The Truth About Cuba: What Did Castro Do When He Got Sick?

Trump says Sprint will bring 5,000 jobs back to the US; OneWeb will create 3,000 jobs, by Jacob Pramuk.

Trump said the deal “was done through” SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, a Japanese billionaire and technology investor. Earlier this month, the pair announced in New York that SoftBank agreed to invest $50 billion in the U.S. and aimed to create 50,000 jobs.

Drexel White Genocide Prof Won’t Apologize, Says ‘Violent Racists’ Smearing Him, by Blake Neff.

A Drexel University professor who called for “white genocide” Christmas Eve isn’t apologizing, and instead says critics of his “satirical” remarks are “violent racists” who are apt to commit genocide themselves.

Drexel [tuition: $34,000 a year] is promising an investigation.

George Ciccariello-Maher got more than he bargained for with a tweet on Christmas Eve in which he said, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” Lest anybody misunderstand him, he followed up Christmas Day by stating that the massacre of white people in the Haitian Revolution was “a good thing indeed.”

Virtue signaler pushed it a tad too far, trying to stand out from the crowd on today’s US campuses.

Spanish festival celebrates the recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims after 800 years, by The Muslim Issue.

Countries invaded and occupied by Muslims never have any good memories from their days of history. It’s always the same theme: aggressive, violent Muslim invaders suddenly show up on their shores with thousands of jihadists. They fill their times with slave raids and slaughters, looting, and rape of women and children. Young and old are beheaded and ruled under barbarity and savagery, until eventually there is large battle for freedom.

Spain lived under the Muslim yolk for over 800 years until the Christian Crusaders forced them out. By that time the Muslims had scarred them both financially and psychologically, leaving only a shell of a country behind that has struggled to return to its past glory prior to the pillages and slaughters.

If you want to relive the Crusaders success over the barbaric Muslim invaders, Spain holds annual festivals on this happy occasion from history:

Certain towns in southern Spain hold an annual festival called “Moros y Cristianos” (“Moors and Christians”), which celebrates the Reconquista — the recapture of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian Spaniards from the Muslim colonizers who had invaded centuries earlier.

In some locales, at the climax of the festival, townspeople take a huge effigy of Mohammed and bring it to the top of a building, throw it down and crush it and burn it. The Mohammed figure, called La Mahoma, is usually bigger than life-size and in full costume.

Wikipedia: “The Reconquista is the period of history of the Iberian Peninsula spanning approximately 770 years between the Islamic conquest of Hispania in 710 and the fall of the last Islamic state in Iberia at Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492.”

The Spanish and Portuguese who went to the New World immediately after that were battle-hardened veterans.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Debbie Reynolds Died Day After After Daughter Carrie Fisher’s Death, by Cavan Sieczkowski.

Debbie Reynolds died Wednesday at 84 years old at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, her son, Todd, confirmed to Variety.

“She wanted to be with Carrie,” he said.

Debbie Reynolds reportedly suffered a stroke on Wednesday, one day after the death of her daughter, actress and author Carrie Fisher. …

Fisher, who was famous for portraying Princess Leia Organa in the “Star Wars” franchise, died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack aboard an 11-hour flight from London to Los Angeles Friday.

How George Soros Destroyed the Democratic Party, by Daniel Greenfield.

It was 2004. … In his best lisping James Bond villain accent, Soros strode into the National Press Club and declared that he had “an important message to deliver to the American Public before the election” that was contained in a pamphlet and a book that he waved in front of the camera. Despite his “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” voice, the international villain’s delivery was underwhelming. He couldn’t have sold brownies to potheads at four in the morning. He couldn’t even sell Bush-bashing to a roomful of left-wing reporters.

But he could certainly fund those who would. And that’s exactly what he did.

Money poured into the fringe organizations of the left like MoveOn, which had moved on from a petition site to a PAC. In 2004, Soros was its biggest donor. He didn’t manage to bring down Bush, but he helped buy the Democratic Party as a toy for his yowling dorm room of left-wing activists to play with. …

Next year the Democracy Alliance was born. A muddy river of cash from Soros and his pals flowed into the organizations of the left. …

The Democrats became a radical left-wing organization and unviable as a national political party. The Party of Jefferson had become the Party of Soros. …

Now, in 2016, the Democrats are further left and less popular:

Obama’s wins concealed the scale and scope of the disaster. Then the party woke up after Obama to realize that it had lost its old bases in the South and the Rust Belt. The left had hollowed it out and transformed it into a party of coastal urban elites, angry college crybullies and minority coalitions. …

And the Democrats don’t intend to change course. The way is being cleared for Keith Ellison, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with an ugly racist past, to head the DNC. Pelosi will oversee the disaster in the House. And Obama will remain the party’s highest profile national figure.

Soros has marginalized the Democratic Party:

The left had recreated the Democrat Party and marginalized it. Much of this disaster had been funded with Soros money. …

George Soros saw America in terms of its centers of economic and political power. He didn’t care about the vast stretches of small towns and villages, of the more modest cities that he might fly over in his jet but never visit, and the people who lived in them. Like so many globalists who believe that borders shouldn’t exist because the luxury hotels and airports they pass through are interchangeable, the parts of America that mattered to him were in the glittering left-wing bubble inhabited by his fellow elitists.

Trump’s victory, like Brexit, came because the left had left the white working class behind. Its vision of the future as glamorous multicultural city states was overturned in a single night. …

Leftists used Soros money to focus on their own identity politics obsessions leaving the Dems with little ability to interact with white working class voters. …

Soros fed a political polarization while assuming, wrongly, that the centers of power mattered, and their outskirts did not. He was proven wrong in both the United States of America and in the United Kingdom. …

The left did not mourn the mass destruction of the moderates. Instead it celebrated the growing purity of the Democrats as a movement of the hard left. It did not notice or care that it was no longer a political force outside a limited number of cities. It anticipated that voters would have no choice but to choose it over the “extremist” Republicans.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

The Neanderthal correlation, by Jeff Hecht. This article is speculative fiction written by a journalist, not real science. But it is in the premier science journal Nature, in its “Futures” section. This is only about ideas that are part of the current Zeitgeist, but there are many hints pointing in this direction. It’s from 2008, but doesn’t seem to be contradicted so far.

The background: Neanderthals split off from humans in Africa about 700,000 years ago, and seem to have bred back into modern humans in Europe from about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, before dying out about 30,000 years ago. Whilst separate from homo sapiens, they developed new genes, some of which got transferred to modern humans. About 1% to 4% of the genes of all modern humans, except those from Africa, are now thought to be of Neanderthal origin.

From the article, set as a fictional researcher Beth telling a manager what she has found:

“I found strong genetic correlations between Neanderthals and modern subpopulations,” she said. “A lot more than I had expected.” …

“There’s a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger’s syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly.” …

“You said these were Neanderthal genes?”

“Yes, they were,” she said. “They weren’t in the modern human genome until Neanderthals interbred with Cro-Magnons between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago.”

“Advanced mathematical processing? Shouldn’t that have been missing from the Neanderthal genome?”

“No, I found that Neanderthals lacked genes linked to successful socialization and management skills. They could count perfectly well, but they couldn’t deal with groups. Socialization genes came from Sapiens”

“You’re trying to tell me …” I said, but my mental censor blocked the idea.

“That human mathematical intelligence came from Neanderthals? That’s what the data say. The Cro-Magnons had the social skills. But that isn’t all.”

Just speculation.

 

9 ISIS supporters arrested near D.C. seemed normal, middle-class, by Garth Kant.

It may have been shocking when nine people accused of supporting the Islamic State, or ISIS, were recently arrested in the posh suburbs of Northern Virginia, so close to Washington, D.C.

But it may be even more disturbing, upon closer inspection, that so many of them seemed so normal, not fitting what most Americans might consider the profile of a supporter of jihad.

For starters, one was named Heather Coffman. Another was Nicholas Young.

As the Washington Times reported: “They included a police officer, a Starbucks barista, Army soldiers, bankers and a cabdriver. Four of the nine graduated from Northern Virginia high schools, one with honors. Two attended Northern Virginia Community College.” …

One of the nation’s top Middle East experts, Clare Lopez, told WND, “These nine arrests highlight once again that Islam is not a race: it’s a global political system of societal control bound by law, Islamic Law, with some associated religious practices, that is achieved by conquest and maintained by force, not by consent of the governed.” …

She further observed, “Nor is devotion to Islam limited to those of less education, lower economic status, or lack of opportunity. In fact, quite the opposite is often true, as with these would-be jihadis for the Islamic State.”

When potential Islamic terrorists have names that don’t seem Islamic, are well-educated, have careers and seem typically middle-class, how is the average American supposed to spot the jihadi next door?

Why? The article quotes former Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst Philip Haney:

“It’s not jihad they are attracted to, per se,” he said. “Jihad is only a tactic. So what is the tactic for? What is the purpose of it all? What is the purpose of ISIS? What is the purpose of the Muslim Students Association? What is the purpose of the mosque? In that sense, it’s the same for all: promotion of sharia law.”

Haney called sharia law “the gravitational force of the entire global Islamic community.”

Haney noted one thing not mentioned in the report was the nationality or immigration status of the suspects.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Theresa May to fight 2020 election on plans to take Britain out of European Convention on Human Rights after Brexit is completed. The resurrection of national sovereignty continues.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Fifty Brilliant Thomas Sowell Reflections, by Kerry Picket.

Economist and conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell announced his retirement in his final column Tuesday [at age 86].

Here are some of Sowell’s pithy thoughts:

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

People who pride themselves on their ‘complexity’ and deride others for being ‘simplistic’ should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on ‘income distribution,’ the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.

Read it all for the remainder of the fifty insights.

If you have a few minutes, this is a Sowell at his zenith in 1987, arguing against judicial activism in the US: