Naturally the New Yorker does its best to bury the lead, but there are plenty of clues in this week's cover story "Gangs of Rio" as to why the world's #1 city for "violent international deaths" won the 2016 Olympics. Since the popular election of Marxist dictator President Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, the magazine grudgingly reports, the once-civil society of Rio has degenerated into something akin to a large South American Superdome, with more violence. While their more enterprising Latin American neighbors nurture healthy export sectors, Brazilians — not unlike so unlike us citizens of the People's Republic of Obameristan — have become net consumers, with "yesterday's" Marxist gangs revealing themselves to be (surprise, surprise!) �…

The Knicks beat the Suns last night behind another incredible offensive performance from young Kristaps Porzingis. The Suns have looked frisky since the firing of Earl Watson—that doesn’t make this some great win, but it does help make the case that the Knicks are not, in fact, complete trash. No. While Porzingis is playing like this, they are a fun and interesting team in a season that has otherwise so far not been especially fun and interesting. No moment in last night’s game was more fun and interesting than this sequence, when Porzingis made recent fourth overall draft pick Josh Jackson look like a complete bozo at both ends, in what has to be the most humbling 10-second span of Jackson’s basketball career: The Zinger! The rare emphatic block that doesn’t go rocketing in…