Icelanders Sign Petition Calling on Government to Accept More Syrian Refugees (VIDEO)

Wow!

Iceland?

It's not like it's the biggest country, or anything, heh.

They're definitely radical leftists up that way, though. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a radical member of Iceland's parliament, refused to cooperate with the FBI when it was investigating WikiLeaks back in 2013.

At the BBC, "Demand to open doors to Syrians spreading online":

More than 12,000 people have shown their support for an Icelandic writer's Facebook plea for her country to take in more refugees. That might not sound like a lot, but bear in mind the total population of Iceland is not much more than 300,000.

Although, unlike some outlets reported, not everyone who joined the group set up by Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir is offering a refugee a place to stay ("Not everyone in this group is offering their home" the group's description reads), a vibrant debate kicked off on the page itself. The government of Iceland has said it will take in 50 asylum seekers this year.

Not everyone was supportive. "Islam is totally not compatible with Europe," read one comment. But most of the comments were broadly positive about the refugees and about Bjorgvinsdottir's initiative.

The large numbers of supporters in such a small country caught global attention. "Thank you, Icelanders, for again taking the lead as citizens - not only of Iceland, but also of the world," one American commenter said. "You a great country, a great people."

Bernie Sanders: 'Democratic' Socialism Is Good for America (VIDEO)

Yeah, let's just rehabilitate socialism, because, you know, it's as American as apple pie, or something.

Indeed, notice how I put "democratic" in quotation marks at the headline.

Socialism's a Utopian ideology imposed at the barrel of a gun. It's the opposite of democracy, which is why folks call them the "Democrat Party." Sanders is right at home in that regard, the freakin' socialist scum-bucket. Let's hope he wins his party's nomination, so we can spend most of next year rightfully attacking the Democrats as socialist tyrants, and, unlike in 2008 and 2012, this time around the leftist fever swamps and the MSM enablers won't be able to deny shit.

Watch: "Bernie Sanders Explains Why You Shouldn't Be Scared of the Term 'Socialism'."

“What Democratic Socialism is about, is having a government which reflects the interests of the ordinary people, rather than is currently the case, the billionaire class..."

Hat Tip: Legal Insurrection, "Bernie Sanders Explains ‘Democratic Socialism’."

And following the links there, to the stompy-feet New Republic, "Stop Calling Bernie Sanders a Socialist."

Julian Wilson Worst Wipeout, Pipeline, Hawaii (VIDEO)

Via Surfer Magazine:

Governor Nikki Haley Says #BlackLivesMatter Movement Is Endangering Black Lives (VIDEO)

Here's the video, "Nikki Haley to #BlackLivesMatter: Yelling and Screaming Isn’t Gonna Get You Anywhere."

And her full speech from earlier today, "Governor Nikki Haley Speaks at the National Press Club."

At the New York Times:

Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who won accolades for swiftly moving to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol after the June massacre of nine black churchgoers, sharply criticized the Black Lives Matter movement on Wednesday.

Citing the unrest that followed the police-involved deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Ms. Haley, a Republican, said the swelling African-American movement protesting police misconduct was imperiling black lives and property.

“Most of the people who now live in terror because local police are too intimidated to do their jobs are black,” Ms. Haley said at a luncheon in Washington. “Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”

Ms. Haley contrasted the rioting in those communities with what she described as the reconciliation that took place in South Carolina after the death in April of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back as he ran from a police officer, and the killing of nine members of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

She noted that Mr. Scott’s killing prompted South Carolina to mandate that police officers wear body cameras, the first state in the country to do so, and she recalled her effort to build support for taking down the Confederate flag.

“Some people think that you have to yell and scream in order to make a difference,” Ms. Haley said. “That’s not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume level.”

For Ms. Haley, at 43 the youngest governor in the country, her address to the National Press Club represented the next phase of what is essentially an audition to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee next year. Her response to the Charleston killings lifted her national profile and prompted many in the party to suggest that Ms. Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, should be on the short list of the eventual presidential nominee.

Ms. Haley did little to dissuade such talk during a question-and-answer session after her remarks, stating that she was focused on her state for now but that if the party standard-bearer next year approached her about joining the ticket, “of course I will sit down and talk.”

Her 28-minute address illustrated how, in positioning herself for higher national prominence, she is trying to balance her conservative views with a more inclusive brand of politics that could make her attractive in a general election...

Still more.

And see the Washington Post, "Gov. Nikki Haley criticizes ‘yell and scream’ strategy of ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but also says GOP needs new tone."

Meh. Don't know about the "new tone" part. I like how Donald Trump just gives the middle fingered salute to talk like that.

Republican Party Loyalty Pledge

Weird.

At Politico, via Memeorandum, "GOP circulates loyalty pledge to box Trump in."

At at the New York Times, "Republican Party Asks Candidates To Sign Loyalty Pledge":

Responding to growing pressure from party donors and officials to dissuade Donald J. Trump from mounting an independent campaign for president, the Republican National Committee on Wednesday asked each of the party’s presidential candidates to sign a statement vowing not to run as a third-party candidate.

With little warning, committee officials called and emailed campaign representatives requesting that they put in writing what every candidate, except for Mr. Trump, has already pledged to do.

“I ______ affirm that if I do not win the 2016 Republican nomination for president of the United States I will endorse the 2016 Republican presidential nominee regardless of who it is,” the document, on R.N.C. letterhead, states. “I further pledge that I will not seek to run as an independent or write-in candidate nor will I seek or accept the nomination for president of any other party.”

The document, first disclosed by Politico, was emailed to the campaigns under the subject line “pledge” and includes a space for the candidates to sign and for the R.N.C.’s chairman, Reince Priebus, to witness...

And I agree with this, at Hot Air:

If I were Trump, I’d feel obliged now to refuse on principle, to show my populist fans that no one tells me what to do. I don’t know why the RNC would try to call his bluff this way unless this whole thing has actually been coordinated with his campaign, i.e. unless today’s news of the loyalty pledge is just priming the pump for the bigger news that Trump’s in the GOP race to stay. In that case, though, why would Trump need any help from the RNC to build anticipation? He’s a media master. He could have made a huge announcement splash without them...

Pretty fascinating.

And yes, Trump should tell the RNC to just fuck off.

More.

Overgrown Sheep Seen Wandering Near Canberra

So, what would sheep do with without their human masters, heh?

At the BBC, "Australia urgent plea to shear overgrown sheep."

The poor sheep couldn't even see, the wool had literally grown over its eyes.

GoPro HERO4 SILVER

A popular item, at Amazon, Fast, Powerful Photo Capture: Captures high-quality 12MP photos at speeds of up to 30 fps - Built-In WiFi PLUS Bluetooth: Delivers enhanced connectivity to the GoPro App, Smart Remote - GoPro HERO4 SILVER.

Plus, don't forget to pick up your copy of Michael Walsh's book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.

'Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, wanted officers to wear their daily service clothes — khaki button-up shirts with open collars and no ties...'

A cool story, at the Los Angeles Times, "A look inside the WWII surrender ceremony: 'My job was to make sure we did not screw up'":

James L. Starnes, navigator of the battleship Missouri, was 24 years old when he learned he would play a key role in the ceremony to mark the end of World War II.

After the Japanese conceded defeat, President Truman announced that "Mighty Mo," the behemoth 58,000-ton flagship of the 3rd Fleet, would host the signatories of the instrument of surrender in Tokyo Bay.

"My job was to make sure we did not screw up," said Starnes, 94, who performed the role of officer of the deck the morning of Sept. 2, 1945.

A former lieutenant commander in the Navy who now lives in a retirement community in Stone Mountain, east of Atlanta, Starnes is one of the few remaining veterans who organized the ceremony on the Missouri 70 years ago.

Five years after joining the Navy Reserve's officer-training program as a student at Emory University in Atlanta in 1940, Starnes was responsible for working out the logistics of the ceremony to mark the formal end of the six-year war that had killed more than 60 million people.

At first he prepared for an elaborate, formal affair with ceremonial dress and gleaming sabers. "We thought, well, this has never happened before," he said. "We'll have a big celebration, put on the white uniforms and polish up our swords."

Before the ceremony, however, Starnes got word that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific, wanted officers to wear their daily service clothes — khaki button-up shirts with open collars and no ties. "We fought them in our khaki uniforms, and we'll accept their surrender in our khaki uniforms," MacArthur was reported to have said...

Keep reading.

Also from Ms. EBL, "Never Forget: 70th Anniversary of the surrender of Imperial Japan."

Disturbing Graffiti of Police Officer at Gunpoint Appears Around Houston

From Nice Deb, at Pajamas, "Needless to say, 'those in uniform say it's incredibly disturbing to see this just days after a deputy was killed while pumping gas'."

Neo-Communism

I took a break from my Civil War reading to wade back into David Horowitz's The Black Book of the American Left.

I particularly enjoy reading his essays on "neo-communism," available at FrontPage Magazine, "Neo-Communism" and "Taking on the Neo-Coms, Part II."

Also, "Are Communists (or Neo-Communists) Dangerous?"

Don't miss all of Horowitz's books at Amazon.

Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis is Sudden Symbol of Recalcitrant Resistance to Depraved Leftist Homosexual Agenda

I'm actually not backing this lady, since she's a government employee. The Supremes ruled in favor of a right to homosexual marriage. I don't like it, but that's the law. She should take her opposition campaign to the private realm. Folks expect to get the marriage licenses in the state, and rightly so.

At the Lexington Herald-Leader, "Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, once a local fixture, is suddenly a national symbol."

And at the Louisville Courier-Journal, "Kim Davis cites God, crowd jeers gay couple," and "Rowan clerk Kim Davis loses Supreme Court fight."

The No-Growth Campaign

At the Wall Street Journal, "Clinton and Trump are offering nothing to improve the economy":

Stocks took another tumble on Tuesday on a weak manufacturing report out of China, and investor shivers about Japan, the oil patch and the U.S. are increasing. The shaky markets and underlying economy seem relevant to the presidential debate—yet the front-runners of both parties have next to no pro-growth ideas to contribute.

Hillary Clinton favors higher taxation, heavier regulation, more political shackling of business, and centralizing more economic control inside the White House. So does Donald Trump—at least as far as we can tell.

Mrs. Clinton is promising Obamanomics Plus: continue the agenda of the last eight years, with bonus corrections toward the left as necessary. She’s proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on some capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, for example, up from 15% as recently as 2012.

On energy, one of the few U.S. growth areas of the Obama era, she is even further to the left. The green elites used to tolerate support for the U.S. oil and natural gas boom if gas could be levered as a transition fuel toward a post-carbon future. Now they favor massive subsidies for wind and solar today and no fossil-fuel drilling, and Mrs. Clinton is moving their way.

About the only growth component of Mrs. Clinton’s agenda is immigration, and there she beats Mr. Trump in a romp. A larger workforce adds to GDP, and economists of all political persuasions agree that increasing human capital drives prosperity and offsets an otherwise aging population.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy is more attitude than substance, and his quicksilver positions change day to day, even minute to minute in the same interview. But he has been consistent about rounding up illegal immigrants and deporting them to their home countries—if they have one, in the case of kids born on U.S. soil. He supports “a pause” in legal immigration too.

The real-estate tycoon is also running as the most antitrade candidate since Herbert Hoover. He has assailed the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and the pending Pacific Rim pact as “disasters” that are “killing us.” Mr. Trump promises to reopen these agreements and do better, though without saying how, apart from his alpha-male negotiating skills. He’s proposing tariffs as high as 30% on imports, and he has already promised to punish Ford and Nabisco for expanding production south of the border.

On taxes, Mr. Trump promises to release a “comprehensive” reform plan soon. So far, though, his only specifics have been some kind of tax relief for the middle class coupled with class warfare. He said in a recent interview that “I would take carried interest out, and I would let people making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay some tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it’s outrageous.”

Carried interest is the accounting term for a share of profits from investments in general partnerships—private equity, hedge funds, (ahem) real-estate outfits. Congress taxes this at-risk capital at a lower rate than ordinary wages because it only pays out if a fund invests wisely, but this treatment should be reconsidered as part a larger tax reform.

Mr. Trump doesn’t engage these facts, much less anything else that might help the real economy. Carried interest is a sideshow. Much like Mrs. Clinton and President Obama, he’s trying to stoke resentment of the rich, or the merely affluent, or foreigners, people dumber than he is, whoever...

Well, it's telling that the editors speak of Donald Trump as if he's the GOP nominee. And should he win it, I'd trust his business background to restore the economy more than Hilllary's Alinskyite pedigree.

Still more.

"Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience..."

Heh, here's Robert Stacy McCain going off on an epic rant against the collectivist left.

See, "Godless Commies: The Critical Theory Cult and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace."

He reviews Michael Walsh's new book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.

Social Justice Warriors Always Lie

A Kindle book, from Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

Economic Progress is More Effective Than Protests

From Joel Kotkin, at the Daily Beast:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the new wave of black nationalists are selling a line that is inimical to real racial progress in America.

The election of Barack Obama promised to inaugurate the dawn of a post-racial America. Instead we seem to be stepping ever deeper into a racial quagmire. The past two month saw the violent commemoration of the Ferguson protests, “the celebration” of the 50th anniversary of the Watts riots, new police shootings in places as distant as Cincinnati and Fort Worth, and renewed disorder, tied to a police-related shooting, in St. Louis last week.

When President Obama was elected, two-thirds of Americans thought race relations were good. Now six in 10 think they are bad, according to a New York Times poll, including some 68 percent of African Americans.

This extreme alienation creates a rich soil for resurgence of a cramped form of black nationalism, as revealed in such widely read books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Coates, like the black nationalists of the ’60s, is fawned over by today’s progressive gentry. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott gushed that Coates’s writing is “essential, like water or air.” Yet the new nationalists do not, like many previous iterations, look to Africa for salvation, and as a potential place of re-settlement. Instead they may look to Africa for inspiration, but seem content to stew in the American racial cauldron, always apart but also here.

Yet to this reader, it’s hard to regard Coates’s book as anything more than a narrow selfie that holds little hope for any future racial progress. To Coates, America itself seems irredeemable, its very essence tied to racial oppression and brutality. America is not about ideals not yet fulfilled, but a legacy of “pillaging,” the “destruction of families,” “the rape of mothers,” and countless other outrages. Today’s abusive police—and clearly some can be so described—are not outliers who should be punished but “are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” His alienation from America is so great that he admits to little sympathy for the victims of 9/11.

Coates is literally a personal cauldron of hatred.

Still more.

And buy Kotkin's book, The New Class Conflict.

The Socialist Dream Will Never Die

From Steven Hayward, at Power Line:

At the end of the day, of course, the socialist impulse is not really rooted in reason or epistemology, but in envy and the desire for authoritarian control. That’s why we’ll never be rid of these people, no matter how many Venezeulas and Cubas you pile up.

Hayward references Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published at the American Economic Review, in September 1945.

Plus, see "The Socialist Dream Will Never Die (2)." (Linked there is Leszek Kolakowski's, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown.)

Kathryn Steinle Parents File Lawsuit Against San Francisco Sheriff Over 'Sanctuary Cities' (VIDEO)

At the San Jose Mercury News, "Kate Steinle killing: Parents file claim against San Francisco sheriff, feds":

SAN FRANCISCO -- Kate Steinle's mother has a phobia of speaking in front of crowds.

But when her family announced Tuesday that they were taking legal action against the local sheriff and two federal agencies for Steinle's death, Liz Sullivan stepped up on a small stool outside City Hall so she could be seen over the phalanx of TV microphones.

"I don't know what's come over me," Sullivan told dozens of reporters. "I feel as though it's Kate. She has somehow empowered me. I feel her strength, and I know she's proud of what we're doing."

In an emotional news conference Tuesday, Steinle's parents said they want to hold accountable not just the illegal immigrant charged with her killing but also the public officials who failed to keep him off the streets. On July 1, just moments after taking a selfie with her father on Pier 14, Steinle -- a world traveler and social justice activist who had just moved in with her boyfriend in San Francisco -- was shot in the back, allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant with a history of seven drug felonies and five deportations.

"It too late to fight for our daughter," Sullivan said, but she hopes their case will ensure the safety of future families and tourists to San Francisco. "This is for humanity, this is for the future, even though ours is gone."

Keep reading.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck Slams #BlackLivesMatter as a 'Hate Group' (VIDEO)

She nails it.

Via NYDN:

Europe's Migrant Crisis Reaches 'Biblical Proportions'

At the Telegraph UK, "EU faces migrant crisis of 'biblical proportions' as Germany registers 3,500 new refugees in just one day - live":

Migrants are arriving in Europe in ever-increasing numbers, with waves of people coming into the EU from Greece, Italy and Hungary. Latest updates here.

For those just joining us this evening as we wind down our live coverage, here is a summary of today's key events:

- Nigel Farage warned this morning that the EU had opened the door to an "exodus of biblical proportions."
- It later emerged that Germany has registered more than 3,500 refugees in the last day alone
- Meanwhile 350,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean since January, IOM figures revealed
- Yvette Cooper this afternoon called on "Britain to be Britain" by taking in 10,000 refugees
- Greece announced it has been forced to move 4,000 migrants onto the mainland as the Aegean islands are "overwhelmed"
- Bulgarian police this afternoon arrested one person in connection with case of an abadoned lorry containing 71 dead migrants
- This evening, Germans welcomed refugees arriving in Munich with food, water, nappies and teddy bears

We continue to cover the latest developments in the migrant crisis...

More.

Manhunt Continues After Police Officer Shot and Killed in Fox Lake, Illinois (VIDEO)

Watch, at CBS News 2 Chicago, "Manhunt in Fox Lake After Police Officer Shot and Killed."

And at the Chicago Tribune, "Slain Fox Lake police officer identified as veteran cop, father of four."

More at Twitchy, "Police officer shot and killed during traffic stop in #FoxLake; Manhunt underway; Update: 3 suspects at large."