A weird immoral passion 195

Something that seems to have eluded comment, though it is particularly disturbing and puzzling, is that the FBI and DOJ bosses named by the inspector general in his report as having used their positions to try keeping Donald Trump out of power, and bringing him down from it, were passionately intent on helping a crook into the White House.

They knew, better than anybody – since they worked hard to cover it all up – that Hillary Clinton was crooked, corrupt, venal, lying, hypocritical and incompetent. And yet they fervently strove to get her elected to the presidency!

What does that say about them? What does it say about the politics of the Democratic Party who nominated a scoundrel as their candidate for the highest office in the land? Isn’t it obvious that to put an incompetent crook in power is to court disaster? Did they shut that logical understanding out? If so, why? What advantage in her election did they see that eludes common sense and overrides prudence?

Reason is baffled. So let’s consider emotion. What emotional need cries out for a leader who could only take the country into steep decline? What weird immoral passion?

How do they square with their conscience the sneaky spiteful steps they took to slander Donald Trump, to stitch him up, to lie about him in order to destroy him?

We are not talking about the dwindling audiences of CNN and the gullible readers of the New York Times – uninformed and misinformed people who swallow what they’re told; who can believe that “Trump is Hitler” because they know nothing about Hitler; who burble nonsense about being “on the right side of history” in imitation of their idol Obama. We are talking about the servants of the nation, the highly educated, the highly paid, the most trusted.

Is it the same intense emotion that compels European leaders to invite Islam to occupy, conquer and subdue their countries? Self-hatred? Life-hatred?

All our questions in this post are rhetorical. But opinions are welcome as always.

Enlightenment, atheism, reason, and the humanist Left 580

This is a kind of review. But it is more of an argument about ideas that vitally affect the real world.

I am in emphatic agreement with roughly half of what Professor Steven Pinker says in his new book Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress*, and in vehement disagreement with the rest of it. Like him, I esteem the Enlightenment most highly; profoundly value science; and certainly want progress in everything that makes us happier and better informed, our lives longer, healthier, less painful, and more enjoyable. Like him, I am an atheist. It is chiefly with his ideas on Humanism that I disagree. Which may seem strange since humanism is atheist. And, certainly, on all his criticisms of religion I am in complete accord. More than that: where small “h” humanism is concerned with humane morals – the imperative to treat our fellow human beings and other sentient beings humanely – the great professor and I could sing in harmony.

“The moral alternative to theism,” he writes, “is humanism.”

But Humanism-the-movement holds principles that I not only do not like, but strongly dislike. They are principles of the Left. And  while he is not uncritical of the Left, Professor Pinker upholds those principles. Humanism, wherever it may be found, is a Leftist ideology. And because the Humanist movement is well-established, widespread, its opinions prominently published, and taught (or preached) where scholars gather, atheism is assumed by many to belong to the Left, inseparably, part and parcel of its essential ideology.

Atheism may be indispensable to the Left, but Leftism is not necessary to atheism.

Atheism as such carries no connotations. No political or ethical ideas logically flow from it. It is simply non-belief in the existence of a divine being. Nothing more. A person’s atheism does not itself make him more humane or less humane.

Steven Pinker implies that it does. Although he states that “atheism is not a moral system … just the absence of supernatural belief”, he also declares that “secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.”

He reasons along these lines:

“Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.”

Not from holy books. Agreed.

“Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change.”

Agreed.

There being no supernatural moral authority, and as human beings have natural needs –

“Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.”

So far, no cause for quarrel. But he elaborates on this last statement to demonstrate that Humanists do this “deriving” well:

“Humanists ground values in human welfare, shaped by human circumstances, interests and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem …”

There it comes, as if it followed logically from scientific knowledge and humane secularism, one of the main obsessions of the Left: concern for the planet, for which, the Left claims, human beings bear responsibility. The words “man-made global warming” silently intrude themselves; as does the “solution” for it – global governance, by those who know what the human race must do; total communism, the highest principle of the Left; its vision of a whole-world Utopia. Though Steven Pinker himself is not a Utopian, he writes a good deal in this book about the virtues of “globalist” politics. He sees globalism as an enlightened, reasonable, science-based, progressive, humanist creed. To “maximize individual happiness”, he remarks, “progressive cultures” work to “develop global community”. He has much praise for international institutions – including, or even led by, the (actually deeply evil) United Nations. He is confident the UN and other international bodies such as the EU, formed after the end of the Second World War, can help keep the world at peace. In fact, there has not been a single year since 1945 when the world has been without a war or wars.

To the globalist view he opposes the populist view. Not wrong when stated thus. But he does not see the populist view as the one held by 63 million Americans who voted Donald Trump into the presidency of the United States because they wanted more jobs, lower taxes, and secure borders; or that of the British majority who voted to withdraw their country from the undemocratic and corrupt European Union. No. He sees populism as a cult of “romantic heroism”, a longing for “greatness embodied in an individual or a nation”.

He is adamantly against the nation-state. He thinks that those who uphold the idea of the nation-state “ludicrously” envision a “global order” that “should consist of ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states”. Who has ever expressed such an idea? And he puts “multiculturalism” (the failing experiment of enforcing the co-existence of diverse tribes within a nation’s borders) on an equal footing with “multi-ethnicity” (the melting-pot idea that has worked so splendidly for the United States of America).

To him, nationalism is ineluctably authoritarian and fascist. He sees President Trump – who is in fact unswervingly for individual freedom – as a “charismatic leader” of the dictatorial Mussolini mold. The politics of the Right for Professor Pinker are irredeemably dyed in the wool with Nietzschean anti-morality, “superman” aspirations, and genocidal urgings. Libertarianism is tainted with it too. He writes: “ … Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.”

Interestingly – and restoratively to my esteem for him – he also asserts that certain Marxists and certain Leftist movements are equally, or even more, colored with Nietzsche’s inhumanity: “[Nietzsche] was a key influence on … Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Post-structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.”

Steven Pinker’s humanism, then, is not far to the Left, just “left-of-center”. And most of the humanists I have known (and argued with) would also place themselves on that section of the political spectrum. “[T]he moral and intellectual case for humanism is, I believe, overwhelming …,” he writes.

He concludes (and here he specifically rejects Utopianism):

We will never have a perfect world. And it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story … belongs not to any tribe but to all humanity – to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”

That is the vision of the Decent Thinking Western Man. He believes that all human beings ultimately want the same things; that the good life is defined for all in the same general terms; that all  would agree to the Golden Rule, which has been “rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions”.

But are those beliefs true? He himself records that there are many who do not value knowledge above ignorance, reason above superstition, freedom above coercion, even life above death. Which is to say, he writes about Islam (in which there is no Golden Rule). He knows Islam has no trace of “Enlightenment humanism”. He declares it an “illiberal” creed, and observes that “[M]any Western intellectuals – who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundred fold – have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.”

He finds one explanation for the double-standard of these intellectuals in their “admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims”. But when it comes to revulsion against ideologists of repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence, is it prejudice or is it judgment? He says also that some of the apologetics are “intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations”. (Or, as I see it, of civilization against barbarism.) I wonder how anyone can look at the drastically changing demographics of Europe, or at least the Western part of it which will surely be under Islamic rule before the century is out, and not notice the clash.

But he does say that “calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic”. Being the decent thinking Western man that he is, he is firmly for critical examination of all ideas.

His optimism shines out of the book. He thinks Islam can be reformed, even that a Muslim Enlightenment is possible. He believes there was an earlier age of Islamic Enlightenment, an “Islamic Golden Age” which could serve as a precedent. Well, if one wants to see bright possibilities, Islam may come to prefer science to the assertions of its prophet. It may become humane in its law and stop oppressing women. It may contribute to human progress. But whatever changes may come to Islam in the future, at present it does not value life above death, freedom above coercion, knowledge above superstition. And there is no good reason to believe it ever will.

 

Jillian Becker    April 12, 2018

 

*Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker, Viking, New York 2018. The quotations in the article come from the last chapter, Humanism.

A great man, a great president 14

It is time to sing the praises of a great president who has accomplished wonders in just one year of his presidency – while being opposed, impeded, maligned, frustrated, denigrated and threatened  by his political opponents, most of the media, and a large contingent of snobby Republicans.

Karin McQuillan does the singing beautifully. She understands that great accomplishment is possible only to those who possess the character and talent for it.

She writes at American Thinker:

As more and more people who hate Trump are forced to admit his achievements as president, they are doubling down on character assassination. Even Trump voters often preface their satisfaction with Trump’s actions by criticizing his tweets or his personality.

Here’s an alternate take on things: Trump’s character is responsible for his outstanding performance in his first year as president. If you want to know who someone is, you look at what he does. What we have: a booming economy, growing jobs, more lawful governance, fewer regulations, more global security. What character traits this took: hard work, focus, commitment, courage, honesty, independence, incorruptibility, self-confidence, love of excellence. The list of Trump’s positive character traits goes on and on. You don’t get achievements independent of character.

I think Trump’s character is excellent.

Trump’s integrity in office is outstanding – the first politician in my memory who is sticking to his promises to voters. We are hugely benefiting from his promise-keeping.

His primary promise was to focus on jobs. Wow, has he delivered. Jobless claims have dropped to the lowest level in 44 years – last seen in 1973, under Nixon. Record-breaking low unemployment in 13 states. Investment reinvigorating the Rust Belt. More high-paying jobs in mining, oil, and industry – another promise kept, as President Trump has unleashed the energy sector and boosted capital investment.

Lazy, leftist, passive President Obama lectured us to accept the new normal of a stagnant economy, which was what his policies delivered. GDP growth was 1.6 percent in 2016.

Passivity and defeatism are not in Trump’s nature. He is a fighter who thinks big. He believes in free enterprise in his gut, because he is himself a go-getter. He thought big for the American economy, because he believes in Americans. Trump likes to say he completed his projects on time and under budget. It was a matter of pride for him. Pride can be a good thing.

Trump was scoffed at as a braggart and buffoon for promising 3-percent growth. He has already over-delivered.

The unemployment gap between blacks and whites has fallen to a record low. Trump promised the black community a better life in a better economy, and he has come through.

Unemployment for Hispanic Americans is the lowest in history. Another promise kept, as our Hispanic citizens have benefited from Trump enforcing our border laws and driving farm wages up. …

Trump boosted the economy through vigorous action: cutting regs, boosting the energy sector, restoring business confidence, dramatic corporate tax cuts, bringing back investments from overseas, and cutting job competition from illegal aliens. We now have a tight labor market, and wages are rising.

For much of the year, Trump was doing a lot of jaw-boning and executive actions, with no legislative back-up. These economic achievements came from President Trump’s character strengths. He is a high-focus, driven bulldozer of a man who gets things done. He’s a practical man. He’s a hard worker. These are not sophisticated or cultured or warm, fuzzy traits; they are traits of a strong man.

We have forgotten to honor masculinity in our culture.

President Trump did more than any president in history in his first year to relieve the regulatory burden on Americans. Complying with useless government regulations costs the economy $2 trillion a year, or 21% of the average payroll per American company. Estimates are that the Obama regs slowed the economy by 0.8%. Trump’s regulatory cuts, in which his administration removed 22 outdated regulations for each new one, is a big part of his doubling our economic growth in one year.

What did it take to cut the size of government and unleash the power of capitalism in this way? It was motivated not by conservative principles of small government. It was based in Trump’s character. He is one hundred percent practical. He has a strong sense of fairness. He is fearless. He thrives on opposition. He has incredible guts and stubbornness, necessary to take on the federal bureaucracy. He doesn’t give in when opponents fight dirty, and boy, does the Deep State fight dirty. He is not scared of the media’s attacks on him as a monster destroying the planet and abandoning the poor.

He is a creative and master fighter, as we see in the his effective use of tweets and branding to encourage his supporters and sow confusion among the enemy. …

He does not flout the law … like the underhanded Barack Obama. Obama’s DOJ and EPA created secret and illegal slush funds. The Democrat DOJ blackmailed the industries it was regulating in order to provide half a billion dollars to left-wing groups. The EPA used phony sue-and-settle tactics to hand undemocratic power to privileged leftist groups.

In sharp contrast, Trump … respects the rule of law. He honors the presidency. He is open and forthright. His administration has turned the DOJ and EPA back to following the laws as written.

Obama was an unhealthy narcissist who had never accomplished anything in the real world, yet he boasted that he knew more about every topic than his top advisers. … The mediocre surround themselves with lesser mediocrities. Obama undoubtedly did know more about foreign affairs than his right-hand national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter with a degree in creative writing.

Trump … is not afraid of being surrounded by top experts. He expects them to know far more in their fields than he does. Trump’s pride makes him seek excellence in others. He has created an impressive Cabinet and White House staff of brilliant achievers. You don’t get effective results on the economy and foreign affairs without a high-quality leader.

The importance of character to effectiveness cannot be overstated. … He is not discouraged by failures and mistakes; he learns from them. He doesn’t just set goals; he follows up on results. He faces reality.

Trump does not see Americans in different categories.  He cares about all Americans, black, white and brown; rich, middle-class, and poor; city-dwellers and country-dwellers; New York sophisticates and Evangelicals. He values freedom and prosperity for himself and for the rest of us. He wants to do what is best for the country, not what is best for only some identity groups or some regions at the expense of others, as in Obama and Hillary’s zero-sum game of identity politics.

We barely survived eight years of a bigot in the White House: the resentful, racially obsessed President Obama, who disliked Evangelicals, rural Americans, working-class whites, white small businessmen, and Jews. At home, Obama purposefully stirred up racial hatred and violence for political gain. Abroad, Obama tried to hand over the Middle East to the Muslim Brotherhood and facilitate nuclear weapons for the mullahs as payback to America. Obama’s race-baiting led to Americans dying – assassinations of our men in blue and innocent black victims of the resulting crime spree. He chose to destabilize Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya, setting off an unprecedented war on Christians and a Muslim migrant invasion of Europe. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t remember NeverTrumps criticizing Obama on character flaws.

Unlike our last president, President Trump is who he is. What you see is what you get. His candor is blunt and refreshing.  e is not an ideologue, not a secret schemer, not a race-baiter, not a bitter person seeking payback. …  [He] is a happy warrior.

Trump is honest in another sense, also: he is not corrupt.  Indeed, he seems incorruptible. Trump does not sell himself to certain industries or lobbying groups (think the Clinton Foundation; think Obama’s wasting the trillion-dollar economic stimulus on Solyndra green schemes and payoffs to Democrat voting blocs).

President Trump is a unique politician – a free man.

There’s another set of admirable traits responsible for Trump’s economic achievements. … Trump actually notices and cares about other people.  His voters are real people to him, as he is real to them. …  His priority on growing the economy and job promotion comes from his love of ordinary people, working-class people of all colors and all regions, whom he sees as real human beings and treats with respect. What a relief after the cold and contemptuous President Obama, who cared about power, not people. Trump’s compassion and insight into working people’s lives are wonderful character traits, shared by few in his class.

The president is also our commander in chief. How has Trump’s character served him in this role?

Trump’s love of country and patriotism are dominant character traits. … [His] personal qualities have resulted in the defeat of ISIS, our improved relations with the Saudis (now on board fighting terrorism and cooperating with Israel), restoration of our warm alliance with Israel, decertifying the odious Iran deal, and supporting the Iranian demonstrators against the mullahs. European countries are finally paying their NATO dues, illegal aliens invading our country are being stopped at the border, the H-1B visa system is being applied lawfully to protect American jobs, and terrorists are no longer welcome into the country. Trump is in the process of bullying the Chinese and the U.N. and South Korea into more effective action against North Korea … The ability to bully opponents is something you want in a president.

Thanks to his fearless and clear-sighted character, we finally have a president who will not allow North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons.  Those of us who see that this is vital for national security are deeply grateful … 

Trump has an abundance of character strengths as a tough guy – he is brave, he is assertive, he is an experienced fighter, and he always goes on offense. He uses punishments and threats and intimidation, as well as cooperation and rewards, to get things done, because that is what it takes to win, and he wants to win. He is unpredictable and keeps his opponents off balance. He is impervious to their outrage. He is a fierce fighter against all who attack him or his family or his country.

NeverTrumps are allergic to Trump’s aggressive masculinity. … His commonsense thinking, bold methods, and blunt personality are toxic to them – never smart, never constructive, never heroic, never associated with his achievements. They are so blinded by their own hatred that they see Trump as a dangerous monster. They accept outright lies and miss the real man entirely.

In a mere 800-word column, Bret Stephens, conservative columnist for the New York Times, managed to call Trump, in Stephens’s own words, a lying, bullying, bigoted, ignorant, crass, petty, paranoid incompetent; a disgrace; an intemperate, dishonest demagogue who requires debased toadyism from his White House and Cabinet; a man who humiliates, denigrates, and insults his own officers and agencies, who is comparable to Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez and a deviant. Stephens talks of the irremediable “stain of [Trump’s] person,” Trump’s violence, his cult of strength (as in dictatorship), his disdain for truth, his hostility toward high culture, his conspiratorial thinking, and his white identity politics. In the midst of the hysterical name-calling, Stephens doesn’t point to a single bigoted word or action by Trump. He can’t. There is none. The accusations are partisan nonsense. In Stephens’s alternate universe, Trump’s evident competence, his love, respect, and commitment to help his fellow Americans, goes invisible, and we are left with a racist, fascist caricature born of leftist agitprop.

It is a sorry reflection on our polite society that they are having conniption fits over Trump’s character. They want to divide the man from his achievements, just as they successfully divided Obama from his failures. Can they succeed in besmirching Trump’s character as they succeeded in sanitizing Obama’s? Their megaphone is large, and their self-interest in supporting the status quo ante is strong. They have a ready-built audience. They have enlisted enemies within our own Republican camp.

We have Trump.  We are winning.

President Trump wants everything he works on to be as good, as well made, as fit for its purpose, as it can possibly be. He achieves it because he works for it. He is not satisfied by anything less than the best. How lucky is America that it has such a person willing and able to come to its rescue, not only to save it but to make it even better than it has ever been, after the eight-year battering it took under the former administration led by the Communist, Islam-loving, America-hating nonentity, Barack Obama!

 

(Hat-tip to Cogito for the link to Karin McQuillan’s fine article)

Posted under Commentary, Conservatism, Defense, Economics, Ethics, Law, liberty, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, January 6, 2018

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Pornography is the way, the truth, and the life 103

“Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” said the poet Philip Larkin.

Okay. We won’t dispute it. But we declare that POLITICAL SEX began in 1968.

With the birth of the New Left. That was when the Left gave up “the exploitation of the proletariat” as its excuse for destroying Western civilization, because twenty years after WWII the proletariat in the Western world was making lots of money from its “exploitation” and refusing to complain about it. Instead, the well-off well-educated soft-living New Left leaders picked on non-whites and women to act in the name of. To put an end to the “oppression” of those races and that sex, they wanted to make a revolution and establish a world-controlling communist regime. Ever since then, Racism and Sexism have characterized the Left.

Make Love Not War” was their slogan. The only individual freedom they were for, was sexual freedom.

It was “the dawn of the age of Aquarius“; an age apparently favoring sexual copulation. They made so much love in California’s bay area – especially in San Francisco – that, doctors said, sexually transmitted diseases that had not been known to the medical profession since the middle ages were once more common, mostly among young middle-class men and women – the  revolutionaries.

There was a climate not of rape but of promiscuity – particularly on campus – set off by sex-positive feminism (women could be as aggressive in pursuit of the big O as men).

Women demanded sexual equality with men. The pill helped. Anything men could do, women could do.

Laws making work-place harassment and having “a hostile environment for women”, created a plaintiff bar. Discrimination against women – not hiring and not  promoting – gave rise to a proliferation of  law-suits. Huge class actions.

A lot of women and their lawyers filed suits for extorting settlements, including women for whom the casting couch gambit did not pay off.

Of course, the “casting couch” was used by unscrupulous men and women. It always had been. It was a time-honored tradition. That didn’t begin in the 1960s! But after 1968, women who didn’t get the part they parted their limbs for, could start a new tradition and sue.

Not all did, of course; and not all suits were successful. Had they been, everything might have been different. Marilyn Monroe pointed out that if she had said no, 25 other women would have said yes.

Hollywood is a flesh-peddler. It is not a source of  moral guidance – though it often pretends to be. It is not an oracular shrine where the higher wisdom may be sought – though it often pretends to be that too. Women stars and starlets sell their looks. And since not all great “sex symbols” have acting talent, the casting couch was useful to manipulative people of both sexes. The difference since 1968 is that Hollywood came to think of itself as “on the side of history”. Since promiscuity was IN, the casting couch ceased to be a naughty open secret and became a model of Political Correctness. Or so the arbiters of sexual mores – the Left – chose to believe. And since everyone who was anyone was on the Left, it was okay for a movie mogul – such as Harvey Weinstein – to demand sex from a pretty girl who wanted him to give her a starring role in his next blockbuster.  

That ethos of the sixties, seventies and eighties (especially among educated elites) –  “Make Love, Not War”, no shame in your body, sexual satisfaction is a right, sex is liberating, sex experimentation is mind-expanding, marriage is slavery, conventional prudery is fascism – was a great time for men. All men. (Though not such a good time for professional prostitutes who suddenly had the competition of no-charge, anytime, anywhere princesses.)

Rich, powerful and famous men have always attracted women. They could take their pick among their groupies. They could grow old and fat and still have a glamorous young wife. The difference between groupies and would-be wives is that groupies accept the sex itself as their reward – morally reinforced by “sex-positive” feminism.

The Trophy Wife (always a second or third) started by simply being  younger and more beautiful than the old wives. But the role developed, evolved. She had not only to be younger and more beautiful, she had also to have had a career, or even achieved fame and fortune in her own right. The career aspect of the Executive Woman became a selling point in itself, adding to Her price and His status when He could claim Her as His.

But there is no Big Girl, growing up in the Western world, who does not know the difference between a low status groper and a Big Boy. No Big Girl is incapable of saying no or yes to Mr. Shlub or Mr. Big. Big Girls can throw off a wandering hand without being traumatized. Big Girls know the difference between a grope and rape, a pass and sexual harassment. Big Girls (Jolie, Paltrow) do not have to squawk aloud and publicly denounce sexual harassment or groping.

And so – Big Girls who settle out of court with Mr. Rich Big, getting dollars in exchange for non-disclosure, should abide by that agreement. They have been compensated for their loss of financial opportunity (which is what “loss of face” and “loss of self-esteem” are really all about).  

Are unwanted passes irritating? Yes. Are they blows against the sanctity of women’s bodies?  No. (It was the patriarchal ownership of women that conferred a “don’t touch” taboo on them  – and which still in Islam renders them corrupted, filthy and discardable when used by non-owners. Rape is an artifact of Patriarchy.) Marriage and marriageability made Woman non-violable. What has replaced them for her protection is the politics of identity. A woman now owns herself, but only as one of  the collective of Women.

Women’s major contribution to society is no longer as the bearers of children. They are female economic units (FEUs). Feminism proclaims a battle between women and men for power. Corporations setting quotas, hire and promote women in place of men. Women must be hired as FEUs, and promoted as FEUs, but any hint of behavior that acknowledges their sex can be the basis for a law suit.

How does society know when a woman is sincerely disgusted, ashamed, humiliated, nauseated etc. by a co-worker or boss?  Sincerity is beside the point. How do we know whether the pass was hostile or amatory? It makes no difference which it is. Heterosexual desire is now immoral. The intention of the perp is beside the point. And so we see the erosion of the idea that “rape” is a horrible crime (except on school campuses, where the cry of “rape” from a malicious female can wreck a young man’s career prospects and reputation without his being allowed to defend himself). In the smart world, rape is on the way to becoming a strict liability offense. The more women are “equal”  to men, the less their bodies/persons warrant special protection. Sexual assault is now just one form of common assault – unwanted touching, of varying degrees of force.

Is a man’s exposing himself and masturbating in front of a Big Girl anything more than ludicrousness? The moral outrage at Mr. Big’s years of unwanted touching does not signal virtue. No-one in Hollywood can reclaim that sort of virtue.

No adult anywhere in the West can, thanks to the universal license supplied by the New Left in 1968.

The Left owns the culture. As a matter of ethical correctness, it teaches prurience to infants.

Pornography is the way, the truth, and the life, in fiction and reality, in the Arts and in the News. 

Posted under Cosmology, Ethics, Feminism, Leftism, United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, October 12, 2017

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A European vision of ISIS as the new utopia 101

Europe – a term that sometime includes Britain and sometimes does not, and this time does – has gone much further towards voluntary dhimmitude, or even (yikes!) mass conversion to Islam, than pessimistic observers such as ourselves had imagined possible until now.

Dhimmitude? Conversion to Islam? Actually, there is something even worse, and to that European eyes are lifting in rapture.

It is now acceptable to present a TV series that promotes – not just Islam, no … wait for it … ISIS as an ideal society.

Yes, truly. It just happened in Britain.

It’s not acceptable to everyone as this review of the offering by a sane and civilized critic, Christopher Stevens, for the Daily Mail shows:

Pure poison … it’s like a Nazi recruiting film from the 1930s

The State

Channel 4

A really super-cool club. That’s how a young black British doctor describes Islamic State [ISIS] in tonight’s episode of The State, her eyes shining as she records a YouTube message urging other young women to follow her example and defect to Syria.

‘A really super-cool club.’ There’s no irony in her voice. Dr Shakira Boothe (played by Ony Uhiara) is a single mother from London who claims to be part of the first generation of Muslims building a religious paradise on earth.

This, then, is how Channel 4, a publicly owned British broadcaster, depicts Islamic State five days after a terrorist attack in Barcelona that killed more than a dozen people – during a year that has seen British children killed by a suicide bomber at a Manchester pop concert.

Do not assume that the true nature of the Islamic State is concealed, its terrible tortures and appalling executions kept off the screen. No. The atrocities are a feature, a vital part of what commends ISIS as an ideal.

A four-part drama screening on consecutive nights, The State is supposedly based on real events in Syria and Iraq, seen from the viewpoint of several British recruits who fled their homes to join the jihad or Holy War. It showcases graphic footage of torture and dismemberment.

The second episode tonight includes an appallingly callous tableau of dead babies in an incubator ward, after a bomb strike on a hospital.

It is sickening. But it isn’t the gore and scattered limbs that leave a tight knot in the stomach: it is the moist-eyed adulation as The State pleads with us not just to sympathise with the British jihadis but to love them. All the women are elegant but strong – independent heroines making a positive choice to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of their pious religious convictions. Joans of Arc, every one. All the men are sensitive and soft-spoken – driven to fight in God’s army for their love of their families. Everyone is deeply intelligent and multi-lingual, with extensive knowledge of the Koran.

And they are all ridiculously good-looking of course, with the occasional Poldark moment for the boys as they strip off their uniforms to reveal waxed chests with moulded six-packs. The soundtrack is all swelling orchestras and throbbing drums, with moments of sad Spanish guitar when a character dies.

No one will be surprised to discover that the writer and director of The State, Peter Kosminsky, is not a veteran of the civil war in Syria. He did not carry out research missions to Raqqa and Aleppo.

In fact, middle-class film-maker Kosminsky is 61 years old and Oxbridge-educated, the epitome of the London media luvvie who is desperate to demonstrate that he is less racist than anyone else at his Hampstead dinner party. …

The dialogue of The State gives him away at every moment. It’s Dad-speak, a middle-aged man’s failed effort to sound ‘down with the kids’, which parrots comical slang last used in the 1970s by the Bay City Rollers – words such as ‘super-cool’.

In tonight’s opening scene, one fighter waves his AK47 and shouts: ‘This is better than flipping burgers!’ It’s meant to be a victory shout – but instead, the line is fake, patronising and, in its assumption that well-educated British Asians like him are destined to work at McDonald’s, dismissively racist.

Kosminsky’s dead ear for dialogue is matched by his inability to smell out lies. Because all the scenes are based on second-hand research, they mirror the propaganda videos that cascade on to the internet, showing life under Sharia law. Much of the series consists of the director’s attempts to capture the camera angles common in phone videos of battlefields and marketplaces.

It’s baffling that a man who knows how the television world works … seems blind to the crass manipulation of Islamic State’s official videos. Kosminsky believes that the choreographed beheadings and the carefully curated aftermath of bombings are true and accurate depictions of ISIS life.

For fear of imposing his own opinions on viewers (good liberals never do that) he offers no comment on the medieval morality of Islamic State. Racism is endemic: the leading characters soon learn to sneer openly at the pathetic white fighters, who are mostly fat, tearful, closet homosexuals.

All of the characters have left their homes without saying goodbye to their parents, though Kosminsky is at pains to point out that this doesn’t mean they are ungrateful or unloving – it’s just that they didn’t dare risk alerting the forces of government oppression.

The men practise dismantling their assault rifles with their eyes shut, and learn the basics of misogyny: ‘A woman in this life is defective!’

And when the bomb strikes that baby ward, there is no hint that any blame lies with the ISIS cowards using the hospital as their shield. If anything, the fault is with the unseen hand, presumably American, that fired the missile. The only explanation for the characters’ betrayal of Britain is summed up in one line: ‘I ain’t never going back to that kuffar dump, bruv.’ Kuffar, as the constant scroll of Arabic dictionary definitions tells us, means dirty, foreign and unholy.

ISIS is a death cult, and the new recruits are expected by their commanders to die quickly and needlessly. But even if the idealistic characters we met last night are killed off later this week, that does not affect the message of the first two episodes. Many people will watch only the first hour or two, and it’s the initial impressions that count for most. Kosminsky cannot be incapable of understanding how most viewers will regard his perverted vision of ISIS. But he only cares about the opinions of his peers in a deluded bubble. Any decent human being, anyone who has felt despair and heartbreak at the terrorist attacks sponsored by Islamic State, will feel nothing but revulsion for his characters. They are traitors to their families and friends. Society has provided so much entertainment and education to enrich their lives, and they are turning all of it to the most evil uses.

But what if  the “deluded bubble” he lives in includes the entire international Left as well as most of 1.5 or so billion Muslims?

The State is no sort of truthful drama, as it claims to be. This is a recruitment video to rival Nazi propaganda of the Thirties calling young men to join the Brownshirts.

Kosminsky celebrates the camaraderie and sense of purpose that he imagines to be the fuel of ISIS. …

Every frame of this film is a lie. It is poison.

It is poison offered to millions of viewers in Britain and beyond. The decision makers at Channel 4 surely approved it for screening in expectation of its having mass appeal. It is quite likely to be shown in many other countries, including America.

Our civilization is moribund. Too many among us believe that no lives matter; that life itself, human existence, does not matter.

But against what is it measured? There is nothing to compare it with. There is nothing else. Out there is a universe of data, incoherent without the human consciousness to order it and invest it with value and meaning.

And if Western man is giving himself over to a cult of cruelty and death, perhaps the human species is after all an evolutionary failure.

Posted under Arab States, Britain, Ethics, Europe, Islam, jihad, middle east, Muslims, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, August 23, 2017

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Regular aborting is good for your health 9

Why should any baby ever be born in Oregon? It’s unnecessary in that utopia ever to have to do anything so horrible, so fascist, so racist, so sexist, so xenophobic, so denying of global warming as to breed.

Whatever your sex, you may find yourself pregnant with a new life formed inside you!

Ugh! A parasite!

Fear not, Oregonians. You can get rid of it fast and free.

From the Washington Times:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said Thursday that she plans to sign a sweeping, unprecedented bill requiring insurers to provide free abortions for their customers, including illegal immigrants.

“The ability to control our bodies and make informed decisions about health are critical to providing all Oregonians the opportunity to achieve our full potential and live productive, thriving lives,” the Democratic chief executive said in an email. “Attempts to deny access to contraceptives and family planning are an attack on all Oregonians, particularly women of color, low-income and young women.”

The $10.2 million bill, which cleared the state House and Senate with no Republican votes, also comes as a badly needed boost for Planned Parenthood’s Oregon affiliate, which helped write the measure and pushed for its passage as it struggles to keep its doors open.

Democrats said the bill would ensure equal access to abortion, but several Republicans said they didn’t understand why the legislation was necessary, given that Oregon already has the least-restrictive abortion laws in the nation.

“We don’t need to do this. This is Oregon,” Republican state Rep. Mike Nearman said during the House floor debate. “There [are] no legal restrictions on anyone’s right to get an abortion. You can get an abortion at any time for any reason. Even sex selection.” …

Mr. Nearman said the bill shows that Oregon has moved from allowing abortion to advancing it.

“Now I guess the only thing we have left is to promote it,” Mr. Nearman said. “We need to make sure that more health care providers are forced to provide it.” …

Democratic state Rep. Pam Marsh said the Oregon bill “ensures that cost alone will never keep a woman from receiving services, regardless of citizenship status, ability to pay or gender identity,” but also sends a message to the Trump administration.

“The bill also plants a clear flag: Regardless of any possible federal action to come, the state of Oregon will protect reproductive health care rights for all residents,” she said in an op-ed. …

Laurel Swerdlow, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon advocacy director, framed the issue as one of equal opportunity to a constitutionally guaranteed right.

“Rights don’t matter if you can’t access them,” Ms. Swerdlow said in a statement. “Every Oregonian — no matter where they live or how much money they make or who provides their health insurance — deserves access to the health care they need.”

Just by being an Oregonian, you deserve the services of medical personnel. Your right is their obligation.

Until the state of Oregon is depopulated, which is unlikely to happen before the earth burns up 100 years from now, it is the place to go to if you are very much in demand for impregnating, as this lady must be:

But won’t it be a pity if no little child will ever have her for a mother?

Posted under Commentary, Ethics, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, July 8, 2017

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No problem for atheism 14

We much admire Dr. Jordan Peterson when he talks about politics. We agree with all we have heard him say on political issues.

We do not agree with him on the subject of morality as he discusses it here;

Our arguments against Dostoyevsky’s young villain-hero Raskolnikov are too numerous to set out here. Enough to say that one person’s need for something is not a reason why another person should give it to him.

But to come to why Dr. Peterson cites the novel:

He agrees with Dostoyevsky’s declaration (made in the novel by Raskolnikov) that “if there is no god then you can do whatever you want”. He is willing to substitute the word “higher value” or “transcendent value” for “god”.

To explain why he agrees, he asks: “What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second?”

He adds:  “It’s as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational.”

He asks: “Why the hell not ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’?”

These are arguments very often put against atheism. They are not difficult for an atheist to answer.

He thinks that atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins* do not realize that the ethics they take for granted are predicated on a long tradition of moral principles encapsulated in the myths of religion. The myths convey, down through the ages, the “higher”, the “transcendent” morality – which, he says, “can be personified in the idea of God”.  Those moral principles, he suggests, are not just divinely revealed, they can be said to define and constitute the Divine itself.

The implication is that at certain moments in ancient history, revelations of some “transcendent” moral truths were imparted to certain men. If not by a god at least from some source of divine wisdom. And because these come from that “higher” source, they are the right guides for human behavior.

He is referring of course to the “moral religions”. Most religions contain no moral precepts whatsoever, if the meaning of “moral behavior” is behaving well towards our fellow human beings.

So let’s examine the moral precepts of the moral religions. Convention has it that there are three of them: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Some oriental religions such as Buddhism and Jainism command your right behavior towards others, but to serve a different end: not in order to benefit them for their own sakes, but entirely in order to put a shine on your own soul.)

Islam may as well be excluded straightaway. It commands Muslims to be good to other Muslims, not to anyone who is not a Muslim. Dr. Peterson is unlikely to include that idea in his notion of transcendent values.

What does Judaism command? That you love (respect) your neighbor as yourself, and that includes even the stranger in your midst. That is sensible. Enlightened self-interest requires the same thing. Judaism is essentially a religion of law. Law is good. The Mosaic laws forbid murder, theft, false testimony, adultery, and covetousness. Divine revelation was not needed for law to forbid murder, theft, and  false testimony. They were forbidden in far more ancient secular codes of law, such as the Hammurabi Code which was written down some 600 years before the Mosaic law is alleged to have been revealed by Jehovah through Moses to the Children of Israel. As for adultery and covetousness, they are not punishable by law or despised by custom in our time. As to the rest of the Jewish religious laws, a reading of the “books of Moses” is very unlikely to support the view that they are of “transcendent” value, fixed stars in the moral firmament by which we may be rightly guided forever. They forbid homosexuality, for instance. Is that a transcendent value?

And then there is Christianity. It too forbids murder, theft, false testimony, adultery, covetousness and homosexuality. It commands you to love (love) your neighbor, to love everyone, to love all mankind however unlovable your neighbor, or your enemy might be. It commands you to forgive sinners, though you may condemn the sin. It demands, in other words, the impossible, and discards the genuinely and supremely moral idea of justice. It recommends self-abasement and self-denial. It asks human beings to act against human nature. Transcendent and eternal values?

No. The bodies of myth that compose the scriptures and moral commandments of certain religions do NOT set a guide to right behavior, or supply a bedrock of moral values.

To answer Dr. Petersons’ remaining arguments:

What is stopping you from getting anything you want (“forcibly” is implied) from everyone else whenever you want to, is the will of everyone else. Your self-interest is best served by taking into account that everyone else is necessarily serving his own self-interest just as you are, and your survival and the satisfying of your needs depends on taking this fact into consideration. Or, as we put it in our own Articles of Reason: My liberty should be limited by nothing except everyone else’s liberty. That is rational. Mankind would not long have survived if many people had not understood the selfish need to tolerate and co-operate with other people. Rational self-interest keeps most of us  from living by the maxim “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”, because if we did we would be likely to die by it.

Finally, to want to get what one wants from everyone else is, he suggests, a “psychopathic tendency”, and that, he says, is not irrational. But what does “psychopathic” mean if not a sickness of the mind – a breakdown of sanity, of the capacity to reason? If psychopaths are the example of what we should not be, who would disagree?

Our final answer: no god ever spoke to any man. No moral precepts come from a divine source.

All are man-made.

None are set in stone.

Every moral idea, like every other idea, needs to be examined by reason.

 

 

* In the case of Richard Dawkins, we would concede that his Leftist principles derive from Christianity. In our opinion they are not good.

Posted under Atheism, Ethics by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, June 28, 2017

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“The real enemy is humanity itself” 184

They really are coming after all of us.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada free Press:

I am sure there are many Americans who have no idea nor care what The Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development (DICED) is. They should. The Draft Covenant is the Environmental Constitution of Global Governance.

The first version of the Covenant was presented to the United Nations in 1995 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. It was hoped that it would become a negotiating document for a global treaty on environmental conservation and sustainable development.

The fourth version of the Covenant, issued on September 22, 2010, was written to control all development tied to the environment, “the highest form of law for all human activity”.

Law for ALL human activity! Think of that. Totalitarianism beyond the wildest dreams even of a Stalin – or Islam.

The Covenant’s 79 articles, described in great detail in 242 pages, take Sustainable Development principles described in Agenda 21 and transform them into global law, which supersedes all constitutions including the U.S. Constitution.

All signatory nations, including the U.S., would become centrally planned, socialist countries in which all decisions would be made within the framework of Sustainable Development.

In collaboration with Earth Charter and Elizabeth Haub Foundation for Environmental Policy and Law from Canada, the Covenant was issued by the International Council on Environmental Law (ICEL) in Bonn, Germany, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with offices in Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK.

Federal agencies that are members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) include the U.S. Department[s] of State, Commerce, Agriculture (Forest Service), Interior (Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The same agencies are members of the White House Rural Council and the newly established White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities (Executive Order, March 15, 2012).

That is to say under Obama. Of course.

The Draft Covenant is a blueprint “to create an agreed single set of fundamental principles like a ‘code of conduct’ used in many civil law, socialist, and theocratic traditions, which may guide [sic!] States, intergovernmental organizations, and individuals”.

The writers describe the Covenant as a “living document”, a blueprint that will be adopted by all members of the United Nations. They say that global partnership is necessary in order to achieve Sustainable Development, by focusing on “social and economic pillars”.  The writers are very careful to avoid the phrase, “one world government”.  Proper governance is necessary on all levels, “from the local to the global” [they say].

The Covenant underwent four writings, in 1995, 2000, 2004, and 2010, influenced by the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, by ideas of development control and social engineering by the United Nations, “leveling the playing field for international trade, and having a common basis of future lawmaking”.

Article 2 describes in detail “respect for all life forms”.

Except the human life form (see Article 33 below).

Article 3 proposes that the entire globe should be under “the protection of international law”. 

Article 5 refers to “equity and justice” [code words for socialism/communism – the author].

Article 16 requires that all member nations must adopt environmental conservation into all national decisions.

Article 19 deals with “Stratospheric Ozone”. “Rex Communis is the customary international law regime applicable to areas beyond national jurisdiction: in particular to the high seas and outer space.”

Article 20 requires that all nations must “mitigate the adverse effects of climate change”. [If we endorse this document, we must fight a non-existent man-made climate change – the author.]

Article 31, “Action to Eradicate Poverty” requires the eradication of poverty by spreading the wealth from developed nations to developing countries.

The perfect recipe for making the entire human race extremely poor. 

Article 32 requires recycling, “consumption and production patterns”.

Article 33, “Demographic policies,” demands that countries calculate “the size of the human population their environment is capable of supporting and to implement measures that prevent the population from exceeding that level”. In the Malthusian model, humans were supposed to run out of food and starve to death. In a similar prediction, this document claims that the out-of control multiplication of humans can endanger the environment.

The assumption is, as the socialist assumption essentially is, that all human beings are alike – or ought to be – like ants, so what does it matter which ones live and which ones are eliminated? 

Article 34 demands the maintenance of an open and non-discriminatory international trading system in which “prices of commodities and raw materials reflect the full direct and indirect social and environmental costs of their extraction, production, transport, marketing, and where appropriate, ultimate disposal.”The capitalist [ie. market] model of supply and demand pricing [the only possible way of establishing prices – ed] does not matter.

This erroneous article of Marxist faith has been the main cause of the downfall of every socialist regime from the USSR to Venezuela.  

Article 37 discusses “Transboundary Environmental Effects and Article 39 directs how “Transboundary Natural Resources” will be conserved, “quantitatively and qualitatively”. [For a future generation more worthy of them than we are? -ed.]  According to the document, “conserve means managing human-induced processes and activities which may be damaging to natural systems in such a way that the essential functions of these systems are maintained”. [?]

Article 41 requires integrated planning systems, irrespective of administrative boundaries within a country, and is based on Paragraph 10.5 of Agenda 21, which seeks to “facilitate allocation of land to the uses that provide the greatest sustainable benefits and to promote the transition to a sustainable and integrated management of land resources“. The impact assessment procedure is developed by the World Bank. …

Writers of the Draft Covenant are approximately 19 U.S. professors of Law, Biology, Natural Resources, Urban Planning, Theology, Environmental Ethics, two General Counsel Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, chair of the IUCN Ethics Working Group, two attorneys in private practice in the U.S., a judge from the International Court of Justice, a U.S. High Seas Policy advisor of the IUCN Global Marine Programme, foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, and 13 members of the UN Secretariat, including the Chairman, Dr. Wolfgang E. Burhenne.

Since this Draft Covenant has a Preamble and 79 articles, it is obviously intended to be a “world constitution for global governance”, an onerous way to control population growth, re-distribute wealth, force social and “economic equity and justice”, economic control, consumption control, land and water use control, and re-settlement control as a form of social engineering.

Article 20 is of particular interest because it forces the signatories to DICED “to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change”. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, “climatologists” from Hollywood, and millennials brainwashed by their professors that CO2 is going to destroy the planet and kill us all, took to microphones and podiums to express their displeasure with such a “criminal” decision.

It did not matter that the President explained … that this accord was nothing else than an economic scheme to steal and redistribute wealth from the United States to the third world … President Trump explained how many millions of American jobs would be lost

How did man become the main perpetrator of climate change? How did we become so powerful that we can change climate with our very existence, but, if we pay carbon taxes to the third world, we correct our guilt of existing, of breathing, and we turn climate into a favorable proposition for all – no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no droughts, no hail, no torrential rains, no earthquakes, no tsunamis, nothing but serene climate year after year? 

The Club of Rome, the premier environmental think-tank, consultant to the United Nations and the alleged writer of U.N. Agenda 21’s 40 chapters, explained:

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy is humanity itself.

… Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment … said:

No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about social justice and equality in the world.

Timothy Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation, said:

We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.

The sad thing is that many mayors around the country have decided to disobey President Trump’s decision on the Paris Climate Accord and reported publicly that they will continue their membership even though such a move is illegal under our Constitution. …

These dissenting mayors have not pledged their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution but to the Global Covenant of Mayors, one of the arms of implementation around the globe of U.N. Agenda 21, now morphed into Agenda 2030. Using grants from our own government, the Compact of Mayors and the European Union’s Covenant of Mayors have influenced initiatives at the local, city, and state governments, forcing their globalist agenda called “visioning” on the hapless population who are now forced to accept decisions made by mayors and boards of supervisors that are robbing them of freedom of movement, of their property rights, of the use of their cars, of farming, in the name of “transitioning to a low emission and climate resilient economy”, a pie in the sky goal.

The real goal is to transform and redistribute the wealth of developed countries and to arrest their development by eventually curbing completely the use of fossil fuels and turning them into a more primitive society dependent on unreliable solar and wind power.

Such a global society would have no borders, no sovereignty, no suburbia, no private property, no cars, and would be controlled by the United Nations umbrella of octopus NGOs.

… Dr. Ottmar Endenhofer, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Co-Chair of Working Group 3, stated:

We [UN-IPCC] redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore

President Trump can save us from this appalling threat of world communist government – if he is allowed to serve his term, best of all his two terms, in office.

But the totalitarian Left is fighting hard to bring him down. It is prepared to use violence. It is using violence. So will only war now save humanity from a terrible Last Age – and then extinction?

And then they cry 383

Acting on the inflammatory rhetoric of the Left, a comedian, Kathy Griffin,

suggested beheading the President of the United States in the manner favored by ISIS.

When she was criticized for her idea, she cried.

Yesterday (June 14, 2017) the Republican Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a far left Bernie Sanders supporter at a congressional baseball practice on the baseball diamond in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time of this writing, Mr. Scalise is said to be in critical condition. Four others were also wounded. Two were Capitol Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey before they shot the gunman dead. (“Had they not been there, it would have been a massacre,” a witness – Senator Rand Paul – said.) The other two were Matt Mika, a lobbyist, and Zack Barth, a staffer for Republican Representative Roger Williams.

There is obviously no dialogue possible between Left and Right in America now (or anywhere else in the world). So the battle has to be fought in other ways.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.

The Left is inconsolably bitter over losing the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most of the states. Having no arguments, no case to make, but being moved by intense childish emotion, Leftists strike out with fists, clubs, guns.

John Hawkins lists 20 quotations from the Left that urged the use of extreme violence. the beating, raping, torturing, and murdering of conservatives, Republicans, and Donald Trump. An accumulation of such declarations (there have been a great many) is more than likely to eventuate in attempts at murder.

You have plays, rap videos and prominent liberals glorifying the murder of the President …  while cops at left-wing universities stand back and allow violent students to riot, threaten and disrupt conservative speakers. 

1) “Michele (Bachmann), slit your wrist. Go ahead… or, do us all a better thing [sic]. Move that knife up about two feet. Start right at the collarbone.” – Montel Williams

The inciters become incoherent with rage. They choke on their fury. Their repetitious cussing is a sign that they have no reasonable case to make.

2) “F*ck that dude. I’ll smack that f*cker’s comb-over right off his f*cking scalp. Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump, I’d punch him in his f*cking face. And that’s not a joke. Even if he did become president — watch out, Donald Trump, because I will punch you in your f*cking face if I ever meet you. Secret Service had better just f*cking be on it. Don’t let me anywhere within a block.”– Rapper Everlast on Donald Trump

3) “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow … I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

4) “I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy

The Tea Party! If those peaceful polite mainly middle-aged people who got together to ask for fiscal responsibility, and who meticulously cleared up every scrap of debris on the ground after they held a public meeting, were  full of anger, venom and bile, they certainly never showed it. But no doubt the lying left-biased media reported that they were.

5) “F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.

It was to “Joe the Plumber” that Obama explained how he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country. His administration, he planned, would take money forcibly from those who had earned it and give it to those who had not. “Joe the Plumber”, like a lot of other Joes, did not like the idea. So, says the Left, kill him.

6) “Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream… giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet.” U.C. Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian fires up the crowd at an anti-war rally by calling for an American intifada

That was clear and plain incitement to terrorist action on a massive scale.

7) “That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida. He’s a millionaire and a billionaire. He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.” — Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa

8) “..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger. Do you want to salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch.” — From a fund raising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

9) “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places.

10) “But the victim is also inaccurately being eulogized as a kind and loving religious man. Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. But in the U.S., we don’t die for speaking our minds. Or we’re not supposed to anyway. Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security.” — Linda Stasi, New York Daily News,on a victim murdered in the San Bernadino terrorist attack

11) “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams.” — Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston)

12) “If I had my way, I would see Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell strapped down to electric chairs and lit up like Christmas trees. The better to light the way for American Democracy and American Freedom!” — Democratic Talk Radio’s Stephen Crockett

13) “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.” — Allan Brauer, the communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County to Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter.

Can anyone get lower than that? Yup. For Leftists there is no bottom.

14) “Violence solves nothing. I want a rhino to f*ck @SpeakerRyan to death with its horn because it’s FUNNY, not because he’s a #GOPmurderbro.” – Jos Whedon

15) “I hope Roger Ailes dies slow, painful, and soon. The evil that man has done to the American tapestry is unprecedented for an individual.” — Think Progress editor Alan Pyke

16) “But, you know, the NRA members are the current incarnation of the brownshirts from Germany back in the early ’30s, late ’20s, early ’30s. Now, of course, there came the Night of the Long Knives when the brownshirts were slaughtered and dumped in the nearest ditches when the power structure finally got tired of them. So I look forward to that day.” — Mike Malloy

“Antifa” is a Leftist brownshirt organization, fascist if ever any organization deserved to be called fascist. It claims to be “fighting fascism”. They and other Leftist rioters who are attacking people at pro-Trump rallies (and the populist equivalents in Europe) are doing exactly what the fascist mobs, both Nazi and Communist, did in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a joke – a very ugly one –  that they are doing their brutal violent murderous work against peaceful crowds in the name of “anti-fascism”.

17) “Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f*cking republican and independent I see. #f*cktrump, #f*cktheGOP, #f*ckstraightwhiteamerica, #f*ckyourprivilege.” – Orange is the New Black star Lea DeLaria

18) “I wish they (Republicans) were all f*cking dead!” — Dan Savage

19) “Sarah Palin needs to have her hair shaved off to a buzz cut, get headf*cked by a big veiny, ashy, black d*ck then be locked in a cupboard.” — Azealia Banks advocates raping Sarah Palin over a fake news story.

They claim to have”imagination” while, they say, the Right does not. So there we see what it is they imagine: Jos Whedon’s hilarious dream of the rhino raping and killing Paul Ryan, and Azealia Banks’s wish for Sarah Palin. Behold the Vision!

20)” Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House, but I know that this won’t change anything.” – Madonna

How many others, like yesterday’s would-be killer, take such outbursts to be declarations of war? There are surely more violent attacks to come.

The Left has become a terrorist organization.

To Haiti cholera, to the Clintons, profit 367

It is not remarkable or surprising to read this account of just some of the IMMENSE AND APPALLING HARM that the United Nations does.

Nor is it surprising to read that the Clintons profit from the harm.

What is surprising is to learn that the New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN actually reported the harm, and the Huffington Post actually criticized the UN and the corrupt firms and organizations that profited from it.

And it’s utterly astonishing to be told that the UN admitted that the 150,000 or so peacekeepers it sends out into the world each year have done so much harm that the UN cannot allow a single claim for compensation to be met because it would be a precedent for an untold number of other such claims. 

From Disobedient Media by Elizabeth Vos:

After earthquakes, hurricanes, and United Nations sex rings have ravaged Haiti, it might be fair to call the locale a hell on earth. In the aftermath of the massive 2010 earthquake, the UN further deteriorated the situation by introducing cholera to the poverty stricken nation. Six years would pass before the U.N. admitted its role in bringing the infection to Haiti.

In the intervening years, thousands of Haitians died from the infection that spread uncontrollably through lack of infrastructure and poor medical treatment. While shockingly little was done by the United Nations in response to the disaster, the tragedy allowed micro-lenders and re-insurers to quickly move in, profiting where critics say aid organizations should have provided help.

The United Nations dispatched peacekeepers to aid the recovery process after a severe earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. Unfortunately the peacekeepers added to the Haitian death toll after introducing cholera to the already devastated environment, apparently brought over by UN peacekeepers from Nepal. It was not until 2016 that the UN finally admitted responsibility for the outbreak. Cholera was not the only plague brought to Haiti by U.N. peacekeepers. As previously reported by Disobedient Media, peacekeepers were revealed to have also been operating a Haitian sex ring in the country from 2004 to 2007.

Bill Clinton was appointed as the United Nation’s special envoy to Haiti at the time of the cholera outbreak, but immediately focused on helping negotiate the release of child trafficker Laura Silsby and her co-defendants before giving attention to Haiti’s plethora of other issues.

Just over ten thousand Haitians are officially reported to have died as a result of the cholera epidemic. However, a study conducted by Doctors Without Borders estimated that this figure may represent a vast underestimation of the death toll. The New York Times reported the results “could multiply the known death toll by roughly a factor of three, at least in the first six months of the epidemic, when it was most intense.” Many of those who died never made it to hospitals, where official counts of the dead were made.

Seven years after it was introduced, cholera is still endemic in Haiti. The United Nations has provided no financial reparations to the victims of the illness and their families. Haitian cholera victims have sued the United Nations in hope of achieving some compensation; so far the absolute diplomatic immunity of the UN has been upheld.

NPR reported that victims want the U.N. to end cholera by installing a national water and sanitation system; paying reparations to cholera victims and their families and publicly apologizing for bringing cholera to Haiti.

U.N. officials’ were cited as fearing that if the Haitian plaintiffs succeed in piercing the agency’s cloak of immunity, it would open the way to unlimited lawsuits seeking compensation for acts of the U.N. or the 150,000 peacekeeping forces it sends out into the world each year.

The UN’s reticence to aid Haitian cholera victims contradicts its central platform promising to uphold human rights. While the country still lacks proper sanitary conditions and medical care, CNN reported that the World Health Organization planned to send one million doses of cholera vaccine to Haiti, adding that there were still: “770 new cases per week in 2016″.

Less than a year after the cholera outbreak, microfinancers and re-insurers including Swiss Re, Fonkoze, Mercy Corp partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative to create the Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organization (MiCRO). At this time Haiti still lacked basic sanitation. Mercy Corp is Chaired by Linda A. Mason, who also co-founded Bright Horizons, a large child care organization that has previously operated in Haiti with Mercy Corp.

Disobedient Media has previously reported on Swiss Re’s involvement with a land grabbing scandal targeting impoverished farmers in Brazil. The report highlighted close financial ties that Swiss Re had to investors George Soros and Warren Buffet. The George Soros Foundation is a major investor in Leapfrog Investments, a private equity firm. Other investors in Leapfrog Investments include the European Investment Bank, JP Morgan, Prudential Financial, Metlife, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and most significantly the TIAA [Financial Services] and Swiss Re. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. also sank billions into Swiss Re in 2009. Buffet has since offloaded a portion of his stake in Swiss Re in 2015, ending a five year long tenure as the reinsurance group’s largest investor.

On the surface, it appeared that microfinance would benefit Haitians. However, re-insurance and microfinance are for-profit business models, not to be conflated with the work of aid groups. According to an article published by the Standford Social Innovation Review, “in some instances microcredit makes life at the bottom of the pyramid worse… in contrast to nonprofit organizations, commercial banks that make microloans typically provide only financial services.

Indonesia’s Bank Rakyat, Ecuador’s Bank Pichincha, and Brazil’s Unibanco all directly target poor customers.” The apparent inability of microfinance to improve the lives of the impoverished it targets has led to detractors denouncing it as a means of de-facto economic enslavement.

The presence of microfinancing groups in Haiti as the UN failed to intervene during the cholera outbreak raises questions in regards to profits these groups may have made in the wake of disasters, be they natural or man-made.

In 2012, the Huffington Post cited critics who speculated that cholera had introduced a profit motive for international reinsurersand asked why Haitians should pay for cholera insurancewhen the United Nations has yet to make reparations for a disease it introduced to a country that had never before experienced this strain of cholera and no other cholera infections for over a century.

The affair raises serious concerns about whether or not insurance and reinsurance firms used the UN-created crisis to profit, and highlights the endemic problems that the involvement of special interests can cause in humanitarian aid work.

Let us sum up what happened:

The UN introduced cholera to poverty-stricken, earthquake and hurricane tormented Haiti.

Insurance companies extract insurance from Haitians to “protect” them from all such “catastrophe risk”.

George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill and Hillary Clinton profit. 

Haitians continue to die of cholera and are even poorer.

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