Why the Left is dead

And why Identity has replaced Ideology:

It seems that there is not much left of the Left and what remains has nothing to do with ‘Left.’

Contemporary ‘Left’ politics is detached from its natural constituency, working people. The so called ‘Left’ is basically a symbolic identifier for ‘Guardian readers’ a critical expression attributed to middle class people who, for some reason, claim to know what is good for the working class. How did this happen to the Left? Why was it derailed and by whom?

The British Labour party is a prime example of this. It is deaf to the cry of the lower classes. It claims to care ‘for the many’ but in practice is only attentive to a few voices within the intrusive Israeli Lobby. As Britain is struggling with the crucial debate over Brexit, British Labour has been focused instead on spurious allegations of ‘antisemitsm.’ It is hard to see how any Left political body in the West even plans to bring more work to the people. The Left offers nothing in the way of a vision of a better society for all. It is impossible to find the Left within the contemporary ‘Left.’

Why has this happened to the Left, why has it become irrelevant? Because by now the Left is a non-hierarchical system. It is an amalgam of uniquely ungifted people who made politics into their ‘career.’ Most Left politicians have never worked at a proper job where money is exchanged for merit, achievements or results. The vast majority of Left politicians have never faced the economic challenges associated with the experience of being adults. Tragically such people can’t lead a country, a city, a borough or even a village.

The Left had a mostly positive run for about 150 years. But its role has come to an end as the condition of being in the world has been radically transformed. The Left failed to adapt. It removed itself from the universal ethos.

In the same way the Left no longer represents the native working class, the "conservatives" of the West no longer conserve. We now live in a post-ideological multinational societies where competing interest groups struggle for the reins of imperial power in order to best benefit their self-perceived interests.

This is nothing new. This is the way that Man has lived for most of his history. The sooner the Right accepts the new/old reality and adapts to it, the more successful it will be. Because there are a lot of people practicing identity politics who are working very hard at trying to steer the Right away from defending national interests.

The Republican Party and I think conservatism in general is also going through a lot of internal debates about what — what it should be, right, what it should be—the sort of position of the party. And I think that’s one that we should be involved in because we, I think, probably want to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more nationalistic incendiary nativist comments and things like that.
—Adam Kovacevic, Head of U.S. public policy, Google

The cockroach media

The cuckservative media is rather like cockroaches. It doesn't matter how much they fail, it doesn't matter how often they are wrong, it doesn't matter that no one reads them and they have no influence, they just don't die off and disappear. The Week celebrates the news of Jonah Goldbergs new and entirely redundant publication as more of what people already don't want.

What if we had a center-right publication, broadly in favor of globalized free trade and deregulation and hawkish on foreign policy, whose columnists really hated President Trump, even when he does things they otherwise agree with, like spit in Vladimir Putin's face?

But The Washington Post already exists, you say. Exactly. Which is why I cannot figure who the audience for Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg's new journalism project is supposed to be. According to Axios, the former editor of The Weekly Standard and the founder of National Review Online are "seeking investors" for "a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical" conservative periodical.

Of course they are. "Generic white #NeverTrump conservative" is already the most overrepresented type in American media. There are approximately 200 of these people in the United States, and every single one of them has a column in a major newspaper and a book about why Drumpf is the logical and polar opposite of certain ideals supposedly embodied in whatever Tocqueville quotes their research assistants have just pulled up for them. They are the same people who have spent the last two decades insisting that all the things that actually keep people voting for the GOP against their own economics interests — opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — are yucky. They are often referred to as "neocons," but this appellation is insulting to the legacy of Irving Kristol and Christopher Lasch. A better one is "metro-conservatives," i.e., think-tank grifters.

#NeverTrump types are desperate to convince readers that clichés about "entrepreneurship," endless war, and moaning about the Founding Fathers are still cool. But nobody listens. They had their shot with roughly 15 other candidates in 2016, and the American people rejected all of them, one by one. If your ideas are so bad that social conservatives would rather vote for a twice-divorced serial philanderer than pull the lever for any of the indistinguishable blue-blazered frat boys who are mouthpieces for them, maybe you should rethink what you're doing. If the Never Trumpers had gotten the candidate they wanted, Hillary Clinton would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

They know this. They also couldn't care less. Why should they, when the paychecks continue to cash? They have been insulated from the badness of their ideas for decades; this isn't going to change, probably ever.

The reason these cockroach media publications keep popping up as fast as they fail is that they are funded by corpocracy in order to gatekeep the Right. The Intellectual Dark Web, The Daily Wire, Bulwark, and Jonah Goldberg's Nameless Project are all designed to keep conservatives and Christians on the globalist reservation.

The Missionaries extended audio

A one-hour and 18-minute sample of Owen Stanley's most excellent satire THE MISSIONARIES narrated by Gabrielle Miller. You can pick up the whole audiobook+ at Arkhaven or just the audio at Audible.

No conspiracy! No conspiracy!

One accused Jewish pedophile is trying to help a convicted Jewish pedophile keep the legal contemplations of his confirmed sex trafficking crimes under wraps. Also, if you believe that Jews have ever conspired at anything for their self-perceived mutual benefit, you are a hater and an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist manifestly guilty of the crime of Noticing. You're probably Hitler too.

A court hearing on whether to unseal sensitive documents involving the alleged sex trafficking of underage girls by Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein — and the possible involvement of his influential friends — will play out in a New York City courtroom next week.

But it may happen behind closed doors, with the news media and public barred — at least in part.

An attorney for lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote a letter to the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday, asking whether the media should be excluded from the proceeding because his oral arguments on behalf of his client could contain sensitive information that has been under seal.

The appeals court had not responded to his concern as of Friday, but if the hearing is closed during his lawyer’s argument, it would represent the latest in a long history of successful efforts to keep details of Epstein’s sex crimes sealed.

Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard, constitutional law expert and criminal defense attorney, represented Epstein, who in 2008 received what many consider an unusually light sentence for sexually abusing dozens of girls at his Palm Beach mansion. Two women — one of whom was underage — have said Epstein and his partner, British socialite and environmentalist Ghislaine Maxwell, directed them to have sex with Dershowitz, 80, and other wealthy, powerful men. Dershowitz and Maxwell have denied the claims.

The (((Chief Judge))) of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Second Court could not be reached for comment, as his office reported that he had a meeting scheduled with (((Robert Kraft))), the winner of the $1 million 2019 Genesis Prize for having made a significant contribution to improving the world, being proud of his Jewish heritage, and inspiring young Jews through his dedication to philanthropy and social justice, at the Young Blossoms of Asia Day Spa.

South Africa in Atlanta

To be honest, I don't feel the least bit of sympathy for the upscale white citizens of Buckhead, Georgia. Outside of Silicon Valley, it would be hard to find a more self-satisfied group of anti-racist virtue signalers anywhere in the United States:

Black crime in Atlanta is protected by the black-run government of Atlanta, who allow black criminals to prey upon the upscale white citizens of Buckhead.

Law and order is dead in America, and in Buckhead, black criminals are allowed to engage in criminality against white citizens because the Atlanta Police Department no longer prioritizes keeping their commercial or private property safe.

A glimpse of the future for all of white Americans once they capitulate power to black elected officials.

I don't see what they're complaining about. The most important thing is that no one can call them racists, and what is the cost of a little theft, burglary, and armed robbery in comparison with such an undeniably unmitigated benefit? After all, crime in the historically low-crime district is now only 31.6 percent higher than in downtown Atlanta.

The future for the United States of Diversity is looking more vibrant than ever!

No Venezuelan Spring

The neocons have met with their first setback in South America, according to the Saker:

The standoff between Venezuela and the AngloZionist Empire last week-end has clearly ended in what can only be called a total defeat for Elliott Abrams. While we will never know what was initially planned by the demented minds of the Neocons, what we do know is that nothing critical happened: no invasion, not even any major false flag operation. The most remarkable facet of the standoff is how little effect all the AngloZionist propaganda has had inside Venezuela. There were clashes, including some rather violent ones, across the border, but nothing much happened in the rest of the country. Furthermore, while a few senior officers and a few soldiers did commit treason and join forces with the enemy, the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan military remained faithful to the Constitution. Finally, it appears that Maduro and his ministers were successful in devising a strategy combining roadblocks, a concert on the Venezuelan side, and the minimal but effective use of riot police to keep the border closed. Most remarkably, “unidentified snipers” did not appear to shoot at both sides (a favorite tactic of the Empire to justify its interventions). I give the credit for this to whatever Venezuelan (or allied) units were in charge of counter-sniper operations along the border.

Outside Venezuela this first confrontation has also been a defeat for the Empire. Not only did most countries worldwide not recognize the AngloZionist puppet, but the level of protest and opposition to what appeared to be the preparations for a possible invasion (or, at least, a military operation of some kind) was remarkably high. While the legacy corporate Ziomedia did what it always does (that is whatever the Empire wants it to do), the Internet and the blogosphere were overwhelmingly opposed to a direct US intervention. This situation also created a great deal of internal political tensions in various Latin American countries whose public opinion remains strongly opposed to any form of US imperial control over Latin America.

In this respect, the situation with Brazil is particularly interesting. While the Brazilian government fully backed the US coup attempt, the Brazilian military was most uncomfortable with this. My contacts in Brazil had correctly predicted that the Brazilian military would refuse to attack Venezuela and, eventually, the Brazilians even issued a statement to that effect.

Meanwhile, the American public is almost entirely indifferent to Venezuela.

So be more inclusive, Navy

I don't see this shortage of sailors being a problem that adding twenty-five thousand women, transvestites, and low-IQ immigrants to the Navy can't fix:

The Navy is short about 6,200 sailors to meet its at-sea requirements for its current force, and that gap could grow as the service adds new ships to the fleet, the head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command told a House panel on Tuesday.

Those sailors will, in part, be used to plus-up crew numbers on each surface ship after the Navy had previously gone to a lower “optimal manning” crew size to save personnel costs, Adm. Chris Grady told a combined hearing before the House Armed Services readiness and seapower and projection forces subcommittees.

“As we sailed through that environment, we recognized that that was too few, and indeed since 2012 the number on a DDG was 240; in 2017 it’s about 270 and will be funded back up very close to the original size of a guided-missile destroyer in 2023 at about 318,” he said. “Personnel is expensive, and that number did not work out well, and we’re now buying back to a larger size crew complement for a destroyer.”

According to the written testimony from Grady and U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. John Aquilino submitted for the hearing, the missing sailors are from the mid-grade and senior enlisted ranks that will take years to train and place in the fleet. The pair indicated there wasn’t a specific set of billets they needed to fill with the new sailors but rather that they were needed across platforms at sea.

That number could grow as the Navy adds ships to the fleet and personnel needs rise, Grady said. Growing sailors fast enough to the level of technical ability to operate the proposed 355 ships is set to be a major challenge for the service and a key focus of the Navy’s ongoing surface reform effort.

Acute manning problems were found to be a factor in the fatal collisions of USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John McCain (DDG-56). For example, Fitzgerald did not have lookouts on the bridge wing immediately before the crash, and sailors aboard McCain weren’t qualified to use the helm controls which contributed to its collision.

I wonder how many of those expanded destroyer crews of 318 are going to be pregnant and unable for deployment when the ships go to sea? Or, is the real number required 240, but so many sailors are unable to deploy that they need a nominal crew of 318 in order to fill the real number needed for the mission?

Fixing conservatism to save the West

The author of The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony, is attempting to define a viable alternative to the neo-liberal world order.

The present moment is one of growing discomfort, both in America and in Europe, with the regnant liberal political theory often described as liberal democracy. It is frequently said that the only genuine alternatives to liberal democracy are Marxism and Fascism, but I don’t believe this is true. I want to sketch an alternative viewpoint that I will call conservative democracy. This ­position is closer to the spirit of traditional constitutionalism in both America and Britain than the liberal political theories of our day. Moreover, it is far better equipped to maintain the free institutions of these nations than liberalism.

There are prominent scholars and public figures who are convinced that “things are getting better” in almost every way. As for me, I find it difficult not to see the Western nations disintegrating ­before our eyes. The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal ­coherence and stability—the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family—are not merely under assault. They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous ­decline.

In the United States, for example, some 40 percent of children are today born outside of marriage. The overall fertility rate has fallen to 1.76 children per woman. American children for the most part receive twelve years of public schooling that is scrubbed clean of God and Scripture. And it is now possible to lose one’s livelihood or even to be prosecuted for maintaining traditional Christian or Jewish views on various subjects.

Add to this the fact that the principal project of European and American political elites for decades now has been the establishment of a “liberal international order” whose aim is to export American norms and values to other nations, and you have a stunning picture of what the United States has become—a picture that in certain respects resembles that of Napoleonic France: an ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalist power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.

I applaud Hazony's efforts. They are without question an improvement on the current situation. But his efforts are not going to work because Christianity is an integral component of Western Civilization and Hazony's habitual conflation of Judaism with Christianity is far too akin to the anti-Western Judeo-Christianity that is one of the primary causal factors of the decline of the USA and the West. Hazony even appears to understand this on some level:

What is now called “liberal democracy” refers not to the traditional Anglo-­American constitution, but to a rationalist reconstruction of it that has been detached from Protestant religion and the Anglo-American nationalist tradition. Far from being a time-tested form of government, this liberal-democratic ideal is something new to both America and Britain, establishing itself as authoritative only in recent decades.

Traditionally, Americans referred to their form of government as republican government. Indeed, insofar as usage is concerned, the term “liberal democracy” does not become more common in public discussion than the traditional term “republican government” until the 1960s. And it does not achieve its present dominant position in discourse on forms of government (overwhelming even the expression “democratic government”) until the 1990s.

This shift in language is not arbitrary, but reflects a profound reconfiguration at the level of ideas as well: a reconfiguration of what kind of government is considered desirable and legitimate. Roughly speaking, the dominant position of the term “republican government” corresponds to the period in which the Anglo-American conservative tradition remained to some significant degree intact, and so was able to serve as a bulwark against too great a penetration of liberal axioms into public life.

What was a “republican government” in the traditional American conception? A republican government in America was, among other things, one that could see itself as reflecting and reinforcing the values of a “Christian people” (to use a famous phrase of the Supreme Court that continued to be reaffirmed through the 1930s). Indeed, in 1942, FDR was still speaking of the United States as a nation that “hold[s] to the old ideals of Christianity.”

But by 1948 we find, for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court banning voluntary religious education in public schools that offer simultaneous Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish classes.

Almost everyone wants the fruits of Western Civilization less whatever aspects make them feel uncomfortable or excluded. But they will never attain them, or even preserve them, without accepting and embracing every aspect of it, even if it leaves them on the outside. In any event, it's a well-written article and it's interesting to see an Israeli intellectual defending both nationalism and American Christianity, as well as highlighting the mythology of the "proposition nation". And he is correct to observe that the survival of the West will require the rejection of what he describes as the closed liberal axiom system of Enlightenment-rationalist principles.

Mailvox: Brexit update

Our British Brexit expert is now less certain that a no-deal Brexit will take place as scheduled on March 29.

The recent votes in the Commons were a non-event. They simply commit parliament to hold votes:

12 March: Theresa May’s deal;

13 March: ‘No Deal’ if Theresa May’s deal was rejected the day before;

14 March: Article 50 extension if ‘No Deal’ was rejected the day before.

Belgian MEP, Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the liberals in the EU parliament, and lead EU parliamentarian on Brexit, was last night against any Article 50 extension which would cause Britain to hold European Elections 23 May. This is because it would give Faragistes and Kippers a say in the selection of the new EU executive to replace Juncker, Tusk et al., and over the ratification of Theresa May’s deal.

Remember that Britain is not trivial in size and is equal to the smallest 19 EU countries combined.

Also remember that Brexiteer lawsuits are stacked up, just waiting for the government to make a mistake. If we can litigate our way out, we will. However, as the lawyers know, first we need a cause of action, and that can’t happen until the government or parliament makes decisions. For example, any delay and Brexiteers will litigate to ensure EU elections are held in Britain so that we can affect the selection of the EU executive and ratification of deals. Of course what is litigated depends on what decisions are taken, it is inherently reactive.

The EU are saying that they would only agree to extensions if Britain has a clear roadmap to achieve a deal. By which they mean surrender. And it is a surrender, on a par with military defeat and occupation, which would lead us around by the nose.

Jacob Rees-Mogg was last night saying that he would be prepared to vote for Theresa May’s deal, including the Irish backstop on one condition: Theresa May resigns.

I think that this is wrong. However it’s not completely crazy. Here’s the logic:

1. Almost all of the deal is time limited. It expires over the course of the next decade. It’s humiliating, it fails to give the EU the contact with hard reality that they desperately need, and it hamstrings our ability to chart our own course, but it does eventually expire. The exception here is the Irish backstop.

2. Any Conservative Party leadership contest would result in a Brexiteer prime minister. This is because the final 2 candidates are voted on by the party members around the country, who are ‘no deal’ Brexiteers. Personally I would prefer Jacob Rees-Mogg, but he would rather remain the “éminence grise”, so it’s going to be Boris Johnson. We have to work with who we’ve got.

3. The ‘Future Relationship’ agreement with the EU, Brexit Part Deux, would then NOT be negotiated by Theresa May and Olly Robbins. Instead it would be negotiated by Brexiteers.

4. This kicks into touch the Labour Party’s new strategy of another referendum and Customs Union with dynamic alignment of regulations (EU membership and control of our economy without representation), because it would simply have been overtaken by events at the next general election (probably 7 June 2022). The Labour Party has yesterday firmly demonstrated that it doesn’t care about its rust-belt voters, so a properly led Conservative Party can pick up those districts at a future election. The Labour Party would solely be the party of metropolitan chatterati and minorities.

5. A Brexiteer Prime Minister can start to dismantle the incestuous relationship whereby Central Office chooses the MP candidates and the MPs choose Central Office – turning ordinary party members around the country into a rubber stamp. This relationship, as I have previously written, is the fundamental problem which disconnects the MPs and government from the electorate. It is this which causes the implementation of policies which are well received by the media, but detested by any sane person.

6. If the Irish backstop remains a problem after several years, we can simply use the 1970 Treaty of Vienna, combined with the fact that no British Parliament may bind a future British Parliament, to repudiate the backstop after the next election with 3 months’ notice.

Separately, I would point out that when we decided to leave the EU, we were prepared to treat it as the cancellation of a golf club membership – which is legally what it is. “We don’t want to play any more. In fact we never did and you lied to us, but no hard feelings, and good luck with your 18 holes tomorrow.”

However, what the EU has done since the discussions with Cameron began after the May 2015 British General Election, is demonstrate that they are not simply a hazard, but are actually a direct threat to us. They have behaved with a colonial mentality towards us. We won’t be safe until we have dismantled the EU. This must now be the primary objective of British foreign and economic policy. Fortunately, the EU is so unstable that this is practical objective, rendered much more so by a Brexiteer Prime Minister who understands the threat with the EU poses.


My thought is that Leave means Leave. No Deal Brexit is the best possible outcome for the British people. No matter how celebrated it may be at the time, any deal with the EU will eventually come to be seen in much the same light as Chamberlain's Munich Agreement and the MPs are being exceedingly foolish to even consider any deal of any kind with the Fourth Reich.

SJWAL extended sample

In case you haven't read it yet, a nearly two-hour audio sample of SJWAL covers the basics.

Obama adminstration supported ISIS

Once more, we see that the conspiracy theory of history tends to be more accurate than the mainstream version:

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has for the first time divulged explosive secrets about how the United States supported ISIS and intentionally allowed the Takfiri terror outfit to gain power in Iraq so that Washington could creep back into the Arab country.

Maliki, who served as PM between 2006 and 2014, told a local TV station on Sunday that the administration of former US President Barack Obama had played a key role in the creation of ISIS by allowing the terrorist group to overrun Iraqi territories.

According to the former premier, in 2013, the US provided Iraq with intelligence and aerial imagery pinpointing ISIS militants who had lined up behind Iraqi borders in Syria in large groups, waiting to cross into Iraq after what they thought was going to be the imminent fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Maliki said back then Baghdad had no fighter jets capable of bombing the terrorist positions and the Iraqi combat helicopters did not have the range to orchestrate an attack. So naturally, Baghdad turned to Washington for help and asked the Obama administration to provide the Iraqi air force with “one or two” fighter jets under the 2008 security agreement between the two sides.

Washington, however, turned down the requests and advised the Iraqi government to ask Jordan for help but that was a no-go as there was no military cooperation agreement between Baghdad and Amman at the time.

Nevertheless, the Iraqi army’s 7th Division was sent to eradicate the terrorists without air support and made some progress before landing in a deadly terrorist siege that killed its commander and nearly dismantled the whole division.

The former Iraqi PM said America’s support for ISIS did not end there as Washington proceeded to stop all supplies of helicopter parts and other military equipment to Iraq and halted a contract to sell Iraq F-16 attack aircraft even though Baghdad had paid for them in advance.

As usual, all one has to do is wait a few years and the official story almost invariably mutates. For example, did you know that despite the headlines at the time, there was no recession in 2001? Just review the current BEA statistics and you'll see that it's been adjusted out of existence.

Two arguments for free speech

A few notes concerning the recent pair of Darkstreams on free speech:

• Addressing J.B. Bury
• Addressing Erasmus

A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbours. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man’s thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer to-day, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech.

- JB Bury, A History of the Freedom of Thought

In the case of Bury, his core argument in defense of freedom of speech is constructed as follows:

1. Man's thoughts are free because they cannot be known or hindered by other parties.
2. Man cannot refrain from speaking his thoughts.
3. Therefore, freedom of speech is an intrinsic right of Man.

I trust the two major flaws in this syllogism are obvious to the reader. First, if Man's thoughts are free because they cannot be known or hindered, then Man's speech cannot be for that same reason. Second, we have evidence every single day that Man is capable of concealing his thoughts, or at the very least, not converting them to speech. The conclusion simply does not follow logically from the premises.

The ineptitude of the Erasmusian case for the freedom of speech is even worse. His 1516 The Education of a Christian Prince is often cited by free speech advocates because it contains the phrase, "In a free state, tongues too should be free."

But what did Erasmus actually write?

Even the emperor Hadrian, a pagan and not to be classed among the good princes, would never listen to a charge of lese-majeste; and not even that cruel monster Nero gave much heed to secret accusation on that charge. There was another one who paid no attention at all to charges of this sort and said, "In a free country, tongues likewise should be free." Therefore, there are no crimes which a good prince will pardon more readily or more gladly than those which affect him alone.
- Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince

Now the punchline. Erasmus not defending free speech, he is encouraging the prince, like King Lune of Archenland, to be the most magnanimous man in the kingdom. And the phrase in question is not his own, as he is quoting "another one". Who is this "another one" of whom Erasmus writes?

Why, it is none other than the Emperor Tiberius, as quoted by Suetonius, the Roman Emperor infamous for the Senatorial purges and treason trials conducted in his name by his chosen right-hand man, Sejanus. A less-convincing historical champion of free speech would be difficult to conjure!

Freedom of speech is manifestly not a right, and the observably inept attempts of its advocates to establish it as one should be more than sufficient to convince every rational observer of the inherently nonsensical nature of the claim.

Better retired than sunk

We may already be witnessing the US Navy's retreat from its 65-year history of naval supremacy on the high seas:

Amidst rising anxiety over whether the US Navy’s thousand-foot-long flagships could evade Chinese missiles in a future war, the Pentagon has decided to cut the aircraft carrier fleet from 11 today to 10. By retiring the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Truman at least two decades early, rather than refueling its nuclear reactor core in 2024 as planned, the military would save tens of billions on overhaul and operations costs that it could invest in other priorities. But the proposal, part of the 2020-2024 budget plan due out mid-March, is sure to inspire outrage on Capitol Hill.

Sure, it's possible that these are just the usual military budget games, but I suspect that the Navy's long-terms strategists are beginning to come to terms with the fact that the aircraft carrier is simply becoming too vulnerable to be worth the concentration of resources that it represents.

The age of the battleship came to an end with World War II. The age of the carrier will officially come to an end with the next conflict between the United States and a major regional sea power.

How Facebook suppresses conservative pages

Project Veritas and a former Facebook insider explain some of the technical details behind how Facebook is "dethrottling" people like Steven Crowder and Mike Cernovich:

According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.

When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.

The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner. “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.”

Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages. “I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment.”

The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence.

It's time to start building class action lawsuits against Facebook and other social media companies engaged in these false, defamatory, and materially damaging practices. And let me assure you that their terms of service don't permit these practices, nor are their legal teams anything to be feared. Remember, despite all their financial resources, these are organizations that are seriously committed to both diversity and identity politics, with all the obvious consequences that follow from those practices.

Conservatives are going to have to stop settling out of court in ways that prevent them from commenting publicly on their experiences or divulging what they've learned, especially because, as Crowder has recently learned, these companies will not live up to their settlement agreements.

Alt★Hero #6: The Dark Hunt

Alt★Hero #6: The Dark Hunt is now available at the Arkhaven store in CBZ and Kindle formats. It will be available on Amazon in Kindle format later today. It has already gone out to the backers; please note that the typo on page 18 has been fixed.

An angry Captain Europa is desperate to get revenge for his public humiliation at the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately for him, Jean-Michel Durand and Christian Foucault are nowhere to be found! So when the two renegade superhumans suddenly show up without warning on the Paris Metro security cameras, the Global Justice Initiative leaps into action to try to catch them before they disappear again. 

But there are few better places on Earth for outlaws to vanish than the massive graveyards located directly below the streets of the French capital.

The CBZ file contains high-quality 2048 x 1360 images. Kindle format is 1280 x 800. Alt★Hero #6: The Dark Hunt retails for $2.99.

UPDATE: on an unrelated note, A THRONE OF BONES is now available on Audible. All 31 hours 25 minutes of it. It's a pretty good deal if you're already a subscriber and only have to spend a monthly credit on it. And if you're not on Audible, you can get it directly from Arkhaven.

UPDATE: Alt★Hero #6: The Dark Hunt is now available in Kindle format on Amazon. If you've read it, I hope you'll consider reviewing it.

Dangerous games

I'm not much bothered about the latest Kashmir flareup. It's pretty obvious that Pakistan wants to de-escalate the situation and has been retaliating in a very measured fashion:

On February 14 a suicide car bomb hit a police convoy in Pulwama in the Indian controlled part of Kashmir. The suicide bomber was a local man. The Pakistan based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed responsibility and uploaded a video of the attacker.

General elections in India are due in May and the Hindu-fascist Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is under pressure. The incident in Kashmir led to violence of Modi followers against Kashmiri people. Pakistan denied any involvement in the incident and called for a joint investigation.

After the suicide attack Modi immediately threatened to retaliate against Pakistan. He did so yesterday. In an elaborate operation Indian fighter jets released stand-off weapons, purchased from Israel, against an alleged JeM training camp near Balakot. India made explicit that it hit a "non-military" target.

While the Indian jets did not enter Pakistan's airspace the target was within Pakistan's undisputed borders. Small scale ground combat between Indian and Pakistani at the line of control in Kashmir is nothing unusual. But the air attack exceed the limits both sides so far held to.

Pakistan saw the incident as a failure of its deterrence. India has about 140 nuclear weapons while Pakistan has about 100. Pakistan's conventional military is inferior to India's. It therefore follows a doctrine of asymmetric escalation which allows for nuclear strikes in response to conventional military attacks.

Pakistan could not leave the hit within its own borders without response. Not responding would have set a precedence and invite further Indian attacks. Earlier today two Pakistani J-17a jets flew into the airspace of Indian controlled Kashmir and released bombs against what its military claimed to be a "non military target":

Two rather antique Indian MIG-21 jets scrambled to chase the Pakistani fighter jets away. They were lured into the Pakistan controlled air space and both were shot down. Pakistan published pictures of one of the downed jets and claimed that the other one fell into an Indian controlled area. An Indian pilot ejected from his plane and was captured by Pakistani troops who had trouble to keep the locals from lynching him. The captured pilot was blindfolded and interrogated. He identified as Wing Commander Abhi Nandan, Service No: 27981, and did not respond to further questions. His father is said to be a retried Air Marshal of the Indian air force. The pilot now seems to be fine. He thanked the Pakistani military for rescuing him from the mob.

The fact that India is lying about having shot down a Pakistani jet is probably a good sign that they don't wish to genuinely escalate either. The Pakistanis would be well-advised to permit the Indian government to lie to its people about how bravely and fiercely it responded to the loss of its two obsolete MIGs.

But one wonders what sort of political ideology "Hindu-fascism" is supposed to be. Did they bring back the swastika?

Global enstupidation

Forget the myth of progress. The entire world is literally getting dumber every day:

Wherever you look: junk science, universities corrupted with bogus “studies” departments, politicians peddling discredited nostrums a moment's critical thinking reveals to be folly, an economy built upon an ever-increasing tower of debt that nobody really believes is ever going to be paid off, and the dearth of major, genuine innovations (as opposed to incremental refinement of existing technologies, as has driven the computing, communications, and information technology industries) in every field: science, technology, public policy, and the arts, it often seems like the world is getting dumber. What if it really is?

That is the thesis explored by this insightful book, which is packed with enough “hate facts” to detonate the head of any bien pensant academic or politician. I define a “hate fact” as something which is indisputably true, well-documented by evidence in the literature, which has not been contradicted, but the citation of which is considered “hateful” and can unleash outrage mobs upon anyone so foolish as to utter the fact in public and be a career-limiting move for those employed in Social Justice Warrior-converged organisations. (An example of a hate fact, unrelated to the topic of this book, is the FBI violent crime statistics broken down by the race of the criminal and victim. Nobody disputes the accuracy of this information or the methodology by which it is collected, but woe betide anyone so foolish as to cite the data or draw the obvious conclusions from it.)

In April 2004 I made my own foray into the question of declining intelligence in “Global IQ: 1950–2050” in which I combined estimates of the mean IQ of countries with census data and forecasts of population growth to estimate global mean IQ for a century starting at 1950. Assuming the mean IQ of countries remains constant (which is optimistic, since part of the population growth in high IQ countries with low fertility rates is due to migration from countries with lower IQ), I found that global mean IQ, which was 91.64 for a population of 2.55 billion in 1950, declined to 89.20 for the 6.07 billion alive in 2000, and was expected to fall to 86.32 for the 9.06 billion population forecast for 2050. This is mostly due to the explosive population growth forecast for Sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the populations with low IQ reside.

This is a particularly dismaying prospect, because there is no evidence for sustained consensual self-government in nations with a mean IQ less than 90.

But while I was examining global trends assuming national IQ remains constant, in the present book the authors explore the provocative question of whether the population of today's developed nations is becoming dumber due to the inexorable action of natural selection on whatever genes determine intelligence. The argument is relatively simple, but based upon a number of pillars, each of which is a “hate fact”, although non-controversial among those who study these matters in detail.

Fourmilab's reviews are always insightful and worth reading in their entirety. And I don't just say that because he has spoken well of one or two of my books.

Africa saves the Methodists

The African delegation ensures the exit of the sodomite churchians who have been trying to converge the United Methodist Church:

After days of passionate debate, deliberation, and prayer—and years of tension within the denomination—The United Methodist Church (UMC) voted Tuesday to maintain its traditional stance against same-sex marriage and non-celibate gay clergy, bolstered by a growing conservative contingent from Africa.

The plan passed, with 438 votes in favor and 384 against (53% to 47%), in the final hours of a special UMC conference held this week in St. Louis to address the issue of human sexuality.

The decision leaves a sizable, vocal opposition, ensuring the exit of many progressive pastors and churches in the largest mainstream Protestant body in the US.

After the final vote, protesters began chanting, “no” and “stop the harm” through the rest of the session until the conference ended over an hour later.

The “Traditional Plan” preserves existing UMC positions and adds further accountability measures for those who violate them by performing same-sex ceremonies or ordaining gay clergy. But this is not the outcome many Americans, including most bishops, had been praying for.

In the States, a large portion of Methodists wanted to see the church accommodate LGBT ceremonies and clergy, as other mainline denominations have done in recent years. One poll through Mainstream UMC reported at least two-thirds of US delegates supported the inclusive “One Church Plan” instead.

But the growing global presence among the 12 million-member denomination held more sway. Methodists from outside the US, who favor more traditional positions on sexuality, made up 41 percent of the 864 delegates at the general conference, including a full 30 percent from Africa.

It's reprehensible that the vote was anywhere nearly that close. But good riddance to all the churchians; those that don't leave of their own volition should be excommunicated without hesitation. There is no place in any Christian church for gay or female leadership of any kind; any so-called "church" that permits gay, female, or child leadership is Churchian, not Christian, at best. It is informative to contemplate  how much convergence would have been avoided, and how much sexual abuse would have been prevented, had the various Christian churches that allowed themselves to become converged instead followed the clear instructions on the Bible concerning who is permitted leadership in the church.

An elder must be blameless, faithful to his wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer manages God’s household, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.

Appoint elders who genuinely love what is good and what is true, not those who call good evil, and call evil good.

Mailvox: thoughts on the Brexit theatrics

Notes from a British Brexit observer:

Reviewing in retrospect, Tuesday seems to have been mostly theatre.

Fundamentally, it is a Leaver population, but a Remainer parliament, Remainer cabinet and Remainer prime minister. Ordinary Labour party members are Remainers. Ordinary Conservative party members are ‘no-deal’ leavers.

The Independent Group are nonentities who will immediately lose their seats at the next election. They are powerless and irrelevant, but get a hearing in the media because they have all the correct opinions. They have only one donor, a retired Jewish property developer.

The number of Conservative MPs on the payroll vote (have some sort of government job) who are threatening to resign for the purposes of preventing ‘no deal’ has notably dropped from 25 last week to 15 this week. Only 6 of them have their heads above the parapet. I could see a situation where it is actually only these 6 who are actually prepared to resign 27 Feb or 12 March. It is notable that nobody resigned at today’s Cabinet meeting. They all know that they are finished at the next election if they vote to prevent ‘no-deal’. They will probably be ‘de-selected’ by their local parties anyway – our version of ‘primaried’.

At Cabinet today, the PM promised that on 12 March, she will allow Commons votes on her deal, on delay, on ‘no deal’, and on another referendum – assuming that the Speaker agrees. Those calling for a referendum deliberately want to skew the question to guarantee the result they want – a full Remain. Conservatives that break ranks are likely to be countered by rust-belt Labour MPs breaking ranks in the other direction. No one wants to break ranks, because it will finish their careers, but they will if they have to. Caroline Flint is our version of Joe Manchin, and her group could vote for Cocaine Mitch. Caroline also has genuine principals – “that’s what my voters want, I disagree, but will do what they want.”

Remember that analysing by electoral district, 2/3 of the districts voted to Leave. If the current crop of MPs refuse to vote to leave then we’ll choose a new crop that will.

Cameron’s referendum gambit was taken because he could see that we were simply starting to vote for whoever was necessary to obtain Brexit, which was going to doom the Conservative Party. By having a referendum, he hoped to isolate the EU issue from the rest of party politics and prevent the replacement of the politicians. Well, we’re seeing that the politicians may have to be replaced and the referendum did not bring catharsis, only paralysis.

People forget that the Leave vote is so huge that if translated directly into the Westminster electoral system, it would result in more than 2/3 Leaver MPs. This is what Cameron was trying to prevent by holding the referendum.

We need a new bunch of politicians anyway because the current crop have revealed their universal uselessness. The whole point of Brexit is to make different policy choices. We’re going to need a better lot than the current crowd to make and implement those choices.

I am still optimistic that we can get ‘no deal’ reasonably soon, but if it takes longer, then so be it. Theresa May’s deal is worse than remaining. If we can’t escape cleanly, better to team up with Salvini and gum up the works.

Jeremy Corbyn has secured his position within the Labour Party for the moment by agreeing to support another referendum, but I think he has doomed the Labour Party at the next general election. The Conservatives were already making inroads into Rust-belt districts in 2017, taking mining and manufacturing areas that had voted Labour for the last 90 years, on the strength of Brexit.

Wednesday is going to be interesting because there may be an attempt to seize control of the legislative agenda from the government. But unless they are able to seize the agenda (doubtful) the real action has been postponed yet again to 12 March. Theresa May is basically hoping that people will blink. But no one has much incentive to blink.

CDA #3 now in print

We are very pleased to announce that CHUCK DIXON'S AVALON #3: The Conscience of the King is now available in a standard-size gold logo print edition. Due to the higher cost of the standard size, the comic will now retail for $3.99, but we will continue to sell them for $2.99 on the Castalia Direct store nevertheless.

For collectors, please note that we will be producing a limited run of gold logo standard-size versions of issues #1 and #2 later this year. And, of course, we will be sending free corrected editions to the 209 people who unfortunately received the "silent" edition of issue #2.

While King Ace is in training with Big Simba and the Specials of the UN-SPC, his former partner-in-fighting-crime Fazer languishes in a prison designed especially for people with superhuman powers. Fazer is desperate to escape, but how can he get out when his jailers possess the technology required to block his unique abilities?

But Fazer isn't the only one feeling trapped, as King Ace quickly comes to learn that his new team isn't tasked with fighting crime in the city of Avalon, but rather, tracking down other people like him and Fazer. And he also discovers that signing on with the official forces of law and order means accepting restrictions on your ability to do what you think is right.

Chuck Dixon is the most prolific comic book writer in history. Set in the world of Alt★Hero, CHUCK DIXON'S AVALON is the legend's newest creation.

Oh, and one more thing. Alt-Hero backers should check their email tomorrow morning....

An absolute grifter

The fact that the Left sees through Jordan Peterson doesn't mean they are wrong:

Over the summer I read 12 Rules, his wildly popular self-help book. On Saturday I went to see him speak at the Logan Campbell Centre. Outside the venue, I spoke to people who had bought tickets in a genuine attempt to understand his appeal.

Dr Peterson's fans have been stereotyped as angry young men lashing out at feminism, or older guys furious that their grip on societal power seems to be slipping.

That's not the impression I got. One man told me Dr Peterson saved him from addiction. A couple of 20-year-olds said they felt disconnected from their generation and had finally found someone to look up to. Everyone who spoke to me was eloquent and reasoned, aware of the common criticisms of Dr Peterson and armed with decent counterarguments.

I don't think they're wrong for connecting with a public intellectual who has made cerebral topics like philosophy and mythology mainstream. I'm not angry with them.

I am angry with Dr Peterson, who has pulled off the greatest scam of our time.

I watched him pace around the stage on Saturday, listened to him ramble through half-baked ideas, and reached the conclusion that he is an absolute grifter.

He's convinced millions of people that watching a middle-aged man pontificate for 90 minutes is akin to a religious experience. You can get that for free at any bar in the world.

I don't think the people who like this guy are stupid. I think they're lost and scared and desperate for someone to show them the way.

White men made up the majority of his audience on Saturday, a fact he mentioned during the Q&A segment in an incredibly defensive bad faith argument. He sneered at the idea that the demographics of a fanbase might be relevant information.

Notice how Jordan Peterson confirmed Milo's criticism of him even as he tried to defend himself from it:

Dr Jordan Peterson defended himself on Australian TV this week after being hit by an unexpected question from far-right internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos author was a panellist on ABC's Q&A on Monday night (local time), following his recent tour of New Zealand.

Yiannopoulos featured in a pre-recorded video, in which he attacked Dr Peterson for "betraying his allies" - specifically citing the Canadian clinical psychologist's perceived silence on the controversies surrounding US judge Brett Kavanaugh and footage of Catholic school students facing off with a Native American protester.

"I don't believe that I'm obliged to comment on absolutely everything that happens everywhere in the world," replied Dr Peterson. "I don't think that I am betraying my fundamental base... I'm also, by the way, not trying to talk to young men. I'm trying to talk to people. There's been this idea generated in the news by news people who keep reading the news that other news people create that somehow I have a coterie of angry, young, white men surrounding me because they're angry about feminism and about all these other 'isms', let's say. I don't see it like that at all."

"You talk a good game about standing up for men and for boys and you've certainly amassed a big army of them, but a few of us have been wondering," Yiannopoulos told Dr Peterson on Q&A.

"Can you explain why, although you talk a good game about standing up against social justice warriors and the 'chaotic feminine', when it comes down to it, you always seem to either fold, stay silent or betray your allies?"

Dr Peterson suggested in his response that Yiannopoulos had the wrong idea about him - just as he and his fans believe much of the news media has.

"I'm trying to suggest to people that their best bet in life - and this is men and women alike - is to adopt as much responsibility as they can for their own lives," said Dr Peterson.

"Because that is where the meaning in life is to be found. The notion that that's somehow a message that's limited to young men is an absurd message."

Got that, young men? The grifter you thought was your champion just cast you off. He's got bigger cons to sell now.

An hour of Corrosion

Actually an hour and 18 minutes, to be precise. And it happens to include my favorite chapter. If you ever enjoyed Isaac Asimov's Foundation, I can just about guarantee that you will very much like Corrosion. It's no longer on Audible, so you can only acquire it at the Arkhaven store.

Bring back the Inquisition

And ban all homosexual priests. Because the Catholic Church is almost completely converged.

Australian Cardinal George Pell, who helped elect popes and ran the Vatican's finances, has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys, a court said Tuesday, becoming the most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of child sex crimes.

An Australian court found Pell guilty by a trial jury on one count of sexual abuse and four counts of indecent assault of two boys at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in the 1990s.

Pell, now aged 77, was accused of cornering the boys -- then aged 12 and 13 -- in the cathedral's sacristy and forcing them to perform a sex act on him.

The cleric denied all the charges and an initial trial ended with a hung jury in September, but he was convicted on retrial on December 11.

Catholics have to stop trying to defend their church and start fumigating it. With a righteious vengeance.

The end of atheism

The Z-Man explains why atheism is on the decline in parallel with the retreat of Christianity from the public space:

The central defect of atheism, old and new, is it is an entirely negative western identity and entirely dependent on Christianity. Specifically, it requires people of some status to defend Christianity and the Christian belief in the super natural. Atheism has always been the oxpecker of mass movements. Everything about it relies on its host both tolerating it and thriving on its own. It’s why atheism has had its spasms of success when Christianity in America has had a revival, as in the 80’s and the 2000’s.

Atheists will deny this, of course. They will argue, as Dennett often does, that the steep decline of Christianity is proof their arguments were superior. The reason they no longer talk about their thing is they won and their enemy is dead. The fact that there are plenty of Muslims and crackpot feminist airheads around spouting magical oogily-boogily never seems to get their attention for some reason. The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.

That’s always been the tell with atheism. Belief in something as insane as male privilege or implicit whiteness should get their attention. After all, these are not just beliefs in the supernatural, they are primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Men of the classical period had more plausible and complex beliefs than people like Amy Harmon. She is a click away from demanding human sacrifice. Yet, the new atheists were never much interest in those magical beliefs. They were too busy hounding the last Christians.

That’s another tell. Atheism has always been a popular pose on the Left, because it was a useful signal. The bad whites loved their boom sticks and sky gods. The good whites rejected all those crazy beliefs. It’s why atheists tended to focus on the mainstream of Christianity, like Catholics and mainline Protestant churches. Mormons were always an easy target. They avoided the Jews and black Baptists. Sure, once in while a zinger against the tribe would be tossed in, but the enemy was always white Christians.

The decline on atheism is a good example of the perils of negative identity. When you define yourself as being in opposition to someone or something, you inevitably become a slave to it. Your very existence depends on it. As the main Christian churches collapse in scandal and bizarre attempts to move Left, the enemies for atheists to attack are getting more difficult to find.

What I find interesting is how many people now understand that atheism is not what it etymologically purports to be, a lack of belief in gods, or even a lack of belief in the supernatural, but what it has observably been since the Abbe Jean Meslier posthumously published his Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World in 1729, mere Western anti-Christianity.

That's all very well and good. But now apply precisely the same historical observation and logic to the concepts of free speech, freedom of thought, and the Enlightenment. What you find yourself concluding may very well surprise, if not dismay, you, depending upon your allegiance to the aforementioned dogmas.

Labour calls for a revote, Tories for delay

The British establishment is rendering itself increasingly irrelevant. First, the Labour Party leader endorsed the EU's principle of "vote until you vote correctly":

Labour's Brexit civil war escalated dramatically today after Jeremy Corbyn backed a second referendum. Leave-supporting MPs voiced fury after the leader heralded a seismic shift, warning that trying to overturn the result from 2016 would be 'catastrophic'.

Tensions are also already seething over when a referendum should be held - and whether Remain should be on the ballot paper.

In an extraordinary move, Mr Corbyn told his MPs last night that the party was ready to back a second public vote to prevent a ‘damaging Tory Brexit’. The party is likely to table a Commons amendment which would mean a referendum on whatever deal finally gets through Parliament.

However, the new stance still appears to leave questions about whether Labour will call for a referendum if Mrs May's deal is not passed, or whether one would only happen if Mr Corbyn wins powers and negotiates his own package.

And Theresa May showed her true Remainer colours by offering to delay Brexit beyond the March 29 deadline.

Theresa May faces a titanic Cabinet battle over Brexit today amid signs she is ready to surrender to a Remainer revolt.

The PM is gathering her senior team as tensions hit new heights, with negotiations deadlocked in Brussels and just weeks to go until the UK is due to crash out. Cabinet sources told MailOnline there were 'encouraging' signs that Mrs May is now ready to delay Brexit to avert mass resignations by ministers who are determined to rule out no deal.

But the expected concession will cause fury among Eurosceptics who have been adamant the option of leaving without an agreement must be kept on the table.

My best guess is that all this is all political sound and fury signifying nothing in the end, and Britain will exit with no deal by the end of March. I also expect Labour to get slaughtered in Leave districts in the next election. But we will see.

War and rumors of war

The Times of Israel is reporting on an Israeli government minister's statement about how the US President and the Israeli Prime Minister are going to divide Jerusalem in the latest iteration of a Middle East "Peace Plan":

Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump were planning to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and divide Jerusalem.

Speaking before a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett, who now heads the New Right party, warned the shift in Netanyahu’s declared position would come “a day or two after election day” on April 9.

Shortly after the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu responded to Bennett’s claim with a terse denial.

“It’s natural for him to be anxious, and to get a little confused,” Netanyahu said of Bennett. “It goes without saying that elections can do funny things to small parties.”

In a statement, Netanyahu’s Likud party called Bennett’s warning “utter piffle with no connection to reality. After the elections, Netanyahu will establish a right-wing government under his leadership.”

In his initial comments to the press, Bennett said that the Trump administration had completed its plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Netanyahu and President Trump have agreed to come out with the plan to establish a Palestinian state on 90 percent [of the West Bank]. They’ve agreed not to present the plan before election day so that it doesn’t hurt Netanyahu, but a day or two after election day the plan will be presented, and will include the division of Jerusalem.”

In the meanwhile, the US has gone back on the promises it made to the Turkish government in order to prevent Turkey from invading northern Syria.

The so called Manbij Roadmap was signed in June, 2018, a full 6 months before Trump’s withdrawal announcement. The deal requires the US to work with Turkey to remove all terrorist groups from Manbij– which is a Syrian city east of the Euphrates– and to assist with security during the transition period. This was the deal the US made with Erdogan during a period of heightened tensions between the two NATO allies. The agreement was made to placate Erdogan and to forestall the imminent invasion by Turkish troops massed on the Syrian border. Readers need to understand that Turkey is not behaving irrationally or precipitously. The Trump team made the deal, and Turkey expects them to keep that deal, that is the long and short of it.

The media has also mischaracterized Trump’s December 19th announcement to withdraw all 2,000 US troops from Syria bringing an end to the failed 8 year-long military campaign. The announcement was not the decision of an unstable and impulsive autocrat who had no real grasp of the situation. (as the media would like you to believe) What the media failed to report is that Trump had discussed the issue with a frustrated Erdogan just days earlier, and he decided to withdraw to avoid an acrimonious split with a NATO ally who was threatening to invade at any minute. Check out this article at the Guardian dated December 12, 2018, just 7 days before Trump’s announcement.

“The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that Turkey will launch a military operation against the Kurds in northern Syria within days, in a decision that could signal a shift in Turkish-US relations and have far-reaching consequences for Syria’s future.

Long frustrated by US support for Kurdish militias that Turkey views as terrorists, Erdoğan has threatened to push deeper into north-eastern Syria since sending Turkish forces into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in February.

The president said during a televised speech in Ankara on Wednesday that the operation was imminent. “We will begin our operation to free the east of the Euphrates [river] from the separatist organisation within a few days,” he told MPs. “Our target is not the American soldiers – it is the terror organisations that are active in the region.”

Erdoğan also expressed disappointment that US-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria had not left the town of Manbij, as agreed in a US-Turkish deal brokered this year. “The Americans are not being honest; they are still not removing terrorists [from Manbij],” he said. “Therefore, we will do it.” (Turkey primed to start offensive against US-backed Kurds in Syria, The Guardian)

There was no mention of Erdogan’s threats in any of the mainstream news publications. The focus was almost entirely on Trump who was blasted as impetuous and ignorant, a foreign policy dilettante. In fact, Trump was merely pursuing the rational option, which was to give ground on Turkey’s legitimate national security needs while concealing his real motives for the policy-change. Naturally, he couldn’t say the US was withdrawing because of Turkey’s sabre rattling, but that, in fact, is what happened. And that’s why Trump announced a ‘complete withdrawal of US troops’; it was a clumsy effort to hide the fact that Washington was backing down on their plan to control the area up to the Turkish border. The Trump team tried to make it look like the president was just keeping a campaign promise, but–as you can see– there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Now, of course, the administration has abandoned its withdrawal plan and decided to keep 400 troops in Syria indefinitely. Unfortunately, the new policy only further exacerbates the tension between the US and Turkey. The reduction in troops does not in any way alleviate Turkey’s security concerns, in fact, it worsens them because it indicates that Washington is more resolved than ever to preserve the status quo. If the US and their multinational allies stay, the YPG will continue to occupy Manbij and other territory along the Turkish border, the de facto independent Kurdish state in East Syria will be preserved, and Turkey will be prevented from resettling the more than 3 million Syrian refugees it has housed for the last 8 years. So, how exactly does Turkey benefit from this troop-reduction plan?

It doesn’t. Turkey doesn’t get anything out of the deal. Nor does the new arrangement fulfill the basic requirements of the Manbij Roadmap. There won’t be any joint Turkish-US patrols because Washington is now committed to keeping Turkey out of Syria altogether in order to “protect the Kurds”, which is a misleading sobriquet that is used to hide the real motive, which is to occupy east Syria and protect Washington’s terrorist-linked militia.

So, will Trump’s modified plan work? Will Erdogan see the withdrawal of some US troops as an honest attempt at peace and security?

No, of course not, because nothing has changed. The only choice Erdogan has is to ratchet up the pressure by delivering more threats to invade. And that is precisely the course that Erdogan has decided to pursue. 

So, not only will Turkey likely invade, but it now knows what the Russians have learned, which is that there is no point in even trying to reach an agreement with the United States, because the USA does not keep its word. And while the US military gets entangled everywhere from Afghanistan to Venezuela, Russia and China continue to bide their time and quietly improve their carrier-killing capabilities.

It's really rather remarkable how every US president since Nixon seems utterly determined to throw themselves on the sword of their own Mid-East "Peace Plan". I know literally nothing about the latest one, but I do know this: it won't work.

No sympathy

If you want LGBTQWTF equality, then you deserve it, good and hard:

Andraya Yearwood hears the comments, usually from adults and usually not to her face.

She shouldn’t be running, they say, not against girls.

Yearwood, a 17-year-old junior at Cromwell High School, is one of two transgender high school sprinters in Connecticut, transitioning to female.

She recently finished second in the 55-meter dash at the state open indoor track championships. The winner, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High, is also transgender and set a girls state indoor record of 6.95 seconds. Yearwood finished in 7.01 seconds and the third-place competitor, who is not transgender, finished in 7.23 seconds.

Miller and Yearwood also topped the 100-meter state championships last year, and Miller won the 300 this season.

Critics say their gender identity amounts to an unfair advantage, expressing a familiar argument in a complex debate for transgender athletes as they break barriers across sports around the world from high school to the pros.

“I have learned a lot about myself and about other people through this transition. I always try to focus most on all of the positive encouragement that I have received from family, friends and supporters,” Yearwood said. “I use the negativity to fuel myself to run faster.”

Connecticut is one of 17 states that allow transgender high school athletes to compete without restrictions, according to Transathlete.com, which tracks state policies in high school sports across the country. Seven states have restrictions that make it difficult for transgender athletes to compete while in school, like requiring athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate, or allowing them to participate only after going through sex-reassignment procedures or hormone therapies.

The other states either have no policy or handle the issue on a case-by-case basis.

Yearwood acknowledges she is stronger than many of her cisgender competitors, but says girls who are not transgender may have other advantages.

“One high jumper could be taller and have longer legs than another, but the other could have perfect form, and then do better,” she said. “One sprinter could have parents who spend so much money on personal training for their child, which in turn, would cause that child to run faster.”

Miller, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said that if she felt a competitor had an unfair advantage, it would simply push her to try to improve.

One of their competitors, Selina Soule, says the issue is about fairness on the track with wider implications. The Glastonbury High School junior finished eighth in the 55, missing out on qualifying for the New England regionals by two spots.

Soule believes that had Miller and Yearwood not run, she would be on her way to race in Boston in front of more college coaches.

“We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing,” she said. “I fully support and am happy for these athletes for being true to themselves. They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair.”

If you fully support these athletes, then stop crying about losing to them. Frankly, I don't see how separate boys and girls competitions can be permitted any more than separate black and white competitions are.

In fact, isn't it totally unequalitarian to deny people who don't have the good fortune to attend high school, or be of high school age, the right to compete in high school track meets?

If equality is the standard, then impose complete equality across every single social construct. And if you won't do that, then you obviously don't believe in equality and we're just arguing over where to draw the lines between various differences.

Corrosion in audio

Corrosion (The Corroding Empire, Book One)

Written by Johan Kalsi and narrated by: Jon Mollison. 7 hours 3 minutes. DRM-free ebook included in both Kindle and Epub formats.

Galactic society is ruled by algorithms. From interstellar travel and planetary terraforming to artificial intelligence and agriculture, every human endeavor has become completely dependent upon the hypercomplex equations that optimize the activities making life possible across hundreds of inhabited worlds. Throughout the galaxy, Man has become dependent upon the reliable operation of 10 million different automated systems.

And when things begin to go wrong and mysterious accidents begin to happen no one has any idea what is happening, except for a sentient medical drone and the First Technocrat of Continox. But their ability to even begin to try fixing the unthinkably complicated problem of galaxy-wide algorithmic decay is made considerably more difficult by the fact the former is an outlaw and the latter is facing a death sentence.

Johan Kalsi is Finland’s hottest science fiction author. An accomplished geneticist as well as a 6’3″ ex-Finnish Marine, in Corrosion, Kalsi shows himself to be more Asimovian than Asimov himself. Corrosion marks his English-language debut.

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No church can serve two masters

The African Methodists choose Jesus Christ over Mammon:

Please hear me when I say as graciously as I can: we Africans are not children in need of western enlightenment when it comes to the church’s sexual ethics. We do not need to hear a progressive U.S. bishop lecture us about our need to “grow up.”

Let me assure you, we Africans, whether we have liked it or not, have had to engage in this debate for many years now. We stand with the global church, not a culturally liberal, church elite in the U.S.

We stand with our Filipino friends! We stand with our sisters and brothers in Europe and Russia! And yes, we stand with our allies in America.

We stand with farmers in Zambia, tech workers in Nairobi, Sunday School teachers in Nigeria, biblical scholars in Liberia, pastors in the Congo, United Methodist Women in Cote d’Ivoire, and thousands of other United Methodists all across Africa who have heard no compelling reasons for changing our sexual ethics, our teachings on marriage, and our ordination standards!

We are grounded in God’s word and the gracious and clear teachings of our church. On that we will not yield! We will not take a road that leads us from the truth! We will take the road that leads to the making of disciples of Jesus Christ for transformation of the world!

I hope and pray, for your sake, that you will walk down that road with us. We would warmly welcome you as our traveling companions, but if you choose another road, we Africans cannot go with you.... Some Africans have been told that if a gracious exit petition is passed our evangelical friends in the U.S. will go their own way and no longer support efforts in Africa. That is not true.

Many of us in Africa have developed deep and long lasting friendships with our brothers and sisters in the U.S. Those relationships will not be severed if a gracious exit petition passes.

Unfortunately, some United Methodists in the U.S. have the very faulty assumption that all Africans are concerned about is U.S. financial support. Well, I am sure, being sinners like all of you, some Africans are fixated on money.

But with all due respect, a fixation on money seems more of an American problem than an African one. We get by on far less than most Americans do; we know how to do it. I’m not so sure you do. So if anyone is so naïve or condescending as to think we would sell our birth right in Jesus Christ for American dollars, then they simply do not know us.

We are seriously joyful in following Jesus Christ and God’s holy word to us in the Bible. And in truth, we think many people in the U.S. and in parts of Europe could learn a great deal from us. The UM churches, pastors and lay people who partner with us acknowledge as much.

Please understand me when I say the vast majority of African United Methodists will never, ever trade Jesus and the truth of the Bible for money.

What a bold and admirable man of God! God will bless those African churches for their faithfulness and bless their nations through them. Those enlightened liberal American churches will die, for they have forsaken Jesus Christ in the name of sin and worldly approval.

Darkstream 20k

To celebrate this subscriber milestone for the Darkstream, I've uploaded this one-hour 43-minute excerpt from the Jordanetics audiobook, which includes Milo's Foreword, my own Introduction, and chapters one and five. If you haven't read or listened to the book yet, this extended audio sample provides a solid foundation for the book's case against Jordan Peterson and his evil philosophy.

It includes one of my favorite sections of the book, which addresses the oft-heard claim that Jordan Peterson's thinking is simply too advanced for less-refined intellects to understand. The claim is particularly amusing for me in light of how few recognize, or even notice, my occasional literary pyrotechnic.

Objection 1: Jordan Peterson is a complex thinker with a Platonic approach that is easily misunderstood by those who don’t carefully follow him. You just don’t understand him.

I answer that, It is true that Peterson is inclined to excessive wordiness and run-on sentences, his references are often obscure, and the examples he provides are frequently too loosely connected and meandering for the average person to easily follow. But the nebulous word salad Peterson customarily presents in lieu of logical arguments is not at all typical of a genius-level intellect, to the contrary, it is much more commonly observed among academic poseurs who wish to be mistaken for one.

If you have actually read the great thinkers of whom Peterson is almost entirely ignorant, one thing that will often strike you is the intense clarity of their thought processes. Their genius stems from the way in which they enlighten the reader, from the way they turn dark chaos into orderly light. They do not confuse, to the contrary, they clarify.

As an exercise, compare the following four sentences, all of which are more complex than the norm these days. I ran each of them through the Gunning-Fog Index, a weighted average of the number of words per sentence, and the number of long words per word. The index provides a number that is supposed to indicate that the text can be understood by someone who left full-time education at a later age than the number; the higher the number, the more complicated the text. But it’s really just an objective measure of textual complexity.

• We must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him. (GFI 31.6)
• In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well –such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. (GFI 21.9)
• The great dramatists and religious thinkers of the world have been able to grasp this fact, at least implicitly, and to transmit it in story and image; modern analytic thinkers and existential theorists have attempted to abstract these ideas upward into “higher consciousness,” and to present them in logical and purely semantic form. (GFI 18.2)
• We have considered that students in this doctrine have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments, partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require, or the occasion of the argument offer, partly, too, because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of readers. (GFI 40.2)

Were you able to distinguish the Peterson quote from the Aquinas, the Aristotle, and the Plato quotes? If you noticed, the Peterson sentence, which is the third sentence, is considerably shorter and less structurally complex than the other three examples, but it is also observably less clear than them. Whereas the Aristotle sentence in particular is rich with meaning, as it implies a vital distinction between rhetoric and dialectic that many today have trouble grasping even when it is explained to them in no little detail, but nevertheless clarifies the relevant point for the reader, the Peterson sentence unnecessarily complicates what is a fairly simple and straightforward observation about the mythopoetic human response to the concepts of good and evil.

And yes, the GFI on that last sentence was a respectable 36.3. But it wasn’t actually that hard to follow or understand, was it? Complexity is neither ambiguity nor nebulosity, and insight does not require complexity. Also, in case you’re interested, the authors of the four sentences, in order, were: Aristotle, Plato/Socrates, Peterson, Aquinas.

All-male military draft unconstitutional

The inevitable consequence of the drive to put women in the military is on the verge of arriving:

A federal judge in Texas has declared that the all-male military draft is unconstitutional, ruling that "the time has passed" for a debate on whether women belong in the military.

The decision deals the biggest legal blow to the Selective Service System since the Supreme Court upheld the draft in 1981. In Rostker v. Goldberg, the court ruled that the male-only draft was "fully justified" because women were ineligible for combat roles.

But U.S. District Judge Gray Miller ruled late Friday that while historical restrictions on women serving in combat "may have justified past discrimination," men and women are now equally able to fight. In 2015, the Pentagon lifted all restrictions for women in military service.

The case was brought by the National Coalition For Men, a men's rights group, and two men who argued the all-male draft was unfair.

Men who fail to register with the Selective Service System at their 18th birthday can be denied public benefits like federal employment and student loans. Women cannot register for Selective Service.

The ruling comes as an 11-member commission is studying the future of the draft, including whether women should be included or whether there should continue to be draft registration at all.

Regardless of what the needs of the U.S. military may be now, we know there will be military drafts in the future because there will be war in the future. And now, thanks to the feminists, young women who don't want to serve in the military will be drafted and forced to risk their lives in combat.

Feminism has always been focused on destroying Christian Western civilization. And turning young women who should be wives and mothers into sterile worker bees and amazons is an important part of that goal.

The obvious implication of hoax crimes

It is regrettable that Jonah Goldberg refuses to embrace truth where it conflicts with his identity politics, because he's still quite good when he's able to be honest with himself. In a recent G-File, he observes an obvious implication of the frequency of hoax crimes in the United States:

Here’s something you might not know: In Nazi Germany, very few Jews staged bogus hate crimes against themselves.

Here’s some more trivia: Very few blacks in the Jim Crow South went to great lengths to pretend that they were harassed or attacked by racists.

You know why? Because that would be incredibly stupid. What, exactly, would the German Jew who staged an assault on himself gain from it? Where would he or she go to ask for sympathy or recompense? Conjure any horror story you like, the Nazi official you brought it to would say, “Yeah, and . . . ?” The black sharecropper who took the time to make his own cross and burn it on his own property would benefit . . . how?

Why am I bringing this up? Well, for a bunch of reasons. I have more points to make than can be found at an English Setter competition.

First, people who live under real oppression have no need to fabulate oppression. To paraphrase Madge from the old Palmolive ads: They’re already soaking in it.

Second, when you live in an oppressive country, there’s no one you can take your grievances to because that is what it means to live in an oppressive country! For God’s sake, people, you’re making me use exclamation points and italics here. If you’re an inmate in the Shawshank prison, you can’t go to the guards to complain. When you live in North Korea, you can’t go to the local police and gripe about your working conditions or the sawdust in your bread.

Jonah is correct. The very need to fake these crimes in the first place is evidence that the problem they supposedly highlight does not actually exist. But unfortunately, he couldn't actually finish the piece without meandering into anti-Americanism:

There will be a hoax involving MAGA hats, but the fake victims will be those wearing them. We already saw the hunger for this kind of thing in the Covington case — but those kids were in fact victims. President Trump invited that kid named Trump to the State of the Union precisely because he wanted to exploit this great reservoir of pity. And the coverage of this legitimate outrage will no doubt encourage others to get a piece of that on the cheap.

As I said, regrettable. But identity almost always wins out in the end. The great irony of those who make a virtue of decrying identity politics is that they are observably some of the most relentless practitioners of identity politics around.