In his "Impromptus" column Jay Nordlinger observes the absurdity of the Big 10 conference as the home to 14 teams.

Speaking of things that are screwy: The Big Ten conference has 14 members. I was reading an article the other day that said that a certain team was "11th in the Big Ten" in some category or other. That makes you stop and think.

It's really only par for the course these days, though. The Atlantic Coast Conference extends as far west as Indiana, the Southeast Conference as far west as Texas, and the Pacific 12 Conference as far east as Colorado. And the Big 12 Conference has, of course, 10 members.

Kevin Williamson takes down the hypocritical, totalitarian progressive and their lifestyle.

On the matter of consumers' contribution to global warming, Arianna Huffington was celebrated for leading a moralistic crusade against SUVs, which are disproportionately favored by the sort of people who might vape, eat at Applebee's, watch the wrong television shows, and vote the wrong way. In reality, the most carbon-intensive thing the typical well-heeled American does is take an international flight - but you will not see progressives leading campaigns against European vacations or exotic eco-tourism in Southeast Asia or South America. Why? Because they dislike SUVs for other reasons - representing as they do suburbia, affluence, and the implicit rejection of tiny hybrids - and emissions are simply a handy cudgel. International travel, on the other hand, is considered an ipso facto moral good, being an integral part of how one learns to sneer at American culture and American habits. International jet travel is, therefore, necessary, and necessarily good.

[ . . . ]

There are many conservatives who prefer organic food, who do yoga, who like trains, and who would prefer living in Brooklyn to living in Plano. De gustibus and all that. The difference is that progressives, blazing with self-righteousness, believe themselves entitled to make their preferences a matter of law.

And that's the Left in short: A lifestyle so good, it's mandatory.

Charles Krauthammer notes the return of anti-semitism to Europe.

The hiatus is over. Jew-hatred is back, recapitulating the past with impressive zeal. Italians protesting Gaza handed out leaflets calling for a boycott of Jewish merchants. As in the 1930s. A widely popular French comedian has introduced a variant of the Nazi salute. In Berlin, Gaza brought out a mob chanting, "Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone!" Berlin, mind you.

European anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, however. It's a European problem, a stain, a disease of which Europe is congenitally unable to rid itself.

David Greenfield has identified the greatest danger resulting from murderous Muslim terror attacks: fear of a backlash against Muslims. Quelle horreur!

The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.

With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its "Muslim backlash" stories.

The Voice of America ran its "Muslims fear backlash" piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its "Muslims fear backlash" story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren't the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.

Amid reporting all this "backlash" nonsense, Greenfield asks an important question: Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning? Excellent point. Maybe all this fear of backlash is a distraction to portray the Muslim community as victims, rather than ask why it is they are so proficient at creating the sort of people that commit this kind of savagery.

On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.

One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.

We don't need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel "unwelcome" when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.

Try comparing an "unwelcome" feeling to being dead.

As Matthew Continetti demonstrates, the left is very selective in its defense of free speech.

Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama's decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.

Dennis Prager notes the preferential treatment of Islam over other religions:

We'll start with an example of pro-Islamic bias that is so ubiquitous that no one seems to notice it. Why do Western media - largely composed of irreligious people, one might add - always deferentially refer to Mohammed as "the Prophet Mohammed" in news articles and opinion pieces?

When Jesus is mentioned, the media never refer to him as "Christ, the Lord" or as "the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." Just "Jesus." In fact, "A.D." ("Anno Domini," "In the Year of our Lord") has been completely dropped by the very academics and media who always write "the Prophet Mohammed."

Unfortunately, this asymmetrical treatment isn't confined to the media. And it can lead to brutal results.

Perhaps the most egregious example of a society's elites treating Islam differently from all other religions took place in the U.K. Between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls, as young as eleven years old, in the small English city of Rotherham (population 275,000), were repeatedly gang-raped and treated as sex slaves. The U.K. government acknowledged that these atrocities were allowed to go on due to the fact the perpetrators were British Pakistanis and the girls were white. No one was allowed to say that at the time. The author of a 2002 report identifying Pakistanis as the perpetrators and organizers of the Rotherham gang rapes and sex slavery was sent to diversity training.

Daniel Greenfield writes that New York needs to elect a leftist mayor on occasion to remind itself why it shouldn't elect leftist mayors:

Bill de Blasio declared war on Central Park carriage horses, put cell phones back in schools, put criminals back in public housing, housed homeless in neighborhoods across the city, went to war with the few city schools that worked and went to war with the police.

And for an encore, he banned packing peanuts.

Within a short time he had managed to reverse decades of reforms while alienating everyone except the editorial board of the New York Times which would continue to support him even if, or especially if, he began executing Kulaks on Staten Island.

Over at Ace of Spades Ace notes that CNN referred to one of the Muslim barbarian hostage takers in France as "African American." Even though he is more likely to be French Algerian.

This is the problem with the politically correct formulation of using the term "African American" to describe any black person. First, it creates the dilemma of how to describe a white person of African descent.

One of my friends was born in South Africa, so she put African American on her application. She is white though - 100% white. African American race on college apps in generally intended to give advantages to minorites, so would admissions people get mad if they found at that she is at no actual disadvantage and is not a minority? I have heard that is true, what do you guys think?

I can't find a link, but I once saw a black South African described as an "African American African" to distinguish him from white Africans. What kind of absurd formulation is that? Finally, you have to really love this one:

When Voyager premiered in 1995 there was some sexist and racist discourse about having a female captain and an African-American Vulcan on the series.

As Debra Saunders correctly observes: Say Islam Is Violent and Jihadis Will Kill You

Bruce Thornton asks "When Will We Wake Up?"

The truth is, many Muslims see the whole Western political order as radically different from--and in their view, inferior to--that of Islam. The cultural cargo of human rights, tolerance of confessional diversity, individual autonomy and self-determination, and political freedom is incompatible with the traditional Islamic doctrine that a divinely bestowed shari'a law is the only legitimate social-political order that can create the best life in this world, and ensure the enjoyment of paradise in the next.

But this truth about Islam's conflict with liberal democracy--a truth documented in 14 centuries of Islamic history and doctrine, and supported by majorities of Muslims worldwide-- is repeatedly denied by Western governments and intellectuals. White House spokesman Josh Earnest repeated this false knowledge, saying after the killings that Islam is "a peaceful religion and it's terrible that we are seeing some radical extremists attempt to use some of the values to [sic] that religion and distort them greatly and inspire people to commit terrible acts of violence." Thus the illiberal, totalitarian nature of shari'a evident in sex apartheid, honor killings, enslavement of girls, persecution and murder of religious minorities, destruction of churches and synagogues, and chronic jihadist violence is attributed to anything and everything other than the role of sacralized violence in Muslim history and theology, a patent fact dismissed as Islamophobic slander. Meanwhile, jihadist slaughter continues worldwide, with almost 800 killed and wounded just in the last week of 2014.