The Yemen Meltdown

At WSJ, "The U.S. withdrawal is a victory for Iran and al Qaeda":

Another week, another victory for disorder in the Middle East. This time the meltdown is in Yemen, where this weekend the U.S. withdrew the remaining U.S. special forces from a base where they were waging a drone war against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The withdrawal comes amid growing chaos in the country after Houthi militants deposed the government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled the capital, San’a, for Aden last month. The Houthis belong to the Zaidi offshoot of Shiite Islam and are receiving help from Iran. They are at war with Sunni jihadists, who struck back in bombings on Friday that killed 152 people in San’a and Saada province. An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.

The U.S. retreat is a major loss in the fight against AQAP, which has been the al Qaeda branch most focused on hitting the U.S. mainland. The U.S. has a military base in Djibouti across the Gulf of Aden as well as naval assets in the region from which it can still strike targets in Yemen. But the loss of special forces on the ground is bound to hurt intelligence collection and thus the ability for accurate targeting. Chaos is a jihadist’s best friend.

As recently as September, President Obama hailed Yemen as an antiterror model. “This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years,” he said. That wishful thinking has now been exposed...

More.

Police Can't Corroborate Rape Allegations at University of Virginia

At CBS Evening News, "Police unable to corroborate U.Va rape allegations."

Also at CNN, "Police say investigators found no 'substantive basis' to support a University of Virginia female student's story that she was raped."

And from Ashe Schow, at the Washington Examiner, "Police investigating UVA rape story emphasize importance of police involvement."

Santa Barbara Woman Tests Negative for Ebola

At the Santa Barbara Independent, "Santa Barbara Health Officials Monitoring Possible Ebola Case: A Woman Who Recently Traveled to West Africa."

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Rookie of the Year 2015 — Kelly Rohrbach

Weekday hotness from Sports Illustrated:

Is Barbarity of Islamic State Pushing Public Opinion Toward Use of Ground Troops?

At Fox News, "Is the barbarity of ISIS changing U.S. public opinion?"

Referenced there is the child jihadi murdering the Israeli Arab, "Islamic State Video Shows Israeli Arab Murdered by Child Jihadi."

And at WaPo, "Support for using ground troops against the Islamic State is increasing."

Hillary Clinton Emails Shed Little Light

This is interesting, but will be entirely academic in the end.

I doubt much is going to come of the whole email thing, even though according this piece she lied about not using her private emails for public business.

At the New York Times, "In Clinton Emails on Benghazi, a Rare Glimpse at Her Concerns."

Taylor Swift Buys Domain Name TaylorSwift.porn

At Billboard:

Taylor Swift knew these domain names were trouble when they walked in.

The singer's team has purchased the web addresses TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult, prior to them becoming available to the public on June 1, according to CNN. It is unclear what she plans to do with them, if anything.

The move was prompted by nonprofit group Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers continuing to expand the number of generic top-level domains, beyond such popular ones as .com and .net.

A number of controversial domain names will be available in June, but public figures and companies are currently being given a window of time in which to register them before anyone else can.

Well, I can imagine what some less scrupulous types might have done with those domains.

USS Theodore Roosevelt Aircraft Carrier — By the Numbers

This is cool, via Telegraph UK:



And at London's Daily Mail, "Towering 20 stories above the waterline and more than 1,000ft long: Inside glimpse of the awesome naval power that is the USS Roosevelt."

Plus, at the U.S. Navy YouTube page, "Theodore Roosevelt Deploys for World Tour."

Ted Cruz Announces Presidential Bid: 'It's Time to Reclaim the Constitution' (VIDEO)

This man is the patriot's patriot.

I don't know if it was a great speech but there's no doubt he meant every word of it. He's a true believer in American exceptionalism.

And no teleprompter at that. Pretty impressive.

More at the Washington Post, "Cruz one of many courting GOP’s hard-right wing."

And watch: "Ted Cruz Presidential Announcement Full Speech (C-SPAN)."

ADDED: At Instapundit, "ANN ALTHOUSE ON TED CRUZ’S OPENING: 'This is a truly powerful speech. Just brilliant'."

Lindsey Pelas

At Egotastic!, "Lindsey Pelas Achieves Instagram Gold Funbag Status."

Could Leftist Disgust with Campus Brownshirts Be Reaching Critical Mass?

From Steven Hayward, at Power Line:

You know campus radicalism—the kind that openly oppresses in the name of ending oppression—is going too far when even The Nation magazine takes notice. Nation writer Michelle Goldberg reports about the case of Northwestern University feminist film professor Laura Kipnes, who wrote an essay last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” It was a long and rambling piece that covered a lot of territory, but contained here and there several nuggets of good sense...

Continue.

You'll laugh. Via Memeorandum.

V.S. Naipaul: Islamic State Dedicated to Bringing About Another Holocaust

One of the very best essays I've read on the issue of how Islamic is Islamic State.

Again, ISIS is Islamic. Very Islamic.

Read Naipal at London's Daily Mail, "A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews - and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. NAIPAUL says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich":

Are Isis and its followers heretics? The politicians of Europe and America, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande, after every Islamicist outrage insist on describing them as a lunatic fringe. Their constant refrain is that these perpetrators of murder and terror have as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity or the testament of Jesus Christ. But does such political assurance bear scrutiny?

Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.

So what impels the tiny minority of young men and women from immigrant communities to volunteer themselves to ‘jihad’ and to almost certain self-destruction, or young women to abscond from their families and from European reality to become jihadi brides.

When I visited Pakistan, I discovered what I have characterised as the effects of an ideological nurture. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim is taught that he or she has no historical antecedents before the conquest of parts of India and its conversion to the faith.

The pressures of poverty and promise bring this Muslim to Britain. He and his family don’t speak English.

They are confined to work and live in an exclusively immigrant area of an inner city – say Bradford, Tower Hamlets or parts of Greater Manchester or Birmingham.

Their children are raised as Muslims, some strict some not so strict, and are sent to the normal city schools which soon become almost exclusively immigrant.

Some find that the values that traditionally inform them are at variance with those of the lives they see around them. This is true for even those Muslim young men and women who are being educated, through Britain’s by-and-large egalitarian system, to be surgeons or computer programmers.

Islamism is simpler. There are rules to obey, a jihad to fight against the civilisation you can’t comprehend, a heaven to go to when you martyr yourself and now a real fighting force in the world which you can join to simplify and solve your existence: no history to complicate your self-awareness, no art to distract you, no ambivalence and choices that ‘Western’ civilisation offers you, no doubt about the fruits of martyrdom, no allegiance to the country in which you were brought up and which gave you a free education and perhaps welfare benefits. A gun, a half-understood prayer and the simplicity that a simple and singular upbringing craves.

That is why they go. And volunteer for death, and die.

In the past three or four centuries since Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Islam remained encrypted in the revelations of the Koran and the Hadith of a 6th Century life.

The expansion of the scientific enquiry coincided with or possibly caused the maritime expansion of European colonialism. Empirical science, the progress of liberal religion and the germination of modern democratic ideas coincided with European colonial dominion over Asia and Africa.

The process of decolonisation in the 20th Century gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilisation, scientific or democratic, was to be condemned as ‘colonial’. There may be no ideological answer to such bigotry.

The Islamic world does contain currents that are opposed to the interpretations that Isis gives to the Koran, the Hadith and to sharia. These are yet to declare themselves...

Remember, the people calling for a reformation are attacked as "Islamophobes."

There is no call among the left's terror enablers to reform the religion. Islam is not Islam!

More.

Fifty-Seven Percent of Americans Want Presidential Candidate Who'll 'Change Obama's Policies...'

Oh God yes.

At CNN, "Election 2016: The perfect candidate":

A new CNN/ORC poll finds most Americans say they would like a candidate who's a seasoned political leader, someone with an executive background, and someone who's willing to change Barack Obama's policies.

Rather than assessing the traits of individual candidates, the poll asked respondents to think about their perfect candidate and choose between two statements relating to several different traits often found in presidential candidates.

Would the perfect successor to Obama be someone with ideological purity or someone who had a great chance at winning? Someone who has had economic success or someone who's never been wealthy? Someone who relies on their religious views to guide policy or someone who believes religion should have no place in government?

Three statements generated wide-reaching support. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they'd like a candidate who has been in the public eye as a political leader for many years over one who's new to the political scene. Further, 59% say they prefer a candidate with executive experience over one who's worked as a legislator, and 57% say their perfect Obama successor would change most of the policies enacted by Obama's administration.

A long history in the political limelight is appealing to a broad swath of Americans, with majorities across age, race and education lines saying they prefer someone who's been in the public eye as a political leader for many years.

There is a partisan tinge to the results of this question, however, with Democrats -- who will choose from a field whose leading contender has decades in the public eye -- more apt to prefer a seasoned leader (77%) than Republicans (51%). On the GOP side, 46% say they would rather see someone who is new to the political scene take the White House in 2016, and their party's field includes several contenders who fit that bill.

Overall, 57% say their perfect Obama successor would change most of the policies of the Obama administration, while 41% prefer that the next president continue most of his policies. Republicans are near unanimous in their search for a change in most of Obama's policies: 94% want that. Among Democrats, 22% are looking for changes while 77% would prefer Obama's policies to remain in place...

More.

That 22 percent of Democrats who want changes to Obama's policies are looking for an even more "fundamental transformation" than we've been seeing this last six years, hence the groundswell of support for an anti-capitalist Liz Warren candidacy. See, for example, Legal Insurrection, "Game Changer: Boston Globe urges Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary."

At Least 70 Bodies Found After Military Retakes Town Held by Boko Haram

At Euronews, "Nigeria: Dozens of corpses found in town re-taken from Boko Haram."

Starbucks Ends 'Race Together' Fiasco

I guess they're having a hard time letting go of this cluster nevertheless.

At WSJ, "Starbucks Ends Key Phase in ‘Race Together’ Campaign: CEO Howard Schultz says other aspects of campaign to continue."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Every Day Muslims Kill in the Name of Islam

Ms. Hirsi Ali, at ABC's This Week, "Does Islam Have a Violent Extremism Problem?"

And the idiot Martha Raddatz kneecaps Ms. Hirsi Ali, accusing her of slandering Islam with a "broad brush." Well, we wouldn't want to make Islam look bad or anything, that's for sure.

Notice above all, Ms. Hirsi Ali is 100 percent classy, composed, and full of reason. Her new book is out tomorrow, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

Venice Man Accused of Allowing His Dogs Kill Neighbor's Cat (VIDEO)

That's not very neighborly.

At CBS News Los Angeles, "Caught on Camera: Venice Man Accused of Allowing His Dogs to Kill Neighbor's Cat."

Democrat Tulsi Gabbard: Obama Needs Stronger Policy on Islamic State

Once again, the courageous congresswoman takes on the White House.

Watch, at CBS Face the Nation, "House Dem: Obama needs stronger ISIS strategy."

And flashback, from last month, "Democrat Tulsi Gabbard Says Obama is 'Misidentifying' the Enemy."

Obama's Role During the Israeli Elections Was Larger Than Reported

The level of corruption is so astounding it's ridiculous.

At the Hill, "Netanyahu pollster: Obama role in election larger than reported."

Texting Makes You Selfish

And less trusting.

All the screen-time is said to effectively rewire your cognitive and emotional processes, especially among the young.


At the Washington Post, "Texting has made us less trusting, more selfish":

Virtual distance is a game-changer when it comes to human relations. When technology is used as an agent for relationships, in some cases it can be beneficial. However when technology is used purposelessly as a default it doesn’t just squeeze out sophisticated interpersonal interactions, it changes the nature of what’s left.

Purposeful use of technology can support children’s learning but when technology becomes either a substitute or a proxy for relationships, language development in children can be held back. Communication becomes the transfer of impersonal information instead of the sharing of a passion. This can have an impact on language development for kids, but it can have affects on other aspects of our lives.

Taking a risk and having a go at that tricky math problem seems more difficult when a child is on their own than when with a friend. More so sticking with a difficult task (a real gym-buddy is more effective than an app).

These kinds of skills – self discipline, ethical understanding and interpersonal communication, as well as social ability, and critical thinking (among others) – are what UNESCO calls “transversal competencies.” And they can be impaired through virtual distance.

When the ripple effects of actions and inactions seem to go no further than the screen, empathy and collaborative skills can be difficult to develop. For example, children seem to have trouble looking into other people’s eyes and are less able to hold conversations.

As connectivity increases, connectedness can lose out...

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