Friday afternoon roundup

Will be interested to get to the bottom, if possible, of Trump's skipping tonight's Heritage Action Forum in Greenville, South Carolina.

The maker of Doritos is showing solidarity with the 2.6 percent of the population with unconventional sex lives by introducing a line of rainbow-striped chips. Consumers will have to go to some bother and expense to show their solidarity:

You won’t be able to find these chips on your store shelf — they will only available for special order with a $10 donation to It Gets Better. Doritos will ship out your rainbow chips in 1 to 2 weeks.

There's been a 50 percent increase in homegrown jihadists in the UK in the last seven years.

The scale of radicalisation was revealed by MI5 director-general Andrew Parker during the first live interview with an MI5 chief in the agency’s 106-year history. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today program, he informed listeners that although half of those on the watch-list live in London, there are also hotspots in the South East, Manchester and the West Midlands.
In the last year, six terrorist plots have been foiled which, had they gone ahead, would have resulted in loss of life. “That is the highest number I can recall in my 32-year career, certainly the highest number since 9/11,” Mr Parker said. “It represents a threat which is continuing to grow, largely because of the situation in Syria and how that affects our security.”
He continued: “Most of the people who try to become involved in terrorism in this country are people who were born and brought up here, have come through our education system, and have nonetheless concluded that the country — their home country and the country of their birth — is their enemy.”

Mr Parker warned that terrorists are on the brink of gaining a technological advantage over security services, as the rate of development of encryption services could soon lead to spy chiefs “going dark”, unable to intercept messages between terror cells. 

Kevin Williamson, as one might expect, has the most incisive take on Clock Boy:

The story immediately became ubiquitous not because of what actually happened — boneheaded as that was — but because it can be used to further a story that the media already want to tell: that the United States is morally corrupt and irredeemably racist; that Muslims are under siege; that “white privilege” blinds the majority of Americans to the corruption at the heart of everything red, white, and blue. Muslim kid meets paranoia in Texas is A-1 copy; NRA-wearing kid meets paranoia in West Virginia, not so much.

President Barack Obama, never one to miss an opportunity for cheap moral preening, invited Mohamed to the White House. That’s an interesting gesture: Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what would happen if a young man showed up at the White House visitors’ center with a backpack in which was a homemade device full of circuit boards joined to a timing device? I do not frequent the White House, but I often am in the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, and my best guess is that if I’d tried to bring Mohamed’s clock into one of those places, there would have been guns drawn.

Here is the money paragraph:

Ahmed Mohamed was mistreated by imbeciles, and he’ll be famous for it, for 15 Warholian minutes, and then again for a 30-second spot when he graduates in a few years and goes off to MIT or wherever. The fact is that he is not worse off because his name is Mohamed, but better off: Nobody would be paying attention otherwise, and he might very well be in jail. Being mistreated by imbeciles is the sine qua non of American public education today, but that fact is of political use only periodically, as in this case.

Europe tells the teeming multitudes of Arab / Muslim migrants that the worm has turned.

Is the bloom off the rose for the Clinton Foundation?

USA TODAY has confirmed that sponsors from 2014 that have backed out for this year include electronics company Samsung, oil giant ExxonMobil, global financial firms Deutsche Bank and HSBC, and accounting firm PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers). Hewlett-Packard, which just announced major layoffs, will be an in-kind donor instead of a cash contributor, and the agri-chem firm Monsanto has cut back its donation. Dow's name is missing from the donor list as well, but the chemical company's exit is not confirmed.
High-profile corporations might not be the only key supporters backing away from association with the Clinton family's charitable arm. In 2014, eight national leaders, kings, presidents and prime ministers, appeared on the program for CGI's annual meeting, including the president of the United States and the prime minister of Japan. This year, only leaders from Colombia and Liberia are currently on the program.

Check out the Most Equal Comrade's lame excuse for the non-viability and near-non-existence of post-America-trained moderate (both anti-Assad and anti-ISIS) Syrian rebels.


What a world!