… and the nationhood that makes it possible.

“We need strong borders and national sovereignty to keep us free,” he rightly insists in this new video, published yesterday, April 29, 2019.

The globalists in power almost everywhere in the West want to destroy the nation state. (Except the US, where we so fortunately have President Trump defending nationhood and liberty.) Their objective is to turn the whole world into “a giant open prison” that would be ruled as China is today.

https://youtu.be/isfr1pn9iXY 

While the West is busy raging and plotting against President Trump, complaining about Russia, destroying statues, submitting to invasion by hordes from the Third World, deciding whether to let citizens return who had gone to help ISIS kill and torture, disentangling the European Union, adding new pronouns to the English language, changing men into women and vice verse, China has been reaching out, near and far, grasping chunks of the world by its real needs, making itself the center of a new international trade order, which could some day be a new political order with Beijing as its capital.

China calls it the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Wikipedia describes it thus:

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure development and investments in [so far] 152 countries and international organizations in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

“Belt” refers to overland routes for road and rail transportation, called “the Silk Road Economic Belt”; “Road” refers to the sea routes, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The old name “Silk Road” makes the Belt sound long-established, connoting beautiful merchandise being carried by traders from East to West, a romance of mutually beneficial trade.

Because the Chinese government wants the world to understand that its initiative is good for all concerned:

The Chinese government calls the initiative “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future” .

And it isn’t only regional, the connectivity: distant parts are brought into the embrace too:

North, central and south belts are proposed. The North belt passes from China through Central Asia and Russia to Europe; the Central belt from China through Central Asia and West Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean; the South belt from China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan.

The land corridors include:

The New Eurasian Land Bridge, which runs from Western China to Western Russia through Kazakhstan, and includes the Silk Road Railway through China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany.

The China–Mongolia–Russia Corridor, which will run from Northern China to the Russian Far East. 

The China–Central Asia–West Asia Corridor, which will run from Western China to Turkey.

The China–Indochina Peninsula Corridor, which will run from Southern China to Singapore.

The Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor, which runs from southern China to Myanmar.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.

All of which is over land.

But China is reaching across the seas too.

The Maritime Silk Road is the name of the sea route corridors. It is a complementary initiative aimed at investing and fostering collaboration in Oceania [Australia and the islands round it], Africa, and South America, by way of the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean area.

And China has made an agreement with Russia to create an ‘Ice Silk Road’ along the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic (a maritime route which Russia considers to be part of its internal waters). There Chinese and Russian companies are cooperating in oil and gas exploration, infrastructure construction, tourism, and scientific expeditions.

Most of the countries joined to China by Belt and Sea Road have become members of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

The bank provides funds for the joint projects, each one of which is part of the great world-wide infrastructure project.

So China has become the indispensable benefactor of countries that could not on their own afford to build their “ports, railways, highways, power stations, aviation and telecommunication facilities”. China joins them together in vast international enterprises. For instance: “the super grid project aims to develop six ultra high voltage electricity grids across China, north-east Asia, Southeast Asia, south Asia, central Asia and west Asia” .

Formal respect is paid to global warming belief:

The wind power resources of central Asia would form one component of this grid.

Back in 2016, This Week in Asia pointed out in what ways and how greatly China would benefit from BRI:

[The Chinese] will generate enough demand abroad to keep their excess steel mills, cement plants and construction companies in business, so preserving jobs at home. They will tie neighboring countries more closely into their own economic orbit, so enhancing both their hard and soft power around the region. They will further their long term plan to promote their own currency as an international alternative to the US dollar. And to finance it all, they will set up a new multi-lateral infrastructure bank, which will undermine the influence of the existing Washington-based institutions, with all their tedious insistence on transparency and best practice, by making more “culturally sensitive” soft loans. The result will be the regional hegemony they regard as their right as Asia’s leading economic and political power.

The paper predicted that BRI was “doomed to fail”. But it seems to be succeeding.

European governments, other than those of Poland and Belarus, have not yet agreed to step on to the Belt, but Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte intends to, and it is rumored that Britain’s insane Prime Minister Theresa May is thinking of it.

General Electric and Caterpillar have signed up to work on BRI projects.

New Zealand has launched itself on the Road.

No doubt President Xi Jinping has his eye on North America.

This would be a good time for him to woo Canada with the Brighter Future song, while Justin Trudeau is still there making destructive decisions.

As for the US, we wonder – did Xi broach Belt and Road propositions to President Trump? If he did, we can probably guess the gist of the answer he got.

But what will the next US President say? Will he/she/zir take America into the warm embrace of China?

Ads like this, the Chinese suppose, will win the hearts and minds of American millennials:

 

But for now – has anybody noticed that China’s hegemony is growing by the day, not just in its region, but world-wide?

So old Joe Biden re-arises as a presidential candidate.

He again offers to lead the nation. He did it twice before, in 1984 and 1988, and his offer was not taken up.

Now he is 76 years old. Is the nation keener on him now than it was all those years ago? Will he be the nominee of the Democratic (Socialist) Party?

Does he qualify? Which is to say, to how many of these questions can he answer “Yes”? Only a score of 100% is sufficient: 

Is he black? No.

Is he a woman? No.

Has he tried to be a woman? No.

Is he homosexual? No.

Is he a socialist? N-ye-maybe.

Does he believe in manmade global warming? Yes.

Is he for late-term abortion? Yes.

Is he for open borders? Yes.

Plainly, on the question of qualification, he fails.

Breitbart reports:

The “women of color” who hosted this week’s presidential forum expressed frustration that the leading Democrat candidates are old, white men. It is an example, they say, of “racist” and “sexist” polling.

In particular, a member of the organizing committee for the event insisted that polls showing Joe Biden in the lead were absurd, especially because he had not yet even officially joined the race as the polls were being conducted, according to Politico.

“With all due respect to the vice president, he hasn’t even announced yet, but he’s the frontrunner?” said Leah Daughtry, organizer of the “She the People” event. “Racism and sexism are part of the fabric and the fiber and the founding of our country,” she added, “and the way that the [Democratic] candidates are being treated, it just reminds you of that. We’re not past it.”

Another minority Democrat activist, LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, also slammed the media for pushing white men as the Democrat frontrunners.

“When you got a media that’s constantly saying Biden and Beto and Bernie and literally elevating the male candidates, I think that’s going to be reflected in the polls,” Brown said.

(“She the people”? This solecism is a New American Fact. Grammar is outdated. It was a White masculine racist idea.)

Thing is, Joe, almost every country in the First World is now a gynocracy. Women rule, okay?

You scored quite highly on the old qualifications for Democratic leadership. They must have been just the ticket when you were picked for vice president.

What were those old-time qualifications?

Are you corrupt?  Yes.

[Joe Biden’s] family, particularly his son, cashed in while he was vice president of the United States. … Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point-person on policy towards Ukraine. He steered $1.8 billion in aid to that government and while he was doing so, his son got a sweetheart deal with this energy company  … [which] paid $3.1 million into an account where Hunter Biden was getting paid.”

So says author Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, who also revealed this:

“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”

Elaborating, Schweizer said, “Well, I think the reason he goes soft on China is because with him on that trip, flying on Air Force Two, is his son Hunter Biden, and ten days after they return from China, Hunter Biden — who has this small firm, he has no background in private equity, he has no background in Chinese finance — gets a whopping $1.5 billion deal from the Chinese government. This is the Chinese government giving Joe Biden and a [John] Kerry confidant the management over this money, and they made huge fees off of this money, and it’s an example of this kind of corruption. That’s the first of three major deals that the Chinese government does with people who are either the children — that is the sons — or close aides to Vice President Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry.”

Schweizer discussed national security implications related to modern corruption, highlighting the acquisition of Henniges Automotive —  a formerly America-based company developing “dual-use” technologies with military applications — by Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-run military contractor. AVIC acquired Henniges in 2017 with a 51 percent stake purchase. The remaining 49 percent was purchased by the Biden- and-Kerry-linked BHR.

“So [Hunter Biden and Devon Archer] get this $1.5 billion to invest, and what they are supposed to do is basically invest in companies that benefit the Chinese government,” stated Schweizer. “So just think about this for a second. This is the vice president of the United States whose father is supposed to be commanding American presence and power in the Pacific to deal with the rising challenge from China, and his son is investing $1.5 billion of Chinese government money. So what do they do? They invest in an American high-precision tools company called Henniges, which used to be owned by Rocket Company, but they produce anti-vibration technologies which have a dual-use application, so this transaction actually requires the approval of the federal government, as it has national security implications. So again, the vice president’s son is helping the Chinese government take over a dual-use military technology-related company called Henniges.”

BHR also invested in a Chinese state-run atomic energy company indicted by the Department of Justice in crimes related to stealing nuclear secrets, Schweizer said.

“But it gets even worse because another investment that they make is in something called CGN — China General Nuclear — which is an atomic power company,” recalled Schweizer. “They invest in this company in 2014. A year later, what happens? The FBI arrests and charges senior officials in this company with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States. Specifically, they’re trying to get access to something called the AP-1000 nuclear reactor that is very similar to the ones that we put on U.S. submarines. So again, you have the son of the vice president, a close aide to the secretary of state who are investing in a company that is trying to steal nuclear secrets in the United States. It’s a stunning story, and here’s the thing: none of this is required to be disclosed because they’ve figured out a way to get around these disclosure laws.” …

Have you colluded with a foreign power? Yes.

“There is far more evidence of collusion involving Joe Biden — or even involving the Clintons — of collusion with these foreign powers than there was with Donald Trump, because you actually have the transaction of money, you have very favorable policies that were carried out. I think ‘collusion’ is not too strong a word. I think it’s a pretty accurate word.”

Schweizer added, “There’s no question. The Bidens got a lot of money — millions of dollars — from these foreign powers. Hunter Biden had no legitimate reasons to get the deal. He simply wasn’t qualified.”

Schweizer warned of politicians and officials monetizing their political influence.

“So what [Joe Biden] is doing is using U.S. taxpayer government resources for the personal benefit of his family, and by the way, all of this absolutely rings true,” remarked Schweizer. “Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s person on Ukraine, he traveled to that country something like 17 times during his tenure as vice president, which is pretty amazing.”

Schweizer went on, “What’s remarkable is when, a couple of days before Donald Trump was inaugurated in Washington, D.C., Joe Biden was actually in Ukraine. It’s pretty remarkable for a vice president of the United States to be overseas that late in the game, but he was in Ukraine. [Joe Biden’s] sway and influence there was enormous, and it raises all kinds of questions about the way that he used or abused government power, and of course it raises questions about what potentially did Ukrainians have on Hunter Biden.”

“What kind of evidence and information do we have?” asked Schweizer of corruption concerns regarding Joe Biden. “We know that millions of dollars flowed into Hunter Biden’s accounts. We know that he was not qualified for the job, and the question is, what did he get for Ukrainians in return? I think that’s all the sort of thing that needs to be investigated and looked into by a grand jury.”

Do you have traitorous impulses? Yes.

From Discover the Networks:

Shortly after 9/11, Biden told his staff that America should respond to the worst act of terrorism in its history by showing the Arab world that the U.S. was not seeking to destroy it. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” he said.

Do you have poor political judgment? Yes.

In 1979 Senator Biden shared President Jimmy Carter‘s belief that the fall of the Shah in Iran and the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule represented progress for human rights in that country. Throughout the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis, during which Khomeini’s extremist acolytes routinely paraded the blindfolded American captives in front of television cameras and threatened them with execution, Biden opposed strong action against the mullahs and called for dialogue.

Do you have a favorable opinion of Communism and advocate for good relations with Communist states? Yes.

Throughout the 1980s, Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan’s proactive means of dealing with the Soviet Union. Biden instead favored détente — which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to remain solvent much longer than it ultimately did. He also opposed Reagan’s effort to fund the Contras, an anti-Communist rebel group in Nicaragua.

Biden was a leading critic of the Reagan defense buildup, specifically vis a vis the MX missile, the B-l bomber, and the Trident submarine. He criticized Reagan for his “continued adherence” to the goal of developing a missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, calling the President’s insistence on the measure “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft”.

Do you lie about your own record? Yes.

Biden first ran for U.S. President in 1987. He was considered a strong contender for the Democratic Party’s nomination, but in April of that year controversy descended on Biden’s campaign when he told several lies about his academic record in law school. In an April 3, 1987 appearance on C-SPAN, a questioner asked Biden about his law school grades. In response, an angry Biden looked at his questioner and said, “I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.” He then stated that he had gone “to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship”; that he had “ended up in the top half” of his law school class; and that he had “graduated with three degrees from college.”

But each of those claims proved to be untrue. In reality, Biden had: (a) earned only two college degrees — in history and political science — at the University of Delaware in Newark, where he graduated only 506th in a class of 688; (b) attended law school on a half scholarship that was based on financial need; and (c) eventually graduated 76th in a law-school class of 85. “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden would later concede, “but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”

Do you steal intellectual property when you think you can get away with it? Yes.

Then, in August 1987 Biden plagiarized a portion of a speech made by British politician Neil Kinnock. Before long, revelations surfaced that Biden also had plagiarized extensive portions of an article in law school and consequently had received a grade of “F” for the course. (He eventually was permitted to retake the course, and the failure was removed from his transcript.)

So what makes Joe Biden think he should stand for president again now?

Is there some great issue on which he feels he – more than any other Democrat aspiring to the presidency – can run against President Trump and win?

Again Breitbart reports:

Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his third presidential campaign on Thursday [April 25, 2019] by referring to a debunked claim that President Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 as “very fine people.”

In a three-and-a-half minute YouTube video, Biden cited the August 2017 riots as his primary motivation for running against Trump, presenting a version of events that even a CNN contributor has declared to be fraudulent.

After referring to the town’s historic role — including Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner — he added, “Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years,” followed by footage of a neo-Nazi procession.

Biden noted that the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were “chanting the same antisemitic bile heard in the ’30s”. He then added that they were “met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensured.”

Go here to read a justifiably furious objection to those statements.

(Among that “courageous group of Americans” were left-wing Antifa extremists who specifically came to Charlottesville to cause violence, and whom even Nancy Pelosi later condemned after they caused another riot.)

Biden then cited the debunked “very fine people” claim:

And that’s when we heard the words of the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were, quote, some “very fine people on both sides”. Very fine people on both sides? With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate, and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew that the threat to this nation was unlike any I had every seen in my lifetime.

What Biden said is completely untrue, as the transcript of Trump’s press conference about Charlottesville shows.

Trump was referring to protesters against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, as well as to non-violent left-wing protesters against racism, and specifically excluded the neo-Nazis from “very fine people” (emphasis added):

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too. …

[Biden] apparently planned to launch his campaign directly in Charlottesville this week, but local leaders objected because “some residents [were] unhappy about the scene a tragedy the city would prefer to forget being used as a campaign launch backdrop” …

It is unclear why Biden chose to run on a divisive racial hoax, even one that remains dogma among many on the left. Biden may feel vulnerable in a Democratic Party now dominated by identity politics. Indeed, the Associated Press reported Thursday that some “women of color” were “frustrated” by his candidacy.

So would this corrupt, traitorous, dishonest man, this candidate out of a past era …

Oh, yes, it must be mentioned too that he is also an assaulting groper and hugger, according to recent reports …

… be a good choice for president of the United States?

We ask as much in anger as in sorrow.

The human race goes on and on suffering from religion. It is the major cause of bloody civil strife. At present Christians are the most numerous victims, Muslims the most frequent and fanatical attackers. Both believe nonsense. Christians die in the cause of nonsense, Muslims slaughter in the name of nonsense.

Look at this ugly tawdry sentimental plaster thing – it is an icon of the Christian God!

Get past it – listen to Paul Joseph Watson talk about the slaughter of Christians by Muslims in Sri Lanka. He too asks, “Why?”

Why does the Western world tolerate Muslim terrorism? Even condone it?

To condone it is to co-author it!

 

The billionaire technocrats who own the search engines and communication media are traitors. They should be on our side, but instead they align themselves with the Organizers, the oppressors.

They grew rich because they were free. Now they want to take away freedom from everyone else by supporting the collectivist Left.

The technocrats reinforce the Leftist movement on campuses and in schoolrooms, in print publishing, TV and the film industry; to diminish, condemn, distort, exclude opinion adverse to their own. If spokesmen for the Right make it to a venue where they have been invited to speak, they are shouted down by the Left, even quite often physically assaulted. They are refused publication. If they achieve an audience, they are censored until they can be successfully banned and silenced.

We are approaching a kind of totalitarianism.

It will be much worse if the now far-left Democratic Party not only keeps control of the House, but gains the Senate and the Presidency. The “Democratic Socialists” will more than likely criminalize the Republican Party in order to entrench themselves. The Republican Party may see this coming, but it puts up feeble resistance. We only have Trump between us and a Union of Socialist States of America. As long as he is in power, Americans will continue to be able to own property, keep most of what they earn, and travel freely. But who can succeed him who will be as strong a defender of what remains of our liberty?

The Left wants to abandon the Constitution or make it a “living document” that can be altered by a simple majority. Can’t be done? Hard to alter the Constitution? It will be easy if the rule of law is abandoned. The first right to go will be freedom of speech (already under attack on the same stupid grounds as in Europe – calling free speech “hate speech”). The next, the right to bear arms. Gone, the First and Second Amendments.

The political leadership of the Left is now so absurd that the Democratic Socialist Party would disintegrate if it were not for the truly powerful non-politicians who are keeping it alive: the academics and the technocrats – and the growing electorate of the un- and ill-educated.

The Left has marched through the institutions. It won the presidency for 8 years and resents losing it. It educates new generations to hate the Founders’ America, to despise individual freedom and capitalism. Millions of voters for Socialism are rising.

With the help of the technocrats, all opposition will be silenced.  

Of course the tens of millions of voters for Trump will not put up with it. They will not give up their guns. If speech is banned, how can they answer but with their guns?

White culture! Ugh!

What an abomination. It must be got rid of.

White people, white ideas, white inventions, all bad from Thales, Newton, Einstein; from Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes; from Leonardo, Velazquez, Rembrandt; from the Framers of the American Constitution; from Pythagoras, Epicurus, Aristotle; from the bringers of the Enlightenment; from the scientists and technologists of our time. Who needs their physics, astrophysics, medical cures, the internal combustion engine, aircraft, nuclear energy, computers, the internet, film, television, the cell phone? Such people, such ideas, such things are believed by Whites to be incalculably beneficial to the human race! How wrong they are!

All must GO.

Pull down the statues. Burn the buildings. Discard the things. EMPTY THE LIBRARIES. The records must be weeded out and destroyed, not a trace allowed to remain. A Great Cleansing of the Past must be effected. What Whites have thought, what Whites have done, must be eradicated from human memory. Even if the ideas and works have included ideas and works from non-white cultures, out with them. Whiteness stains and spoils whatever it touches.

Whiteness is a taint. An evolutionary malformation.  A corruption of the human strain. A character fault.

Fortunately, remedial plans are being made and authoritatively explained by Social Justice Warriors in positions of influence. The flame now lit for a great Cultural Reformation won’t flicker out. They are taking action.

For instance, a librarian named Sofia Leung at that great institution of learning MIT, writes:

If you don’t already know, “whiteness as property” is a seminal Critical Race Theory (CRT) concept first introduced by Cheryl I. Harris in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article by the same name. She writes, “slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property” and the formation of whiteness as property required the erasure of Native peoples. Basically, white people want to stay being white because of the privilege and protection whiteness affords under the law that they created. Harris also makes this really good point, “whiteness and property share a common premise — a conceptual nucleus — of a right to exclude”. Bam! That really hits it on the head.

As I’m collaborating on [a] book about CRT in Library and Information Studies (LIS), I’ve been having lots of discussions on these topics with some really smart folx. …

As others have written … libraries and librarians have a long history of keeping People of Color [POC] out. … Legal and societal standards revolve around whiteness and libraries are no different.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections [are] filled with this so-called “knowledge” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.

Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. … [L]ibrary collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do.

On this, Rod Dreher comments at the American Conservative:

The left really is trying to destroy our civilizational heritage. You think I’m a Chicken Little about this stuff, but this below is what it means to have barbarians march through our institutions.

The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT libraries, Sofia Leung (“I believe that social justice work is library work and that we should all be collectively engaged in our liberation”), has detected impurity in the stacks. …

This woman is not some SJW kook beavering away in the basement of  Evergreen State, or a dyspeptic grad student in Grievance Studies. She is an important librarian at MIT. What’s more, the venerable trade publication Library Journal tweeted her blog entry. The blog entry in which she calls for the purging of library collections because white people wrote them and loved them and collected them. Their existence offends her sense of justice.

Do you not see what’s happening here? Those who control a culture’s memory control its people. Sofia “Social Justice Work Is Library Work” Leung wants to throw certain books down the memory hole because they are racially impure. …

Well, yes, of course she does. Bam! I mean to say, folx …  for goodness sake … if libraries are to exist they must be filled exclusively with the books of all those Black African writers who have contributed so much to the knowledge and wisdom of mankind through the ages. Will the present libraries, once purged of White garbage, be big enough, will there be enough of them, to hold all those cultural riches?

Have you read the Attorney General’s summary of the Mueller report? (It’s easy to find on the net. Lots of the websites that Google favors have published it in full. And it’s not very long.)

Yes, that Mueller. The one who produced a report.

It seems that Mueller’s report is a strangely empty document.

The second part is more a meditation on small sayings and events which it cannot make up its mind about … what might they mean? We cannot tell. We are not sure. They might mean something …

Which is odd since the report took a couple of years to be born, well nourished on malice.

To understate the matter, it not only fails to justify the length of time it took to come to its unsurprising conclusions (where it comes to any at all), but also the number of people it kept busy, or its enormous cost.

Its gestation apparently required the destruction of several lives, the imprisonment and bankrupting of some men, and the ruining of their reputations for doing nothing much.

It should have been aborted.

When it emerged with drum-roll and trumpeting that echoed round the globe – voila! – there arrived …. an anti-climax!

For all the effort of its numerous progenitors, and all the hope which they invested in it, they could not make it do what they wanted.

Reality is an obstinate barrier to fantasy’s wish-fulfillment.

It reveals nothing of any interest that was not already known – except of course to the Democrats and their toadying media the total innocence of President Trump on the charge of his “colluding” with an enemy power to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

To them that is a shocking surprise because they had convinced themselves that it would condemn him as a traitor – because they really, really hate him, because – and now that it doesn’t … Hear them roar!

Amazing that leading politicians are bitterly disappointed and foaming furious to learn that the duly elected president of their country is NOT a traitor!

Professor Jordan Peterson crushes a feminist with facts she does not want to notice.

Very enjoyable!

 

(Hat-tip to Zerothruster)

As all the world knows, yesterday, April 15, 2019, a few minutes before 7 o’clock in the evening, Notre Dame, the magnificent cathedral of Paris, caught fire and in a few hours its spire and roof were destroyed.

Was the fire deliberately set? There is reason to suspect it. In recent years there have been numerous attacks on French churches and Christian artifacts – 887 in 2017 alone.

These attacks occurred in the first quarter of 2019, according to Newsweek:

France has seen a spate of attacks against Catholic churches since the start of the year, vandalism that has included arson and desecration. …

[On Sunday March 17, 2019] the historic Church of St. Sulpice in Paris was set on fire just after midday mass on Sunday,  Le Parisien reported, although no one was injured. Police are still investigating the attack, which firefighters have confidently attributed to arson. …

[In February] at the St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Houilles, in north-central France, a statue of the Virgin Mary was found smashed, and the altar cross had been thrown on the ground, according to  La Croix International, a Catholic publication.

Also in February, at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, in south-central France, an altar cloth was burned and crosses and statues of saints were smashed. …

And in the southern city of Nimes, near the Spanish border, vandals looted the altar of the church of Notre-Dame des Enfants … and smeared a cross with human excrement. Consecrated hosts made from unleavened bread, which Catholics believe to be the body of Jesus Christ [when consecrated and swallowed in the ceremony of the Eucharist], were taken and found scattered among rubbish outside the building. …

… The Tablet … reported that in February alone there had been a record 47 documented attacks on churches and religious sites. …

On February 9, the altar at the church of Notre-Dame in Dijon, the capital of the Burgundy region, was also broken into. …

Who has been doing this? Whom do the press and the authorities, clerical and lay, accuse?

The Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, which was founded in cooperation with the Council of European Bishops Conferences (CCEE) but is now independent, said there had been a 25 percent increase in attacks on Catholic churches in the first two months of the year, compared with the same time last year.

Its executive director, Ellen Fantini, told Newsweek that while in many cases the motive for the attacks was not known, France faced growing problems with anti-Christian violence, especially by anarchist and feminist groups.

“I think there is a rising hostility in France against the church and its symbols, but it seems to be more against Christianity and the symbols of Christianity. These attacks are on symbols that are really sacred to parishioners, to Catholics. Desecration of consecrated hosts is a very personal attack on Catholicism and Christianity, more than spray-painting a slogan on the outside wall of a church. … The pressure is coming from the radical secularists or anti-religion groups as well as feminist activists who tend to target churches as a symbol of the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled.” …

Last month, the Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe met French church leaders and said in a statement: “In our secular Republic, places of worship are respected. Such acts shock me and must be unanimously condemned.”

Senior Figures within the French Catholic Church expressed their sorrow at the rise in attacks on symbols of their faith.

Anarchists. Feminists. No mention of Islamic terrorists. Yet in one instance where the attackers are known, they were Muslims.

The last known plot to damage Notre Dame by blowing up a car near it was carried out though not to completion by a Muslim woman.

A  Muslim immigrant recently arrived will soon be on trial for damaging the Basilica of Saint-Denis in which kings of France are buried, including Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) who defeated a Muslim army that was intent on conquering France at the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.

And there is a known ISIS plan to repeat the atrocities committed at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015, when 130 people were tortured and killed.

Then there is the mysterious case of the alarm-raiser, reported by the Daily Beast:

An alarm was raised at Notre Dame at 6:20 p.m. on Monday night — 23 minutes before the structure was engulfed in flames — but officials found no sign of a fire.

Firefighters who responded to a second alert raced to the scene but were unable to tame an inferno that ripped through the 12^th century cathedral for the next 9 hours….

Paris public prosecutor Rémy Heitz announced on Tuesday that a full investigation would uncover how a massive fire was allowed to gut the cathedral.

“What we know at this stage is that there was an initial alarm at 6:20 p.m., followed by a procedure to verify this but no fire as found,” Heitz explained. “Then, there was a second alarm at 6:43 p.m. and at that point a fire was detected in the structure.”

Who knew that a fire was about to break out? If an arsonist, why the warning?

Despite all this – but unexpectedly, considering how afraid the European authorities are of stirring up indignant reaction to any accusation of Muslims – the Paris prosecutor’s office is treating the fire as an accident. It “rules out” arson as a cause and terrorism as a motive, “at least for now”. (If you listen hard you can hear the ghost of Charles Martel groaning in his tomb in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.)

Is it unreasonable to suspect that Notre Dame was set on fire by a Muslim terrorist?

Dennis Prager writes at Townhall:

I don’t know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set fire to Notre Dame Cathedral (as they have scores of other churches around Europe). In terms of what the fire represented, it doesn’t much matter. What matters is the omen: Europe is burning, just as Notre Dame was.

With that we agree. The symbolism of the burning is inescapable. Europe is burning away. The main cause of its destruction is its slow conquest by Islam.

But that is as far as our agreement goes with the views Dennis Prager expresses in this particular article. He mourns the burning of Europe as a bonfire of Christianity. (He writes about Christianity as if he did not know its own  atrocious history of massacre and persecution.) We mourn it as a bonfire of Western civilization.

 

Who are these men smiling while Notre Dame cathedral burns behind them? Could we guess anything about them, and why they are happy?

If Julian Assange has published information that has harmed anybody working for the United States, it is right that he has been arrested and right for him to be brought to trial.

But has he?

The BBC (no longer a trustworthy source in general but quoting other sources here) reported and commented in 2010 when “a trove of US diplomatic cables which offer, among other things, unflattering and candid assessments of world leaders” was released by Assange’s organization Wikileaks: .

Much of the criticism of Wikileaks … revolves around the notion that releasing such information risks lives.

Identities of informants could be compromised, spies exposed, and the safety of human rights activists, journalists and dissidents jeopardized when information of their activities is made public, the argument goes.

US military officials contend that allowing enemies access to their strategic and operational documents creates a dangerous environment for American troops serving abroad. ..

But is there any real evidence of this peril?

The problem … is proving direct links between the information released and any loss of life.

After the release of an enormous haul of US defense department documents in August, [a] Pentagon spokesman… told the Washington Post: “We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the Wikileaks documents.” …

After this latest release a Pentagon official … [said] that even three months later the US military still had no evidence that people had died or been harmed because of information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which detailed government lies and cover-ups in the Vietnam War, is skeptical of whether the government really believes that lives are at stake.

He told the BBC’s World Today programme that US officials made that same argument every time there was a potentially embarrassing leak.

“The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually, lives are at stake as a result of the silences and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal,” he said. “The same charges were made against the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid.” …

Assange did not steal Pentagon documents, he published them. If he was wrong to do so, then so were the newspapers that did the same, such as the New York Times.

Professor Alan Dershowitz writes at The Hill:

Before WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gained asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he and his British legal team asked me to fly to London to provide legal advice about United States law relating to espionage and press freedom. I cannot disclose what advice I gave them, but I can say that I believed then, and still believe now, that there is no constitutional difference between WikiLeaks and the New York Times.

If the New York Times, in 1971, could lawfully publish the Pentagon Papers knowing they included classified documents stolen by Rand Corporation military analyst Daniel Ellsberg from our federal government, then indeed WikiLeaks was entitled, under the First Amendment, to publish classified material that Assange knew was stolen by former United States Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning from our federal government.

So if prosecutors were to charge Assange with espionage or any other crime for merely publishing the Manning material, this would be another Pentagon Papers case with the same likely outcome. Many people have misunderstood the actual Supreme Court ruling in 1971. It did not say that the newspapers planning to publish the Pentagon Papers could not be prosecuted if they published classified material. It only said that they could not be restrained, or stopped in advance, from publishing them. Well, they did publish, and they were not prosecuted.

The same result would probably follow if Assange were prosecuted for publishing classified material on WikiLeaks, though there is no guarantee that prosecutors might not try to distinguish the cases on the grounds that the New York Times is a more responsible outlet than WikiLeaks. But the First Amendment does not recognize degrees of responsibility. When the Constitution was written, our nation was plagued with irresponsible scandal sheets and broadsides. No one described political pamphleteers Thomas Paine or James Callender as responsible journalists of their day.

It is likely, therefore, that a prosecution of Assange for merely publishing classified material would fail. Moreover, Great Britain might be unwilling to extradite Assange for such a “political” crime. That is why prosecutors have chosen to charge him with a different crime of conspiracy to help Manning break into a federal government computer to steal classified material. Such a crime, if proven beyond a reasonable doubt, would have a far weaker claim to protection under the Constitution. The courts have indeed ruled that journalists may not break the law in an effort to obtain material whose disclosure would be protected by the First Amendment.

But the problem with the current effort is that, while it might be legally strong, it seems on the face of the indictment to be factually weak. It alleges that “Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records” from federal government agencies, that “Manning provided Assange with part of a password,” and that “Assange requested more information.” It goes on to say that Assange was “trying to crack the password” but had “no luck so far.” Not the strongest set of facts here!

It was Manning who committed a crime, not Assange.  Where Assange is concerned, we ( in agreement with Mark Steyn – see the video in the post immediately below – who is as firm a conservative as we are) do not accept that the US has a legal or moral right to have an Australian arrested in London and extradited here for offending the US. In his case, it is not a question of treason and betrayal as with Manning. It is a question of liberty.

Even if Assange is a Leftist, with opinions we strongly dislike, we cannot approve the gross interference with his personal liberty, cannot but object indignantly to his arrest and incarceration.

However, we are interested in what sort of person we are defending.

Is he a Lefty?

Hard to be sure. A sign that he is not, is that there are people on the Left who wish him dead. For instance, Bob Beckel said on Fox News:

A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, a treasonist, and he has broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be — And I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty, there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.

Chris Hedges writes cogently (in part only – we strongly disagree with some of his comments) at truthdig.com:

The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? …

Pause here for a particular disagreement. President Trump has not personally approved the extradition. During his presidential campaign he defended Wikileaks.

Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.

The Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained by WikiLeaks. …

U.S. government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both of which also published the leaked material from Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents. …

Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s reputation.

Assange, who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon earned the ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists. 

What has Julian Assange himself said that reveals what motivates him?

He is against governments keeping secrets from the people. He thinks it is the job of journalists to reveal them.

Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.

One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.

It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that, when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.

Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organizes and directs other journalists.

Cablegate [the scandal over the release by Wikileaks of State Department documents in 2010 and 2011] is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times. 

You can either be informed and be your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you. 

Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.

True information does good. 

In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic. 

Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

With these statements at least, we agree. We agree that Western governments have become too secretive. We agree that it is a journalist’s business to report what a government is doing to the people who elect it …

… always provided that no individual working for the country is harmed, and no planned strategies of war are betrayed to our enemies. For that to be prevented, it is the responsibility of governments to keep their secrets safe.