The longest American war 7

We would like to know your opinions of President Trump’s policy, which he announced yesterday, towards Afghanistan and the war America is still waging there against the Taliban.

Below is a video clip in which Lt. Col. (Ret.) Michael Waltz talks approvingly about the speech and the policy to Fox Special Report host Bret Baier.

Michael Waltz is the author of Warrior Diplomat.

We quote the advertisment for it:

Grappling with centuries-old feuds, defeating a shrewd insurgency, and navigating the sometimes paralyzing bureaucracy of the U.S. military are issues that prompt sleepless nights for both policy makers in Washington DC and soldiers at war, albeit for different reasons. Few, however, have dealt with these issues in the White House situation room and on the front line. Michael G. Waltz has done just that, working as a policy advisor to Vice President Richard B. Cheney and also serving in the mountains of Afghanistan as a Green Beret, directly implementing strategy in the field that he helped devise in Washington.

In Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret’s Battles from Washington to Afghanistan, Waltz shares his unique firsthand experiences, revealing the sights, sounds, emotions, and complexities involved in the war in Afghanistan. Waltz also highlights the policy issues that have plagued the war effort throughout the past decade, from the drug trade, to civilian casualties, to a lack of resources in comparison to Iraq, to the overall coalition strategy. At the same time, he points out that stabilizing Afghanistan and the region remains crucial to national security and that a long-term commitment along the lines of South Korea or Germany is imperative if America is to remain secure.

Posted under Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Videos, War by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Tagged with , , ,

This post has 7 comments.

Permalink

Corruption, crime, and clumsy cover-up in the Democratic Party 88

First, Mark Steyn’s comments on the case:

Next, Andrew C. McCarthy writes at National Review:

There  is a very intriguing investigation of the Awan family. There are about six of them — brothers, spouses, and attached others — who were retained by various Democrats as computer-systems managers at compensation levels dwarfing that of the average congressional staffer. The Awans fell under suspicion in late 2016 and were canned at the beginning of February, on suspicion of mishandling the sensitive information to which they’d had access: scanning members’ e-mail, transferring files to remote servers under the Awans’ control, stealing computer equipment and hard drives (some of which they attempted to destroy when they were found out), along with a sideline in procurement fraud.

The hard drives were hammered to destroy them of course, just as Hillary Clinton’s were (according to the FBI).  Hammered! Every blow declares a great fear of what might be found on them.

Which is?

What else but proof of crimes committed by their owners and associates?

We should say that almost all of them were canned. Hina Alvi and her husband, Imran Awan, stayed on, even though they were no longer authorized to have access to the House computer system (i.e., to do the work they were hired to do). Alvi continued to be retained by Congressman Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, for another four weeks. During that time, we now know, she was tying up loose financial ends, packing her house up, and pulling three young daughters out of school — just before skedaddling to Pakistan.

What Imran Awan was arrested for (on Monday, July 24, 2017), and what he and his wife are openly suspected of, is a scam to cheat a federal credit union out of some  $300,000. They made “several false statements about their qualifications for a credit line and their intended use of the money”. McCarthy thinks that “the strongest part of [the] case … involves the schemers’ transferring the loot to their native Pakistan”. This however was not mentioned in the indictment.

Why?

And questions as to why proliferate as more of the story unfolds:

Awan was kept on the payroll for about six more months by Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman, and Clinton insider. She finally fired him only after he was arrested at the airport right before a scheduled flight to Qatar, from whence he planned to join Alvi in Pakistan.

Why?

There are grounds to suspect blackmail, given (a) the staggering sums of money paid to the Awans over the years, (b) the sensitive congressional communications to which they had access, (c) the alleged involvement of Imran Awan and one of his brothers in a blackmail-extortion scheme against their stepmother, and (d) Wasserman Schultz’s months of protecting Awan and potentially impeding the investigation. There are also, of course, questions about stolen information.

And why

Why did the FBI and the Capitol Police allow Hina Alvi to leave the country on March 5 when there were grounds to arrest her at Dulles Airport? Why did they wait to charge her until last week — by which time she was safely in Pakistan, from which it will likely be impossible to extradite her for prosecution? What, moreover, about Awan’s brothers and other apparent accomplices? What has become of them since they were fired by the House almost seven months ago?

Imran Awan’s sudden arrest in late July meant the Justice Department would finally have to file formal charges in court. Thus, there was hope that we’d finally get some answers. Instead, the indictment raises still more questions.

Why, why, why?

To begin with, it is not the easiest thing to get one’s hands on the indictment. The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. There is no press release about the indictment on the office’s website, though U.S. attorneys’ offices routinely issue press releases and make charging documents available in cases of far less national prominence. (I found the indictment through the Orlando Sentinel, which obtained and posted it in conjunction with the paper’s report on the filing of charges.)

By the way, the U.S. attorney’s office is currently led by Channing D. Phillips, an Obama holdover who was never confirmed. Still awaiting Senate confirmation is Jessie Liu, nominated by President Trump in June. …

And here comes the big one, underplayed …

Steven Wasserman, Representative Wasserman Schultz’s brother, has been an assistant U.S. attorney in the office for many years. I have seen no indication that he has any formal role in the case [emphasis added – ed]  …

What is clear, however, is that the office is low-keying the Awan prosecution.

But why?

The indictment itself is drawn very narrowly. All four charges flow from a financial-fraud conspiracy of short duration. Only Imran Awan and his wife are named as defendants. There is no reference to Awan-family perfidy in connection with the House communications system.

Why not?

More bizarre still: There is not a word about Alvi’s flight to Pakistan, nor Imran Awan’s failed attempt to follow her there. This is not an oversight. The omission appears quite intentional.

It is common Justice Department practice, in pleading a conspiracy indictment, to allege that the scheme began “on or about” its starting date and continued “up to and including the date of the filing of this indictment”. Strictly speaking, a conspiracy ends when the crime that is its objective has been completed. But there is no requirement that a specific end date be set forth in the indictment. Therefore, prosecutors go as long as they can — i.e., right up to the date the grand jury voted to indict — to give themselves the widest berth possible to argue that evidence damaging to the defense is relevant and admissible. But that is not what happened in the Awan indictment.

The Justice Department alleges that the conspiracy took place “from on or about December 12, 2016 through on or about February 27, 201″. February 27 was six days before Alvi fled and five months before Awan was arrested trying to leave the country. This makes no sense. Indeed, it does not even make sense in the context of the narrow scheme prosecutors have charged: Although the indictment says the conspiracy ended on February 27, it alleges a relevant $83,000 interbank transfer occurred on February 28 (see indictment, paragraphs 8 and 22). That is, prosecutors assert that a money transfer supposedly in furtherance of the conspiracy happened a day after the conspiracy was already over. That is surely just a mistake — anybody can screw up a date.

There is, by contrast, no apparent explanation for omitting from a fraudulent cash-transfer prosecution the fact that the conspirators undertook to transfer themselves to the foreign country where they’d sent the money. Why would prosecutors leave that out of their indictment? Why give Awan’s defense a basis to claim that, since the indictment does not allege anything about flight to Pakistan, the court should bar any mention of it during the trial? In fact, quite apart from the manifest case-related reasons to plead instances of flight, a competent prosecutor would have included them in the indictment simply to underscore that Awan is a flight risk who should have onerous bail conditions or even be detained pretrial.

We must also ask, again: Why did the FBI allow Alvi to flee? Before she boarded her March 5 flight to Qatar (en route to Pakistan), agents briefly detained her. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents had already searched her baggage and found $12,400 in cash. As I have pointed out, it is a felony to move more than $10,000 in U.S. currency out of the country unless one completes the required government report … There was no indication that she did so in the complaint affidavit submitted to the court when Awan was arrested last month.

By the time Alvi fled, the Awans had been under investigation by various federal agencies for at least three months.

The FBI was sufficiently attuned to the Awans’ criminality that its agents went to the trouble of chasing Alvi to the airport.

If she didn’t fill out the required form, she should have been arrested for the currency violation. Is it possible that, rather than arresting her, federal agents instructed her to complete the form on the spot? One would hope not, but even in such an unlikely event, Alvi would undoubtedly have made false statements about the provenance of the cash. That would also have been a felony, providing more grounds for her arrest.

Why let her go, especially when, as its agent told the court in the aforementioned affidavit, the FBI “does not believe that Alvi has any intention to return to the United States”?

Why again and again.

More bizarre: Why not include Alvi’s flight — as well as Awan’s later attempt to go on the lam — in describing the money-transfer scheme charged in the indictment? Patently, these episodes are damning proof of fraudulent intent, which prosecutors must establish at trial if they are to convict Awan. Did prosecutors fail to mention the flight evidence in hope of diverting attention from the government’s decision to let Alvi flee? Again, one would hope not, but if not, what could the explanation be?

To summarize, the indictment is an exercise in omission.

Nothing about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged, prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what should be their best evidence.

There is something very strange going on here.

Something strange? No. Something nasty and disgraceful, but not strange. Nasty and disgraceful is business as usual in the Democratic Party.

Eurofeminists and the Islamic law of female obedience 122

Federica Mogherini, the “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, recently went to Iran to attend the inauguration of the regime’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian expatriot living in Europe, writes at Gatestone:

Others who accepted Iran’s invitation were North Koreans, members of Hezbollah, and leaders of Hamas. All three of these groups are known for cruelty, especially against women, and crimes against humanity.

Federica Mogherini is a Communist, feminist, typical Eurocrat.

The writer does not call her a Communist. He calls her a “social democrat”. She is, however, a lifelong Communist. The Italian Communist Party, of which she became a member in her mid-teens, was founded by Gramsci, the planner behind “the long march [of the Left] through the institutions [of the Western world]”. His plan has been executed with astonishing success, consummated by the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States (and now frustrated at last to the unappeasably fury of the Left by the election of President Donald Trump).

From Mogherini’s Wikipedia entry:

Federica Mogherini was born on 16 June 1973 in Rome, Italy … [She] attended the Sapienza University of Rome where she studied Political Science graduating with a specialization in Political Philosophy with a final dissertation entitled Relationship between religion and politics in Islam.

So she has more than a superficial knowledge of the ideology of Islam.

A member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation from 1988, in 1996 Mogherini joined the Youth Left after the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party and its transformation into a social democratic party. In 2001 she became a member of the National Council of the Democrats of the Left (DS), later serving on its National Executive Board and Political Committee. In 2003 she started working at the DS’s Foreign Affairs Section, where she was given responsibility for relations with international movements and parties, later becoming the team’s coordinator; after that she was given responsibility for Foreign Affairs and International Relations …  In this role, she oversaw the policies on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Middle East [ie. Israeli-Palestinian, pointless, ritualistic, so-called] peace process. Mogherini was in charge of maintaining relations with the Party of European Socialists, the [essentially Communist] Socialist International and other left-wing parties, including with the US Democratic Party.

Majid Rafizadeh proceeds:

By attending these kinds of events, social democrats such as her repeatedly endorse and give legitimacy to repressive states that implement Islamic law, Sharia. As Mogherini rubs elbows with men who have ordered the deaths of thousands of women (and men), she toes the line of their expectations. Instead of evolving their mindset, she allowed all of the women she claims to represent, to remain oppressed, as they have been for so very long.

Mogherini took the problem even a step farther. Instead of attempting to appear as if she were working toward progressive thinking among these violent Islamist leaders, she acted as if they were friends. She appeared proud to snap selfies with the representatives of this repressive regime. The story came under the international spotlight. Some of the deputies used their selfies with Mogherini to project their legitimacy to the international community while others created self-promotional posters of themselves with Mogherini wearing the mandatory hijab. …

This act of compliance [wearing a hijab] sends a brutal and unshakeable message. Women in these Islamist societies are controlled by laws which proclaim they must be hidden, or treated as their husband’s property. The hijab has become a symbol of this. Conversely, when Iranian leaders visit Mogherini’s country, they do not follow Italy’s rules. Instead, Italy follows the regime’s Islamist rules by offering appeasements such as covering up nude statues and not serving wine.

Mogherini – who years ago also agreed to be in a controversial picture taken with the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat – also played a crucial role in sealing the nuclear agreement for the Iranian regime and lifting the sanctions for those dictators. Instead of seeing these oppressors punished, she enabled them to have fewer limitations, as they still hold their own people beneath their thumbs and continue to be the cause of their suffering.

Mogherini then tweeted about her blog post, which states “It was an opportunity to talk again to Rouhani, to Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and to the Supreme Leader’s foreign policy advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati”.

Is this really an opportunity to be proud of and boast about? And what did she talk to them about?

While Mogherini is joyfully attending events with these Islamist leaders and rejoicing in having taking pictures beside them, does she ever think about the millions of women who are brutally oppressed under these Islamist regimes? Does she consider those women balled up and crying on the floor after being beaten by their husbands? Does she ever think about hundreds of people – men and women – being executed, often after sham trials, every year, and based on the Islamist laws in this country? While she shakes the hands of these men, does think of the nine-year-old girls who are “legally” being forced into marriage with the government’s approval?

Where are all the women’s rights, liberal moral values that she and her party stand for? They were not at the celebration, and they were certainly not represented by those selfies.

Women are dehumanized, subjugated and treated as inferior on a daily basis in Islamist state of Iran as well as other Muslim states. Many people in there are struggling every day despite all the dangers they face to obtain the few rights they can. In general, a woman’s testimony in court is worth half of a man’s testimony. Women need approval from their male guardian to leave the country, and in Saudi Arabia, to leave their home. Women cannot obtain a passport without a guardian’s consent. In Iran, a man can marry any woman he desires. Men are allowed to have four wives and an unlimited number of temporary marriages (mut’a), but women can only marry a Muslim man. Honor killings continue while the regime turns a blind eye to them.

Based on the law of tamkin (obedience), women must provide full accessibility and unhampered sexual availability to her husband. Article 1105 of Iran’s Islamist Civil Code states, “In relations between husband and wife, the position of the head of the family exclusively belongs to the husband.”

Article 1117 of the Iran’s Islamist Civil Code states states :

The husband can prevent his wife from an occupation or technical profession which is incompatible with the family’s interests or the dignity of him or his wife.

Men can initiate a unilateral divorce. Women receive only half of what men get in inheritance. A wife gets to receive only one-sixth of an inheritance if she has a son when her husband dies. If she has only a daughter, the inheritance would not automatically go to them. The deceased husband’s family – brothers, sibling and parents – would have a call on it as well. Women cannot become judges… and the list goes on.

Of course, people such as Mogherini are fully cognizant of these atrocities and the discrimination which are repeatedly reported by human rights organizations. … Not one of these European leaders can plead ignorance of the acts that those men commit.

Yet, there we see people like Mogherini shaking the hands that rob women of their freedom and their voices.

The fact is that these supposed feminists not only turn a blind eye to those atrocities, but their presence at these events actively endorses and legitimizes the rule of these dictators.

Why, if they claim that they are champions and front-runners of women all around the world, do they contribute to, and facilitate the rule of ruthless dictators against their own people?

When the subject turns to the specific cases of millions of oppressed women around the world – such as Asia Bibi [“Asia Woman”, real name Aasiya Noreen], a Christian mother on death row in Pakistan for seven years for taking a drink of water [from the same cup as her Muslim workmates]; or the 19-year-old who, this year, was raped by her cousin at gunpoint and then sentenced to death by stoning for “adultery”; or who were forced to marry their rapists; or child marriages at 12,000 a day; or women who are beaten by their husbands or who have acid thrown in their faces; or women used as suicide bombers – they become totally silent. They disregard these women’s rights.

By demonstrating their support for these regimes and the men that enforce them, people such as Mogherini significantly weaken and undermine the indigenous movements that attempt to advance precisely the human rights that people such as Mogherini claim to advocate.

When Mogherini smiles in her hijab in Iran, she is delivering a strong blow to women rights movements that attempt to remove the compulsion of the obligatory hijab and grant women equal autonomy, education and freedom. She is empowering suppression.

A true advocate of individual rights and democracy might instead have set a brave example.

It needs to be reiterated often that the Left is not for individual rights and democracy.

Women such as Mogherini are feeding into the system, not destroying it. Those who continue to give legitimacy to oppressors and Islamists need to be held accountable.

Finally, my message to people such as Mogherini and others like her is simple: Do you have any conscience or sense of decency? Or is it simply all about power, money, narcissism, and manipulations at the cost of the oppressed, including women? Can you hear that little girl’s cry, or are your ears as deaf to it as the men who cause it?

Mogherini will not answer, but we will. No, such as she has no conscience or sense of decency. Yes, it is “all about power, money, narcissism, and manipulations at the cost of the oppressed”.

During her visit to Iran this month, Federica Mogherini (left), the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, rubbed elbows with men who have ordered the deaths of thousands of women (and men). Does she ever think about hundreds of people being executed, often after sham trials, every year, and based on the Islamist laws in this country?

Does she ever think?

Down with history 2

The statue of General Robert Edward Lee is taken down in New Orleans:

Was General Lee worth commemorating?

Well yes, actually:

 

Posted under History, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, August 19, 2017

Tagged with ,

This post has 2 comments.

Permalink

The terror that is worse than terror 64

Spain this week suffered the biggest Islamic State onslaught to be mounted in Europe since Nov/ 14, 2015, when the jihadis murdered 140 people in Paris. The Spanish offensive claimed the lives of 14 civilians and 7 terrorists. More than 100 victims are in hospital, 20 with serious injuries.

DEBKAfile reports:

The first signal came Wednesday night, Aug. 16, with two large explosions at a house in the Spanish town of Alcanar, 190km south of Barcelona. Inside, police found a dead woman, an injured man and 20 canisters of butane and propane gas. It was clearly a bomb workshop.

Thursday and Friday saw attacks in quick succession – first in Barcelona, where a van mowed down hundreds of people on the Las Ramblas Blvd, killing 13 and injuring up to a hundred; then early Friday in Cambrils, south of Barcelona, where five bomb-vested terrorists in a car managed to injure six civilians, one of whom, a woman, died later, and a police officer, before they were all killed in a shootout with the police.

Their bomb belts when examined proved to be harmless fakes. By then, it was obvious that the terrorist attacks which shook Catalonia for three days were orchestrated from a single control center, with dozens of armed terrorists, supported by as many abettors, at its disposal. Many are still at large and armed, and so the wave of violence may not be over.

The two suspects captured by the Catalan police in Barcelona are being pressed hard to give up information on future attacks and additional terror cells poised for action.
Earlier this month, British media disclosed the existence of the Al-Kharsha Brigade, set up by ISIS in Syria to train terrorists holding European passports for strikes in the continent’s cities. The disclosure was meant apparently to prepare the British public for a further upsurge of terror. …

The full name of this Brigade is Amniyat Al-Kharji.

Recruits undertake exceptionally rough training. They are also treated psychologically to survive the first stage of an attack long enough to draw it out for maximum casualties, while accepting their own death for the cause.

Now what cause might that be?

Job-hunting? Pension-building? Social housing preference? Civil rights? Free stuff?

Finding that cause has been the hopeless task of European authorities and law-enforcement for years. It remains a mystery.

Few of the hundreds of recruits joining this brigade finish the course as postgraduate terrorists. Others are sent back to their countries and told to wait for a prearranged signal to go into action.  A few stay on in Syria to act as liaison between the central ISIS command and the clandestine cells spread out in many countries.

According to Western intelligence experts, some 50 terrorists from Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Belgium, have completed the Al-Kharsha Brigade’s course of instruction and are fully qualified for mass murder atrocities in any of their countries.

It is also estimated that of the 5,000 European jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq up until early 2017, one-third, i.e. around 1,600, have returned home. There is no information on how many remain committed to the path of terror. The 3,400 who stayed on in Syria are thought to be engaged in a variety of tasks – either in ISIS combat units or weapons development programs which produce items for arming the organization to stand up to attack. These workshops most likely produced the explosive gliders seen recently over Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Security services in Israel and Western countries still find it hard to accept that the Islamic State is running a regular army, whose battle and terrorist operations are orchestrated by a single central command, whether they take place in Syria, Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East or in Europe. This stance of denial enables the authorities to disencumber intelligence agencies of responsibility when attacks are not prevented.

But it also means that they underestimate ISIS as a fighting machine on the battlefield, although their offensives show the planning of a professional army, as far as tactics and the disposition of strength are concerned. When outgunned, the Islamic State army retreats in orderly fashion, as was seen both in Iraq and Syria.

ISIS does claim some of the terrorist operations carried out by local extremists on their own initiative, without orders from above. But the three-day terror rampage that hit Spain this week bore all the hallmarks of ISIS planning and organization.

Eurocrats and young Know-it-alls on television panel discussions tell us (us being the non-Muslim people of the West ) that terrorist attacks, of the sort carried out in Barcelona, are now part of normal living and we must just get used to it. Expect to be killed or agonizingly injured or crippled, at any moment as you go about your normal life, by a savage Someone-or-other whose identity you may not name, on pain of being called a Racist.

Nothing, you must understand, in all the world, taking all possibilities of disaster into account, could be worse than the fate of being called a Racist. Die rather. Lose limbs. Sacrifice your friend, your lover, your spouse, your child, but never expose yourself to being called a Racist!

If it were not for the fact that being called Racists is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, the governing and law-enforcing authorities might be able to take action to eliminate the imminent threat of violent assault. The fact that they won’t take that action reinforces the fact that to be called a Racist is a fate too terrible to contemplate.

Q: Is that because persons of some particular Race are carrying out these atrocities?

A: No. Persons driven by a certain ideology are carrying them out. But that ideology must never be named, let alone examined.

Q: Why?

A: Because if you examine it, you will be called a Racist.

Q: But not with any justification?

A: Doesn’t make any difference whether it’s justified or not. If once that label is stuck on you, you are doomed.

Q: To what?

A: Oh, look – there’s a squirrel!

Posted under Belgium, Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Islam, jihad, Muslims, Spain, Terrorism by Jillian Becker on Friday, August 18, 2017

Tagged with , , ,

This post has 64 comments.

Permalink

The improper study of womankind 79

Nothing proves the inferiority of women more plainly than the obsession of women with being Woman, while men get on with their jobs.

When we say “women” we mean of course wymyn – or however they choose to spell themselves: the harridans, shrews, termagants, harpies of the West who call themselves feminists.

They go to universities and spend years on “Women’s Studies”, then seek employment in a world where knowledge of other things is needed. Some of them get employed – to supervise “diversity in employment”. Then they complain that they are valued less than men, paid less than men, ergo they are “oppressed by men”.

In all this proving amply that they are less valuable than the men!

Ilana Mercer (a libertarian), writes at Townhall:

Of the many men who toil in high-tech, few are as heroic as James Damore, the young man who penned the manifesto Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber. In it, Damore calmly and logically exposed the tyrannical ideological edifice erected to perpetuate the myth that, in aggregate, women and men are identical in aptitude and interests, and that “all disparities in representation are due to oppression”.

Despite active recruiting and ample affirmative action, women made up only 14.5 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively, of computer science and electrical engineering graduates, in 2015. While they comprise 21.4 percent of undergraduates enrolled in engineering, females earned only 19.9 percent of all Bachelor’s degrees awarded by an engineering program in 2015.”

There is attrition!

Overall, and in the same year, 80.1 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in engineering went to men; 19.9 percent to women. (Engineering by the Numbers, by Brian L. Yoder, Ph.D.)

As Damore, and anyone in the world of high-tech knows, entire human resource departments in the high-tech sector are dedicated to recruiting, mentoring, and just plain dealing with women and their ongoing nagging and special needs.

In high-tech, almost nothing is as politically precious as a woman with some aptitude. There’s no end to which companies will go to procure women and help them succeed, often to the detriment of technically competent men who must do double duty. Their procurement being at a premium, concepts such as “sucking it up” and soldiering on are often anathema to coddled distaff.

A woman in high-technology can carp constantly about … being a woman in high-tech. Her gender — more so than her capabilities — is what defines her and endears her to her higher-ups, for whom she’s a notch in the belt.

While male engineers — and, indubitably, some exceptional women — are hired to be hard at work designing and shipping tangible products; women in high tech, in the aggregate, are free to branch out; to hone a niche as a voice for their gender.

Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create.

Young women, in particular, are pioneers of this new, intangible, but lethal field of meta-technology: kvetching (complaining) about their absence in technology with nary a mention of their achievements in technology. The hashtag “MicrosoftWomen” speaks to the solipsistic universe created by females in high-tech and maintained by the house-broken males entrusted with supporting the menacing matriarchy. Are these ladies posting about the products they’ve partaken in designing and shipping? Not often. Women in high-tech are more likely to be tweeting out about … being women in high-tech. Theirs is a self-reverential and self-referential universe.

One featured techie’s professional title, aforementioned, is impressive: “principal engineering lead at Microsoft”. As is to be expected of a woman hard at work in the ruthlessly competitive field of high-tech, she spends her days as “a female tech ambassador”, writing fluffy, gyno-centric books on self-affirmation, “mentoring other women via Skype”,  “answering emails … on how they, too, can enter the world of tech”,  designing clothes, and, according to her impartial boosters, being the “next greatest female tech rock star”. It’s all in a woman’s day’s work. …

So intent are women on equal outcomes at all costs, as opposed to equality of opportunity, that they’re pleased to serve as political props; ornaments in a corporate world compelled to affirm the idea that under the skin — and but for the Great White and his wicked ways — men and women are similarly inclined and endowed. …

“Of course, to say that ‘science needs women’,” reasoned Theodore Dalrymple, in a 2014 Taki’s magazine column, is as logically consistent as saying that, ‘Heavyweight boxing needs Malays’, ‘football needs dwarf goalkeepers’, ‘quantity surveying needs bisexuals’, ‘lavatory cleaning needs left-handers’. Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.”

We witnessed an irrefutable demonstration of male superiority a few years ago when our street was flooded. The water was creeping up driveways towards houses. Women and their small children – one of them only four years old – were desperately filling sacks with sand (obtained free of charge from the city council) and piling them up at their doors to keep the water out. A car drove on to our river of a street. It stopped and a man got out. He stood for a few moments looking at the scene, then walked over to a drain, pulled away something that was blocking it, and all the water flowed away.

Ah, that bell-shaped curve. More men at both extreme ends – the geniuses and the morons. Women thick in the middle.

The women at the moron end, we unshakably believe, are all feminists.

Posted under Feminism, Sex by Jillian Becker on Thursday, August 17, 2017

Tagged with ,

This post has 79 comments.

Permalink

The pursuit of happiness in the age of destruction 9

There are two great sources of happiness. (I am not saying they are the only ones, just that in my estimation they are the greatest.)

One is the achievement of something important to you for which you have striven; success at what matters supremely to you, a goal of your life accomplished. That is a happiness that depends only on you, on how well and how pertinaciously you work for it. The way to it can be helped or frustrated by others, but the attained end is yours, all yours, earned and deserved. If the goal itself is worth attaining (which is to say, not evil) it assures self-esteem. And justified self-esteem is happiness.

The even greater source of happiness is, I think, to live harmoniously in the companionship of another person; a person in whom you have confidence; whose happiness matters to you, and to whom your happiness matters. Such a bond can be fruitful with the birth of children. The happiness, the sheer pleasure, that children can bring to their parents is – in my experience – unequalled by anything else.

For millions of women, the pursuit of that supreme happiness has been discouraged, by feminists, environmentalists, and community-organizing governments; which is to say by the ideologues of the Left, the changers.

Systematically through the last hundred years, the Left has ruined art, music, poetry, architecture. The ugly, the cacophanous, the unintelligible, the brutal and overwhelming are all that we are offered. The works bewilder and belittle us, and bore us too. Vast edifices ignore the eternal human desire for seclusion, tranquility and comfort in private life and for pleasantness and convenience in public places; for buildings and streets which are in proportion to our human size and are considerate of our nature.

Now science too has been corrupted by the changers. It is no longer a search for truth, but an oracular source of dogma. We must believe its doctrine that we, the human race, are a danger to the planet we live on – an accusation intended to abase and shame us. They – the changers – tell us we are too many, are harmful to other living things, to the earth and the air and the seas.

The changers insult and deplore our civilization, ultimately to destroy it.

For a while yet you may strive for personal achievement.

For a while yet you may establish a family and live in your own house.

But the circumstances are changing. Our civilization is under attack, and it is no longer strong or well defended.

They are changing everything: where you live, how you live, with whom you live; what you learn and so what you think; what you do, how you do it, and with whom; what you eat; what you wear; whom you may befriend; whether you may be cured when you are sick; how long you may live and when and how you will die.

The changers do not need to constitute or dominate an elected government. You will not be able to vote them in or out. They know they cannot be sure of winning by the ballot. So democracy will go.

The Left has become Death, the destroyer of our world.

 

Jillian Becker    August 16, 2017

Posted under Leftism by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Tagged with ,

This post has 9 comments.

Permalink

The Russian hacking that never happened 141

The Nation weekly journal is generally on the side of the Others: the Democrats, the socialists, the statists, the Islam-promoters, the politically correct, the “social justice warriors”.

So if THEY say that there was no Russian hacking of the DNC during the 2016 election year and can prove it – which it seems they can and have – then the conspiracy to spin a “narrative” that presidential candidate Donald Trump plotted with “the Russians” to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House, is over.

We quote the meaty parts of the article by Patrick Lawrence at The Nation:

It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised — a year since events in the spring and early summer of 2016 were identified as remote hacks and, in short order, attributed to Russians acting in behalf of Donald Trump. A great edifice has been erected during this time. President Trump, members of his family, and numerous people around him stand accused of various corruptions and extensive collusion with Russians. Half a dozen simultaneous investigations proceed into these matters. Last week news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury, which issued its first subpoenas on August 3. Allegations of treason are common; prominent political figures and many media cultivate a case for impeachment.

The president’s ability to conduct foreign policy, notably but not only with regard to Russia, is now crippled. Forced into a corner and having no choice, Trump just signed legislation imposing severe new sanctions on Russia and European companies working with it on pipeline projects vital to Russia’s energy sector. Striking this close to the core of another nation’s economy is customarily considered an act of war, we must not forget. In retaliation, Moscow has announced that the United States must cut its embassy staff by roughly two-thirds. All sides agree that relations between the United States and Russia are now as fragile as they were during some of the Cold War’s worst moments. To suggest that military conflict between two nuclear powers inches ever closer can no longer be dismissed as hyperbole.

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment. Few have noticed since these evasive terms first appeared that an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge. This is how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept — as the record shows many of them have done.

We come now to a moment of great gravity.

There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate”.  This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

  • There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year — not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak — a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
  • Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.

This article is based on an examination of the documents these forensic experts and intelligence analysts have produced, notably the key papers written over the past several weeks, as well as detailed interviews with many of those conducting investigations and now drawing conclusions from them. …

 

Qualified experts working independently of one another began to examine the DNC case immediately after the July 2016 events. Prominent among these is a group comprising former intelligence officers, almost all of whom previously occupied senior positions. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded in 2003, now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence. The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. Most of these men have decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies. …

Until recently there was a serious hindrance to the VIPS’s work, and I have just suggested it. The group lacked access to positive data. It had no lump of cyber-material to place on its lab table and analyze, because no official agency had provided any. …

Based on the knowledge of former officials such as Binney, the group knew that (1) if there was a hack and (2) if Russia was responsible for it, the NSA would have to have evidence of both. Binney and others surmised that the agency and associated institutions were hiding the absence of evidence behind the claim that they had to maintain secrecy to protect NSA programs. … [but] “Everything that they say must remain classified is already well-known,” Binney said …

Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst. Two independent researchers selected it, Snowden-like, as the medium through which to disclose their findings. One of these is known as Forensicator and the other as Adam Carter. On July 9, Adam Carter sent Elizabeth Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media, a paper by the Forensicator that split the DNC case open like a coconut.

By this time Binney and the other technical-side people at VIPS had begun working with a man named Skip Folden. Folden was an IT executive at IBM for 33 years, serving 25 years as the IT program manager in the United States. He has also consulted for Pentagon officials, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Folden is effectively the VIPS group’s liaison to Forensicator, Adam Carter, and other investigators, but neither Folden nor anyone else knows the identity of either Forensicator or Adam Carter. … Unanimously, however, all the analysts and forensics investigators interviewed for this column say Forensicator’s advanced expertise, evident in the work he has done, is unassailable. They hold a similarly high opinion of Adam Carter’s work.

Forensicator is working with the documents published by Guccifer 2.0, focusing for now on the July 5 intrusion into the DNC server. The contents of Guccifer’s files are known — they were published last September — and are not Forensicator’s concern. His work is with the metadata on those files. These data did not come to him via any clandestine means. Forensicator simply has access to them that others did not have. It is this access that prompts Kirk Wiebe and others to suggest that Forensicator may be someone with exceptional talent and training inside an agency such as the FBI. “Forensicator unlocked and then analyzed what had been the locked files Guccifer supposedly took from the DNC server,” Skip Folden explained in an interview. “To do this he would have to have ‘access privilege’, meaning a key.” …

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate — the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.

What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second — half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between — but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads — conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like — degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting.“It’s clear,” another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.

To be noted in this connection: The list of the CIA’s cyber-tools WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to. (The tool can also “de-obfuscate” what it has obfuscated.) It is not known whether this tool was deployed in the Guccifer case, but it is there for such a use. …

VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:

  • On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
  • On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.
  • On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.
  • On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.

It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent”.

By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA], the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers — an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. … The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.

How has the Democratic Part reacted to the revelation, in a usually supportive magazine, that they have been proved to have lied?

Flat denial, and accusation that the revelation is itself  a “conspiracy  theory”:

[The Nation’s] Editor’s note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.” 

We await with keen interest – animated we confess by more than a little Schadenfreude – the reaction of: the Mainstream Media, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Robert Mueller, James Comey, Julian Assange, Guccifer 2.o, Vladimir Putin, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

The fat controller 72

Al Gore, maker of the film An Inconvenient Truth, has made a new film titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. 

Like its predecessor, it rebukes our wickedness in making the earth heat up by living the way we do.

Paul Driessen, writing at Townhall, gives us a glimpse into the world we will be living in if we obey the prescriptions of Al Gore and his fellow climate alarmists:

Al Gore’s new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era “manmade climate disaster” report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of “climate deniers” are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we don’t end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe it’s our educational system, our cargo cult’s easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Let’s take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the 25 billion megawatt-hours of today’s total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (That’s not total energy consumption, and it doesn’t include what we’d need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) We’d need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require 12.5 billion acres! That’s twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. …

The renewable future assumes these “eco-friendly alternatives” would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner. Refrigerators and freezers would conk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foods would spoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone – so we wouldn’t have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. …

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldn’t even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels – or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise – we couldn’t mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldn’t even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required to manufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines – much less power civilization.

The USA [would be] de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. … Explore rural Africa and India.

Back then (and over there), most people’s lives were (are) spent in “backbreaking labor with picks and shovels”.   

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there won’t even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioid crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, you’ll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again … grow millions of acres of hay to feed them – and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

There’ll be no paved streets – unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC [electricity].

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. You’ll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live.

Don’t bet on it. Don’t even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel …

Will there be such an elite? Well, there always was an aristocracy, a small minority supported in luxury by “the horny-handed sons of toil”, and there no doubt will be again in the non-electric Gorean utopia when most people will have horny hands. There always were and always will be the fat people among the thin. Even if they watch their diet and exercise conscientiously, they will be fat compared to the rest.

But be warned, all ye environmentalists who now take for granted a life made luxurious by the inventions of “dead white men”, most of you will also have to do that back-breaking boring work all day every day, or perish.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. …

But at least your climate will be stable and serene … until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries won’t be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward … Those that don’t swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid …

So how about this as a better option?

Stop obsessing over “dangerous manmade climate change”. Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism – and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms – and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earth’s climate, when they really end up controlling our lives. 

Posted under Climate, Energy, Environmentalism by Jillian Becker on Monday, August 14, 2017

Tagged with , ,

This post has 72 comments.

Permalink

Fifty shades of black and the unbearable whiteness of being 178

Yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia, one bunch of Nazis who knew they were Nazis fought another bunch of Nazis who seem not to know that they are Nazis.

The ones who know they are Nazis, displaying and shouting anti-Semitic slogans, are also called “white supremacists” – fairly enough, since that is what they are. And they are rightly condemned for it.

The ones who seem not to know they are Nazis are never called “black supremacists”, although that is what they are, even those who are not black. (Judging by the pictures of the riot in the press and on TV, the majority on that side were white.) And it’s hard to find public figures who will condemn them for it.

Black supremacism? Does it exist?

Of course it does. The Black Lives Matter organization will not allow you to say that all lives matter. To say so is to infuriate them.

So in the view of the Nazis who do not know (or anyway acknowledge) that they are Nazis, it is not supremacism as such that is wrong, it is only white supremacism that is wrong.

Whites must be abolished. Not the people who are white, necessarily – or not yet – but their whiteness must go.

Tom Ciccotta writes at Breitbart:

Stanford University will introduce a course this fall which will task students with considering “abolishing whiteness” and the ultimate goal of understand “what is the future of whiteness”, according to the institution’s course catalog.

The course, which is entitled “White Identity Politics”, will be taught by instructor John Patrick Moran, and analyze the “future of whiteness”.

For the uninitiated, the concept of “whiteness” refers to the social aspect of race.

According to the University of Calgary, “whiteness” is a socially and politically constructed learned behavior built upon the systematic privileges afforded to whites in Western society.

The Stanford course looks to abolish this social concept of “whiteness” through an analysis of what the course description alleges is “the rise of white identity politics in the United States” as a result of the 2016 Presidential election.

In fact it arose with the New Left who despaired of the proletariat as its chosen victim class, and decided to make revolution in the name of victim races instead. But everything now must be blamed on the election of President Trump in 2016. He is the Super Scapegoat – and white to boot!

Stanford Professor Tomás Jiménez explained that “whiteness” refers to “the set of behaviors and outlooks associated with the racial category, white”. Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States.

Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-level seminar asks, does white identity politics exist? How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness? We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities. Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity.

What is the future of whiteness?

Ernest Miranda, a spokesperson for Stanford, told the College Fix that “abolishing whiteness” is a concept devised in the 1990s to encourage whites in the Western world to stop identifying as white in order to help end inequalities.

Harvard scholar Noel Ignatiev spoke about the concept of “whiteness” in a documentary on campus radicalism. He argued that “whiteness is a form of racial oppression”, and that “there can be no white race without the phenomenon of white supremacists”.

Noel Ignatiev is a lifelong fanatical white-hating white Marxist.

“Stop identifying as white”? Apparently, just as you can now call yourself a man even if you are a woman and “society” must accept that you are a man (and vice versa), so you can now call yourself black even if you are white and “society” must accept that you are black. You can and you must. “Society” can and it must.  Persons of all other skin colors must also “identify” as black (because only black lives matter) so there will be … what? fifty? shades of black. Then as an all-black nation, may Americans continue with their lives as usual?

This “identifying” of white men as black must be retrospective. It’s okay to enjoy all the discoveries and inventions made by white men, as long as from now on the discoverers and inventors are “identified” as black. Because white men’s science is not true, says a shade-of-black feminist woman physicist –

From Truth Revolt by Trey Sanchez:

Science shouldn’t be misconstrued as truth because most of the foundations were laid by white men, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a particle physicist and philosopher of science at the University of Washington. Her argument appeared at Slate in an article titled, Stop Equating ‘Science’ with Truth.

Chandra Prescod-Weinstein

Prescod-Weinstein’s entire premise was built on the Google employee [James Demore] memo which laid out factual differences between men and women and why women are less likely to enter fields of science and technology:

It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution — and of the deification — of science itself. For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that “peer-reviewed” and “correct” are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week. It’s 2017, and to some extant scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s…

Science’s greatest myth is that it doesn’t encode bias and is always self-correcting. In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong.

Prescod-Weinstein puts “science” in quotations a lot in her piece because of its ties to Europe during the Enlightenment.

“Much of the science that resulted from this system, conducted primarily by white men, is what helped teach us that women were the inferior sex,” she writes.

And those systems have been passed on through the ages through bad education and apparently, she is finally telling everyone the truth in this article:

Most saliently in the context of the Google memo, our scientific educations almost never talk about the invention of whiteness and the invention of race in tandem with the early scientific method which placed a high value on taxonomies [classifications] — which unsurprisingly and almost certainly not coincidentally supported prevailing social views.

We never learned that former president and inventor Thomas Jefferson “hid behind science as a shield” because his writings about slaves being inferior to whites proved he was not “much of a scientist” as much as he was “a biased white supremacist”.

And then there was the stealing of ideas already known by indigenous peoples:

Very few curricula acknowledge that some European scientific “discoveries” were in fact collations of borrowed indigenous knowledge. And far too many universally call technology progress while failing to acknowledge that it has left us in a dangerously warmed climate.

Wait, how did climate change sneak in there? Is she saying that is “science” or science?

One of the top comments on this story really gets at the heart of the matter of what this feminist physicist is trying to say: “Obviously any science done by anyone not a young Black female with a degree in physics is at best bunk, but probably evil. We all need to throw away the Constitution because an evil White man wrote that, too.”

Prescod-Weinstein suggested in her conclusion that perhaps a new experiment is in order to take back science from the patriarchy:

Google bro would argue that we ought to consider the possibility that white women and racial minorities simply produce lower-quality work, which is why we struggle to be recognized as competent knowledge producers. It’s time to turn the tables on this debate. Rather than leaning in and trying endlessly to prove our humanity and value, people like him should have to prove that our inferiority is the problem. Eliminate structural biases in education, health care, housing, and salaries that favor white men and see if we fail. Run the experiment. Be a scientist about it.

But as she explained already in her article, it was men like “Google bro” that encoded their bias into scientific theory which would make any conclusions from the experiments null and void. And then where will she find the answers? Perhaps she’ll join other leftists and pursue their “own truth”.

Feminists are already black. All of them.

Mark Tapson writes, also at truth revolt:

As if anyone needed any more proof that liberal arts colleges are a worthless joke, Campus Reform reports that a self-described “feminist ethnographer” at Grinnell College in Iowa will be teaching a course in the fall which will focus on “attacking racism by making whiteness visible”.

Professor Karla Erickson, whose background is in American and Women’s Studies, will teach the four-credit special topics class called “American Whiteness”, which vows to explore “whiteness as a specific racial formation with a distinct history, proactive and defensive politics, and institutional and personal investments”.

Sounds like a great introduction to cultural Marxism.

Professor Karla Erickson

According to the course description, students will learn about the “historical expansion” of whiteness while discussing both the “formal and informal advantages that accrue to whiteness” and potential “challenges to whiteness”.  In other words, this course offers absolutely nothing of intellectual merit and is purely social justice indoctrination.

Erickson unsurprisingly refused to provide Campus Reform with a copy of the current syllabus, but CR found one for an identical course from the spring of 2015. It states, “Whiteness is, among much else, a very bad idea. It is quite possible to avoid hating white people as individuals but to criticize the ‘idea of white people in general’.” Well, that’s good to know, although we’re sure that anyone who would take or teach such a course is perfectly comfortable hating white people while pretending to be tolerant and inclusive.

Campus Reform notes that the 2015 syllabus also featured texts such as “Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness” and “The Case for Reparations”, the latter of which encourages students to “take on the labor of interrogating and attacking racism by making whiteness visible”. We suspect, however, that the course will not be interrogating and attacking the blatant anti-white racism which “American Whiteness” promotes.

“This course is meant to facilitate a personal journey towards a better understanding of how whiteness functions in a racist nation, therefore sincere attempts at working through whiteness will be rewarded,” the 2015 syllabus states.

Take note, however: the course will not facilitate preparing you for learning anything useful or getting a job after college, unless you plan to become a feminist ethnographer who teaches social justice jargon-heavy courses to exacerbate the racial divide.

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »