Antony Beevor, Ardennes 1944

He's a prodigious historian.

At Amazon, Antony Beevor, Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge.

Samantha Hoopes Uncovered for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2017 (VIDEO)

Via Theo Spark:

Westworld's Angela Sarafyan Wears Risqué Sheer Panel Dress Without Underwear for Vanity Fair and L'Oreal's Toast to Young Hollywood Party in Los Angeles

At London's Daily Mail, "You're Sheer-ly Not Serious! Westworld's Angela Sarafyan Goes Without Underwear Beneath See-Through Panel Dress at Hollywood Bash."

Shop Amazon Today

Thanks for supporting the blog!

Here, at Amazon, Today's Deals.

Also, Biofreeze Pain Relieving Gel - 4 Ounce Tube - Pack of 4.

And, AmazonBasics Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable - 6 Feet (1.8 Meters) - White.

BONUS: Nick Adams, Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness.

Trump Administration Outlines Plans for Sweeping Deportations of Illegal Aliens

Following-up, "Katie Pavlich: #Democrats Use Illegal Immigration to Stoke Fear."

At USA Today, "Homeland Security unveils sweeping plan to deport undocumented immigrants."

Katie Pavlich: #Democrats Use Illegal Immigration to Stoke Fear

Katie's cool.

Marine Le Pen Wins Over Women Voters Who Feel Left Behind in France

She's awesome.

At Bloomberg.

And at Blazing Cat Fur, "Marine Le Pen Refuses to Cover Herself for Muslim Poobah."

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus

*BUMPED.*

I'm telling you, the literature on Native Americans is among the most radical scholarship you'll find.

FWIW, at Amazon, Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States.

Professor Simpson's posted a link to the book's introduction on her faculty homepage.

'Feminist Witchcraft,' Mental Illness and the Demonic Dangers of the Occult

At the Other McCain.

'None Dare Call it Treason'

Actually, the first couple of chapters are chilling. It really hits home. John Stormer might as well have explaining Obama's America and the left's glorification of Islam.

Here, None Dare Call it Treason.

I have a copy. It's not "fake news."

A 1964 book claiming that communists had infiltrated all levels of government was that era's version of fake news https://t.co/V1K2wG4uCp

— NYT Metro Desk (@NYTMetro) January 11, 2017

Iceland, Where Murders Are Rare

But where this woman's disappearance has gripped the nation.

At NYT:

Killing of a young woman grips Iceland https://t.co/zDW0ZJE5w1

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 24, 2017

Never Trumpers Continue to Subvert Trump's Presidency

I want to get to Milo's resignation from Breitbart, and the debate on its causes, which is mind-boggling. But I'm tired from a long day. I promise to post on it later. (But see David Horowitz for now, in any case, "The Right Throws Milo to the Wolves: Why the Left Dominates the National Culture." Interesting that I wrote yesterday that "the left's fingerprints are all over this." The "right" is morphing into the "left.")

Meanwhile, here's VDH, "Seven Days in February":

Trumps’ critics, left and right, aim to bring about the cataclysm they predicted.

A 1964 political melodrama, Seven Days in May, envisioned a futuristic (1970s) failed military cabal that sought to sideline the president of the United States over his proposed nuclear-disarmament treaty with the Soviets.

Something far less dramatic but perhaps as disturbing as Hollywood fiction played out this February.

The Teeth-Gnashing of Deep Government

Currently, the political and media opponents of Donald Trump are seeking to subvert his presidency in a manner unprecedented in the recent history of American politics. The so-called resistance among EPA federal employees is trying to disrupt Trump administration reform; immigration activists promise to flood the judiciary to render executive orders inoperative.

Intelligence agencies had earlier leaked fake news briefings about the purported escapades of President-elect Trump in Moscow — stories that were quickly exposed as politically driven concoctions. Nearly one-third of House Democrats boycotted the Inauguration. Celebrities such as Ashley Judd and Madonna shouted obscenities to crowds of protesters; Madonna voiced her dreams of Trump’s death by saying she’d been thinking a lot about blowing up the White House.

But all that pushback was merely the clownish preliminary to the full-fledged assault in mid February.

Career intelligence officers leaked their own transcripts of a phone call that National Security Advisor–designate Michael Flynn had made to a Russian official.The media charge against Flynn was that he had nefariously talked to higher-ups in Russia before he took office. Obama-administration officials did much the same, before Inauguration Day 2009, and spoke with Syrian, Iranian, and Russian counterparts. But they faced no interference from the outgoing Bush administration.

No doubt the designated security officials of most incoming administrations do not wait until being sworn in to sound out foreign officials. Most plan to reset the policies of their predecessors. The question, then, arises: Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate (and Trump himself?) and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press? For what purpose?

Indeed, Trump’s own proposed outreach to Russia so far is not quite of the magnitude of Obama’s in 2009, when the State Department staged the red-reset-button event to appease Putin; at the time, Russia was getting set to swallow the Crimea and all but absorb Eastern Ukraine. Trump certainly did not approve the sale of some 20 percent of North American uranium holdings to Russian interests, in the quid pro quo fashion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did, apparently in concert with Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation — and to general indifference of both the press and the intelligence community.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that career intelligence officers have decided to withhold information from the president, on the apparent premise that he is unfit, in their view, to receive it. If true, that disclosure would mean that elements of the federal government are now actively opposing the duly elected president of the United States. That chilling assessment gains credence from the likelihood that the president’s private calls to Mexican and Australian heads of state were likewise recorded, and selected segments were leaked to suggest that Trump was either trigger-happy or a buffoon.

Oddly, in early January, Senator Charles Schumer had essentially warned Trump that he would pay for his criticism of career intelligence officials. In an astounding shot across his bow, which was followed up by an onslaught in February, Schumer said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. . . . So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Schumer was evidently not disturbed about rogue intelligence agencies conspiring to destroy a shared political enemy — the president of the United States. What surprised him was how naïve Trump was in not assessing the anti-constitutional forces arrayed against him.

Trump-Removal Chic

The elite efforts to emasculate the president have sometimes taken on an eerie turn. The publisher-editor of the German weekly magazine Zeit raised the topic on German television of killing Trump to end the “Trump catastrophe.” So did British Sunday Times columnist India Knight, who tweeted, “The assassination is taking such a long time.” A former Obama Pentagon official, Rosa Brooks, recently mused about theoretical ways to remove Trump, including a military coup, should other avenues such as impeachment or medically forced removal fail: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

The Atlantic now darkly warns that Trump is trying to create an autocracy. Former Weekly Standard editor in chief Bill Kristol suggested in a tweet that if he faced a choice (and under what surreal circumstances would that happen?) between the constitutionally, democratically elected president and career government officials’ efforts to thwart or remove him, he would come down on the side of the revolutionary, anti-democratic “deep state”: “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it [emphasis added], prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” No doubt some readers interpreted that as a call to side with anti-constitutional forces against an elected U.S. president.

Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep equate the president with brownshirts and assorted fascists. A CNN reporter announced that Trump was Hitlerian; another mused about his plane’s crashing. Prominent conservative legal scholar Richard Epstein recently called for Trump to resign after less than a month in office, largely on grounds that Trump’s rhetoric is unbridled and indiscreet — although Epstein cited no indictable or impeachable offenses that would justify the dispatch of a constitutionally elected president. Earlier, Republican columnists David Frum and Jennifer Rubin had theorized that the 25th Amendment might provide a way to remove Trump from office as unfit to serve. The New Republic published an unfounded theory, based on no empirical evidence, alleging that Trump suffers from neurosyphilis and thus is mentally not up to his office.

Former president Barack Obama — quite unlike prior presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, who all refrained from attacking their successors — is now reportedly ready to join the efforts of a well-funded political action committee to undermine the Trump presidency...

It's sickening.

I don't recognize American politics anymore. I don't recognize my country anymore.

But thank goodness for decent, clear-thinking people like VDH.

Keep reading.

Shop Today's Deals!

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Today's Deals.

And, Amazon Echo - Black.

BONUS: Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865.

Also, Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics.

The Most Politically Dangerous Book

It's Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

The most politically dangerous book you’ve never heard of https://t.co/urHQbA9z61 via @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/k6hCeijH2A

— POLITICO (@politico) December 12, 2016

Cuirasse du Carabinier — Waterloo

Here's the story, "Cuirass with Cannon-Ball Hole":

Armour of a cuirasse du carabinier holed by a cannonball at the battle of Waterloo pic.twitter.com/TBJ7rGPIVf

— History In Pictures (@historyepics) January 15, 2017

This is a French cuirass, a breastplate worn as body armour by French cavalry. The hole is from a British cannonball that smashed through the unlucky soldier’s chest. The Waterloo campaign was the first occasion that British troops found themselves face to face with Napoleon’s armoured cavalry, whose cuirasses and metal helmets made them a daunting foe.

Yet as the British would discover, even these armoured troopers were by no means invincible as this breastplate brings home with shocking force.

More.

'Alexa, stop!'

At WSJ, "Alexa, Stop Making Life Miserable for Anyone With a Similar Name!":

“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot.” https://t.co/w5mG5rsj0A

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 27, 2017

“Alexa, stop!” Joanne Sussman screamed in her living room.

Immediately, the computer living inside her Amazon Echo speaker stopped playing her favorite music station. Simultaneously, Mrs. Sussman’s 24-year-old daughter, Alexa, froze on the stairs.

“What, mom? I’m taking the laundry down,” human Alexa shouted back. “What do you need?”

“I always liked my name, until Amazon gave it to a robot,” says Alexa Sussman, a recent New York University graduate who works in marketing.

The artificial-intelligence invasion is upon us, in the form of disembodied personal assistants we can give orders to, query and, in some cases, try to converse with. In hopes of getting us used to our new artificially intelligent family members, the technology companies behind them have given the machines mostly female names to go with their soothing voices.

Apple Inc. picked “Siri.” Microsoft Corp. chose “Cortana.” ( Alphabet Inc.’s Google opted to keep its software nonhuman, calling it “Assistant.”) Amazon.com Inc.’s choice, as it happens, was the 39th most popular girl’s name in the U.S. in 2006. That means in some homes the plan has backfired: The effort to make a gadget more humanlike has earned it human enemies.

In the Sussmans’ household in Levittown, N.Y., the confusion cuts both ways. Last week, when human Alexa’s father, Dean, asked her to grab some water from the kitchen, Amazon’s Alexa wanted to help, too. “Amazon’s choice for water is Fiji Natural Artesian Water, pack of 24. It’s $27.27, including tax. Would you like to buy it?”

When he told his daughter to move the living-room chair, Amazon’s Alexa yelped, “Ready to pair!” Robo-Alexa had a command for Mr. Sussman himself: “Go to the Bluetooth devices on your mobile device.”

The microphones in the $180 Amazon Echo and the smaller $50 Echo Dot are always listening for “Alexa,” which is their default “wake word,” the phrase causing it to start paying attention to commands. Amazon lets users change the wake word to “Echo,” “Amazon,” or, starting this week, “computer.”

But many users aren’t aware. The Sussmans found out about the setting a year after buying the device. They have decided to keep “Alexa” because they say they find it funny.


Amazon has sold more than 11 million Echos and Dots since 2015, Morgan Stanley estimates, and it is working with partners to put Alexa into other products, including Ford Motor Co. cars and General Electric Co. lamps.

Some human Alexas want nothing to do with her.

“Oh, your name is Alexa, like the Amazon thing?” Alexa Duncan, 33, says she hears all too often these days. She refuses to buy the Echo.

Amazon says it named its Alexa after the ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria. The company hasn’t offered any formal apologies to the human Alexas.

Michelle Malkin Slams the Media's Thin-Skinned Reaction to Being Called the Enemy (VIDEO)

From Hannity's last night:

ICYMI: Scott Greer, No Campus for White Men

At Amazon, No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination.

The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist

This is one of the best reasons we have Donald Trump. He repudiates these losers like nothing. Besides, conservatism is the new counter-culture. These idiot socialist progs are uncool.

From Joel Kotkin, at the Daily Beast, "The Depression and WWII shaped the greatest generation, and postwar prosperity shaped the Baby Boomers. Millennials, battered by capitalism, move ever leftward":

Roughly half of Millennials have positive feelings about socialism, twice the rate of the previous generation https://t.co/ofqRdNCJpD

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 19, 2017

Increasingly American politics are driven by generational change. The election of Donald Trump was not just a triumph of whiter, heartland America. It also confirmed the still considerable voting power of the older generation. Yet over time, as those of us who have lived long enough well know, generations decline, and die off, and new ones ascend.

In this past election, those over 45 strongly favored Trump, while those younger than that cast their ballots for Clinton. Trump’s improbable victory, and the more significant GOP sweep across the country, demonstrated that the much-ballyhooed millennials simply are not yet sufficiently numerous or united enough to overcome the votes of the older generations.

Yet over time, the millennials—arguably the most progressive generation since the ’30s—could drive our politics not only leftward, but towards an increasingly socialist reality, overturning many of the very things that long have defined American life. This could presage a war of generations over everything from social mores to economics and could well define our politics for the next decade...

Hey, bring it on, lol.

And keep reading.

Playboy Playmate Elizabeth Elam (VIDEO)

Following-up from last week, "Playboy Magazine to Bring Back Nude Women."

Watch, "What Turns on March Playmate Elizabeth Elam?"