Mailvox: a perspicacious analysis

RS points out how the Narrative is pushed in the media:

You're an intelligent enough gentleman that I don't have to hold your hand and provide a play-by-play as to exactly why and how this article is propagandistic. Suffice to say that given the political climate in the West and saying (as I do)that skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the like aren't a problem in the West as this article assumes, It basically demonises whitey and Trump supporters.

I just want to point out something. We know of documented incidents of violence, hatred, and intolerance of SJWs, abortion-supporters, the Orwellian- Antifa, amongst others. We know how "the Left" likes to accuse anyone who disagrees with them: conservatives, nationalists, Christians.

So, with that in mind..read the article carefully. This is what I got out of it:

1. Isolation - TPTB will try to isolate individuals away from communities that provide support - whether psychologically or materially. This might be done in a simple divide-and-conquer methodology, or just by simple distraction.

2. They'll provide some of these isolated individuals with alternate communities that feed and reinforce only the narrative they believe is socially acceptable.

3. "The narrative" - note that the "expert" references *narratives*, not truth...but stories. And they are no longer interested in persuading with truth and reason, but avenues of mind control and manipulation.

4. The planting of seeds - which I call gentle coercion. This actually begins in the news and entertainment media.  It is not..maybe coercion is the wrong word for it..perhaps subtle indoctrination.

Here's an example: this article exists. It assumes that violent racism is a serious problem which needs to be solved, but the assumption is not explicitly described. It just provides a solution to a problem that we are expected to accept. We must submit first to the idea that this is a problem, before we can deal with the solution fairly..but if we work backwards? The game is up. It's like the game of Jeopardy. What is the question, Alex? And we are expected to provide the question and, in that sense, delude ourselves into thinking that it was our own thoughts, that we came up with it by ourselves. Vox, does this sound right to you? It's insidious! I love how they trot out the expert and a rabbi. It's just another manipulation tactic. All we need is the gay guy and a bar and the joke's on us. Oh wait, they did trot out the gay guy!

5. The love-bomb - this is indicative in their description of taking people on a roadtrip to find nice people. Oh...that person was kind to me! Therefore, illegal immigration or Islam or SJWism or Christian persecution or whatever isn't a problem! It's another logic inversion. Now, possibly those things aren't a problem! But that doesn't follow from "there are some nice Hondurans who don't traffic children". Yes. Obviously.

Wherever you encounter inversion, you know you are dealing with the servants of the Lie. That's the scent of sulfur that informs you that what you're dealing is not merely error, but evil.

Mailvox: deplatform yourself

A YouTube commenter describes how he achieved a degree of self-enlightenment

I got off Facebook in 2012-13, somewhere in there, when I found myself being emotionally and mentally overtaken by propaganda and kindergarten-politics every day all day. All I could think about and talk about(or more accurately complain about) was conspiracy theory and leftists. One day I looked at my post history and thought, "Holy shit I must be annoying."

Was wasting my life away being concerned about shit I can't change, posting to a bunch of dummies I barely knew, who wouldn't care enough to even know what I was going on about. Best thing I ever did. Also got banned from worldnews reddit a few weeks ago based on subject matter. Nothing but a blessing on all fronts. Keep them spirits high people!

Or as I see it, not all battles are worth fighting. When you have a surfeit of enemies, some degree of prioritization is necessary. Focus on defeating the important ones first, avoid the battles that cannot be won for one reason or another, and ignore the anklebiters.

Corporates abandon Facebook

Arkhaven was not the first company to reject Facebook and Instagram and it will not be the last:

Popular fitness brand CrossFit has deleted its Facebook and Instagram accounts with a combined following of about 6 million, saying the platforms betrayed users' trust after they removed a popular nutrition-oriented user group.

"Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease," CrossFit said in a statement posted on Wednesday, referring to the Banting7DayMealPlan group that Facebook mysteriously deleted – only to reinstate it without an explanation. The group's 1.65 million users shared their experiences and information about low-carb high-fat diets.

Once a supposedly neutral social media platform demonstrates that it is in the thought-policing business, you should not utilize it any longer. The more corporates abandon Facebook, the more its rivals will see the advantage in political and ideological neutrality.

Comics and cats

It's a bold strategy.

IDW Publishing announced a brand new Marvel Action comic title, Captain Marvel.

“Carol Danvers’ quiet night with BFF Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman) takes a catastrophic turn when Manhattan’s bodegas are suddenly overrun by a host of angry felines! And not just any felines—Flerkens, the most terrifying, pocket-dimension-holding, tentacle-devouring kitty-look-alikes in the entire universe! Can Captain Marvel overcome the formidable foes before it’s too late?”

“I feel so privileged to help launch Captain Marvel’s solo title for Marvel Action,” says Sam Maggs. “Carol has always been my favorite super hero; I love how she’s truly come into her own, culturally, and is finally being widely-recognized as the star that she is. Being able to write for Carol is the most exciting and terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me. I can’t wait to share this arc with everyone!”

Maggs also noted the book will have lots of cats.

We'll see how it works out for them.

AG Barr will watch the watchers

We finally have an answer to that age-old philosophical question: William Barr.

President Donald Trump on Thursday granted Attorney General William Barr new powers to review and potentially release classified information related to the origins of the Russia investigation, a move aimed at accelerating Barr’s inquiry into whether U.S. officials improperly surveilled Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Trump directed the intelligence community to “quickly and fully cooperate” with Barr’s probe. The directive marked an escalation in Trump’s efforts to “investigate the investigators,” as he continues to try to undermine the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe amid mounting Democratic calls for impeachment proceedings.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that Trump is delegating to Barr the “full and complete authority” to declassify documents relating to the probe, which would ease his efforts to review the sensitive intelligence underpinnings of the investigation. Such an action could create fresh tensions within the FBI and other intelligence agencies, which have historically resisted such demands.

To watch the watchers and investigate the investigators. Next, launch The Storm.

Cancel your accounts

I'll be sending out an email to all of the Arkhaven backers involved later today, but if you've set up an account on a certain site and have been awaiting further instructions, please cancel that account today. Last night we were informed that we would not be permitted to use the site because badthink and so forth.

This will not have any effect on the project at all, so please don't worry about that. We have a plethora of options and will be selecting a better one next week. But in order to send a very clear message, it would be good if everyone involved canceled their account today. We do not intend any legal action at this point, as we would much rather not work with any partners who are less than entirely enthusiastic about working with us.

Life in prison for Assange

That's what U.S. Federal prosecutors are aiming for with 17 additional charges:

A federal grand jury has announced 17 additional charges under the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is currently in a UK jail awaiting an extradition hearing. The new indictment, made public on Thursday, relates to US documents WikiLeaks published in 2010, and alleges Assange revealed the names of individuals who were working with the US government, thus endangering their lives.

The new charges expand the original one-count indictment of conspiracy to hack into US government computers, announced in March, prior to Assange’s arrest in London. He faces up to 10 years in prison on each count, on top of another five from a previous indictment, if convicted.

Imagine the charges that will be faced by people who gave much more critical information to the Chinese and Israelis... oh, wait, that's right. Nothing ever happens to them.

The imperial overreach of the corpocrats

Back in December, Ron Unz observed that sooner or later, China is very likely to strike back against the out-of-control imperial corpocracy that currently rules the USA:

Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme World Hegemon. As a result, local American courts have begun enforcing gigantic financial penalties against foreign countries and their leading corporations, and I suspect that the rest of the world is tiring of this misbehavior. Perhaps such actions can still be taken against the subservient vassal states of Europe, but by most objective measures, the size of China’s real economy surpassed that of the US several years ago and is now substantially larger, while also still having a far higher rate of growth. Our totally dishonest mainstream media regularly obscures this reality, but it remains true nonetheless.

Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and imprisoning one of its leading technology executives reminds me of a comment I made several years ago about America’s behavior under the rule of its current political elites:

Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the rabies virus. The virus may have no brain and its body-weight is probably less than one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central nervous system, the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.

Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to bite all the other animals it can reach. Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens, and poor Fido finally collapses dead in a heap.

 Normal countries like China naturally assume that other countries like the US will also behave in normal ways, and their dumbfounded shock at Ms. Meng’s seizure has surely delayed their effective response. In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow and famously engaged in a heated “kitchen debate” with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of Communism and Capitalism. What would have been the American reaction if Nixon had been immediately arrested and given a ten year Gulag sentence for “anti-Soviet agitation”?

Since a natural reaction to international hostage-taking is retaliatory international hostage-taking, the newspapers have reported that top American executives have decided to forego visits to China until the crisis is resolved. These days, General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US, and China is also the manufacturing source of nearly all our iPhones, but Tim Cook, Mary Barra, and their higher-ranking subordinates are unlikely to visit that country in the immediate future, nor would the top executives of Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and the leading Hollywood studios be willing to risk indefinite imprisonment.

And there is nary an American who would shed a tear if they were imprisoned indefinitely over there. It's such a shame that the Meng arrest didn't take place before Mark Zuckerberg's visit to China....

The thing with an agenda

Gregory Hood points out the creepy Deep State aspects of the strange ending of A Game of Thrones:

The political settlement that ends the series is even more implausible. “Bran the Broken” possesses magical powers of seeing events in the past, present, and future around the world. He has mostly sat around the past few seasons, occasionally making awkward comments. Nonetheless, the lords of Westeros make him king, based on a speech by Tyrion. Democracy is laughed off, but some form of elective monarchy is created. Bran’s sister Sansa declares the North should be an independent kingdom, and Bran agrees, thus ceding a huge part of his realm as his first act. Why other kingdoms don’t also immediately secede is left unexplained.

Obviously, Westeros is a world of fantasy, where magic, dragons, and giants can be found. Yet as George R. R. Martin repeatedly states, it contains a low amount of magic for a high fantasy series, and the focus is on political realism and cynical maneuvering. Naïve audiences who hadn’t read the books got the message when Ned Stark had his head chopped off. Supernatural beings only work in fiction if they operate in a context where they are comprehensible. Characters must respond in believable ways. The idea that lords with their own agendas and interests would agree to have an odd cripple with no blood connection to the ruling dynasty is absurd.

Yet this is just lazy writing and not important unless you are deeply committed to a television show. If we accept “King Bran,” what’s the real message? It’s that he represents the rule of Narrative, which is to say the rule of media, rather than the rule of tradition, heroism, or even intelligence.

Tyrion justifies the choice of Bran by saying he has the best story. “The boy who fell from a high tower and lived. He knew he’d never walk again, so he learned to fly,” he says. “He crossed beyond the Wall, a crippled boy, and became the Three-Eyed Raven.” Many online wits observed just about every other character (Jon, Arya, Sansa) had a better story.

Yet Tyrion says more than this. He argues that stories are ultimately what unite people more than armies, gold, or flags. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” he says. “Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” (He obviously hasn’t heard of online deplatforming).

Much earlier in the series, Varys posed Tyrion the question of what power really was. Varys said “power resides where men believe it resides.” Tyrion now goes further—power lies in the ability to shape belief.

If any one person has this power, it is Bran. “He is our memory, the keeper of all our stories,” says Tyrion. “The wars, weddings, births, massacres, famines. Our triumphs, our defeats, our past. Who better to lead us into the future?” This is an echo of Orwell—“Who controls the past controls the future.”

Indeed, Bran shows he doesn’t just know about events, he can shape them. Earlier in the series he said he could never be Lord of Winterfell, because he was now the Three-Eyed Raven. He wasn’t really Bran anymore.

Now however, he accepts the crown. “Why do you think I came all this way?” he says. Though he claims he doesn’t want to be king (indeed, earlier in the series he says he doesn’t really “want” anything anymore), he overrules Grey Worm’s objection to making Tyrion Hand of the King. “I’m king,” he says in justification. Bran also shows more emotion and personality after becoming king, though not much. There’s not really “one” person ruling the realm through the power of story (of narrative). However, there’s clearly something with an agenda of its own.

Bran as king doesn't make any sense at all... except perhaps as predictive programming and rule by AI. The obvious king from a logical perspective was the Gendry the blacksmith, the bastard of Robert Baratheon and the most-legitimate claimant to the throne.

China rejects civic nationalism

If you want to know why all the smart long-term money is on China vis-a-vis its strategic struggle with the declining US global empire despite the latter's current military superiority, it is China's growing nationalism that is the strongest reason:

“Make China Great Again” is officially now the agenda of President Xi Jinping. Can “Make the Han Great Again” be far behind? In this interesting if somewhat academic work, Australian China scholar Carrico has examined the rising influence of traditionalist, racially based sentiments within modern China, particularly through study of the Han Clothing Movement (Hanfu yundong) and associated ideas.

At one level, the movement, established in 2001, is a curiosity, seemingly on the fringe of a society rapidly modernizing and engaging with the world. Han clothing is the symbol of a wider commitment to belief in restoration of a largely imaginary era of Han greatness and cultural purity and rejection of foreign-influenced money obsession of China today. But it has important elements in common with the officially promoted emphasis on Confucian principles, and on long held beliefs in the genetic division between Han and the rest.

Nor does this merely appeal to aging traditionalists and those who hanker after a return to traditional script and other pre-Communist aspects of the nation. The book begins with a quote from a Han Clothing Movement supporter, an IT professional based in that hub of Chinese modernism, Shenzhen:

“You can’t have nationalism without race (minzu zhuyi). That’s what we want to do: promote Han racial nationalism (Han minzu zhuyi) …. The multiracial nationalism we have now in China, with 56 races as part of a larger “Chinese race” (Zhongua minzu) is a big scam. It was imposed upon us by the Manchus, forcing us Han, the core of China from the beginning of time, into submission. All that this nationalism has done is to weaken China.  You can’t just destroy the distinction between civilization and barbarism (Hua yi zhi bian), incorporate a bunch of barbarians into our nation and then expect a strong nation. All this talk of “wealth and power” (fuqiang) is empty and meaningless without Han nationalism.”

The principal villains, from this Han perspective, are not the western powers and Japan and the one hundred years of humiliation, they are the Manchus. The dynasty may have been overthrown in 1911, but Manchu ideas, customs and (allegedly) Manchu money continue to prevail. The queue may have gone but the Manchu qipao and magua – both designed originally for horse-riders –are is still viewed as the standard Chinese traditional dress, as for example provided to delegates to the APEC Summit in China in 2015.

The Han movement’s intent is to remove all such foreign impurities, which has also to include inter-marriage with inferior foreign genes, a problem which has supposedly been enhanced by the one child policy.

While China is rejecting the Manchu legacy that was imposed upon its nation, the US is increasingly being forced to submit to its own Manchus, to such an extent that American history is being revised, American heroes are being vanished, and the 1st Amendment is under legal and political siege.

The wages of faithlessness

The Conservative Party in the UK is melting down due to its faithlessness and refusal to deliver the Brexit for which the people voted. They'll be punished tomorrow in the European elections that should never have taken place, and hopefully to a similar extent in the next general election.

The Legend on breaking into comics

The Legend Chuck Dixon discusses how he broke into comics back in the day. For Unauthorized subscribers only.

With regards to the disappearance and reappearance of the Darkstreams and Owen's Livestreams, that was a consequence of the recent site update. A new category was added to which each existing video needed to be independently assigned, which took an amount of time. Everything should be operating correctly now.

In defense of Christian nationalism

The anti-imperial omninationalist position is a very old one in Christian circles.

Let them ask, then, whether it is quite fitting for good men to rejoice in extended empire. For the iniquity of those with whom just wars are carried on favors the growth of a kingdom, which would certainly have been small if the peace and justice of neighbors had not by any wrong provoked the carrying on of war against them; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighborly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city.

Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity. But because it would be worse that the injurious should rule over those who are more righteous, therefore even that is not unsuitably called felicity. But beyond doubt it is greater felicity to have a good neighbor at peace, than to conquer a bad one by making war. Your wishes are bad, when you desire that one whom you hate or fear should be in such a condition that you can conquer him.
- St. Augustine of Hippo

Eurocrats call openly for empire

They always intended the European Union to be the EUSSR:

The leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) told CNN that proposals by European populist-patriots to reform the EU and devolve power from Brussels back to the nation-state would mean that the bloc “will die inside.”

“The world is developing into one not of nation states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The US is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests,” Mr Verhofstadt stated during the interview, speaking to the leftist American news network in what was described as his “spacious” Brussels office.

Mr Verhofstadt, who is also the European Parliament’s Brexit Coordinator, is an avid supporter of greater federalisation of the European Union.

During a Euronews Raw Politics panel last week, the former prime minister of Belgium compared a proposed United States of Europe to the United States of America, saying: “The United States of Europe is a way to organise a common action on the European level by recognising, by guaranteeing the autonomy of the member states.”

Other Eurocrats have also voiced support for a United States of Europe, including former president of the European Parliament and German socialist politician Martin Schulz who called for its formation by 2025.

Fortunately, nationalism is rising across the continent and the various European peoples have no interest in empires, which throughout European history have always been the primary source of bloodshed.

The false flags failed

So the Pentagon is taking credit for preventing Iran from following through on its nonexistent plans to attack the United States:

Washington’s peace-oriented threats towards Iran have paid off – at least according to Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who says that the Islamic Republic had to “put on hold” its violent plans thanks to US efforts.

While Iran has repeatedly denied allegations that they are responsible for recent tensions and said that they prefer diplomacy to threats, Shanahan on Tuesday was certain that Tehran’s dangerous behavior had only been curbed by the US’s proactive measures.

These peace-keeping gestures presumably include sending a navy strike group to Iran’s border, ratcheting up crippling sanctions and President Donald Trump’s amiable threat to end the country altogether.

Meanwhile, another 10,000 or so hostile foreigners invaded the southern border today. The Pentagon did nothing at all about that and had no comment about either the invasion or its inactivity.

The four horsemen of bad science

A scientist addresses the irreproducibility problem presently plaguing what passes for professional "science":

I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research. How can that be? We know how to formulate and test hypotheses in controlled experiments. We can account for unwanted variation with statistical techniques. We appreciate the need to replicate observations.

Yet many researchers persist in working in a way almost guaranteed not to deliver meaningful results. They ride with what I refer to as the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known). My generation and the one before us have done little to rein these in.

In 1975, psychologist Anthony Greenwald noted that science is prejudiced against null hypotheses; we even refer to sound work supporting such conclusions as ‘failed experiments’. This prejudice leads to publication bias: researchers are less likely to write up studies that show no effect, and journal editors are less likely to accept them. Consequently, no one can learn from them, and researchers waste time and resources on repeating experiments, redundantly.

It's fascinating to see how science has not only demonstrated itself to be utterly useless as a device to adjudicate ethics, morals, or philosophy, but has actually corrupted itself in attempting to replace Christian ethics and moral philosophy.

The answer to post-Christian globalism

And to the Culture of Death is Christian nationalism:

While European nations languish with rapidly declining birthrates, Hungary stands out with rising marriage rates, falling abortions, and its highest birthrate in 20 years, Breitbart reports. Marriage is up by 43 percent since 2010, while divorce has dropped by 22.5 percent in the same period. This demographic turnaround has not been an accident, but the fruit of deliberate programs to promote marriage and the family while defending Hungary’s cultural identity and Christian roots.

“After we won the election in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, we decided to build a family-friendly country and to strengthen families raising children”, said Hungary’s Minister for the Family, Catalan Novak.

Standing firm in its position despite fierce opposition from the socialist left, the Orbán government enacted legislation resulting in “a comprehensive family-support system, a family-friendly tax system, a housing program, 800,000 new jobs, and many opportunities to create a balance between life and work”, Ms. Novak stated.

“We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe. People in the West are responding to this with immigration”, Prime Minister Orbán said at the State of the Nation address in Budapest in February.

Be fruitful and multiply or be replaced. Those are the choices. Choose wisely.

Darkstream: the Game of Thrones finale

My take on the finale of A Game of Thrones relied somewhat upon this article on Scientific American explaining the way in which the shift from George Martin's sociological storytelling to Hollywood's psychological storytelling all but ruined the HBO show, but allowed for a moderately satisfying end to the saga nevertheless.

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

This is why it's going to be challenging to make A Throne of Bones properly. But we'll find a way to do it, and the success of A Game of Thrones is why we'll have the opportunity.

What an astonishing surprise

Nearly one-third of immigrant children are unrelated to their "parents":

DNA tests of migrant children arrested at the US-Mexico border with their families have revealed the minors were not related to the adults accompanying them, the US media have reported. In a pilot program conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) DNA tests were being taken of immigrants who are suspected of arriving at America’s southern border with children who were not theirs.

“There’s been some concern about, ‘Are they stepfathers or adopted fathers?’” an official involved in the system's temporary rollout told Washington Examiner. “Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members.”

It's going to be tough on all the sanctimonious conservative virtue-signalers once they understand that they have been actively championing sex trafficking on a scale the world has never seen before. And so much for the "keeping families together" argument against repatriation.

Then they came for Thomas Jefferson

And Andrew Jackson:

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg fully supports erasing the names of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from titles of prestigious annual political dinners around the country, due to their slave-owning history.

The Indiana politician shared his view on The Hugh Hewitt Show Friday after the radio host asked if Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves.

'Yeah, we're doing that in Indiana. I think it's the right thing to do,' Buttigieg said ahead of his June 15 appearance at the event that is now named the Blue Commonwealth Dinner in his state.... He said scrubbing the names of the 1801-1809 President Jefferson and 1829-1837 7th President Jackson from event titles was not an attempt to erase history.

However he regards the move as a way to not only acknowledge the damage of the enslavement of people but to make it clear racism still thrives in America.

'The real reason I think there is a lot of pressure on this is the relationship between the past and present that we're finding in a million different ways that racism isn't some curiosity out of the past that we're embarrassed about but moved on from,' he said. 'It's alive. It's well. It's hurting people and it's one of the main reasons to be in politics today is to try to change or reverse the harms that went along with that.'

It is always Year Zero for the antichrists, whether they call themselves montagnards, liberals, socialists, progressives, or SJWs. And yet, the Fox News crowd loves this guy:

Pete Buttigieg received a standing ovation from the crowd at the end of his Fox News town hall in Claremont, New Hampshire Sunday night.

No one knows anything

Especially the so-called experts:

The idea for the most important study ever conducted of expert predictions was sparked in 1984, at a meeting of a National Research Council committee on American-Soviet relations. The psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock was 30 years old, by far the most junior committee member. He listened intently as other members discussed Soviet intentions and American policies. Renowned experts delivered authoritative predictions, and Tetlock was struck by how many perfectly contradicted one another and were impervious to counterarguments.

Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.

The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

As it happens, I've occasionally taken part in the project as one of the forecasters, although I haven't even logged in to the system for years. The one time I was moderately active, my team was in second place, although that was largely thanks to one guy who was easily the best in our group. If I recall correctly, I was better than the average forecaster, but not in the top ten percent. I still get emails from time to time asking me about the prospects for a Russian attack on Estonia before September and so forth, but I lost interest in it pretty quickly.

Anyhow, the article is right. Everyone is wrong about the future and most people are actually much more reliable as negative predictors, which I interpret as meaning that events proceed in a non-linear manner that is contrary to normal human expectations. That's my best guess as to why the future is so hard for everyone to predict, or even anticipate.

Barcelona Life Episode 6

The new episode of Barcelona Life is now available on Unauthorized.TV. If you thought the Roast Beast was something else, you'll definitely want to check out Jamon Jamon!

Rule by immigrant

Tucker Carlson correctly identifies the fundamental failure of the US immigration system that was created by the confluence of immigration and excessive democracy:

For the left, whether the country benefits is not the point. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar––herself a symbol of America’s failed immigration system if there ever was one, someone who hates this country coming here at public expense––spent yesterday demanding the abolition of ICE, the decriminalization of illegal immigration itself, and an end to all deportation programs. She demands open borders, the unlimited arrival of anyone who wants to come to America, whether they have anything to contribute or not, and by the way you get to pay for it.

Tom Wolfe saw this coming at the turn of the century. I doubt it escaped his attention that the disastrous 1965 Naturalization Act that destroyed the USA was championed by immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Did anybody high or low look for a Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to create a new tribute on the order of the Statue of Liberty for the nation that in the twentieth century, even more so than in the nineteenth, opened her arms to people from all over the globe—to Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, Ethiopians, Albanians, Senegalese, Guyanese, Eritreans, Cubans, as well as everybody else—and made sure they enjoyed full civil rights, including the means to take political power in a city the size of Miami if they could muster the votes?

And as soon as American immigration restrictions were relaxed in the 1960s, people of every land, every color, every religion, people from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, began pouring into the United States.
- Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

The Syrian false flag

Don't believe any of the new stories about Iranian "attacks" that are now beginning to appear as the neocons continue banging their idiot war drums. All of these purported justifications for military action in the Middle East and the Gulf are fraudulent and they have been for decades. It has now been reported that the "poison gas attacks" supposedly conducted by Syrian government forces were no more real than Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction".

A huge international news story broke last week, but I doubt you will hear about it anywhere else. It seems very likely that the decision we, France and the USA made in April 2018 to bomb Syria was based on a mistake as big as the fictional weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body which examines alleged incidents of the use of poison gas, has just confirmed to me that a devastating leaked document from its Dutch HQ is genuine.

The document, written by one of the OPCW’s most experienced investigators, shows that it is highly unlikely that gas canisters found at the scene of an alleged poison gas attack in Douma, Syria, were actually dropped from helicopters – as has been widely believed and claimed. The claim is crucial to the case for bombing Syria. A copy of the leaked document can be found on my blog on Mail Online.

Yet the OPCW’s official report on the event made no mention of any such doubts. What is going on? The OPCW is a valuable organisation, containing many fine people, with a noble purpose, but has it been placed under pressure, or even hijacked, by political forces which seek a justification for military intervention in Syria?

Given that a decision between war or peace, affecting the whole planet, could one day hang on its judgments, I think the world is entitled to an inquiry into what is happening behind its closed doors.

The treason committed by the FBI isn't the only treason that has been committed in the last twenty years. There are a whole host of warmongers in Washington DC whose lies are directly responsible for tens of thousands of American dead and wounded. And the inevitable false flags directed at Iran are the one thing that have real potential to derail the 2020 Trumpslide, but only if President Trump is foolish enough to fall for them:

Asked this week if the U.S. was going to war with Iran, Trump said simply: “I hope not.” Aware of the potential backlash from within his party, the president is trying to play down the possibility of hostilities. He held the door open for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and malign activities in the region amid reports that he was pushing back against his more hawkish advisers’ preference for a military solution.

Prominent Trump supporters offered a pointed warning on Friday about the prospect of a new war, which they view as a direct violation of his “America First” pledge.

“It would be a disaster for him and for the country getting into another military engagement in the Middle East,” said Corey Stewart, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia. “It does concern me that the president has (national security adviser John) Bolton and a lot of these neocons advising him. That’s clearly not what he ran on and what most Americans want.”

No more war in the Middle East. It is neither America's concern nor America's business. If the New Palestinians want war with Iran, then they can go and fight it themselves. It would certainly be entertaining to see Ben Shapiro, Bill Kristol, and Max Boot go up against the Revolutionary Guard.