Don't bother teaching evolution

You've got much bigger problems, science fans:

A new survey has found that a third of young millennials in the U.S. aren’t convinced the Earth is actually round. The national poll reveals that 18 to 24-year-olds are the largest group in the country who refuse to accept the scientific facts of the world’s shape.

YouGov, a British market research firm, polled 8,215 adults in the United States to find out if they ever believed in the “flat Earth” movement. Only 66 percent of young millennials answered that they “always believe the world is round.” Science teachers across the U.S. will be shaking their heads after learning that nine percent of young adults answered that they have “always believed” the planet was flat.

Another nine percent said of young adults said they thought the planet was spherical but had doubts about it. In a disturbing display of indecision, 16 percent of millennials said they weren’t sure what the shape of the planet was.

And good luck with that "global warming" narrative.

Calling Mary Beard

Mary Beard, to the front desk. Your services are required.

Historians believe the Queen is a descendant to the founder of Islam - after tracing her family tree back 43 generations.

The claim makes the British monarch a distant ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad.

The findings were first published in 1986 by Burke's Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees.

But the claim has recently resurfaced after a Moroccan newspaper said it had traced the queen's lineage back to the Prophet.

Forget Londonistan. Ukistan is go!

The end of the Jewish century

I suspect that this lawsuit, if successful, will spell the beginning of the end of the Jewish century in America:

A group that is suing Harvard University is demanding that it publicly release admissions data on hundreds of thousands of applicants, saying the records show a pattern of discrimination against Asian-Americans going back decades.

The group was able to view the documents through its lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 and challenges Harvard’s admissions policies. The plaintiffs said in a letter to the court last week that the documents were so compelling that there was no need for a trial, and that they would ask the judge to rule summarily in their favor based on the documents alone.

The plaintiffs also say that the public — which provides more than half a billion dollars a year in federal funding to Harvard — has a right to see the evidence that the judge will consider in her decision.

Harvard counters that the documents are tantamount to trade secrets, and that even in the unlikely event that the judge agrees to decide the case without a trial, she is likely to use only a fraction of the evidence in her decision. Only that portion, the university says, should be released.

“This is an important and closely watched civil rights case,” William S. Consovoy, the lawyer for the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in his letter to the court. “The public has a right to know exactly what is going on at Harvard. Even if this were a commercial issue — as Harvard would like to portray it — the public would have a right to know if the product is defective or if a fraud is being perpetrated.”

At stake in the dispute is the secrecy of the university admissions process, especially at elite institutions like Harvard that are competing for a small pool of highly qualified students, and whether and how race and ethnicity play a role.

Students for Fair Admissions includes more than a dozen Asian-American students who applied to Harvard and were rejected. They contend in their lawsuit that Harvard systematically and unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants by penalizing their high achievement as a group, while giving preferences to other racial and ethnic minorities. They say that Harvard’s admission process amounts to an illegal quota system.

U.S. Jews have perpetrated four self-serving myths that have contributed to their control of the intellectual high ground in the United States. One, Judeo-Christianity. Two, the historically nonsensical "nation of immigrants" narrative. Three, that they are unusually intelligent. And four, that their statistically improbable success in Hollywood, the media, and the financial sector is primarily a consequence of that superior intelligence.

Those myths have been severely eroded, but not exploded entirely yet. The primary reason that Harvard is so desperate to conceal the extent to which it has engaged in racial, ethnic, and religious favoritism is that it will a) reveal how far superior the Asian intellectual elite is to the Jewish intellectual elite, and, b) expose the extent to which Jewish admissions officers have compromised Ivy League admissions on behalf of their co-ethnics for the last five or six decades.

At a certain point, even those who are not particularly bright will eventually grasp the significance of the fact that the supposedly brilliant guys whose whip-smart intelligence is supposed to be the basis of their success reliably turn out to be the Sam Harrises and Ben Shapiros of the world, intellectual charlatans with elite degrees who are observably third-rate intellects at best.

A not-entirely-unrelated thought struck me when I was reading E.O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence the other day. Although Wilson cites the way in which kinship selection has been disproven, it did strike me as a potentially useful basis for a model that mathematically quantifies the extent to which nepotism influences group outperformance, one which, in this particular application, would demonstrate the essential silliness of the myth that has snared even the likes of the eminent Jordan Peterson.

How China can win

Although the US cannot lose a trade war with China due to the fact that it is already $600 billion in the annual red thanks to the trade deficit, that does not mean that China does not have an ace or two up its sleeve:

Chinese President Xi Jinping is now exchanging threats of tit-for-tat tariffs with President Trump, who announced Thursday he's considering raising the stakes another $100 billion. China vowed to defend itself "at any cost."

Compared to the scale of the U.S. economy, the numbers are still relatively trivial and mostly theoretical. But if things do spiral into all-out trade war, it's worth noting China has a nuclear option.

I'm referring to rare earth metals.

These are elements like dysprosium, neodymium, gadolinium, and ytterbium. They aren't actually rare, but they do play crucial roles in everything from smart phones to electric car motors, hard drives, wind turbines, military radar, smart bombs, laser guidance, and more. They're also quite difficult to mine and process.

It turns out the United States is almost entirely dependent on foreign suppliers for rare earth metals. More importantly, it's almost entirely dependent on China specifically for rare earth metals that have been processed into a final and usable form.

Basically, if China really wanted to mess with America, it could just clamp down on these exports. That would throw a massive wrench into America's supply chain for high-tech consumer products, not to mention much of our military's advanced weapons systems.

In fact, China isn't just America's major supplier of rare earth metals; it's the rest of the globe's major supplier as well. And in 2009, China began significantly clamping down on its rare metal exports. Once, China briefly cut Japan off entirely after an international incident involving a collision between two ships. This all eventually led to a 2014 World Trade Organization spat, with America, Japan, and other countries on one side, and China on the other.

That forced China to abandon its quotas. But it also shows China is willing to use its advantage in rare earth metals to play hardball if it's pushed far enough.

However, this is not an argument for free trade. In fact, it is precisely the opposite, it is a devastating disproof of Ricardian Comparative Advantage theory, which posits that manufacturing can move seamlessly between industries. In fact, if one were to argue that the USA must engage in trade due to its fear of its inability to process rare earth metals, one would have have to reject the theory of comparative advantage, and therefore, free trade.

This is the danger of engaging in the Ricardian Vice. It becomes all too easy to accidentally refute your own position when attempting to respond to protectionist arguments.

Overheard on Idka

Compare the narratives

Austin Bay considers the Seven Chinas grand narrative.

Nations have always used narratives to support their diplomatic operations. Not all of them are "weaponized," but a powerful, moving story gives a diplomatic initiative additional energy. Often these narratives incorporate nation or ethnic historical and cultural themes. Since they support a diplomatic initiative, they are always political.

In February, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies published a short paper entitled "Seven Chinas: A Policy Framework." The paper briefly examined "seven identities" that the Chinese government uses to "shape and justify policy."

Each identity is a narrative.

China 1: Self-sufficient civilization (We generate our own values)

China 2: Most humiliated nation (Our senior civilization, conquered and despised)

China 3: Leader of the developing world (Late developing China leads developing nations)

China 4: Champion of plurality (We are ending Western/American hegemony)

China 5: Sovereign survivor (We survived the collapse of Communism because we are unique)

China 6: Last man standing (The West is declining while our wealth is increasing)

China 7: Herald of the high frontier (China and shares the global trade and communications commons)

In the South China Sea China's narrative weapons have augmented its military and economic clout. It's proved to be a powerful combination.

Compare these to the ever-shifting globalist and SJW narratives that have replaced the traditional Western narrative. It is eminently clear that in any matchup of these particular weaponized narratives, China is not merely winning, China is going to win.

An economic education

Sometimes these jokers openly admit what is readily obvious to even the casual observer: the basis for their professed knowledge is remarkably shallow. In this particular circumstance, one might even say callow.

Jeffrey Gundlach warns we may be repeating the mistakes that led to the Great Depression. The bond investor was asked for his view on the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China.

"It's not a positive. I mean it is really interesting when I was in elementary school and high school we talked about the Great Depression ... [What] my teachers told me was that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates prematurely in a not so strong economy and also the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act," he said Wednesday on CNBC's "Halftime Report."

Well, if the opinions of public school elementary teachers from four decades ago aren't a sound basis for modern economic policy, I don't know what could be. Sure, my elementary school teacher didn't know the difference between a triceratops and an allosaur, but I'm confident her knowledge of economic history was considerably more sound.

What he said

An astute comment at Steve Sailer's about the Kevin Williamson firing:

The NR staff currently wailing on twitter about the injustice of dumping a talented writer for being provocative on an independent website can show it’s not just crocodile tears by apologizing to Derbyshire.

Apologizing? They should offer to rehire him with a raise as well. Consider David French's wailing about "the cowardly firing" with just a few changes to it.

The AtlanticNational Review has caved to the intolerant mob and fired Kevin WilliamsonJohn Derbyshire, and in so doing has contributed to a slanderous fiction — that KevinJohn is so beyond the pale that he has no place at one of the nation’s premiere mainstreamconservative publications. His millions of words, his countless interviews, and his personal character were reduced to nothing — inconsequential in the face of deleted tweets and a five-minute podcast dialoguea single column. Look, I know it’s easy for some to dismiss KevinJohn’s termination as mere inside-baseball media drama. But it’s more than that. It’s a declaration by one of America’s most powerful mediaconservative entities that it can’t even coexist with a man like KevinJohn. If he wants to write, he should run along to his conservativeAlt-Right home. His newlong-time colleagues simply couldn’t abide his presence.

These cuckservative Never Trumpians simply do not realize that their time is past. They have been exposed for hypocrites and fools. They do not lead opinions, they are led by the Left instead, following it slavishly from one societally destructive policy to the next. Give them a little more time and they'll be dutifully laying out the conservative cases for cannibalism, child sacrifice, and Satan worship.

Hence the real reason for their wailing. They know they are losing the right-wing audience that is increasingly rejecting their soft leftism, and now they are beginning to realize that the hard Left has no use for them either.

The Littlest Chickenhawk has been crying about that on Twitter, in addition to issuing the conventional dire warnings of consequences never being the same. He thinks he is one of the "virtuous people" to decide who is acceptable and who is not, to decide who is chased down and disemployed and who is not, intstead of the overt Left.

This is, we are told, the "stone cold truth" and "the Left won't like it".

The Left continues to radically narrow the Overton Window - the spectrum of acceptable discourse. They separate discourse into two categories: the acceptable and the unacceptable. Then they shrink the acceptable down to the opinions located between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This necessarily places Kevin Williamson and @bariweiss and @SamHarrisOrg and me and everyone else the Left finds unpalatable into the “excluded” category. But the unacceptable category is already populated by those who are actually unacceptable: alt-right trolls, for example. This means that the population of opinion in the unacceptable category - let’s call them Deplorables, since the Left does - come to be a majority by way of exclusion. Unless, that is, virtuous people who have been excluded by the Left draw distinctions among themselves. Which they should, of course - Kevin and @bariweiss and I and @SamHarrisOrg all get lumped in as Nazis by the Left, but we all fight the actual alt-right Nazis.

But counting on the virtue of people you’ve just deemed unacceptable not to band together against you is both stupid and unrealistic over time. Which means the Left is doing something unethical here, and deeply dishonest - and something that is likely to foster polarization that results in the mainstreaming of truly gross opinions. This is how you get a reactionary movement willing to countenance alt-right evil: you tell people they’re part of the alt-right when they’re not, and treat them as such no matter how much of a lie that is. What just happened to Kevin Williamson leads conservatives to side with anyone the Left casts out, good or bad, merely as a form of protection. That shouldn’t happen. But it does. And the Left causes it with this bulls***.

Demonstrating, once more, that Ben Shapiro is not of the Right at all, but of the soft Left. That's why they are always trying to a) disassociate from the Right and b) fix the Left.

Glenn Reynolds and Kurt Schlichter have similar takes. From Instapundit:

What really happened is that women at The Atlantic complained that Kevin’s abortion views upset them. And since making women feel bad about their life choices is a mortal sin, he had to go.

The difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives assert that making women or blacks or gays or Jews feel bad is sufficient reason to lose your job. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that only making blacks or Jews feel bad is enough to justify disemployment.

Financial nuke or dud?

There are dire warnings about a financial nuclear option in the dawning US-China trade war:

It took China just 11 hours to retaliate against the United States for proposing tariffs on some 1,300 Chinese products, but Chinese officials are holding back on taking aim at their largest American import: government debt.

In a tit-for-tat response to the Trump administration’s plan for 25 percent duties on $50 billion of Chinese imports, China hit back with its own list of similar duties on key American imports including soybeans, planes, cars, beef and chemicals. But officials signaled no interest for now in bringing their vast holdings of U.S. Treasuries to the fight.

China held around $1.17 trillion of Treasuries as of the end of January, making it the largest of America's foreign creditors and the No. 2 overall owner of U.S. government bonds after the Federal Reserve. Any move by China to chop its Treasury portfolio could inflict significant harm on U.S. finances and global investors, driving bond yields higher and making it more costly to finance the federal government.

But a reader explains why the bond threat is toothless.

It’s hilarious reading Drudge headlines about how the Chinese owning US Treasuries is some kind of “nuclear option” for Beijing.

Presumably, China thinks it will somehow crash the value of its Treasury holdings by dumping it on the open market. This is somehow supposed to destroy the value of these bonds…or something. It’s almost as if no one understands how bonds actually work.

Bonds have an intrinsic value, the face value of the bonds which is the amount of money that is returned to bondholders when the bond matures.

This is the par value. If I sell a bond to you for $1,000, then I am obligated to return $1,000 to you plus interest when the bond matures. If I sell a $1,000 bond to you at an interest rate that is lower than the market rate, then I may only collect, say, $950 for the bond, but, at maturity, I am obligated to pay $1,000 back to you plus interest.

If you decide to sell the bond that I sold to you on the open market, then you may get a premium above the $1,000 or you may get a discount below $1,000, but the face value of the bond, the money owed, does not change. Upon maturity, $1,000 is owed to the bond holder.

The value of the bond may oscillate on the secondary market because of the risk of default or because interest rates have changed, but, absent the risk of default, the value of the bond is purely mathematical. Since US Treasuries have virtually zero risk of default, the value of the bond is simply the interest rate paid by the bond, vs. the interest rate of competing securities of similar risk vs. the duration. These can all be calculated in Excel using amortization tables.

There is nothing China can do to devalue US Treasuries by dumping their holdings. If they decide to sell for an artificially low price, then they are simply creating arbitrage opportunities for the buyers and frenzied trading will quickly bid back up the value of those bonds to their mathematically determined price.

See how important bonds and interest rates are in understanding the economy?

The financial trade media is heavily invested in arguing that there can be no winners in a trade war. But they are ignoring the fact that the trade war has been ongoing for decades and the USA has been continually surrendering.

They are also ignoring the uncomfortable fact that if comparative advantage were legitimate, the correct response to tariffs and other trade restrictions would be to do nothing. According to free trade theory, a country is economically better off if it enacts no trade restrictions regardless of what its trade partners do. The fact that various US trade partners are threatening retaliation for US tariffs is further evidence that, despite their free trade rhetoric, they do not genuinely believe in the concept. Nor should they, because it does not work as advertised.

A negative asset

What goes around comes around. The truth about the dysfunctional, downscale writer Kevin Williamson is that he deserves to die. Economically, he is a negative asset.

Conservative commentator Kevin Williamson was fired from The Atlantic, just weeks after being hired, the magazine told TheWrap.

“Kevin is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. But I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways,” said editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in an email to staff on Thursday.

In his memo, obtained by TheWrap, Goldberg explained that Williamson was being terminated over his views on abortion, which have come to wide attention in recent days.

“Late yesterday afternoon, information came to our attention that has caused us to reconsider this relationship. Specifically, the subject of one of Kevin’s most controversial tweets was also a centerpiece of a podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion,” wrote Goldberg.

Williamson even appears to have been fired despite lacking the courage to stand by his previous convictions. There was no "errant tweet", as the podcast footage subsequently demonstrated. So, who led Jeffrey Goldberg to believe that there was? Did he come up with that on his own, or was that an excuse that was given to him?

While Goldberg himself once trumpeted Williamson’s hire from the National Review, the writer immediately drew outrage — particularly over a tweet in which he argued that women who had had an abortion should face the death penalty. Williamson defenders — and Goldberg himself — had argued that his career should not be judged on an errant tweet.

Some on the Right still don't get it. The Left is not fixable. The time for worrying about "the heckler's veto" is long past. There is no public square anymore because there is no common ground. The Left is fighting a cultural war by any means necessary, and even if you're not willing to do the same, it is reprehensibly foolish to expect them to do otherwise, much less mend their ways for fear of handwringing moderate right-wingers following through on ominously implied threats which they are manifestly unwilling to even articulate.

And we are supposed to imagine what happens to us in light of Williamson's rapid ejection from The Atlantic? Where have you been for the last ten years? We don't have to imagine anything. We've already experienced it.

Marvel's vision of the future

So, Wolverine is a woman. The President of the United States is a woman. And a superhero. And a Muslim. It just keeps getting better... check out who is the President in the ALL-NEW WOLVERINE #33. Needless to say, the Comics-SJWs just love it.

As to what we're doing to take advantage of this nonsense, I'm pleased to be able to say that the first TWO issues of Alt★Hero are now illustrated, the first issue is colored, and we are rapidly approaching the print layout stage. So, here's the question: do we maximize the potential audience by using the smaller format and selling the single issues for $2.99 or do we go out with the larger format at $3.99?

If you're an Alt★Hero backer or if you're intending to buy the single issues, please share your opinion. I go back and forth on this one. Keep in mind that the graphic novels will be in the larger format regardless. And backers will receive the digital editions for free, of course.

We will have another print release on Monday. Possibly two, as a matter of fact.

Another Twitter "suspension"

The Z-man is the latest to be kicked off Twitter:

My twitter account was suspended for violation of their rules. The specific violations were that I was threatening to post personal information about someone and that I was contemplating suicide. Neither of those things are true, but that does not matter in these issues. What I think happened is some anti-Semites, who support the deranged loon Paul Nehlen, took issue with me saying Nehlen is a nut. Soon after, a lunatic started spamming me on Twitter and then my account was permanently suspended by the twitter police.

I’m not all that upset about it. I have been thinking about cutting out social media from my internet life. I was never into Facebook. I never saw the point of it. I’m not that interesting and neither are my friends. If I need to see cat videos, I have a cat at home. I never really liked twitter all that much, but I figured it was a good way to promote the site. It was mostly just a time waster. The increase in traffic from my activity was pretty much zero. My readers know where to find me, so twitter added nothing and just took away.

I’m still up on Gab, but I’m done posting there. Frankly, I’m tired of “white nationalist” types that have made Gab their home. I probably have muted two times the number of people I follow. It’s a free country and I think those people have a right to speak their mind on-line, but I just don’t want to hear it or see it. I’ve reached my limit on that stuff. It’s like being chained to a lunatic. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, you can’t help but notice the lunatic. The solution is to divorce myself from the whole scene. Goodbye lunatics…

Apparently tcjfs was kicked off too. As for the rest of it, the reality is that very few people are cut out for blogging long term. If it doesn't come to you naturally, then you're going to burn out sooner or later.

As for the usual "Alt-Right is over" theme, that's a uniquely American perspective that confuses political philosophy with political movement, ideas with groups, and understanding with branding. When the White House is denouncing and firing globalists, European nationalists are winning elections, and Big Social is enduring everything from Congressional summons to attacks by SJW gunwomen, and self-styled conservative opinion leaders are increasingly irrelevant, the Alt-Right is the exact opposite of over.

Remember, winning is a process, not a conclusion. And as for me, I'm still not tired.

I thought correlation was not causation

SJWs in the media are now trying to claim "globalist" is an anti-semitic term:

The term “globalist” has been used at the White House at least three times this week in reference to an outgoing Jewish Trump administration official, raising some eyebrows because the word is increasingly used in xenophobic and anti-Semitic contexts.

The word came up on Wednesday when a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether a similar candidate will take the place of Gary Cohn, the outgoing director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council.

“He was a noted free trader, a globalist. Will the president seek another globalist, another free trader?” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked.

This followed Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, using the word “globalist,” in quotation marks, to describe Cohn in a statement that was tweeted by his department on Tuesday....

For the anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi members of the so-called “alt-right” white supremacist movement, “globalist” is a euphemism for “Jew.” It refers to the longstanding conspiracy theory about an international Jewish cabal working to undermine the traditional white family and Western culture by pushing for immigration and diversity.

A glossary of extremist language published by The New York Times places “globalism” among terms like “alt-right,” “antifa” and “cuck.”

First, that is an interesting implication that the mainstream media is now aware that the real battle is between nationalism and globalism, and shows that it fears an increasingly nationalistic public's reaction to those who openly advocate the latter. Second, it's an astonishingly foolish way for any philosemite to try to defend globalism, as the following logical syllogism should suffice to demonstrate.

• Major Premise: Globalists advocate evil.
• Minor Premise: Globalist means Jew
• Conclusion: Jews advocate evil.

This leads directly to the following syllogism.

• Major Premise: All good men must oppose evil.
• Minor Premise: Jews advocate evil
• Conclusion: All good men must oppose Jews.
• Restated: Anti-semitism is a moral obligation for all good men.

Now, unless you agree with the conclusions, you will have to identify which categorical proposition is false. Unless you are pro-globalism, the first minor premise has to be the false one.

This is astonishingly inept rhetoric, even for the Huffington Post. It never ceases to amaze me how the Left simply refuses to accept that words actually mean things and good people actually oppose certain forms of evil. While it may have worked for blacks (racism) and gays (homophobia), no one is going to drop their opposition to globalism, or stop identifying globalists as globalists, for fear of being called anti-semitic.

In any event, I look forward to the Post's future articles on how "pedophile" and "satanist" and "Hitler" are also anti-semitic terms.

Why Trump is still popular

It's really not hard to figure out. No one believes anything the media says anymore.

It's not surprising that after little more than a year in office many people who voted for a president still support him. But it's also surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office. Unless it's the negative reporting that is the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case. You can only ask adults to participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling GIF is a credible threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide to tune you out. Very largely this had already happened by Inauguration Day, but now the work of MSNBC and The New York Times and PolitiFact is complete. Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care either.

There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here. It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good, what was bad, what was unremarkable or indistinguishable from what any modern president would do, what was painfully idiotic, what was, perhaps, evil. We chose not to exercise this responsibility. Instead we decided to indulge in our live-action roleplaying fantasies about being brave selfless journos taking on a mean demagogue because we love the Constitution so much.

The morons in the media may have the memory of goldfish, but those of us who still remember how they said Bill Clinton getting it on with an intern in the Oval Office was no big deal aren't inclined to take their solemn declarations that the God-Emperor banging the occasional Playmate or porn star more than a decade ago is an imminent threat to the Constitution.

The media killed its own credibility. Now they are Fake News and everyone knows it, even those who pretend to believe them. As Glenn Reynolds says, their chief occupation is now deciding what facts they are going to try to hide from the American people.

The spirit of privacy

Facebook's newfound commitment to data protection and privacy is mostly theoretical:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that new data privacy laws will only apply “in spirit” to more than three quarters of the company’s users.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force the social network to comply with strict rules about the privacy of its European users. But Mr Zuckerberg failed to commit to rolling out the protections globally.

“We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” Mr Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. With only 17 per cent of its 2.2 billion users residing within Europe, the vast majority of Facebook's users will not benefit from the new rules.

But on the plus side, they've already scanned all your messages anyhow:

Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they’re flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company’s rules. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked or taken down.

The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger’s practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.

“In that case, our systems detect what’s going on,” Zuckerberg said. “We stop those messages from going through.”

Of course, it's not as if Google isn't doing exactly the same thing with Gmail and Microsoft isn't doing the same thing with Skype. If it's on the Internet, someone other than the intended target is reading it. Count on it.

Defend the border?

Against an invasion of millions of aliens? How unthinkable! How outrageous! The God-Emperor finally takes action to secure the southern border of the United States.

President Donald Trump is directing the National Guard to protect the southern border of the country, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Wednesday.

"It’s time to act," Nielsen said, without specifying the number of troops that would be deployed though she said “it will be strong.” She added that details will be worked out with governors and that “we do hope that the deployment begins immediately.”

The move follows Trump’s warning Tuesday to Mexican leaders that he would abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement without assurances of help on securing the border.

And, inexplicably, the President's approval rating has also been rising. But  how can this be? Doesn't he know this violates the Ellis Island Amendment?

The God-Emperor understands that immigration is war. And if you don't sink the ships, you will come to regret it.

UPDATE: See, all it takes is a little firm resolve from the White House.

A caravan of Central American migrants whose trek across Mexico infuriated President Donald Trump has decided not to travel to the US border, leaders said Tuesday.

Nothing they won't ruin

The Man Behind the Curtain seeks a sex change for Indy:

Ready Player One director Steven Spielberg says it’s time for a woman to play Indiana Jones. The director says he knows putting a woman in the lead role of an Indiana Jones movie would upset fans, but believes it's time the explorer 'took a different form'.

A woman? Or a girl? No doubt Mr. Spielberg would find it very amusing to make Indy an 10-year-old girl. A promiscuous 10-year-old girl coming on to an older man. Perhaps he could be an older man who just happens to make movies starring lots of children.

After all, it wouldn't be interesting if she was 16 or 17, right, Stephen?

YouTube restrictions inspired shooting

Well, that's certainly ironic. YouTube's executives would do well to reconsider their policy of discriminating against the videos they don't like before another SJW snowflake takes violent exception to losing most of their audience courtesy of YouTube's biased algorithms.

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has confirmed the identity of the shooter who opened fire on YouTube’s campus in San Bruno Tuesday. Nasim Aghdam, 39, lived in Southern California and appears to have had a robust presence on YouTube.

In a video posted in January 2017, she says YouTube “discriminated and filtered” her content. In the video, Aghdam says her channel used to get lots of views but that after being “filtered” by the company, it received far fewer views.

In a video posted in January 2017, Nasim Aghdam says YouTube “discriminated and filtered” her content. In the video Aghdam says her channel used to get lots of views but that after being filtered by the company, it received fewer views.(Published Tuesday, April 3, 2018)

In one online rant, she complained that YouTube censored her content by imposing an age restriction on one of her workout videos because they were too racy.

I still think that building our own platforms is the preferred option. But I'm certainly not going to shed any tears if the SJWs turn on Big Social.

When Big Social picks winners and losers - and it most certainly does so in an arbitrary fashion - not all of the losers are going to take their unfair treatment well.

Alt-Right is inevitable

You may recall that I predicted Europe's strong shift to the Right, which is still in the very early stages.

Far-right views are now mainstream in Europe, is the stark warning coming from a leading historian.

Polish officials recently blamed Jewish people for their 'own destruction' while the Hungarian Prime Minster declared Europeans should not 'mix' with Africans. The Croatian president on a trip to Argentina came under fire from a Holocaust survivors charity for thanking the country for taking in 'notorious' pro-Nazi criminals.

Ton Junes, who works with the Human and Social Studies Foundation in Bulgaria, says the events all show a worrying trend for a rise in far-right views.

'There is something broader going on in the region which has produced a patriotic, nativist, conservative discourse through which far-right ideas managed to become mainstream,' the expert explained.

Ever since WWII, such views were taboo in Europe, confined to the far-right fringes. Today they are openly expressed by mainstream political leaders in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, part of a populist surge in the face of globalization and mass migration.

The media is still babbling about this political transformation as if it is a bad thing and preventable somehow. In truth, it is neither. In truth, it is the process by which Europe will save itself from the plans of those who are seeking to destroy the West by eliminating both Christianity and the European nations from the satanists who have hated the former and envied the latter for centuries.

We won't see this on YouTube

I tend to expect any videos of the reported shooting at YouTube will be censored in a hurry:

Police have confirmed an active shooter at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno Tuesday afternoon. The shooting appears to have happened in an outdoor cafe on the grounds of the facility.

Police were seen laying down evidence markers near the seating area of the cafe. People near the area reported hearing shots fired, police activity and lockdown procedures.

KPIX 5 reporter Andria Borba said at least two Homeland Security units were responding. Police radio transmissions describe casualties being taken to local hospitals. San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the hospital received patients from the incident but could not confirm a number.

I'm not saying this was necessarily a false flag, but it's pretty obvious at this point that the gun control nuts weren't getting sufficient traction out of the Parkland crisis actors.

UPDATE: Or perhaps it was just Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

ABC reports that she is a white woman wearing a dark top and a headscarf.  She reportedly came through the back door and fired at least 20 shots, according to an unnamed law enforcement source. Witnesses say there were multiple injuries but no fatalities have been reported.

Perhaps they should rethink that whole "gun-free zone" concept.

UPDATE: No, it's a domestic.

Woman 'shoots her boyfriend before killing herself' after going on gun rampage at YouTube's California HQ and injuring four people 

Government by Facebook

This strikes me as an astonishingly horrific idea:

The Facebook founder is fighting to wrest back control of the data breach scandal alarming the world, but his ambitions for the social network are nothing short of chilling.

The founder of the world’s most popular social platform outlined his ambitions for Facebook to act as a democratic system, with an independent “Supreme Court”, which people will be able to petition for their content to be restored.

“I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal,” said the 33-year-old, positioning the social media network almost as its own state, although staff are not elected. “I think we can build that internally as a first step.

“What I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”

Considering that the Zuckerbot has spent years learning Mandarin, one would think that he would be smart enough to do the math and realize that global democracy necessarily means rule by Chinese social norms and values.

And yet, that would be preferable to rule by the Zuckerbot's bizarre values... which one certainly cannot describe as "norms".

Google, the Damned

Fox News notes that the satanists at Google ostentatiously refuse to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For the 18th year in a row, Google has no doodle to celebrate Easter, and Christians are angry on this holy day.

Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars editor-at-large, tweeted Sunday about Christianity’s most joyful day: ‏”So Google has a doodle for every obscure ‘woke’ person/event imaginable, but nothing for Easter? #EasterSunday”

James Woods retweeted it, saying: “They loathe Christians. Plain and simple.”

A spokesdemon defended the depraved corporation with all the adroitness and honesty of its Father, the Devil.

'Doodles may appear for some non-religious celebrations that have grown out of religious holidays, such as Valentine's Day, Holi's Festival of Colors, Tu B'Av and the December holiday period, but we don't include religious imagery or symbolism as part of these.'

 Yes, who doesn't celebrate whatever 2B'@Vz  is supposed to be? You know, there appears to be an observable pattern here....

I'm not angry, myself. I'm just amused. Because one day every knee shall bow before Jesus Christ and every tongue will admit that he is Lord, including those belonging to these angry, evil people exhibiting their impotence in such a foolish and petty manner.

Why we crack down hard

Takimag's elimination of its comment section underlines why the moderators and I act so swiftly, and ruthlessly, to eliminate commenters who even appear to be inclined to attempt disrupting the discourse, hijacking the mic, changing the subject, or disqualifying and discrediting me.

While we would prefer to have a free and open forum for our readers, a few bad eggs seem incapable of communicating as though they were in good company and have in so doing, ruined it for the the rest of you. So in a way, yes, you can blame (((them))), or at least those who blame (((them))), for this gag.

However, many of you do have something to add, and we would like to hear from you. Please email the mailroom so that we may post a selection of letters from our readers on a weekly basis, and in so doing, perhaps raise the bar above the pale from where it fell off.

As many of you will appreciate, Takimag is run like a dictatorship, rather than a nanny state, and therefore a moderated site is not an option we are considering at this time. Up until now moderation has been ineffective and seems to only encourage the bastards who ruin the exchanges many of you enjoy and will likely miss.

At this point, we would be ever so grateful if you would kindly give the steady stream of childish threats to abandon Takimag forever a rest and be grateful we provide this platform for you and our writers, and that they have something intelligent to say week after week.

For more than a decade, we kept the comments open and anonymous while primarily focusing our moderation efforts on the trolls, of the psychologically unstable, ideological, and professional varieties, as they popped up. This approach was fairly effective, but time-consuming. However, as our understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy has developed and deepened, we've come to understand that there are certain classes of commenters who will reliably, over time, become disruptive even if it is not their intention to do so. We also found the task of moderation to be increasingly Sisyphean, as the more stubborn trolls simply changed their names again and again and again. Hence my decision to lock down the comments and limit them to registered commenters.

Now, one of the strengths of this blog is the pattern recognition possessed by both me and the long-term commenters. If we haven't seen it all before, we've seen an awful lot of it. So, if you're a monomaniac, an attention seeker, or someone who is "just having fun", the chances are that you're not going to last long before going into the spam trap. To summarize, if you insist on creating work for me and the moderators, for any reason, then we don't want you here. Don't ignore or blow off a warning, because the chances are there will not be a second one. The blog was here before you started commenting and it will be here long after you stop.

Given the trouble that some commenters appear to be having with Blogger not playing nicely with their browser, I should also point out that I will always tell you that you are being spammed. If you have not been so informed, then you should assume that the issue is with your browser, not your commenting status, and that the only possible fix is on your end. So, if you are having problems commenting, please don't ask me or inform me about it. There is literally nothing I can do for you in that regard, except tell you to try different browsers and browser settings.

It's been two months or so since I locked down the comments and I have to say that despite a few dire predictions, the end result has been entirely satisfactory. Traffic remains strong, the number of trolls has been significantly reduced, and the amount of spam has fallen by more than 95 percent.

Chicago Typewriter: Gold Logo edition

Chicago Typewriter is now in print and is already available from Castalia Books Direct! It is 60 pages and printed in Dark Legion's premium 10x7 format, and retails for $7.99. If you buy one of the first 2,500 copies, you will receive a Gold Logo edition, as shown on the image here.

In 1920s Chicago, the criminal underworld is more than vice, racketeering, and bootlegging.

During a brutal territory dispute with the Chicago Outfit, Emilio Enzo and his associates discovered just how deeply involved the criminal underworld is in the occult and supernatural. Using hidden pathways to our world, forces of pure evil have worked in secret to maintain their dark stronghold on the city. Now those forces are back to take their revenge on the one man willing to challenge their reign by stealing the soul of his girlfriend Kat.

While visiting an old shop full of oddities, Emilio comes across an antique ribbon for a typewriter with an unusual history. And after bringing the strange red ribbon home and spooling it into his machine, he is startled when it begins to communicate with him at night....

1920s Prohibition-era Chicago collides with the hidden world in this debut graphic novel from Brandon Fiadino.

You can see all four Arkhaven and Dark Legion Comics currently available in print here. The gold Logo edition of Chicago Typewriter should be available via Amazon soon.

The Lightbringer+

The God-Emperor continues to be more popular with the US electorate than Obama ever was.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating hit 50 percent in Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll Monday, which puts him ahead of his predecessor at the same point in the presidency. The last time Trump hit 50 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll was February 27. At the time, he was generally within the 47-50 percent range. The President’s approval rating outpaces that of former President Barack Obama, who sat at 46 percent in Rasmussen’s tracking poll on April 2, 2010.

But the more important thing about Trump's persistent popularity is the way this reveals the increasingly limited ability of the US media to influence the way the American people think. They are throwing literally everything and the kitchen sink at this man and yet none of it sticks to him.

At this point, he could go down to the border, personally machine gun invading immigrants, and his popularity would increase 10 percent. The Stormy Daniels affair reveals that we have reached the point of negative returns for media hit pieces on the president.

The Washington Post is complaining that Trump is becoming increasingly hardline on immigration.

President Trump’s sharp shift in tone on immigration this week from would-be dealmaker back to the hard-line stance he campaigned on comes amid signs that some of his conservative base is growing impatient for him to fulfill promises on the border wall and other measures to crack down on illegal immigration.

Over the past two days, Trump has issued declarations on Twitter that shut the door on a legislative deal to protect young undocumented immigrants from deportation, blamed Democrats for the failure, demanded the Mexican government take stronger action to close the border, and conflated a refu­gee crisis from Central America with the Obama-era deferred-action program that Trump ended in the fall.

Here is hoping that we will see truly hardline policies put in place soon. His conservative base is right. It is time to send them back and build the wall.

But what about the economy?

Clearly the West cannot permit the Israelis to deprive their economy of the benefit of these tens of thousands of hard-working immigrants who are merely seeking a better life for them and their children.

Israel has announced it will cancel its plans to deport tens of thousands of African migrants after a deal was agreed to send 16,000 of them to Western countries.

A minimum of 16,250 migrants will be resettled in Canada, Italy, Germany and other Western nations under the agreement announced in a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.

Under the deal with the UNHCR, Israel said it plans to relocate more than 16,000 migrants to Western countries.

'This is a unique agreement between the UN commissioner and the state of Israel, that takes 16,250 people out, takes them out to developed countries like Canada, or Germany and Italy - that is the commitment the UN High Commissioner has made - to organise it and even to fund it,' Netanyahu said on live television.

The God-Emperor should inform Prime Minister Netanyahu that the USA will subsequently be providing all of its aid to Israel in the form of economy-boosting immigrants. I understand there are a few thousand candidates on their way from Central America.

Behavioral scaling and immigration

From Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson

The availability and quality of food can also move groups along behavioral scales. Well-fed honeybee colonies are very tolerant of intruding workers from nearby hives, letting them penetrate the nest and even take supplies. But when the same colonies are allowed to go without food for several days, they attack every intruder at the nest entrance. In general, primates also become increasingly intolerant of strangers and aggressive toward other group members during times of food shortages.

I tend to doubt it is a coincidence that this unprecedented and uncharacteristic openness to immigration and disregard for national borders is entirely unrelated to the fact that the West is fatter and more overfed than ever before in human history.

With societies, as with individuals, lean is mean, hard, and dangerous. Fat is soft, weak, and defenseless.

A noble act

Peter Hitchens highlights the sacrifice of a new Christian who became a martyr for the faith:

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been. We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.

But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.

He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.

Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.

Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.

But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he (knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.

Beltrame's noble sacrifice demonstrates once more that Christianity is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of Western civilization.

Binary thinking

If you read here regularly, you've probably encountered me dismissing those prone to attempting to divide everything into very simple conceptual poles. This is not to say that pure right and wrong do not exist, or that it is always inappropriate to apply Abelard's straightforward heuristic of "It is so or it is not so", merely that one cannot reduce all complex matters to such a simple binary equation.

So, it was interesting to discover, when re-reading a relatively new translation of Siddhartha, to see Herman Hesse portraying the protagonist referring to a concept that is not entirely dissimilar.

I have found a thought, Govinda, that you will think neither a joke nor foolishness, it is my best thought. It says: the opposite of every truth is just as true! For this is so: A truth can always only be uttered and cloaked in words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided that can be thought in thoughts and said with words, everything one-sided, everything half, everything is lacking wholeness, roundness, oneness. When the sublime Gautama spoke of the world in his doctrine, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and redemption. This is the only way to go about it; there is no other way for a person who would teach. The world itself, however, the Being all around us and within us, is never one-sided.

Now, I certainly disagree with the surface meaning of the original thought; the opposite of every truth is simply not true or it would not be the opposite. But while that particular meaning is obviously incorrect, I think the subsequent statements are true in a slightly different sense than Hesse may have intended... or perhaps the translator messed it up somehow. I will have to review the original German to reach an opinion one way or the other. Regardless, that is neither here nor there, the point is that the world observably contains both the truth and the falsehood; to speak of what is necessarily implies the conceptual existence of what is not.

This is the true multiverse; it is conceptual, it is not material. There may be various levels of reality, there may be multitudes of realities in the way that even in our single material reality contains millions of simulated sub-realities and we are no more capable of proving that ours is the bottom turtle any more than an AI-controlled character in World of Warcraft can. But this conceptual whole is relevant for deeper understanding, for just as one cannot understand the concept of white when one has no ability to perceive the not-white of black, one cannot understand the concept of truth unless one is familiar with the not-truth of falsehood.

In the same way, we cannot grasp the essence of grace without an awareness of the not-grace of being sinful, and we cannot understand the importance of Jesus Christ or the reason for his sacrifice without an awareness of evil, both our own and the world's. This need to know both the truth and the various not-truths in order to understand something is why binary thinking is not merely limited, it is crippling.

London killing

London's murder rate has increased to the point that it has surpassed New York City's. I wonder what might have caused that? Other than immigration, of course, which we are reliably informed does nothing except benefit the economy.

London's murder rate has overtaken New York City's numbers for the first time ever, according to a new report.

February marked the first month in history books that London had more murders than the American city with a total of 15 homicides. Out of the 15 killed, nine were aged 30 or younger.

In March, there were 22 murders, which is likely to match if not beat out New York's numbers.

The victims:

• Sadiq Mohamed, 20, Kentish Town
• Abdikarim Hassan, 17, Kentish Town
• Josef Boci, 30, Greenwich
• Seyed Khan, 49, Ilford
• Rotimi Oshibanjo, 26, Southall
• Promise Nkenda, 17, Canning Town
• Sabri Chibani, 19, Streatham Common
• Lewis Blackman, 19, Kensington
• Hasan Ozcan, 19, Barking
• Hannah Leonard, 55, Swiss Cottage
• Kwabena Nelson, 22, Tottenham
• Mark Smith, 48, Chingford
• Bulent Kabala, 41, Enfield
• Saeeda Hussain, 54, Ilford
• Juan Olmos Saca, 39, Peckham

 I can only conclude that it must be the evil guns. Or racism. But regardless of what the cause might be, it is rather remarkable to observe how people continue to be genuinely surprised at yet another failure of the Magic Dirt to transform human behavior.

Fortunately, the inhabitants of Londonistan can be secure in the knowledge that their city is increasingly diverse, and therefore, stronger. And speaking of the joys of vibrancy and diversity, Germany is growing stronger as well:

Horror on streets of Germany: State of emergency declared as 80 men brawl with MACHETES. Police were called to the Altmarkt area of the city over reports of the mass bawl. Officers used CS gas to control the brawling men.

The scores of men were also using telescopic batons in the fight in Druisburg, which is on the west of Germany. Police said they were spat at and had objects hurled at them. Around 50 people were arrested and onlookers captured the brutality in shocking photos.Those arrested refused to explain what sparked the fight and 30 people were later released.

A police official told the newspaper Der Westen: "There are three rival groups. It may be a conflict between Turks, Lebanese and Kurds. "Unlike with a demonstration of that size, we do not have a contact person, nobody wants to talk to the police.”

Christ is risen

And, as he warned, the world continues to hate him and those who follow him.

As Christians around the world prepare to observe the holy weekend of Easter, many will be asked at their services to pray for the persecuted around the world. After years of advocacy groups raising awareness, the plight of the Christians of the Middle East, particularly in the former Islamic State territories, has become common knowledge among American Christians. Yet they are far from the only group that will celebrate Easter this year in defiance of state persecution, mob violence, and repressive cultural norms imposed by groups threatened by the spread of the Christian faith.

Below, six countries where Christians struggle to practice their faith freely against systematic institutional and cultural pressure.

China: Xi Jinping has led a systematic crackdown on “unauthorized” Christianity that has worsened year after year since he became “president” in 2013. Xi has led a movement to “sinicize” Christianity, forcing the legal Christian churches to deliver sermons extolling the virtues of his regime. “Unauthorized” Christianity is deemed a “national security threat,” and Christians who dare worship in their homes face severe law enforcement reprimand.

Venezuela: Dictator Nicolás Maduro and his subordinates have struggled for years to submit the Christian faith to their whims – publishing socialist Christmas carols, identifying their policies with the Gospels, and proclaiming that “Christ is Chavista.”

India: In India, the repression faced by many Christians is not at the hands of the government, but at the hands of violent Hindu nationalist mobs. According to Open Doors, an organization that tracks the persecution of the Christian faithful worldwide, the permissive attitude of a Hindu nationalist government has allowed for the exacerbation of violence against these communities, some of the oldest Christian congregations on earth. In one incident this year, a mob tortured and hanged a Christian pastor after six months of loudly disturbing Sunday services. Local police ruled the death a suicide, triggering thousands to protest for justice.

Nigeria: Nigeria’s population is 40 percent Christian, with many practicing freely in the nation’s south. In the north, however, Christians face severe persecution from jihadist groups like Boko Haram and violence by the majority-Muslim Fulani herdsmen against Christian farmers. The herdsmen are believed to be conducting raids targeting Christians and have killed an estimated thousands of civilians.

Sudan: Sudan, a nation run by Muslim tyrant wanted for genocide, is one of the most repressive states in the world, a Muslim-majority tyranny where Christians face destruction of property and arbitrary arrest if they are too visible. Open Doors ranks Sudanese Christians in the top five most persecuted Christian nationalities in the world.

Indonesia: Indonesian Christians are under growing public scrutiny. While Christians have long coexisted in the world’s most populous Islamic country, they have increasingly fallen victim to radical Islamic mobs.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.
- Luke 6:22