Alcides Escobar Hits Inside-the-Park Home Run in World Series 2015 (VIDEO)

I have baseball on right now. My wife's not thrilled about watching the GOP debate on CNBC, and frankly, neither am I after flipping the channel over there a couple of times during the commercials.

In any case, here's the shocking first-pitch inside-the-park home run from last night. I couldn't believe my eyes:

South Carolina School Arrest Controversy Proves America's Classrooms Are Out of Control

Following-up from the other day, "White Police Officer is Seen Flipping Black Female High School Student on Her Back (VIDEO)."

As always, context matters. And in this case, the officer used force against the student, who was disrupting instruction, after she resisted repeated requests to leave the classroom. Note this key passage from the Los Angeles Times' reports, "Violent South Carolina classroom arrest adds to 'school-to-prison pipeline' debate":

At least three students who were in the classroom at Spring Valley High said the teacher tried to discipline the unidentified student for looking at her phone.

When the student refused to leave class, the teacher called in a vice principal. When the student refused the vice principal's request to leave, officials called in the deputy, Fields, who also helps coach the school's football team.

In one video, the deputy can be seen telling the student sitting at her desk, "You either come with me, or I'm going to make you."

In a second video posted on Instagram, the student can be seen lifting her arm defensively as the deputy physically tries to remove her from her desk.

The deputy then wraps his arm around her neck from behind in a headlock and tries to lift the student by one of her legs. As the deputy struggles with the student, the desk flips backward onto the ground with the student still sitting in it, the video shows.

The desk then crashes into another desk and nearly hits another student, who appears to be shocked at what she is witnessing. The deputy drags the first student, who is still entangled in the desk, and throws her across the classroom, the two videos show.

Lott said there was a third video that showed the student hitting the deputy...

The officer's been fired now, and he may have indeed used excessive force, but without the context, the video itself tells us very little about the situation. What's amazing, although completely unsurprising, is that there's no national outrage over the student's classroom disruptions and her defiance of school authorities. No one cares about the civil rights of all the other students to receive a good education. When one student is held accountable for acting out, then all that student has to do is claim her "civil rights" were violated ... and that's it. Those in charge of enforcing discipline will themselves be disciplined. It's a no win situation for teachers, which is why the teaching profession is totally unattractive as a career for many.

And don't miss this entry from David French, at National Review, "The Spring Valley Arrest Video Isn’t Disturbing: Here’s Why."

Melissa Benoist

She's Supergirl.

I watched it. Or, I watched the last half hour, I guess. I don't know. Not sure if the series is gonna fly, so to speak.

The World Will Blame President Obama If Iraq Falls

At National Journal.

Via Instapundit, "NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. ‘Direct Action’ Against the Islamic State."

Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.

A great post.

Read the whole thing, and click around at the links.

Sexy Gandalf

Crazy.

At BuzzFeed, "Everyone’s Freaking Out Over This Girl’s Amazing “Sexy Gandalf” Costume":

“The absolute best thing though has just been the general thirst for Gandalf I’ve created,” she said. “Honestly, nothing is better than seeing people exclaim ‘I want to fuck Gandalf’ because of me!”

The Central Dynamics of the Republican Race Remain the Same; Only the Lead Has Changed (VIDEO)

Following-up from Sunday, "CBS News 2016 Battleground Tracker Poll: Donald Trump and Ben Carson Tied in Iowa (VIDEO)."

A great segment with Major Garrett, at CBS Evening News:



BONUS: At Hot Air, "Reuters national online tracking poll of likely GOP voters: Carson 33, Trump 26, Rubio 10, Cruz 8."

Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban Rejects Angela Merkel's 'Welcoming' Ideology of Unchecked Immigration Suicide

Well a right-wing party, and apparently anti-immigrant, just won the majority in Poland's parliamentary elections this week, so perhaps we're witnessing a major shift in European politics. Or at least, in East European politics.

From James Traub, at Foreign Policy, "The Fearmonger of Budapest":

BUDAPEST, Hungary — The European response to the refugee crisis that escalated this August has two poles: Germany’s Angela Merkel and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Merkel has consistently maintained that the immense flow of refugees from Middle Eastern war zones constitutes a collective moral obligation for Europe; Orban has called this view a species of madness. Orban is as powerful a spokesman for nativism and xenophobia as Merkel is for universalism.

And Orban got there first. In mid-January, after attending a mass rally in Paris honoring the victims of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket, Orban said in an interview, “We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people. Therefore, immigration must be stopped.” Orban was quite explicit about the kind of immigration he especially opposed. “We do not want to see a significant minority among ourselves that has different cultural characteristics and background,” he said. “We would like to keep Hungary as Hungary.” That was the lesson he took from Charlie Hebdo.

Orban is fully prepared to wade into the darkest pools of the Hungarian psyche. In April, still well before the refugee flood, Orban’s government distributed a questionnaire to all adult Hungarians which stated, among other things, “Some people believe that the mishandling of immigration issues in Brussels and the spread of terrorism are connected.” It then went on to ask, “Do you agree with this opinion?” Citizens were also told, “Some people say that immigrants threaten the jobs and livelihood of Hungarians,” then asked, “Do you agree?” The U.N.’s human rights commission condemned the questionnaire as “extremely biased” and “absolutely shocking.” Nevertheless, most of those who bothered to answer did, of course, agree. Having thus manufactured a show of public support, Orban’s Fidesz party posted billboards around the country with messages like, “If you come to Hungary, you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians.”

Orban had prepared the Hungarian people in advance for the Biblical tide of refugees who began pouring through Hungary on their way to Germany or Sweden. The fences he ordered built at the border with Serbia and then with Croatia; his use of the army to turn back refugees; his scathing rhetoric; his passage of emergency laws that criminalized the very act of seeking asylum — all have been denounced across Europe, but they’ve done wonders for his standing at home. In recent years, support had been steadily draining from Fidesz to the ultranationalist Jobbik party, but by September of this year the trend had begun to reverse.

Why is Hungary different? To be fair, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have all resisted the idea of accepting Muslim refugees, but unlike Hungary they don’t have to deal with 300,000 refugees crossing their territory and overwhelming their infrastructure. Yet both Croatia and Slovenia, which have had to deal with refugees diverted from Hungary, have behaved and sounded more like Germany than Hungary. In Slovenia, the army fed the refugees and walked them to the Austrian border. Croatia’s interior minister explained his country’s policy by saying, “Nobody can stop this flow without shooting.”

That is not the view I heard in Budapest, including from people otherwise suspicious of Orban. Istvan Gyarmati, a retired diplomat who now runs a democracy promotion institute in Budapest, told me that “now everyone agrees that Orban was right about the refugees.” It would not be long, he predicted, before Merkel realized that she had a policy and political catastrophe on her hands. I asked Gyarmati how he thought the problem should be resolved. That was easy: “The alternative is to keep them out of Europe.” Once they had fled the war zone for the safety of Turkey or Jordan, they no longer needed asylum or could legally claim such status. They were just migrants. I heard the same argument — which does, in fact, correspond to the letter, if not the spirit, of the Geneva Conventions — from several government officials. When I pointed out that this meant building a wall around Europe, they shrugged...

Traub talked to all these people and he still doesn't get it, marinated in his "welcoming" collectivist ideology that both Poland and Hungary are rejecting.

Put a wall around Europe? Yeah, you think?

Still more.

Kelly Brook Slim Figure in Black Satin Play-Suit After Dropping 8 lbs

I love this lady.

At London's Daily Mail, "Kelly Brook showcases slimline figure in black satin playsuit after shedding 8lb by cutting carbs and drinking tea without sugar.

Plus, flashback, "Phenomenal New Kelly Brook Sunbathing Pics From Cancun."

Ted Koppel's New Book Out Today

It looks interesting!

At Amazon, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.

Plus, at Time Magazine, "9 Questions With Ted Koppel":

At the heart of the book is the question of whether we have become so fractured in how we digest information that Congress and other institutions aren’t working.

Well, it’s become more difficult because at one end of the spectrum you have MSNBC and at the other end you’ve got Fox, and on all your radio stations you’ve got a variety of highly politicized talk-show hosts who make any kind of movement in the direction of moderation seem like a betrayal.

Could a show like the old Nightline exist today?

Apparently not...

Heh.

Phony 'Rape Crisis' is Assault on Common Sense

From Heather Mac Donald, at the Weekly Standard:

In August 2012, two rapes by unknown assailants were reported at Harvard University, sending the school into crisis. Police cruisers idled around the campus; uniformed and plainclothes officers came out in force. Students were advised not to walk alone. A member of the undergraduate council called for the closing of Harvard Yard. “I thought Cambridge wasn’t a dangerous area,” a freshman told the student newspaper. “It was Harvard—it was supposed to be safe, academic.” (In fact, Harvard still was safe. The campus authorities ultimately deemed at least one of the rape allegations baseless, judging by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Since Harvard never disclosed the outcome of either of its investigations, its findings regarding the other supposed incident remain secret.)

In September 2015, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust announced that Harvard students experience sexual assault with “alarming frequency.” Faust was responding to the results of a sexual assault survey conducted at Harvard and 26 other colleges earlier in the year. According to the survey, spearheaded by the Association of American Universities (AAU), 16 percent of Harvard female seniors had experienced nonconsensual sexual penetration during their time at the college and nearly 40 percent had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact. The “severity of the problem” required “an even more intent focus on the problem of sexual assault,” Faust said. Harvard professor and former provost Steve Hyman decried the “terribly damaging” problem that “profoundly violates the values and undermines the educational goals of this University.”

And yet, apart from Drew Gilpin Faust’s recital of Harvard’s burgeoning rape bureaucracy—50 Title IX coordinators, a new Office for Sexual and Gender-Based Dispute Resolution filled to the brim with “trained investigators,” a doubling of staff at the Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response—nothing else happened. No beefed up escort services, no added police presence. Life went on as usual, including the usual drunken parties and hook-ups.

The rhetoric from the other participating schools was similarly alarmist. According to Yale president Peter Salovey, the “profoundly troubling” behavior documented in the AAU survey “threatens individual students, our learning environment, and our sense of community.” But Yale, too, confined itself to denunciations of the “threatening” behavior.

Why the disparity between administrative talk and action? Harvard, after all, is not the only college capable of forcefully responding to alleged rape. In the fall of 2014, the University of Virginia doubled down on security after a student was abducted and presumed raped (the girl was later found to have been killed). If Drew Gilpin Faust and her fellow presidents really believe that they are presiding over a crime scene of what would be unprecedented proportions, they should at the least radically revamp their admissions procedures to prevent sex fiends from joining the student body, if not provide round-the-clock protection to female students.

Nothing of the sort ever happens, however. And that is because there is no such crime wave on college campuses—according to the alleged victims themselves. The vast majority of survey respondents whom the AAU researchers classified as sexual assault victims never reported their alleged assaults to their colleges’ various confidential rape hotlines, sexual assault resource centers, or Title IX offices, much less to campus or city police. And the overwhelming reason why the alleged victims did not report is that they did not think that what happened to them was that serious. At Harvard, over 69 percent of female respondents who checked the box for penetration by use of force did not report the incident to any authority. Most of those non-reporters—65 percent—did not think their experience was serious enough to report. This outcome is inconceivable in the case of real rape. No woman who has actually been raped would think that the rape was not serious enough to report. The White House Council on Women and Girls, echoing campus rape dogma, maintains that colleges are churning out legions of traumatized rape “survivors,” who go on to experience a lifetime of physical and emotional disability. Apparently these victims are so shellshocked that they don’t even realize how disabled they are.

The rate of nonreporting climbs as the sexual assault categories ginned up by the AAU grow ever more distant from the common understanding of rape. Over 78 percent of Harvard female respondents who checked the box for penetration due to “incapacitation” did not report. Three-quarters of them said that what happened to them was not serious enough to report. Over 92 percent of Harvard female respondents who said they were the victim of sexual touching by force did not report; over 81 percent said that what happened to them was not serious enough to report. Over 93 percent of respondents who had been sexually touched due to incapacitation did not report. Over 80 percent of them did not think it serious enough to report.

The picture is identical at every other college in the survey. At Yale, nearly 73 percent of female victims of alleged penetration by force and over 94 percent of female victims of alleged nonconsensual touching by incapacitation did not report to an agency or organization, because they did not think that what happened to them was serious enough.

These are females who since matriculation have been the targets of an escalating “rape culture” propaganda campaign. Yet that campaign has not changed the fundamental disagreement between rape survey respondents and their pollsters. The mother of all campus rape surveys, conducted by feminist researcher Mary Koss and written up in Ms. magazine in 1985, found that 73 percent of respondents whom the study characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped when asked the question directly. (Not surprisingly, campus rape researchers stopped asking that question. Campus rape researchers also quickly shelved an equally deflating question from the Koss survey: whether the victim had sex with her alleged rapist again. Forty-two percent of Koss’s alleged rape victims said that they had, another inconceivable outcome in the case of actual rape.) Seventy-two percent of female respondents in a 2014 MIT survey who said that they had experienced unwanted sexual behavior said that their experience was not serious enough to report...

Keep reading.

WATCH: Graphic New Video of Horrific Car Crash That Murdered Four People at Oklahoma State University Homecoming Parade

At CBS News, "New video of deadly OSU homecoming tragedy."

The suspect, 25-year-old Adacia Chambers, is likely to plead not guilty by reason of insanity --- which is pissing people right off. At WSJ, "Lawyer Questions Mental Health of Suspect in Deadly Oklahoma Crash."

Why Are Young Feminists So Clueless About Sex?

A fabulous essay, from Margaret Wente, at Toronto's Globe and Mail.

Feds Ready Forced Disclosure of Donors to Conservative Groups

Because politics is total war.

From J. Christian Adams, at Pajamas:

The Federal Election Commission is considering rules which could force non-profit organizations, such as a pro-life organization, to disclose the names of donors.

The speech-regulating Left has long been in favor of forced donor disclosure because it facilitates their most fanatical followers to unleash abuse on them.

That’s what happened to the owner of the Texans when he supported an effort to block a transgender referendum in Houston. Harassment of financial donors to conservative causes has become one of the standard tactics of the militant left...

Keep reading.

Chelsea Ake-Salvacion, 24-Year-Old Las Vegas Salon Worker, Found Dead in Cryotheropy Chamber (VIDEO)

God this is bizarre.

The woman apparently "froze to death within seconds."

At the Washington Post, "Salon worker praised cryotherapy — then ‘froze to death’ during treatment."

Russian Jets Fail to Fly in Syria

At USA Today, "Harsh conditions are foiling Russian jets in Syria":

WASHINGTON – Russian warplanes sent to Syria to back the regime of Bashar Assad are breaking down at a rapid rate that appears to be affecting their ability to strike targets, according to a senior Defense official.

Nearly one-third of Russian attack planes and half of its transport aircraft are grounded at any time as the harsh, desert conditions take a toll on equipment and crews, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive intelligence matters.

The Russians appear to be having difficulty adapting to the dusty conditions, and the number of airstrikes they have conducted seems to have dipped slightly.

"For deployed forces, that's a hideous rate," said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm.

Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed warplanes, including Russia's advanced Fullback ground-attack jet, helicopters and troops to a base near Latakia, Syria, in September. In addition, at least a dozen transport planes have been stationed there.

"They could have bad operating procedures, inadequate supplies of spare parts and support crews," Aboulafia said.

Russia's inexperience deploying forces at some distance, unlike their military actions in bordering countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, could also account for problems keeping planes in the air, he said.

"An awful lot of expeditionary warfare revolves around logistics," Aboulafia said. "A lot of it comes down to experience. They don't have that much of it."

For U.S. warplanes, readiness rates of less than 80% would attract attention from top brass, said a senior Air Force commander with multiple combat deployments in the Middle East. The officer was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. However, the officer noted that planes break, especially in austere, deployed conditions. He characterized mission-readiness rates of less than 80% as a matter of concern, not alarm.

David Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who led planning for the air war in Operation Desert Storm, said the rates for American fighters in combat zones has been above 90%. The readiness rate of 70% for Russian fighters isn't surprising, he said, because they lack experience being deployed and have been flying their jets hard. He called their rates for cargo planes, "pretty low."

"If those rates are accurate, it indicates that their deployed logistics function requires some attention," Deptula said.

U.S. pilots and aircraft have flown combat missions in the Middle East almost continuously since the first Gulf War. They struck Saddam Hussein's forces to push them from Kuwait, patrolled no-fly zones in Iraq for more than a decade, and fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, they returned to strike Islamic State militants on the ground in Iraq and Syria.

Last week, the Pentagon and Russian military reached an agreement to avoid conflict among pilots flying missions in Syria. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Friday said the Russian attacks have targeted opponents of Assad in Syria, where the civil war has killed more than 200,000 people...

More.

Feminism Flourishes in the West Because the Patriarchy is Dead

But don't count on it staying that way.

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "Before you complain about 'patriarchy'."

Drone Images Show Flow of Migrants Crossing Into Slovenia (VIDEO)

Via France 24:



BONUS: At Atlas Shrugs, "MIGRANT VIDEO: 'They are sitting in our backyards'."

White Police Officer is Seen Flipping Black Female High School Student on Her Back (VIDEO)

At Mother Jones, via Memeorandum, "Disturbing Video Shows School Cop Body Slam and Drag a Black Female Student."

And at NYDN, "VIDEO: SC school officer attacked a girl in a brutal beatdown during an arrest."

Iraqis Live in Constant Fear of Islamic State

The Obama administration doesn't really care. The recent shift to a larger U.S. role in Iraq is the result of political expediency. The White House wants to make it look like it's doing something before handing off its failed Middle East policy to its successor.

At USA Today, "Life under Islamic State rule in Mosul one of constant fear":

DOHUK, Iraq — Journalists are beaten or executed as spies. Children routinely witness executions and no longer go to school. A portion of government workers' salaries are seized.

That is what life is like living under the brutal rule of the Islamic State in Mosul since the extremist group captured Iraq's second largest city in 2014, according to residents lucky enough to escape to this Kurdish enclave about 45 miles to the north.

Yousuf Saba, 41, a former journalist with local news channel Sama al-Mosul, said he fled for his life in recent weeks after the militant group began rounding up journalists suspected of leaking negative information about the Islamic State.

“Anyone who was part of the journalist union in Mosul was taken,” Saba said. “They accused them of spying and threatened to kill their families. Some of my friends ... were interrogated and beaten, even though they had no proof against them.”

In early September, the militants executed 15 local journalists as suspected spies in front of a large crowd in the center of Mosul and forced children to watch, said Saba, who witnessed the killings.

Two weeks after he fled the city, the Islamic State killed his younger brother as an "example for others who were trying to escape," he said. "If more people leave, they will lose their credibility in front of the world."

Mohamma Bakour, 32, a schoolteacher who escaped in September, said the militants initially shut down all the schools. Now, he said, they have revised the courses to be consistent with their radical view of Islam.

“Books that discuss evolution are banned, and (many) science labs in schools have been burned," Bakour said. "'Only God created the world, and you don’t need experiments to tell them the world exists.' That’s their philosophy.”

Bakour said many children have been traumatized by the regime's brutality.

“When they cut a throat in front of the children, some children get psychologically affected and other children accept it as normal," he said. "In more than one year, the Islamic State has created a society where it’s normal for children to watch their elders being murdered by them.”

Most children don’t go to school and could end up joining the militants, Bakour said. Child labor is common. Many children “sell water and snacks on the streets to make $5 a day to support their families. But if they get recruited by (the Islamic State), they make much more money, and many families need that," he said...

Still more.

Hillary Clinton Accuses Bernie Sanders of Sexism (VIDEO)

Oh brother.

Grandma's going after Bernie Sanders for "sexist" attacks. You won't hear the end of this until Hillary quits the scene, and I mean six-feet deep.

At National Review, "2016 Officially Begins: Hillary Clinton Calls Critic Sexist."