Science fiction ethics

I'm trying to think of a less useful, more intrinsically irrelevant concept than utilizing science fiction as a lens with which to consider the ethics of war....

Generally, three families of theories about the ethics of war have some credibility or prestige within modern liberal democracies. We can question whether the third is technically an ethical theory, but it plays the same role, and I think it does contain at least a residual ethical element:

• Pacifist theories, which, with limited exceptions and variations, rule out acts of violence.
• Just war theories.
• International relations realist (or simply "realist") theories of war. These are basically theories of enlightened self-interest.

Before going further, it’s important to note that there are other approaches that now lack credibility among thoughtful people in liberal democracies. These approaches emphasize such things as empire, personal and national glory, spreading religion or ideology, the idea of war as a kind of adventure or grand game, or as character building, and so on. A whole range of such approaches were once popular, but are now commonly viewed with disdain.

Historically, that is a recent development. These approaches to war lost credibility as a result of the horror of trench warfare in World War I, the immense destructiveness of the atomic bombs used in World War II, and the hydrogen bombs developed soon after, and doubtless other historical developments. But at least until World War I, these older ideas had great currency.

Prior to that time, few narratives of future wars included warnings against the horrors of war as such, or against the horrors of a future form of war. Where they expressed warnings, as they often did, it was usually against geopolitical and military vulnerability, as with “The Battle of Dorking”, a novella by G.T. Chesney (1871), and, in the Australian context, The Yellow Wave by Kenneth Mackay (1895). The great exception here is The War in the Air by H.G. Wells (1908), which I’ll return to in more detail.

The article is not entirely uninteresting for anyone who is interested in military history or strategy. But the idea that science fiction offers anything - anything at all - to say on the subject is objectively risible. And this intrinsic irrelevance is underlined by the way that the opinions of "thoughtful people in liberal democracies" are meaningful, let alone definitive.

600% and counting

News of the availability of the 2020 Junior Classics is has observably spread as far as Australia and Hong Kong. If you are similarly interested in acquiring one of the greatest homeschooling assets ever printed, whether in digital, hardcover, or deluxe leather editions, you can do so here.

The campaign owner is aware that the campaign cannot be found by searching for it on Google or the crowdfunding site. That is by design, so there is no need to repeatedly inform us of that fact. If you wish to help spread the news about the , please feel free to post the animated GIF above with a direct link to the campaign attached. And thanks very much to the Classics backer who created the banner.

In other crowdfunding news, we are aware of about 500 AH Vol. I omnibuses that have not yet shipped due to a problem with the order formatting. We are in the process of fixing that with the printer, so if you have not yet received your omnibus, just sit tight, as this is just a minor procedural problem.

UPDATE: The Heirloom perk is intentionally priced higher than the sum of its parts because certain backers have requested a means of providing additional support to the project.

UPDATE: Both the leather and the case-laminated hardcover editions are printed on acid-free paper that meets the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 standards for archival quality paper.

Repatriations are officially on the table

What the media pretends is unthinkable is already happening:

Mexico has deported over 300 Indian nationals to New Delhi, the National Migration Institute (INM) said late on Wednesday, calling it an unprecedented transatlantic deportation. The move follows a deal Mexico struck with the United States in June, vowing to significantly curb U.S.-bound migration in exchange for averting U.S. tariffs on Mexican exports.

"It is unprecedented in INM's history - in either form or the number of people - for a transatlantic air transport like the one carried out on this day," INM said in a statement.

The 310 men and one woman that INM said were in Mexico illegally were sent on a chartered flight, accompanied by federal immigration agents and Mexico's National Guard. They arrived in New Delhi on Friday.

Isn't it remarkable what a little standing firm can accomplish? The ease with which China has caused both the NBA and Hollywood to kneel demonstrates that the US government and other US organizations could easily break the mainstream narrative, it only requires a little backbone of the sort that has hitherto been lacking.

YouTube deplatforms Red Ice

This news is hardly surprising:

Yes, today they did it. YouTube deleted our channel without notice. Special thanks goes out to all our members for your incredible support. You ensure that we can continue. No matter how much they limit and stifle our ability to speak, share our perspectives, talk about news, events, history and the future, with your help can we continue to produce content.

It's great that nationalists are accepting their deplatforming with calm equanimity rather than the shock, horror, and tears of the average conservative, but their responses would be considerably more effective and consequential if the deplatformed would take legal action and make the rubble bounce. As long as no one resists, the deplatformings will continue.

Not being an expert on Swedish law, I can't analyze their probabilities of success, but as a general rule, European courts are extremely disfavorable to Google and Google-owned companies.

Kneel, Hollywood

And you know the sick freaks of Evilwood will kneel to power, as they always do, which is an indictment on the so-called "conservatives" of America:

In a shocking twist not unlike the ending of a Quentin Tarantino film or two, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's China box office ambitions appear to be going up in flames.

The critically acclaimed movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, had been approved for release in China on Oct. 25, but regulators have abruptly reversed course.

According to multiple sources close to the situation in Beijing, who asked not to be named because they weren't permitted to speak publicly about the matter, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's local release has been indefinitely put on hold.

The film would have been Tarantino's first proper release in China, and the country's enormous market was expected to help push the title's worldwide box office total past the $400 million mark (it has earned $366 million to date). The abrupt change-up comes as a blow to both Sony Pictures and the film's Chinese financier, Beijing-based Bona Film Group.

As The Hollywood Reporter reported exclusively in January, Bona took a sizable equity stake in Once Upon a Time, which gave the company participation in the film's worldwide box office, as well as distribution rights in Greater China. Bona's CEO Yu Dong and COO Jeffrey Chan are both prominently credited as executive producers of the film.

As is typical in China, no official explanation for the cancellation has been offered by Beijing regulators. Bona didn't reply to text messages and emails, and Sony's China office could not immediately be reached.

But the story swirling through the executive ranks of China's film industry Friday was that the decision stemmed from Tarantino's somewhat controversial portrayal of martial arts hero Bruce Lee, the only character of Chinese descent in the movie. Friends and family of the late Lee have blasted the director for the depiction, saying the real-life action star didn't behave as he's portrayed in the film.

According to sources close to Bona and China's Film Bureau, Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, made a direct appeal to China’s National Film Administration, asking that it demand changes to her father's portrayal.

It's amusing to see how the combination of Trump, Putin, and Xi is revealing the essential helplessness of the permanent inversives to everyone. The defeat of the West and the conquest of America has been shown to consist of nothing more than word spells cast by evil wizards of rhetoric upon an innocent and somewhat retarded people.

Ever notice how offending Christians is always defended as "artistic integrity" but they'll cast that integrity aside the moment anyone actually stands firm? Never take a wizard's spell at face value.

Spying on US conservatives in Ukraine

The Ukraine revelations take an unexpected turn, with reports of the State Department using Ukraine as a base to spy upon conservatives in the United States:

The prominent conservative figures — journalists and persons with ties to President Donald Trump — allegedly unlawfully monitored by the State Department in Ukraine at the request of ousted U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch include:

• Jack Posobiec
• Donald Trump Jr.
• Laura Ingraham
• Sean Hannity
• Michael McFaul (Obama’s ambassador to Russia)
• Dan Bongino
• Ryan Saavedra
• Rudy Giuliani
• Sebastian Gorka
• John Solomon
• Lou Dobbs
• Pamella Geller
• Sara Carter

Before this impeachment narrative finishes failing and disappears, a LOT of anti-Trump figures are going to be in prison.

China's grand strategy

An interesting perspective on what David Goldberg, for many years an opinion leader in the outdated "jump-to-China" plan, claims to perceive China's grand strategy to be.

China’s notion of what it means to be the world’s superpower is different from ours, though, and begs examination.

An Ideological and Economic Competitor

Earlier this month, Dr. Kiron Skinner, head of Policy Planning at the State Department, had this to say: “In China, we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago, and I think it’s also striking that it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

 As Victor Davis Hanson observed, Japan was, in fact, a great power competitor, and a formidable one, from its crushing defeat of Russia in 1905 to the end of the Second World War.

To put the present situation in context: Japan’s GDP [Gross Domestic Product] in 1940 was one-fifth of America’s and its population only half. China’s GDP is roughly the same as ours (25 percent larger than ours in purchasing power parity, according to the International Monetary Fund, or 30 percent smaller in nominal terms at the present exchange rate). Its population is more than four times [that of the U.S.]. China’s investment in frontier technologies exceeds America’s by a wide margin. It also graduates four times as many STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] Bachelor’s degrees and twice as many doctorates—and the skills gap is widening. One-third of [China’s] new labor market entrants have bachelor’s degrees, and one-third of those are in engineering.

Today, the two economies are of roughly equal size, but China is growing twice as fast. President Trump has said repeatedly that our economy is doing well while China’s economy is doing badly. He is misinformed. The perception that China is weak is widespread in Washington, and evidently contributed to the recent breakdown in trade negotiations. That is a strategic miscalculation that may have baleful consequences. China fears nothing but America’s technological edge, and that edge is eroding at an alarming pace.

National Principles and Imperial Designs

Dr. Skinner is broadly correct: We have never engaged a strategic rival with resources and skills on this scale. Today’s situation is radically different in another respect. In America and China we observe the confrontation of the national and the imperial principle in their purest form. America is history’s most successful nation-state. Its premise is the sanctity of the individual, the heritage of the English Protestants who in the 17th century envisioned a biblical republic. When I last had the privilege of addressing you three years ago, I spoke about our unifying political culture and its ever-present theme of the individual’s pilgrimage toward redemption. Our sense of the sacred in every citizen has proven a stronger and more enduring bond than the ethnocentric nationalisms of the Old World.

China is the oldest and—despite intermittent breakdowns—the most successful empire in history, subjecting the interest of the individual to the imperatives of the state. Unlike America, China never assimilated the scores of ethnicities who comprise its enormous population. Instead, it orders them into an imperial system ruled by a centralized elite and communicates by a system of imperial ideograms rather than a common tongue. It maintains a ruthless meritocracy that filters talent by standardized examinations. It has always viewed its people as raw material for imperial power and, within living memory, has sacrificed frightful numbers of them. The imperial order is perpetually at risk of fracture, and the succession of dynasties is interrupted by episodes of internecine war and unimaginable suffering. But the imperial system perpetually restores itself because the Chinese have had no alternative to warlords and anarchy.

Who is this "we", (((David)))? What Goldberg, aka Spengler, omits from his analysis is the fact that the West is no longer the West, but rather, a failed and parasitized successor to what used to be the West. There is no us, there is no Judeo-Christian "sense of the sacred in every citizen" in the current Post-West. What Goldberg falsely claims is "a stronger and more enduring bond" than the nationalisms of the genuine West is not only intrinsically weak, it is leading directly to general collapse and a war of many tribes that will greatly serve China's long terms strategic interests.

Goldberg's analysis is obvious trash, resting as it does on such observably false assertions. But it is very useful to know it, because it informs us of what the current post-Western elite wants to believe and what the basis of their future actions will be.

What will Kevin do?

The Legend Chuck Dixon considers the implications of the head of Marvel Studios being given responsibility for Marvel Comics on Unauthorized. The video is free for everyone, not just subscribers.

Col Kratman on the Kurds

Long before the recent media campaign on behalf of the Kurds - which of course is nothing more than a pathetic neoclown attempt to put pressure on the God-Emperor Trump - Tom Kratman wrote about why the Kurds are not a people who merit help, much less sympathy, from anyone on the planet:

My first experience of the Kurds – rather, of how the rest of the area thinks of and feels about them – was before I’d ever met my first one. This was at a majlis, in the town of Judah (or Goodah), Saudi Arabia, sometime in December or so, 1990. Citizenship is kind of an iffy and flexible concept in that part of the world, so there were folk from Saudi, from Oman, from the Emirates. There was even one Arab who insisted he was a citizen of the Gulf Cooperation Council, since he was a fully documented citizen of so many places in the GCC. I had my doubts right up until he pulled out a bilingual ID card which, indeed, did seem to list him as a citizen of the GCC. One of the attendees had brought with him a book detailing the results of the chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja by the army and air force of Saddam Hussein.

It was really heartbreaking, all those picture of gassed, dead, discolored, and decomposing Kurdish kids, who are, in fact, every bit as cute as the papers and television made them out to be. At least when they’re not dead they are. My team sergeant, Sig, and I were duly appalled and sickened.

The Arabs, though, didn’t seem to understand. To paraphrase, “What’s the problem? Don’t you understand that these were _Kurds_ who got gassed?”

At the time, I found that attitude completely inexplicable.

Fast forward a few months; we’ve incited the Kurds and Shia to rise up and overthrow Saddam. They didn’t, of course, while such an uprising would have looked difficult and might have done us some good. Oh, no; instead the Shia – whose rebellion was spontaneous, anyway – waited until it looked like the Iraqi Army was crushed and such an uprising would be easy. The Kurds – who were organized – waited even longer.

Sorry, boys, but when we offer you a quid pro quo, that doesn’t translate into “free lunch.” Moreover, when we’ve already offered someone a cease­fire it’s a bit late to try to get us to start hostilities again. In short, we owed them nothing.

Fast forward, again, to late May, 1991. I’d come home from the Middle East, hung around a while, and been sent back, this time to Operation Provide Comfort, the Kurdish Rescue, there to quasi govern a few towns, run refugee camps, coordinate humanitarian relief, and such like. While we’re waiting in the camp on the Turkish side of the border, not too far from Silopi, overwatched by a Turkish police fort on a hill, some Kurds got in position to fire at the fort such that, should the fort return fire, the Turks will be shooting at us. So much for gratitude from people you’re trying to save, eh?

Fortunately, Turkish discipline held firm and enlightened Kurdish dreams of advancing the cause of having a homeland of their own by getting their rescuers killed came to naught.

President Trump's position of not defending the Kurds from our actual allies, the Turks, is legally, militarily, and morally correct. If anything, the US military is treaty-bound to defend the Turks against Kurdish incursions as per its NATO obligations.

And, of course, those tactics very likely explain this near-incident between Turkish and US forces:

The Pentagon confirmed Friday that US troops in Syria "came under artillery fire from Turkish positions" and demanded that Turkey halt all operations that could require the US to take "immediate defensive action."

This is what hope looks like

Young white Americans understand, in a way most of their elders simply cannot, that they are caught up in an existential war against them, and they are desperate for the kind of hope the God-Emperor is providing them:

DONALD Trump's rally in Minneapolis has turned heads after people pointed out that it looked more like a Justin Bieber concert rather than a political meeting. Teenage girls and boys were seen crying tears of joy as the US president talked about his win in the 2016 election to a 20,000-strong crowd in Minnesota.

Fake solar power

So much for the idea of powering your home with solar panels:

One valuable lesson has been learned from the California blackouts concerning the greens' vaunted solar power.

People with solar panels fitted to their homes have long acted under the impression that these granted them some immunity to blackouts.  They now know better.  Those who went to the heavy expense of purchasing and installing solar panels are in the same situation as their neighbors: no light, no heat, no power.

How does this make sense?  If you've got a system that generates power all by itself, with no outside aid or assistance necessary, then it's a sure thing that it'll continue generating power even after the grid itself is shut down, right?

Ah, but we're dealing here with corporate policy.  And when that enters the picture, then sense of any kind quickly departs the stage.

It turns out that solar panels do not supply power to the homes they are attached to.  Instead, they transmit power out into the grid itself.  A complex system of credits is employed to reimburse the homeowner.

Forget being reliant upon it; even being connected to a centralized system turns out to be a fatal flaw when the system collapses. But hey, at least they got a tax break for installing them, right?

He is not your father figure

A Roosh reader observes that Jordan Peterson's parenting skills have turned out to be more than a little suboptimal.

Peterson's daughter finally confirms she's "separated" from her husband and has been "co-parenting" (not that this is remotely a surprise to anyone who has been glancing at her Instagram etc.)

Not that this is a new thought here but it's rather damning that his daughter has turned out be "attempting to find herself" (in the usual fashion) even with a toddler child and seemingly very supportive and at least somewhat redpilled father. Very disheartening, obviously the fame and attention got to her head a bit but I'm well past the point of seeing Peterson as any sort of personal role model. Having read 12 Rules twice I can tell you there's some valuable proto-morality that can set others in the right direction but "You will know them by their fruits" (Matt. 7:16a).

Perhaps we've seen enough of Peterson's fruits to move on to deeper traditions as a whole.

This guy gets it.

Peterson made millions writing a book telling people how to live. But look at how someone turns out that had all the benefit of his advise 24/7.

No one who has read Jordanetics will be even remotely surprised by this. Jordan Peterson has been a terrible parent since he was passively permitting other children to mistreat his daughter at the park. The fact that a lot of young men have been looking up to Peterson as an ersatz father figure promises more than a few additional disasters in the future.

UPDATE: Seriously suboptimal.

She shows a screenshot of her prescription history. Two of those prescriptions are used to treat herpes.

Trumpslide 2020 cometh

Moody’s has been highly accurate in predicting the outcome of elections dating back to 1980. The only time the company was incorrect was in 2016, when it predicted Hillary Clinton would narrowly win.

Three different economic models employed by the analytics agency suggest that Trump’s Electoral College victory is on course to surpass the 304-227 count that secured him victory over ‘Crooked’ Hillary.

The projections are based on economic factors, specifically how confident consumers are with their financial situation.

They're already starting to use words like "steamroll". Remember, you heard it here first.


UPDATE: In related news, the God-Emperor's DOJ announces a massive blow against the Swamp:

South Korean National and Hundreds of Others Charged Worldwide in the Takedown of the Largest Darknet Child Pornography Website

Dozens of Minor Victims Who Were Being Actively Abused by the Users of the Site Rescued

Jong Woo Son, 23, a South Korean national, was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia for his operation of Welcome To Video, the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content.  The nine-count indictment was unsealed today along with a parallel civil forfeiture action.  Son has also been charged and convicted in South Korea and is currently in custody serving his sentence in South Korea.  An additional 337 site users residing in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. as well as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia have been arrested and charged.

No wonder they wanted so desperately to impeach him. The noose around them just keeps inexorably tightening. And remember, Pizzagate is totally debunked because an actor filed a single shot at a computer....

The Democrats back down

Remember that impeachment thing? You know, because the fate of the republic was at stake due to the high crimes of the president? Yeah, well, forget about that:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday she will not stage a vote on the House floor to officially launch an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The decision came after Democratic leaders, returning to Washington following a two-week recess, had reached out to members of their diverse caucus to gauge the party's support for such a vote.

After back-to-back meetings with party leaders and then the full caucus, Pelosi announced that no such vote would take place. Democratic aides emphasized, however, that the process remains fluid and that Pelosi may reverse course and stage such a vote at any point in the future.

"There's no requirement that we have a vote, and so at this time we will not be having a vote," Pelosi told reporters during a last-minute press briefing in the Capitol.

President Trump is using their emotional projection as bait. It's one of the more brilliant political tactics I've ever observed; it's worthy of an entire chapter by Machiavelli. What he's doing is accusing himself of things that he knows they are doing. So they demand the very investigations that he wants, thereby forcing the media to extensively cover the very topics it wants to bury.

24 hours, 300 percent

The Junior Classics campaign is going extremely well, having hit 300 percent of goal in less than 24 hours. You can acquire a digital set, a hardcover set, or a deluxe leatherbound set by backing the campaign.

The 2020 edition is about 85 percent 1918 and 15 percent 1958. This is because the 1918 volumes are generally better, but a) one of the original volumes was half-comprised of Alice in Wonderland whereas the later volume had a better and broader selection of stories, and b) the stories contained in the 1918 Volume 9 Stories of Today are seriously outdated and mediocre in comparison with the relatively timeless stories contained in the 1958 Volume 9, Sport and Adventure.

If you want multiple sets, just run through the buying process as many times as you require. You will receive multiple backer numbers.

The digital editions are both EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) format.

The Dark Ages, new and improved!

The Z-man doesn't get the etymological origin of the term "Dark Ages" quite right, but he raises a good question about whether the West has already entered another one:

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

As I explained in TIA, Petrarch's term was the reversal of an earlier Christian perspective of the time before the coming of the Light of the World by an embittered Italian patriot looking at the ruins of the Roman Empire and despairing of the relatively barbaric German domination of his time.

Which is hauntingly similar to the situation which the people of the West may soon be facing. That is why it is so important to preserve knowledge now. Barbarians have never cared about building or minded living amidst filth, which is why we are already at the point where the fate of our indoor plumbing is in doubt.

It's not enough to know about things. It's not even enough to know how to maintain them. It is vital to learn how to design, develop, and build things if civilized society is to be preserved. We're already bringing back the Junior Classics, but perhaps we also need to create a new series, Core Civilization, comprised of books that teach the core basics of everything from architecture to gardening and water engineering. Because it's clearly time to begin thinking about these things.

I started to think about those people living in the Roman Empire wondering why the water no longer comes from the big stone thingy anymore. Some may have remembered their ancestors working on them for some reason, but they no longer recall why. The people who knew how and why those aqueducts worked were long gone. No one was around who could figure out how to make them work again, because they lacked the capacity to do it.

Fake News is very, very fake

In fact, it's considerably more fake than even the average skeptic imagines:

I didn’t have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: «oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel’. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.

We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.

It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.

While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.

So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: ‘I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ‘

‘Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.’

That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:’Young man, you didn’t see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?’

It's entirely obvious that the world is very different than we were taught to believe, and is actually very different than even the cynical and the skeptical observe it to be.

Mr. Dress Up

Warning: language.

Jordan Peterson is a mirror

He reflects back to the insufficiently aware precisely what they want to see:

You can pretty safely judge someone's politics from his attitude toward Jordan Peterson.  We on the right listen to see if he makes sense.  That's because our attitudes are shaped by reality.  Leftists, unimpressed by reality and anticipating something they don't like, shout him down.  Media interviewers stumble over their own assumptions, struggle with their biases, and leap to conclusions rather than grasp that the world is complex and simplistic answers just don't cut it.  As a result, they regularly end up looking shallow, uninformed and foolish.

Clearly this gentleman of the Right has not listened closely enough to Jordan Peterson or he would realize that Mr. 12 Rules for Meth does not make anything that even remotely approximates sense. Not that his Christian fans have noticed that he's not on their side.

In a joyful ceremony, Christian leaders gathered to grant Jordan Peterson the status of honorary Christian. Though the Canadian professor has never identified as a Christian and does not attend any church, a vote was taken and the decision was made unanimously that Peterson had earned his salvation and could be drafted into heaven by popular vote.

The Junior Classics, 2020 edition

The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education of every child.

This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference to individual tastes and needs, will help many children enjoy good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child's enjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual's enjoyment of his mental occupations.

CHARLES ELIOT
PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
1918

This is an essential action to help preserve the hard-worn knowledge of Western civilization. To back the campaign to revive the Junior Classics by REDACTED PRESS, please visit the crowdfunding campaign page.

All print editions will ship to the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The shipping cost is included. The digital editions - EPUB and MOBI formats - are included with all of the print edition sets.

The neoclown narrative

The neoclowns are desperately trying to spin the situation in Syria to their advantage:

President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four American adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State.

Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team.

The fact of the matter is that there wasn't a damn thing the president could do about Turkey's decision to send troops into Syria. As it stands, given that Turkey is a NATO ally attacking an "American adversary", the United States would appear to have a military obligation to aid the Turks in their incursion into Syrian territory regardless of who happens to be their target.

The idea that the 50 nukes at Incirlik Air Base are being "held hostage" by Turkey is nothing more than shamelessly manipulative rhetoric. They are at no risk and can be utilized or withdrawn at will; the Turks have no ability to interfere with them in any way. But it's just another way of trying to make the God-Emperor look inept and foolish, and scare the uninformed into supporting the neoclown program for sending American troops to the the Middle East.

President Trump is just doing what he does best, breaking the unwritten rules and gentleman's agreements in order to lay the foundation for a substantive change of an untenable situation.

Sony converges Cinderella

No tale is too classic for the Devil Mouse Sony to resist its urge to destroy:

Actor and LGBTQ activist Billy Porter has confirmed that he will play the role of the Fairy Godmother in James Corden’s forthcoming live-action movie musical Cinderella.
“I have a couple of movies that I’m working on,” Porter announced on the New Yorker‘s Instagram Stories. “I’m gonna be playing the fairy godmother in the new Cinderella movie with Camila Cabello.”

E! News reports that the 22-year-old Cabello will play the role of Cinderella while also helping to write the film’s music. Porter and Cabello are currently the only two actors announced for the remake, which is described as a “modern re-imagining of the classic fairytale.”

See, he's a FAIRY godmother. Get it! So clever. So brave. Thank you for this.

Inside CNN

The upcoming Project Veritas release promises to be very interesting indeed, as the investigators are being investigated:

This week, a CNN insider will blow the whistle and through Project Veritas will release dozens of recordings made of officials at the highest levels of CNN, revealing a political agenda, bias and misconduct hidden from public view.

This series of tapes — which we think will be the biggest story of the year for Project Veritas — blends two extraordinary series of events; a brave insider secretly recording at work and a hard-hitting piece of hidden camera muckraking into one of the supposed “most trusted names in news.”

As the revelations about the disgraced Matt Lauer have demonstrated, the media tends to be considerably worse behaved and more degenerate than the people at whom they point and cluck.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

Nothing works anymore: construction edition

Forget bridges, highways, and high-speed trains. Major US cities can't even build simple buildings without drama anymore:

A large portion of a Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans collapsed Saturday morning, killing at least two people and injuring 20 others, authorities said. The building bordering the city's historic French Quarter is considered unstable and officials said further collapse is possible.

Three people were initially reported missing, though one has since been found, according to the New Orleans Fire Department. Authorities said no one on the ground was injured in the collapse.

According to Mayor LaToya Cantrell, 112 people were in the building at the time of collapse. Though the search for those missing was suspended for the evening, Cantrell confirmed that rescuers found two bodies but were unable to retrieve them.

VFM Bear said it best: it's the indoor plumbing that I'm going to miss the most.

Import the Third World, become the Third World. This really isn't that hard. Ain't immigration and diversity grand?

So it turns out the guy behind the collapsed Hard Rock hotel, Praveen Kailas  was previously convicted of ripping off the state, and was allegedly cutting corners by employing unqualified labor.

The collapse of science

Illustrating once more that science is dependent upon technology rather than the other way around, a petty Python script bug may force the retraction of more than 100 published scientific studies:

Scientists in Hawaiʻi have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper.

The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

“This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned,” the new paper reads. “Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information].”

Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria. The aim of the project was to "try to find compounds that are effective against cancer,” Williams said.

To help understand how devastating this sort of thing could be for the profession and practice of science, consider the very frightening possibility that modern science increasingly relies upon the sort of people responsible for enhancing your user experience of Skype and manning Twitter "customer support".