memo didn’t get through to everyone. Hence Kiran Gandhi’s marathon protest.

Does this mean we should all feel terribly outraged on behalf of Kiran? Well up to a point, I’d say. Stripped of its broader social context, her humiliation — even though it wasn’t deliberately inflicted on her personally — does seem a bit ugly and callous and deserving of our pity. But then you ask yourself: ‘Hang on, this girl has got a Harvard MBA, so she’s not exactly thick. Can she really not work out the logic of why it is that over the years we’ve developed certain conventions about the public display of bodily fluids and functions? Has she not considered that these might have been designed at least as much for the comfort of women as men?’

The bigger problem is this: even at Ivy League universities — indeed, perhaps especially at Ivy League universities, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge — the lunatic preoccupations of the radical feminists and social justice warriors, from ‘rape culture’ to ‘intersectionality’, have become so fashion-able and all-consuming that stupid has become the new clever.

Ronda Rousey's the Most Dangerous Woman on Earth (VIDEO)

Well, she's definitely dangerous.

Via Maxim:



PREVIOUSLY: "Ronda Rousey's Fear of Fighting," and "Ronda Rousey Makes Weight for #UFC190 Tonight!"

Trump Serious About Winning Iowa

Well, you think?

The purpose of entering into a campaign is to win. There may be other reasons, like making oneself attractive for a cabinet position in the new administration, but running for office is no walk in the park. It's for serious people. I've never doubted Trump means what he says when he says he's in it to win. Amazing that the media class still thinks he's playing games.

That said, here's Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, at the Washington Post, "An Iowa surprise: Donald Trump is actually trying to win":

DES MOINES — For five days, the royal-blue bus rumbled through miles of cornfields alongside a popular annual bicycle trek across Iowa. It showed up at a country music concert in Cherokee and at a bacon festival in Ottumwa.

And when the hulking vehicle with thick white block letters that spell “TRUMP” pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot in Fort Dodge this week, people flocked to it. It didn’t matter that Donald Trump wasn’t inside. The bus alone — with the “Make America Great Again!” slogan extending across its sides — created an irresistible oasis of celebrity politics amid a desert of minivans and shopping carts.

“One hundred people showing up for a staffer? I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Chuck Laudner, a longtime Iowa organizer who oversees Trump’s efforts here. “They kept saying the same thing: They want something different.”

For many Americans, the Trump presidential campaign amounts to a billionaire talking endlessly, and entertainingly, on television. But here in Iowa, it’s another story. Trump is trying to beat the politicians on their turf, building one of the most extensive organizations in the Republican field.

The groundwork laid by Trump’s sizable Iowa staff, with 10 paid operatives and growing, is the clearest sign yet that the unconventional candidate is looking beyond his summer media surge and attempting to win February’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.

This is becoming a cause of concern for rival campaigns.

“I see them as a major threat to all the other campaigns because of the aggressiveness of their ground game,” said Sam Clovis, an Iowa conservative who leads former Texas governor Rick Perry’s campaign.

“You cannot swing a dead cat in Iowa and not hit a Trump person,” Clovis continued. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. . . . Every event we go to — the Boone County Eisenhower Social, the Black Hawk County Lincoln ­Dinner, the boots-and-barbecue down in Denison — the Trump people are everywhere with literature and T-shirts and signing people up...

All well and good, but it's worth monitoring. There's more to winning the nomination than taking Iowa.

More at that top link.

Record-Breaking Snakehead Fish Caught with Bow and Arrow in Mattawoman Creek in Charles County, Maryland (VIDEO)

The Mattawoman Creek is a tributary to the Potomac River.

The fish set a new state record.

It's a big sucker.

Watch, at CBS News Baltimore, "Highly-Invasive Snakehead Fish Killed With Bow and Arrow in Charles County."

The Spy Satellite Secrets in Hillary's Emails

From John Schindler, at the Daily Beast, "These weren’t just ordinary secrets found in Clinton’s private server, but some of the most classified material the U.S. government has":

After months of denials and delaying actions, Hillary Clinton has decided to turn over her private email server to the Department of Justice. As this controversy has grown since the spring, Clinton and her campaign operatives have repeatedly denied that she had placed classified information in her personal email while serving as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term. (“I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” she said last month.) Her team also denied that she would ever hand over her server to investigators. Now both those assertions have been overturned.

Hillary Clinton has little choice but to hand over her server to authorities since it now appears increasingly likely that someone on her staff violated federal laws regarding the handling of classified materials. On August 11, after extensive investigation, the intelligence community’s inspector general reported to Congress that it had found several violations of security policy in Clinton’s personal emails.

Most seriously, the inspector general assessed that Clinton’s emails included information that was highly classified—yet mislabeled as unclassified. Worse, the information in question should have been classified up to the level of “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN,” according to the inspector general’s report.

You may have seen acronym lists like these on declassified documents before—and glazed over them. This is the arcane language of the cleared cognoscenti, so let me explain what this means:

• TOP SECRET, as the name implies, is the highest official classification level in the U.S. government, defined as information whose unauthorized release “could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security or foreign relations.”

• SI refers to Special Intelligence, meaning it is information derived from intercepted communications, which is the business of the National Security Agency, America’s single biggest source of intelligence. They’re the guys who eavesdrop on phone calls, map who’s calling whom, and comb through emails. SI is a subset of what the intelligence community calls Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI. And these materials always require special handling and protection. They are to be kept in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, which is a special hardened room that is safe from both physical and electronic intrusion.

• TK refers to Talent Keyhole, which is an intelligence community caveat indicating that the classified material was obtained via satellite.

• NOFORN, as the name implies, means that the materials can only be shown to Americans, not to foreigners.

In short: Information at the “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN” level is considered exceptionally highly classified and must be handled with great care under penalty of serious consequences for mishandling. Every person who is cleared and “read on” for access to such information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions—and what the consequences will be if the rules are not followed...

Keep reading.

Schindler writes the 20 Committtee blog.

Islamic State Suspected of Using Chemical Weapon, U.S. Says

Is anyone surprised?

At the Wall Street Journal, "Militants likely used mustard agent on Kurdish forces in Iraq, officials say":

WASHINGTON—Islamic State militants likely used mustard agent against Kurdish forces in Iraq this week, senior U.S. officials said Thursday, in the first indication the militant group has obtained banned chemicals.

The officials said Islamic State could have obtained the mustard agent in Syria, whose government admitted to having large quantities in 2013 when it agreed to give up its chemical-weapons arsenal.

The use of mustard agent would mark an upgrade in Islamic State’s battlefield capabilities, and a worrisome one given U.S. intelligence fears about hidden caches of chemical weapons in Syria, where Islamic State controls wide swaths of territory.

It raises new questions about the evolving threat posed by Islamic State and the ability of U.S. allies on the ground to combat it. Frontline Kurdish, Iraqi and moderate Syrian forces say they aren’t getting enough U.S. support now to counter Islamic State’s conventional capabilities.

Officials say these forces may need specialized equipment and training to help protect them against unconventional weapons if they become a fixture on the battlefield.

U.S. intelligence agencies thought Islamic State had at least a small supply of mustard agent even before this week’s clash with Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as the Peshmerga, U.S. officials said. That intelligence assessment hadn’t been made public.

The attack in question took place late Wednesday, about 40 miles southwest of Erbil in northern Iraq. A German Defense Ministry spokesman said about 60 Peshmerga fighters, who help protect Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, were reported to have suffered injuries to their throats consistent with a chemical attack while fighting Islamic State.

Mustard agent, first employed as a weapon in World War I, can cause painful burns and blisters, immobilizing those affected by it, but it is usually deadly only if used in large quantities.

“These were apparently chemical weapons. What it was exactly we don’t know,” the German ministry spokesman said, adding that experts were on their way to the scene to conduct a fuller analysis. He said German personnel weren’t present at the scene of the attack.

The possibility that Islamic State obtained the agent in Syria “makes the most sense,” said one senior U.S. official. It is also possible that Islamic State obtained the mustard agent in Iraq, officials said, possibly from old stockpiles that belonged to Saddam Hussein and weren’t destroyed.

U.S. intelligence agencies are still investigating the source and how it could have been delivered this week on the battlefield, officials said.

Islamic State has taken control of territory in Syria close to where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces stored chemical weapons, including mustard agent. The regime said in 2013 that all of its mustard stockpiles had been destroyed, either by Syrian forces themselves or by international inspectors.

Inspectors, however, have subsequently said they weren’t able to verify claims by the Syrian government that it had burned hundreds of tons of mustard agent in earthen pits. U.S. intelligence agencies now say they believe Damascus hid some caches of deadly chemicals from the West, possibly including mustard.

Intelligence officials and chemical-weapons experts have expressed concerns in recent months that some of those banned chemicals could fall into the hands of Islamic State or other extremist groups.

U.S. intelligence agencies have also warned the White House that the Assad regime could use chemical agents it still has to defend its remaining strongholds if they come under siege...

Still more.

Street Skater Dave Snaddon

This is cool, at FHM:

Man Killed by Cedar Point Roller Coaster After Hopping Fence to Look for Dropped Cellphone

Oh man, what a way to go --- at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.

Not too smart either.

At the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, "Man struck, killed by Cedar Point roller coaster identified."

And at the Sandusky Register, "Man dead in accident at Cedar Point: Man entered restricted area and was struck by a train from the Raptor roller coaster":

An East Canton man was struck and killed by a roller coaster train after hopping a fence at Cedar Point Thursday evening to search for a phone he dropped while riding the Raptor.

James A. Young, 45, was pronounced dead at the scene by the Erie County coroner.

Young was at the park with friends, and had just finished riding the Raptor at about 5 p.m., when he decided to jump a fence and head into a restricted area underneath the coaster, according to Sandusky police Assistant Chief Phil Frost.

While Young was trying to retrieve a cell phone he dropped while on the ride, he was struck by a passing train, police said.

Officials continue to investigate the matter, and Frost said it has not yet been determined if Young was struck by the train itself, or by a person riding on the train.

Police declined to disclose specifics about Young's injuries...

More.

Plus, watch the police press conference, "Man dead after being struck by Raptor roller coaster at Cedar Point."

ADDED: At the Washington Post, "Teacher killed by Cedar Point roller coaster: ‘He’d just gotten a dream job’."

Rand Paul Goes on the Offensive Against Donald Trump

Rand Paul is doing poorly in the presidential race, really poorly.

He needs to do something to rekindle some support, so what better than to sock the man who's sucking all the oxygen out of the GOP tent?

Here's his new campaign video, "Rand Paul: "Telling It Like It Is'." (Via IJR, "One Candidate’s So Frustrated With Trump’s History of Democratic Support That He’s Taking to the Air.")

And see National Journal, "Rand Paul: Donald Trump Is a 'Bully' and an 'Empty Suit'."

Plus, from Robert Schlesinger, at U.S. News and World Report, "Grasping at Trump":

Is the 2016 GOP field starting to enter the second stage of dealing with Trump – moving from denial to anger? The latest signs include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's new declaration of war against the reality TV star, but that move may say more about how the freshman legislator views his own campaign than it does about how Trump's competitors view his novel candidacy.

BONUS: At iOWNTHEWORLD Report, "Rand Paul – “Trump is Not a Conservative”."

Carly Fiorina on 'Hannity'

I just love to listen to her speak.

Watch: "Forina on Hillary's lies and rejecting the political class."

In Case You Missed Alex Morgan on Jimmy Kimmel's a Couple of Weeks Ago

Here it is.

Jimmy must be taking a vacation this week, because I caught this segment on Wednesday night.

Watch: "Alex Morgan on Winning the World Cup."

Jackie Johnson's Got Your End-of-the-Week Forecast

It's not quite the weekend yet, but no matter.

Any time's a good time for Jackie's forecasts.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles: