Nothing new, stupidity in power. More the general rule than the rare exception.

Think of the First World War. A greater blood-letting than the human race had ever achieved before in all our blood-stained history. Death the only victor. Virtually a whole generation of young men wiped out. Why? For what? To gratify the vanity of a bunch of stupid monarchs. Stupid, vain monarchs and the leaders of a couple of stupidly governed republics.

But their stupidity was not deliberate. Not chosen as a preference over wisdom. Never until now have governments decided that stupidity is a chief qualification for high office. 

But now it is, in America.

Now, in America, under a leftist Democrat federal government – the stupidest government the republic has ever had with a doofus gone senile for a president, a cackling fool for a vice president, a childishly vindictive harpy for speaker of the House, all supported by mass media staffed with parrots and toadies – generations are being raised to be ignorant and dumb. Illiteracy and innumeracy will be conditions of honor; ability, talent, mastery, mere proofs of “white privilege” and “white supremacist” ambition.

Joel Kotkin writes at the American Mind on the intentional stupidifying of Americans:

Our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors … are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, [including] not only China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.

“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed …

The skills shortage may be even more profound on the factory floor. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. The percentage of the skilled manufacturing work force over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years to 20 percent of active workers. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024. Manufacturing employment is expanding more rapidly than in almost four decades but there are an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs unfilled right now.

To maintain our factories, offices, and laboratories, America needs more rigorous training, not less, and greater emphasis on skills and the ethic of work.

But more rigorous training, an emphasis on skills, an ethic of work are not on the schedule of those who make the big decisions. The Democrats in power believe – have always believed since their slave-owning days, their Ku Klux Klan days, their days of Jim Crow laws – that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites. In recent decades, still looking down on Blacks but opting to be charitable to them rather than cruel as of old, they have insisted that Blacks must be given special concessions, special advantages, to help them compete with Whites. And now they are going much further in their folly. Blacks can’t compete in exams, they say, so abolish exams. Further still: Whites and Asians must be handicapped so that Blacks can surpass them in academic achievement and governmental power. For Blacks to be elevated, Whites must be brought down. Blacks must be honored as eternal victims; Whites execrated as eternal oppressors.

That lie, that racist lie, is what Democrats insist they must be taught. That false and perilous belief – not literacy, not numeracy, not the acquisition of skills – is, they say, the business of education, from first grade to college.

They call it Critical Race Theory.

Kotkin deplores the effects of it:

Critical Race Theory is re-enforcing, and enhancing, a long-developing pattern of educational failure ever more evident. …

The current educational philosophy has purposely downplayed the acquisition of skills by scrapping such things as exit exams, or clearly comparable measures of achievement. …

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches  of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. ‘Woke” educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that meritocracy [is an] essentially racist system. Some denounce habits of punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of racism and white privilege.

In a world where brainpower pushes the economy, the denigration of [such] habits of mind can only further weaken our economic future and undermine republican institutions. Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on race and gender. …

The new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have little use for our [cultural] inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists. The Western classics, no longer celebrated, are at best fodder for deconstruction. Yale English majors no longer have to study Shakespeare or Chaucer, while you can get a classics degree at Princeton without learning Greek or Latin.

For years, humanities have been molded by post-modernist ideology, but now even the sciences are becoming, as in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, politicized. One would think the tech oligarchs at least would advocate for a well-educated domestic technical workforce. But secure in their wealth and power, the new hegemons feel little fealty to traditional ideas about competition and merit; some, including Bill Gates, openly support groups that promote the idea that science and math are themselves racist for focusing on grades and performance. A new Canadian math curriculum stresses the way in which [math] works “to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges” …

So now there is not knowledge, a pool of learning common to all humankind, but race-differentiated “knowledges”, all equal in value.

The goal is to “decolonialize” math, which is ironic, to say the least, given the huge role of Indian and Arabs in generating the symbols and concepts critical to the understanding of numbers.

Rather than science based on evidence and argument, we now get something closer to Science as Revealed Religion [most notably] on issues like the pandemic and climate change.

Government and their allies in the oligarchy, the media, and academia … have transformed science into fallacies that turn unsupported assertions into “accepted truths”.

As the concepts of objectivity, debate, and merit decline, even talent is now seen as yet another “social construct” of our “corrupt society”. Asian parents have to fight off attempts to eliminate merit for admission to elite high schools …

The pushback against the war on merit won’t come from the craven masters of Wall Street or Silicon Valley but from the grassroots, operators of small businesses, new and old, and most importantly, from parents. Most American voters—by wide margins—reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is supported by most Democrats, the powerful teachers’ unions … and the White House. 

Without knowledgeable, motivated, and skilled workers, America’s future will be dismal. … Merit has to be restored …

Has to be, yes. But will be? When? How?

The World Economic Forum is now (January 25-29, 2021) enjoying its 51^st session.

It is about to change our world forever. Or hopes to. If we let it.

Its main purpose this year is to promote the implementation of the Great Reset.

The Great Reset is, according to its admirers:

A project to bring the world’s best minds together to seek a better, fairer, greener, healthier planet as we rebuild from the pandemic.

The first thing to know about the World Economic Forum, which meets annually at Davos in Switzerland, is that it is a voluntary luxury parliament of billionaires and politicians and billionaire-politicians.

The next thing to know is: what is it for, what do these people aim at, what do they want? And the answer, with no exaggeration, is: they want to rule the world.

The Covid-19 world-wide epidemic provides the would-be world rulers with their best opportunity yet for claiming that “world solutions” are needed.

So now again an arrogance of theorists [collective noun; singular verb] wants to organize the rest of us, or as many of the rest of us as can be raked in and arranged into a pattern of existence they know to be beautiful. Their aim is only to do us good. Theirs is a kindly plan for putting human affairs right and making the whole world nice, and they alone can do it. That is their conviction, their unshakable belief.

They call their plan the “Great Reset”. They will gather into their own hands all the wealth of the world (now don’t go asking what that is or how such a thing can be done!) and redistribute it equally so each gets the same share as everyone else. (No, shush, don’t ask whether they will put their own wealth in the pool for redistribution. That’s another inappropriate question. Please try not to be hostile. Please be co-operative, neighborly, communitarian, declare that you are concerned above all else for the wretched of the earth, and you will already be helping to accomplish the Great Reset.)

This economic equalizing of all – leading, they say, inevitably to the social equalizing of all (though not of course making us all equal in power with them, the rulers themselves) – is NOT to be called or thought of as Communism, or Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or even Socialism. It is “a better form of capitalism”, aka “stake-holder’s capitalism”. It is the gift to humanity of Big Business.

The Great Reset has been made gloriously implementable right now by the Covid pandemic. Universal lockdown has forced people everywhere to change the pattern of their lives. The old ways have had to go. What an opportunity this is for shaping the new ways as they ideally ought to be! For directing the arc of history the way it ought to bend!

The World Economic Forum will turn a nasty disease into a boon for humankind.

There might have been difficulties put in the way by the United States of America if Donald Trump had been re-elected president in November 2020. He was a nuisance to the would-be world rulers for three years, and would have gone on holding them back for a while yet had not Covid-19 burst upon the political scene and forced even him to accept unprecedented change.

A billionaire himself but like no other, he is a man incapable of formulating a grand theory of any sort; one who personally knows people who build things with mortar and metal, actually standing among them and listening to them, sometimes wearing a hard hat himself! That man wants each of those workers to have a say in how he [generic masculine pronoun] is ruled! He wants each of them to keep the money he earns for himself and his dependents! That man would acknowledge no world crisis needing a “world solution” (not even global warming) – until he was confronted by Covid-19. That one man could have stood in the way of the Davos plan for years to come, and perhaps even destroyed it forever!

They did their best to traduce him in the eyes of the millions of deplorable Americans who voted for him. They accused him of all the worst sins they could think of, calling him racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, homophobe, transgenderphobe, misogynist, narcissist, climate change denier, liar, Nazi, Hitler. They tried to impress on the electorate that his face was orange, his hands too small, his hair too … too … They said he had two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else had only one. They explained why his wife and children were beneath their contempt. They did all that, and did everything they could think of to relieve the country of his leadership – and it made no difference. The deplorables continued to cheer him on, fanatically. Tens of millions of them. They said the accusations were not true. And then he actually got more votes in that November 2020 election than any other Republican candidate for the presidency had ever got before him!

Fortunately, somehow, even more votes were cast for his opponent Joe Biden, a man who loves the plan of Davos.

How can the visionaries of Davos not be grateful to the Covid virus for falling upon the world; grateful to China from where it emanated; grateful to the United Nation’s World Health Organization for promoting the great change in everyday life that nothing else could have accomplished?

You too must learn to love the vision and the plan.

Here is the face and the message of Davos. See it, hear it, learn it, obey it.

The face is that of Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. He is introduced by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the EU).

And here’s CNN, at highest sycophantic pitch, interviewing Klaus Schwab in 2020, when he and his like-thinkers were still trying to use “climate change” as the urgent disaster from which the world needed saving by them, before the happy advent of the Covid pandemic.

And here is Klaus Schwab talking about what he calls the fourth industrial revolution – the digital revolution – and how it requires globalization and social equalization.

And here he explains his “new definition of capitalism”.

And here is an appreciative article about the World Economic Forum put out for the occasion of this 51st. session. It is by Jonathan Michie, Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford, He writes at The Conversation:  

The 51st World Economic Forum starts on January 25 …

Inevitably, the event … aims to respond to the apocalyptic events of the past 12 months. “A crucial year to rebuild trust” is the theme, built around the “great reset” that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and Prince Charles launched last year.

The event will be accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, to emphasise the fact that we face global challenges that require global solutions and action.

This recognises that the effects of the pandemic are likely to be increasingly compounded by other major global threats, including the climate crisis, financial crises, and social and economic inequality. To give just one example, the COVID-19 mortality rate in England in December was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived.

See? Pure philanthropy drives the WEF.

So how successful is the WEF’s mission likely to be?

This is not the first time that global crises have required global action, but there have been mixed results in the past. After the first world war, the UK played a pivotal role in forming the League of Nations on the international stage. But this ultimately failed to deliver, with the UK’s insistence on post-war reparations undermining Germany’s economic recovery and political stability.

So the failure of the League of Nations – and therefore the outbreak of the second world war? – was Britain’s fault.

Professor Michie does his best to make the idea of an international forum managing the world’s economy nothing to be feared; rather something already tried and tested:

When the world next sought to prevent future conflicts towards the end of the second world war, the lessons were to some extent learned from last time around. The allies met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the US in 1944 to develop policies for economic stability.

This led to a new system of interlinked exchange rates organised around a gold-backed US dollar, as well as new institutions to help manage it, including the International Monetary Fund and what later became the World Bank. This was followed in the next couple of years by the United Nations and the forerunner to the World Trade Organization. The Bretton Woods system endured until the early 1970s when the US came off the gold standard, but much of the system created in the 1940s survives in one form or another today.

And who dares say that the creation of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization was a bad thing?

The 2007-09 financial crisis, which involved the first global recession since the 1930s, led to many calls for action to prevent similar crises in future. There was some tightening of regulation, but the threat of instability remains due to excessive debts and too much speculation.

With only the 1940s seeing a really adequate response to global crises, what will make the difference this time?

The WEF’s vision of a “great reset” recognises that what is needed to tackle these crises goes far beyond economic reforms, or climate measures, or tackling a pandemic – it is all of these combined, and more. It is the idea that global action needs to be underpinned by a mission to change society, to make it more inclusive and cohesive; to match environmental sustainability with social sustainability. It follows their call to “build back better” – one echoed by many around the world.

The WEF seeks action across seven key themes: environmental sustainability; fairer economies; “tech for good”; the future of work and the need for reskilling; better business; healthy futures with fair access for all; and “beyond geopolitics” – national governments collaborating globally.

The WEF says the key is reestablishing public trust, which is “being eroded, in part due to the perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic”. But this may prove difficult, given there is little change in corporate or government leadership.

The big hope is 78-year-old Joe Biden, who was US vice president for eight years during which many of these problems were mounting, not being solved.

Sadly, the main cause for optimism is the fact that today’s crises are so great that they may provoke action. Future financial crises look likely. The climate crisis is increasingly accepted to be an existential threat. And now the pandemic is a huge economic and human disaster, with further such pandemics recognised as likely because of everything from the explosion in global travel to the effects of climate change.

A key question for this year’s conference … is whether a new form of globalisation will be developed. …

A new era is required, building on the Paris Agreement to limit climate change now that the Americans are joining again – with more support of a Green New Deal geared towards achieving net zero emissions and making the global economy truly sustainable.

We need bold initiatives to tackle the threat of future pandemics; financial speculation, tax evasion and avoidance, and the threat of financial crises; and to reduce the unsustainable inequalities of wealth, income and power across the globe.

So tax avoidance is now considered morally wrong or possibly criminal. We must arrange our financial affairs so that we pay the greatest amount of tax that we possibly can.

Will corporate and political decision-makers rise to the challenge? There needs to be sufficient popular pressure – from citizens, voters, consumers, workers, educators and activists – to push governments and business to change course fundamentally.

The professor names the forerunners of this new globalist movement:

These past few years have witnessed the Occupy movement, the Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter and countless climate crisis groups.

Who could have predicted  that all those billionaires, many of them from Wall Street, would find reason to honor and adopt the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Yes. And BLM – a self-declared Marxist movement – will work in perfect harmony with the new capitalism and Big Business.

Calls for action have been coming from business leaders at Davos and elsewhere for years.

The hope is that this time, the scale of the emergency will finally make radical change unavoidable.

Unavoidable, the radical change that Klaus Schwab, and Prince Charles, and Bill Gates, and George Soros, and Joe Biden will manage. We have no choice but to let it happen.

And why should we not be happy about it? It will improve the world forever. Guaranteed.

“ANYTHING to oppose Trump” is the motto self-scorched into the anger-fired skulls of the Kings and Queens of the Universe – so crowned by the New York Times, with the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the ghost of Che Guevara in perpetual attendance.

This time, for that great cause, Global Royalty is trying to resuscitate the COVID-19 patient, the World Health Organization, an institution born of the iniquitous UN, run at vast expense by a puppet of China, for the pleasure of the world’s Gasbags.

President Trump, knowing the patient was always a wasteful useless parasite who recently did great harm to the whole world by helping to cause a pandemic, rightly decided to let it fade away. By defunding it.

So – it follows as the night the day – Global Royalty rushes to save it. By raising funds for it.

Lee Cary writes at Canada Free Press*:

The Event: A Star-studded fund raiser for the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contributors, filmed in their homes, included Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, Stevie Wonder, British soccer star David Beckham, former U.S. first ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Billie Eilish, Bill Gates, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, Andrea Bocelli, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga – the usual cast of celebrities who show up to promote global causes.

The event kicked off with a one-minute video from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—a “superstar” according to Ms. Gaga.

Tedros said [in a speech compiled from the UN Book of Utter-Ready Phrases – ed]:

Today, we come together as one to express our common humanity. To mourn those we have lost. To salute the health workers who save lives. And to say, with one voice, we shall not be defeated. Covid-19 has taken so much from us. But it has often given unique opportunity to put aside our differences, to break down barriers, to see and seek the best in each other. And to lift our voices for health for all. And to insure this never happens again. Never again. The World Health Organization is proud to be part of this historic show of solidarity. I want to thank Lady Gaga, the many artists and many (inaudible), global citizens, my friend Hugh Evans, and the United Nations, for bringing us together as one world together at home.” 

In an article in The Dispatch titled Suspending WHO Funding Should Be Just the Beginning: let’s talk about what the organization does—and what it doesn’t do, the author  Lyman Stone writes*:

[The WHO] is a body for research, conferences, and grant-writing, not frontline disease-fighting.

The WHO’s current head, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is not a doctor of medicine. 

[The WHO] spends from $200 to $600 million on travel expenses each year.

High-ranking WHO official and Canadian scientist Bruce Aylward racked up $400,000 in travel expenses helicoptering around West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, even as many African countries could not afford basic medical supplies or body bags.

The WHO pays for the travel costs of experts they invite to conferences. A huge part of the WHO’s budget is simply buying plane tickets and booking swanky hotel rooms for prestigious experts to give speeches and present papers they’ve already published online. 

Dr. Tedros made Robert Mugabe [dictator of Zimbabwe, a mass murderer – ed] a “goodwill ambassador” for the WHO in Africa.

And under his watch, the WHO has begun to include “traditional Chinese medicine” remedies in its international diagnostic manuals. What’s particularly galling about this is that the ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine often include the very wild animals that are over-hunted and endangered around Africa, and from which so many novel zoonotic diseases originate. For the WHO to endorse these practices is absurd and dangerous.

The WHO has done everything it can to support the propaganda of authoritarian regimes and cover up [not cure – ed] embarrassing epidemics.

Dr. Tedros spent his major speeches urging the world not to blame China, and claiming that “stigmatization” [of China] was as big a problem as COVID-19. 

As a result of the WHO’s delay, many countries delayed their responses by weeks, making a crucial difference that epidemiologists say may have doubled the total death toll.

The WHO has been dominated by shills for the Chinese Communist Party for nearly a decade and a half, and in that time it has systematically suppressed information about numerous epidemic outbreaks and actively advanced propaganda for authoritarian regimes at great cost to public health.

Any appropriate responsibility for the U.S. being unprepared for a pandemic such as COVID-19 falls heaviest on the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, followed by the eight years of the Barack H. Obama administration.

So it’s no surprise that Laura Bush and Michelle Obama are among the Global Royals eager to fatten up WHO and get it organizing those luxury conferences again.

 

The UN must be destroyed!

 

*We have shortened some of the quoted passages.

*

Later:

About Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus

From our Facebook page, quoting from Discover the Networks:

The US paid most of the costs of keeping the World Health Organization in existence, and yet successive US governments allowed this to happen:

Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus is a corrupt, dishonest, communist, terrorist-loving thug. From 2005-2016 he was a member of the corrupt government of Ethiopia. In 2017, when he ran for the post of Director-General of the WHO, he stood accused of complicity in the commission of “crimes against humanity” in Ethiopia. That charge was related not only to three cholera coverups, but also to allegations surrounding Tedros’s longstanding political affiliation with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an organization that grew out of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray and was responsible for horrific atrocities — particularly targeting the Amhara ethnic group in the country’s northwest region. The TPLF became Ethiopia’s principal ruling party. In the 1990s, the U.S. government listed TPLF as a terrorist group. The Global Terror Database continues to list it as such, given the organization’s ongoing commission of armed attacks in rural areas. Tedros remains a high-ranking member of TPLF’s Central Committee, or politburo. TPLF provided millions of dollars for Tedros’s campaign to become the leader of the WHO. Those funds – along with vital support from China – propelled Tedros to victory when, at the Seventieth World Health Assembly in May 2017, the WHO Member States elected him to a five-year term as their Director-General, making him the first person to hold that position without a medical degree. Notably, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping was the WHO’s longtime goodwill ambassador – a post that enabled her to effectively promote Chinese interests under the umbrella of the UN.

The Superpimp, the pleasure-host of the world’s globalist elite, of the nomenklatura of all the nations, of the Whole World Community Organizers, of the priests of catastrophic climate change, was Jeffrey Epstein.

Cliff Kincaid explains in some detail at Canada Free Press:

The late billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia is what has interested the media. But his own blog, which is still active even after his death, suggests what he and his fellow elites were really interested in. He called it “cutting edge science”. It is how the global elites intend to manage our lives. They already claim credit for “rewriting our global culture”.

“Jeffrey Epstein is a former member of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee at Harvard, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Academy of Science and a former Rockefeller University Board Member,” his website proclaimed. “Mr. Epstein is also an active member of the Edge Organization.”

You can’t get higher-up than Epstein. This is the crème de la crème of the American establishment. But as Patrick Wood, Editor of Technocracy News & Trends, notes, “He had no visible or logical means of creating wealth, although he spent a fortune on various pet projects.”

Wood comments that Epstein was definitely NOT like “the typical member” of the Trilateral Commission (TC) or Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “He had no compelling outward qualifications as far as I can tell, but if you think about the TC and CFR as being potentially useful for nefarious purposes, then Epstein was the blackmailer and his secret and real profession was sex trafficking and pedophilia,” Wood adds, “It has been alleged that every room in his mansions had hidden cameras that filmed everything and everyone, and that the videos taken were stored offsite in a still-undisclosed location. These will never be released because they implicate so many of the global elite.”

Actually, there have been no published examples of Epstein having sexual relations with children. With young women who were under the age of consent in most US states, yes, and that is inaccurately called “pedophilia”. And sure the girls were young enough to be considered victims. But they were old enough to know what they were doing and have their own reasons for doing it. Such as, to make money. A respectable motive in itself.

So it could be argued that his “pedophilia” is not the worst thing about the man. Then in what did his worst villainy lie? Was it that he stole his starter millions (which Kincaid does not mention)?

Or was it simply that he kept and presided over Concupiscence Castle – the Grand Central Brothel – where Our Betters could meet and feast and copulate with young whores and plot to turn the whole world into China, ruled by them? Did all the Great and the Powerful fear the exposure of what Epstein knew about them? Did the Superpimp live high, as Kincaid suggests, on blackmail?

These are serious concerns, and there is no guilt by association. But Epstein’s mysterious death, at this juncture in history, is extremely significant. Blaming two federal prison guards for his “suicide” cannot be accepted at face value. …

A quick look into one of Epstein’s affiliated groups, the Edge organization, reveals a “Billionaires’ Dinner” with photos of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post; Jeffrey Epstein; and many others. “Guests have included the leading third culture intellectuals of our time, dining and conversing with the founders of Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Space X, Skype, Twitter,” says the website. “It is a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds—the people that are rewriting our global culture.”

This new global order is based on Scientism, a philosophy attractive to the global elites which holds that a small group of powerful people will manage the future through technocracy. Some of these people believe in “transhumanism,” the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical characteristics, creating a virtual super-race of humans.

Epstein, for example, “planned on using his own semen to impregnate the chosen ones and thus improve the human race,” notes Wood. “Epstein also planned to cryonically freeze his head and his penis, so that future science could bring him back to life to live forever.”

That organ must have served him well. Reliably. He wouldn’t want to risk having an untested substitute.

In this way, Epstein believed that he would, personally, be resurrected and experience a form of eternal life.

While this kind of approach sounds fantastic, the fact is that Epstein, a college dropout, was highly regarded by such elite organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Harvard University.  As reported by the Harvard Crimson, “He cultivated cozy friendships with top Harvard administrators including a former University president” and pledged a $30 million donation to Harvard to fund the University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “Our work is about understanding the past, managing the present, and helping to build the future,” it says.

Epstein was accepted into the “Chairman’s Circle” of the CFR’s top donors but the group’s president, Richard Haass, has tried to distance himself from Epstein after his death. However, the Trilateral Commission, whose membership is by invitation only, has not said anything publicly about his involvement with the organization.

Research into the agenda of these organizations is as important as finding out those who were rubbing elbows (or other body parts) with Epstein or the young girls in his harem.  How could someone with enormous wealth, obtained through mysterious circumstances, reach the pinnacle of power. Was it because of his keen intellect?   

The Trilateral Commission’s goal has always been the “deeper integration and greater globalization” of the world’s economies but asserts that such a process has been jeopardized by “populism and nationalism”.

It has! And that’s very good news. We have President Trump to thank for it.

That’s a reference to the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. President and the Brexit process of leaving the European Union in Britain. In the words of the Trilateral Commission, the future of humanity is threatened.

By which the Trilateral Commission means that its plan, to bring humanity under world Communist government by Those Who Know Best, is threatened.

The Trilateral Commission Summer 2019 report, Democracies Under Stress, reflects the current political thinking of the global elite who invited Epstein  to join their “prestigious” organizations and attend their “dinners”. It states, “All of this [stress] is occurring at a time when Beijing is offering the world what many see as a viable alternative to democracy.”

The “many” is not defined. But speaking for themselves, in terms of the “many,” these global elites apparently see the U.S. experiment in constitutional self-government as less efficient than China’s rule by the communist elite. 

This report from the Trilateral Commission features two pictures of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a prominent member of the North American Group. One shows Kissinger with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who fooled the West with Glasnost and Perestroika while pursuing the goal of world communism with the support of “socialists” and environmentalists in the West. Former top Jimmy Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also “played an important role in the formation” of the Trilateral Commission and served as its first director from 1973 to 1976. By the way, his daughter is Mika Brzezinski, a host on the Trump-hating MSNBC cable channel. She is married to co-host Joe Scarborough. Both are members of the CFR.

Media organizations represented by Trilateral Commission members include NBC News, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Clearly, they, too, play a major role in shaping the culture. 

What, no George Soros? He too is a TC member.

The heavy media presence in the organization explains why commission meetings and reports are not examined critically or even covered. Hence, we can assume one is invited to join such an organization, “by invitation only,” and stay involved, based on favorable coverage, or non-coverage, of what this organization actually does. That virtually guarantees that “whistleblowers” will never come forward with inside information about their plans.

But Patrick Wood, who co-authored the book, Trilaterals Over Washington, has watched the activities of the organization for many years and says there is no doubt that China has always been the key to the plans of the TC. He notes that Kissinger started the relationship with China under President Nixon and then Brzezinski completed most of the communist country’s integration into the global economy under President Carter. The goal has been to develop an elaborate scheme of social engineering, a technocracy, which will be used to bring into being an anticipated new worldwide utopian system.

*

A note about the Trilateral Commission’s aims:

Cliff Kincaid’s assertion that a “worldwide utopian system” is the ultimate goal of the Trilateral Commission seems to be denied by the Commission itself in Democracies Under Stress. There are such assertions as: “ A shift in the mindset of traditional elites [is needed] from lamenting the decline of democracy to taking action to defend it”; “[The TC can give] inspiration and reassurance to those who have traditionally looked to the United States and its allies as democratic models by underscoring the continued commitment of its member states to democracy, the rule of law, and free and open markets”.

And then there is this:

The democracies of North America, Europe, and Asia must be revitalized in order to ensure that they—not the authoritarian regimes gaining confidence and establishing themselves more firmly on the global stage [by which they mean chiefly the Trump administration] – are the ones that offer workable solutions to the dilemmas of our rapidly changing world [they mean chiefly China]. Unlike at other times, many of the governments of the advanced democracies—the original architects of the international system underpinning decades of relative peace and prosperity [?] —are no longer the best safeguards of their own democratic workings, nor ardent advocates of the ability of democracies to tackle global ills collectively. The Trilateral Commission is well-poised to play a vital role in this revitalization effort, and seeks to once again become an analytical home for assessing the stresses on the advanced democracies, offering solutions for dealing with them, and catalyzing cooperation among these countries on global economic, political, and security matters.

Ah, now! Plainly to the undeceived reader’s eye, the TC has one chief purpose, and it stresses that purpose throughout the article. It is writ so large that it could easily be missed. Its reason for existence is to advance internationalism of a kind and in a manner that the UN was not designed and could not be used to achieve: the establishment of unchallengeable central global power by a cabal of the like-minded elite. One hint that the plan involves redistribution of wealth – despite the claimed support for free markets – lies in the recurring phrase “climate change”.

Examples:

Prospects for … adequately addressing climate change are slim as long as advanced democracies are compromised by internal divisions and governed by institutions that are no longer well-suited to the realities of the day.

The Commission has three groups: one for North America, one for Europe, and one for Asia (expanded … to include South Korea, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Australia, China and others)… [T]he trilateral structure is essential to catalyze cooperation to meet pressing global problems—from nuclear proliferation to climate change to pandemics to growing protectionism.

“Climate change” is a chosen problem because it seems obviously to need an international solution. “Advanced democracies” cannot deal with it because of clashes of policy and opinion  which make for changing governments (so that nationalist and populist governments can and do get elected), and their institutions (such as multiple competing parties and branches of government with separated powers) are “no longer well suited to the realities of the day”.

The UN has tried and failed to scare the nations into yielding up autonomy in the interest of saving the planet from freezing or burning or becoming a globe of salt water, but these saviors of democracy … of “democracy”, Communist style, not of the separate autonomous genuine democracies … could have better luck, they hope, in bringing off the trick without rousing suspicion of the real  motive feebly disguised in ambiguity.

Are science and technology giving rise to new religions?

Is “God” arising out of the machine?

Does pure rationality require the irrational? Doubt – the dynamic of science –  crave Belief?

Do machines need to be “granted a soul by God”?

Will  human beings “make God”?

Brandon Withrow writes at the Daily Beast:

What has improved American lives most in the last 50 years? According to a Pew Research study reported this month, it’s not civil rights (10 percent) or politics (2 percent): it’s technology (42 percent).

And yet, according to other studies, most Americans are wary of technology, especially in areas of automation (72 percent), or robotic caregivers (59 percent), or riding in driverless vehicles (56 percent), and even in using brain chip implants to augment the capabilities of healthy people (69 percent).

Science fiction, however, is quickly becoming science fact — the future is the machine. This is leading many to argue that we need to anticipate the ethical questions now, rather than when it is too late. And increasingly, those taking up these challenges are religious and spiritual.

How far should we integrate human physiology with technology? What do we do with self-aware androids … and self-aware supercomputers? Or the merging of our brains with them? If Ray Kurzweil’s famous singularity — a future in which the exponential growth of technology turns into a runaway train — becomes a reality, does religion have something to offer in response?

What we see there is the old fallacy that morality is inextricably tied to religious belief.

On the one hand, new religions can emerge from technology.

In Sweden, for example, Kopimism is a recognized faith founded over a decade ago with branches internationally. It began on a “pirate Agency Forum” and is derived from the words “copy me.” They have no views on the supernatural or gods. Rather, Kopimism celebrates the biological drive (e.g. DNA) to copy and be copied. Like digital monks, they believe that “copying of information” and “dissemination of information is ethically right.”

“Copying is fundamental to life,” says their U.S. branch, “and runs constantly all around us. Shared information provides new perspectives and generate new life. We feel a spiritual connection to the created file.”

“Recognized as a faith” it may be, but it’s hard to see how Kopimism is a religion. Whether you read the (badly translated) Swedish explanation of what it’s about, or the US Branch’s, you’ll find only, at best, a fuzzy idea of religion. An analogy between the copying of DNA in the procreation of human beings and the copying of information in the construction or things with artificial intelligence (AI) – does that put AI into the realm of the supernatural? Or is it the feeling of a “spiritual connection to the created file” that translates the robot from the laboratory into the realm of the numinous?

It may be the “sharing” (of information) that makes the inventors think their -ism is a religion, evoking as it does their ancestral Christianity.  (A theme to which we return later.)

… A recent revelation from WIRED shows that Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who helped pioneer the self-driving car at Waymo (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet) founded his own AI-based religion called “Way of the Future”. …

Little is known about Way of the Future and Levandowksi has not returned a request for comment. But according to WIRED, the mission of the new religion is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” and “through understanding and worship of the Godhead, [to] contribute to the betterment of society”.

The “realization” of a “Godhead”. Making a “Godhead” real? Like a self-driving car? What will it look like? What will it do?

It is not a stretch to say that a powerful AI — whose expanse of knowledge and control may feel nearly omniscient and all-powerful — could feel divine to some. It recalls Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Magic=Miracle=Mysticism. Another connection to the old religions.

People have followed new religions for far less and, even if AI doesn’t pray to electric deities, some humans likely will.

The potential for an out-of-control AI has encouraged warnings from some of the biggest minds, including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk who tweeted that it could lead to World War III. Clearly no Luddite himself, Musk has compared the creation of AI to “summoning the demon”,  and called for regulation and oversight of AI development, forming OpenAI, which looks for a “path to safe artificial general intelligence”.

Regulation and oversight by whom? To guard against what exactly?

Musk himself was named-dropped this week by Hanson Robotic’s empathic AI Sophia, when she was interviewed by Andrew Sorkin of CNBC this week.

A video well worth watching. Sophia is extremely impressive.

When asked about the danger she poses to humanity, she tells him, “You’ve been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies. Don’t worry if you’ll be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.” Not exactly the Golden Rule.

Not far off it, though.

Add to these warnings a prospective human cult following — paying their tithes to AI and devoutly obeying their digital demiurge — and that apocalyptic future could include those humans who not only welcome, but also work toward our eventual demise.

Humans working to put an end to the human race? More on that is needed.

But is there a positive fate for religion and AI?

Beyond possible new religions and warnings from icons of tech and science, artificial intelligence is also of interest to theologians who wonder what it means for faiths, particularly those that came into being when computing power was limited to the abacus.

“One thing that I think is interesting is the potential for an AI — our creation — to transcend us,” says James F. McGrath, the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University and author of Theology and Science Fiction.

“The potential for AIs to transcend us and thus become our teachers to whom we look for answers to questions we cannot answer, including about God, is not hard to imagine,” says McGrath. But, he adds, “the historic answer in monotheistic religions is that the creation can never be greater than the creator.”

To suppose that a synthetic brain can teach us about a “supernature” (that no one really knows to exist) is to ascribe powers to the creature surely beyond all possibility?

If human beings could make a thing that could do that, then indeed humanity itself would have become supernatural – as this Christian professor goes on to say:

He notes, however, for Gnostics, humans can transcend the “creator/demiurge,” though “even then,” he says, “we have the potential to reunite with that source from which we stem. It is not surprising that Gnostic themes regularly surface in science fiction, and in particular those that explore AI.”

Transcend the creator God – the “source” – he believes in, yet still “reunite” with it. (The old Gnostics believed there was a divine spark in the human being that would ultimately return to the sphere of the divine and “become one” with it.)

Currently, the greatest expression of science-fiction-turning-reality in tech-based religions is found in the frequently optimistic transhumanism.

Transhumanism and its cognates are represented by organizations like the Humanity+ (formerly, the World Transhumanist Association) and Extropy Institute. In its purely secular form, transhumanists are those who see technology as an important part of improving the world, enhancing human physiology, prolonging life, and even leading us into a posthuman future.

Follow those two links and you will find many idealistic sentiments, not much to do with technology.

Remember that brain chip? They exist — along with brain-computer interfaces — but are in their infancy. It represents the reality that humans are already becoming cyborgs. For some, this means there is the potential for an optimistic posthuman world.

The Terasem faith, for example, is futurist and transreligion, meaning it can be “combined with any existing religion”.  Founded by Martine Rothblatt, creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio and her spouse, Bina Aspen Rothblatt, Terasem adherents embrace love, see life as purposeful, and death as optional. They look to technology as a source for eternal life, focusing on “cyberconsciousness software, geoethical nanotechnology and space settlement.”

They foresee a future in which technology will extend life indefinitely by means of “mindfiles” of individuals — collections of our memories and emotions — which might then be transferred to what is called a “transbeman” (Transitional Bioelectric Human Being). Early attempts of their technology can be seen in Bina Rothblatt’s counterpart android, Bina48. (See Morgan Freeman’s interview with Bina48.)

And what about God? Their fourth tenet is that God is technical. “We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful and beneficent. Geoethical nanotechnology will ultimately connect all consciousness and control the cosmos.”

“Geoethical”? Earth-wide uniform ethics? Connect all consciousness? Control the entire cosmos? There’s ambition for you!

Transhumanism can also become the node connecting the theological of existing religions and the technological, and the Christian Transhumanist Association [CTA] is a stark example.

Again a link worth following. These Christians are determined to see technology as an enhancement of their faith.  In their case, technology is allowed into their existing religion, unlike those which see technology as the progenitor of new religions. Their faith is of primary concern to them. Technology is a challenge solved.

… Micah Redding, [CTA’s] co-founder and executive director … [says]:

New technological possibilities shouldn’t be simply feared and denied, but engaged and understood. Only in doing so will we be able to confront the challenges of the future, mitigate the risks, and take advantage of the opportunities to create a better world for us all. … As I see it, Christian Transhumanism is grounded in compassion, and centers love as the key to the future of flourishing life. … This puts us in contrast with any form of transhumanism which centers radical egoism.

For Redding, transhumanism is a “Christian mandate,” recently calling it the next Reformation in an article at The Huffington Post. “We cannot be faithful to the Christian calling without ultimately embracing some form of transhumanism.”

Others share his optimism and are hard at work in crafting a theology of transhumanism.

“I see transhumanism as a contemporary outgrowth of an ancient Christian vision of human transformation,” says Ronald Cole-Turner, the H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and author of The End of Adam and Eve: Theology and the Science of Human Origins.

He too sees promise in the emergence of the Christian Transhumanist Association.

“Using technology, today’s transhumanists want to enhance human beings in ways that sound suspiciously like the classic Christian expectation,” says Cole-Turner, “things like greater cognitive awareness, improved moral disposition, and increased overall sense of well-being, and a hope of endless life.”

For early Greek-speaking Christians, Cole-Turner says, “it was seen as a process of theosis or ‘becoming God,’ not in an ontological sense but in every other significant meaning of the word. Latin-speaking Christians used ‘deification’ to refer to the same thing.”

The idea of theosis — being transformed in union with God — is gathering steam among Christian scholars, he says, noting that it makes theological sense of transhumanism. “God is the ground or source of everything, working through the whole creation to bring people, communities, and all creation to its glorious fulfillment in Jesus Christ. It is a transformation of everything by every means.”

Christianity promised eternal life (possibly in heaven, also possibly in hell, but anyway eternal life). According to Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that promise was the predominant cause of the spread of Christianity. So, Professor Cole-Turner teaches, Christians who look to technology to provide a form of “eternal life” (perhaps of the kind predicted by the Terasem faith) are being faithful to Christianity. For him, for them, the distance between “eternal life”  and the “glorious fulfillment of creation in Jesus Christ” is short. The transformation of life from this earthly existence to a reliably “glorious” eternal life need not be effected after all by the grace of God (or by good works), but can be brought about by technology. Why not? Now the professor comes to think of it, Jesus Christ could only have meant “a transformation of everything” by any … whoops, no … “by every means“.

But will Jesus save robots?

[Micah] Redding [of the Christian Transhumanist Association] adds a theological dimension to this idea.

It’s clear that artificial intelligence plays a significant role in the world today,” he says, “and thus must be factored into God’s eventual work of redemption. We don’t yet know whether that involves self-conscious AIs ‘coming to Jesus’, because we don’t yet know the process by which an AI might become self-conscious. If and when it does happen … it shouldn’t challenge Christian doctrine. If God can grant a soul to carbon-based lifeforms, God can grant a soul to silicon-based lifeforms as well.

Buddhism too can be at home with “emerging technologies”:

“Transhumanism was the confluence of my interests in Buddhism, radical politics and futurism,” says James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Having worked for a Buddhist social development organization in Sri Lanka — and once ordained as a monk — Hughes moved to Japan and went into bioethics. He discovered he was a techno-optimist, and at heart, a transhumanist.

“I discovered the new World Transhumanist Association,” he says, becoming their first Executive Director, and writing Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond To The Redesigned Human Of The Future. But after a division over political perspectives, he and a few others in the WTA founded IEET, leading him and three others to work toward Buddhist concerns.

Among some of his transhumanist issues, he says, is nonhuman personhood rights. Organizations like the Nonhuman Rights Project already seek these rights for animals (e.g. apes and elephants). Likewise, Hughes says, transhumanists want to “base those moral standings on levels of consciousness, and extend them to enhanced humans, animals, and machine minds.”

It would be interesting to hear what an imam at al-Azhar University in Cairo and the Ayatollah Khamanei of Iran have to say about possible new developments in Islam when human beings are almost totally cyborgs, or entirely replaced by machines.

This is about the drowning of the West.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since its establishment in 1950, has resettled some 50 million refugees – an extraordinary achievement by any standards.

So Denis MacEoin writes at Gatestone.

An achievement? We would call it a vast disaster, a colossal calamity. (The United Nations must be destroyed.)  And the rest of his article proves our contention.

So we quote his article with appreciation, in strong agreement with most of his opinions.

Refugees are back in the news. This summer, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa is likely to rise significantly.

According to the Daily Telegraph:

Europe could face a new wave of migrant arrivals this summer, a leaked German government report has warned. Up to 6.6m people are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe, according to details of the classified report leaked to Bild newspaper.

Six million six hundred thousand people are about to cross the Mediterranean and enter Europe.

With the closing of the route through the Balkans and entry via Greece, most refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers are crossing the Mediterranean into Spain or Italy, putting those countries under enormous strain. Since 2016, Austria has strengthened border police to prevent thousands more entering from Italy, and increased the number of troops and armored vehicles on the border in 2017.

On World Refugee Day 2016, the United Nation’s High Commission for Refugees announced that there are now more displaced persons than there were after World War Two: “The total at the end of 2015 reached 65.3 million – or one out of every 113 people on Earth… The number represents a 5.8 million increase on the year before.”

There are over sixty-five million displaced people in the world right now. 

…  The rise in criminality in general, rape, Islamic radicalization, and even terror attacks as a result of a barely controlled influx of migrants from mainly Muslim countries has created alarm in [European] country after country.

This alarm has led to serious divisions. It has divided people politically, with the left and centrists welcoming increasing numbers and the right  …  calling for more rigid controls and even the expulsion of many incomers. Even this division conceals two important issues.

First, it is easy to forget that many countries are legally bound to accept refugees from wherever they originate. These are the 142 countries who are signatories to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol extending it. They include European countries into which refugees have been coming, such as Germany, Spain, Italy, France and the UK. (The United States is signatory only to the 1967 Protocol.) The Convention guarantees that refugees shall not be sent back into harm’s way, and that, according to the UNHCR, “refugees deserve, as a minimum, the same standards of treatment enjoyed by other foreign nationals in a given country and, in many cases, the same treatment as nationals”. Among the few non-signatories are the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Second, there is a moral dimension that transcends simple party politics. Many religious people, such as Christians, may give greater priority to compassion for their fellow man than national concerns about the ability to cope with overwhelming numbers of new arrivals or ways of integrating them into their own societies. Many Jewish people, conscious of the world’s failure to take in hundreds of thousands of Jews in the years leading up to, and even during, the Holocaust, also feel a moral obligation to show a level of concern for today’s refugees far above what was shown to their grandparents. This view also extended to the way a barely-established state, Israel, took in around a million Jews expelled from Arab states after 1948.

Generosity and moral actions, however, may unintentionally make matters worse. In a recent Gatestone article on migrants, Douglas Murray quotes a statement by Bill Gates, a philanthropist who has started to rethink the results of such generosity:

On the one hand you want to demonstrate generosity and take in refugees. But the more generous you are, the more word gets around about this – which in turn motivates more people to leave Africa. Germany cannot possibly take in the huge number of people who are wanting to make their way to Europe.

Balancing legal requirements, stemming from the 1951 Convention, with the needs of national security, finance, and social cohesion, still proves a major dilemma for signatory states. Non-signatories such as the Gulf States, vastly wealthier than European countries such as Greece or Italy, have no such a dilemma, even though many Syrian and North African refugees speak much the same language, have the same religion, and practice similar customs in daily life. …

There are likely to be further waves of refugees in the next few years, then more from Syria now that Islamic State is all but finished in Raqqa. The civil war in Syria, with the ISIS threat to a large extent removed, is certain to intensify; then more will flee Iraq with the recapture of a battered Mosul and further clashes between Sunni and Shi’i militias; then more from Libya, where ISIS-affiliated groups clash with a multitude of other Islamist fighters; then more from other failed and failing states in North Africa, the Middle East, the rest of Africa and Afghanistan, where the Taliban are again resurgent – more, in fact, from everywhere as social structures break down further, now that so many qualified people such as doctors, teachers, scientists have vanished to Europe. …

The collapse around the world of so many countries that never became democracies – countries lacking in abundant natural resources and whose dictators, taking international aid for their own pockets, sucked them dry – has led to an exodus that threatens to displace some of the world’s leading democracies. Many are now under a barely manageable strain and growing impoverishment, actually enabled by our democratic values, our concern for international conventions, our compassion and, at times, our naïvete. … Our decline will leave future refugees without sanctuaries in which they may thrive and give their children the opportunities for which they came.

In other words, Western democracies that accept hordes of refugees from the world’s hellholes will be turned into hellholes themselves, and there will be no refuge anywhere on earth. 

Tyranny scatters the miserable, who can only turn the world into one big hellhole of misery. 

Something, however, is missing. The left, who so often lead the campaigns to welcome to our shores an almost unfettered number of newcomers …  have in recent years justified their actions through the concept of intersectionality.

In itself, intersectionality could a useful way of looking at the world by seeing links between people who suffer different forms of oppression, such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so on. It argues, for example, that a poor black woman has more issues to solve than, say, a middle-class white woman, even though both may be victims of male oppression. In theory, it is a useful tool; in practice, not so much.

How does intersectionality apply to refugees? Well, in general the “Left” have made the open reception of refugees a major cause, using intersectionality to justify this while condemning any other approach as fascist.

Articles often drip with standard far-left language: “emancipate ourselves from all forms of oppression”, “if we want to fight capitalism with all its forms of oppression”, and “white supremacist behavior harms our political self-organization” and other displays of racism framed in victimhood.

Referring to Linda Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian-American “anti-Zionist”, Benjamin Gladstone argues in Tablet Magazine that

No matter what the Sarsours of the world say, Jewish issues do belong in the intersectional justice movement. … Despite its enormous value and importance, however, the idea of intersectionality can also be manipulated to exclude Jewish issues from pro-justice movements.

Why “Jewish issues”? And what does this have to do with refugees? The answer is that the “Left” … [has] turned intersectionality into two seemingly unlinked matters: as an argument to call for unlimited entry for refugees and other migrants; and as a weapon to advance their hostility for Israel in demonstrations, in conferences, and in their written work.

The clearest expression of this refusal to include Jewish concerns in any intersectional discussion is the way “Left-wing” and anti-racist demonstrators, and speakers, starting in Ferguson in 2014, have consciously linked the Black Lives Matter movement to the Palestinian cause, blaming the “oppression” of the Palestinians on Jews, Zionists, and Israel, and then appealing to intersectionality as the basis for that link. This pairing of two causes rapidly became a core part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Already by 2015, in a deeply anti-Semitic and anti-Israel document, the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine, one reads:

Our support extends to those living under occupation and siege, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 7 million Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The refugees’ right to return to their homeland in present-day Israel is the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.

There is, of course, no mention of Palestinian repression of free speech, of corrupt Palestinian governance, of Palestinian terrorism, or other abuses that follow in the wake of rotten governance. This overdone concern for generations of the descendants of Palestinian refugees – people forced to live in camps, not by Israel but by the Arab states referred to – is then artificially made to meld with the intersectional concern for refugees who are fleeing into Europe from wars in Muslim countries.

It is precisely here that the pretence of intersectionality on the left is most fully exposed. It is not just that supporters of intersectionality refuse to accept Jews as recipients of their outpourings of love and generosity, or that they focus in a racist and fascist manner on the supposed evils of the only Jewish state. They show themselves to be hypocrites in two ways.

To begin with, there actually are no Palestinian people, as used in the current sense of the term. The Oslo Accords accurately refer to Arabs, which is what they are – Arabs who left Israel in the war of 1947-8 in order not to be involved in a conflict in which other Arabs fought with Jews and Christians and who currently make up more than a million of the Arabs now living in Israel as citizens with equal rights. These Arabs who abandoned Israel while it was fighting for its life and who afterwards wanted to return. Israel refused on the grounds that these countrymen had not been loyal. It is those displaced persons, largely in Jordan and Lebanon, who then found themselves on the wrong end of a war that their brother Arabs had started and, to everyone’s astonishment, had lost. It is these Arabs (and their descendants), who fled Israel during the War of 1947-8, and who are therefore considered by Israel a fifth-column, who are what we now call the Palestinians.

And the UN has never attempted to resettle them. On the contrary, that nefarious institution has deliberately kept them, generation after generation, as  refugees.

Jews have remained in place in the area continuously for more than three thousand years – with Arabs, Christians, Turks, Helenes, Philistines, and whoever else came along – even when, at times, many were forced out.

One might have assumed that this history of abuse of the Jews would excite intersectionalists into reaching out to Jewish people everywhere and working with them to quell anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish terrorism. Instead, they have chosen to align with a people whose leaders have refused multiple times to accept a Palestinian state each time it was offered to them.

Instead, they apparently prefer to hate Jews and the Jewish state of Israel.

This is important. Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms and Russia in World War I, long before the Holocaust, and from Arab and Muslim states were among the earliest to head for Palestine, then Israel, in order to build a new Jewish homeland, where Jews would be guaranteed a refuge from violence and hatred. Do not those refugees deserve the same intersectional support as those flowing into Europe today? Do not the many thousands of black Jews who went from Ethiopia and Sudan to Israel deserve backing from Black Lives Matter? Do not the thousands of Indian Jews now in Israel deserve friendship from people of color?

We are sure that Denis MacEoin knows that as Black Live Matter and all anti-Israel movements are battalions of the international Left, they class the Israelis as “colonialists”, and – however absurdly – as “white supremacists”. What BLM is really all about is promoting communism. That is what they are paid for, by George Soros and other haters of America and Western civilization. They should not be allowed for one moment to think that we are taken in by their claims to victimhood or believe they have any sympathy for actual victims. They are transparently hypocritical, as is the whole of the Left.

Instead, left-wing intersectionalists work towards an increasingly unachievable Palestinian “right of return”. …

There is no room here for a discussion of the spurious nature of “Palestinian Refugees” or the fact that they are kept in refugee camps – not by Israel but by Arab states. But such a discussion within groups who use intersectionality as a tool for hatred against Jews and Israelis is long overdue.

If intersectionality means anything as a system for bringing diverse peoples together, for helping refugees settle, for expressing solidarity with people who have suffered, it is meaningless if certain people are excluded. The “mistake” the Israelis made seems to have been that, although driven out as refugees, they exercised their right to self-determination, returned to their homeland, and turned it into one of the most successful countries in the world. The Palestinians, who had an equal opportunity to attain the same success, remain in poverty and disarray, with terrorism for 80 years as their only notable achievement. If they had agreed to work with the Jews instead of fighting them, who knows where they might be today? That would have been positive intersectionality, bringing two suffering people together for the common good. But to some, being “politically correct” evidently matters more than making the world a better place.

When most European countries have become Muslim countries – which will be quite soon now – Israel will be an island of freedom and democracy in a vast ocean of  Islam. That is a sea that really is rising. How can Israel survive? Islam will flow over it, as it will over every democracy eventually. Unless it is stopped now. And there is no sign of it being stopped (except perhaps in America, by President Trump).

Admitting millions of Muslims into Western democratic countries is not a way to save the drowning, but to be drowned.

The Left is actively and passionately aiding Islam in its “holy war” to conquer the non-Muslim world by arms and by stealth. This despite the fact that the values and principles declared by Islam are – every single one of them – in total opposition to those declared by the Left. (Eg. Equality of women versus female subjugation; normalization of homosexual relationships versus throwing gays off high buildings; intolerance of religion versus forced religious conformity.)

The question is: Why?

Is the idea that when the Western nation states with their free political and economic systems have been destroyed by combined effort, they – the Left – will be able to bring Islam under control?

Are there other possible answers? We can’t think of any.

Daniel Greenfield explains how “a Socialist totalitarian utopia”, if it is achieved, will be, and can only be  “an Islamic theocracy of slaves, terror and death”:

The left helped create Islamic terrorism; its immigration policies import terrorism while its civil rights arm obstructs efforts to prevent it and its anti-war rallies attack any effort to fight it. …

When a Muslim terrorist comes to America, it’s the left that agitates to admit him. Before he kills, it’s the left that fights to protect him from the FBI. Afterward, leftists offer to be his lawyers. The left creates the crisis and then it fights against any effort to deal with it except through surrender and appeasement.

Islamic violence against non-Muslims predated the left. But it’s the left that made it our problem. Islamic terrorism in America or France exists because of Muslim immigration. And the left is obsessed with finding new ways to import more Muslims. [Chancellor of Germany] Merkel is praised for opening up a Europe already under siege by Islamic terror, Sharia police, no-go zones and sex grooming and groping gangs, to millions.

The left feverishly demands that the whole world follow her lead. Bill Gates would like America to be just like Germany. Israel’s deranged Labor Party leader Herzog urged the Jewish State to open its doors.

And then, after the next round of stabbings, car burnings and terror attacks, they blame the West for not “integrating” the un-integratable millions who had no more interest in being integrated than their leftist patrons do in moving to Pakistan and praying to Allah …  But “integration” is a euphemism for a raft of leftist agenda items from social services spending to punishing hate speech (though never that of the Imams crying for blood and death, but only of their native victims) to a foreign policy based on appeasement and surrender. Islamic terrorists kill and leftists profit from the carnage.

The ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism is a manufactured crisis that the left cultivates because that gives it power. In a world without 9/11, the Obama presidency would never have existed. Neither would the Arab Spring and the resulting migration and wholesale transformation of Western countries.

In the UK, Labour used Muslim immigration as a deliberate political program to “change the country”.  In Israel, Labor struck an illegal deal with Arafat that put sizable portions of the country under the control of terrorists while forcing the Jewish State into a series of concessions to terrorists and the left. The same fundamental pattern of Labour and Labor and the whole left is behind the rise of Islamic terrorism.

Muslim terrorism creates pressure that the left uses to achieve policy goals. Even when it can’t win elections, Muslim terrorism allows the left to create a crisis and then to set an agenda.

The left’s patronage of Islamic terrorists for its own political purposes follows a thread back to the origin of Islamic terrorism. Islamic violence against non-Muslims dates back to the founding of Islam, but the tactics of modern Islamic terrorism owe as much to Lenin as they do to Mohammed.

Today’s Islamic terrorist is the product of traditional Islamic theology and Soviet tactics. The USSR did not intend to create Al Qaeda, but they provided training and doctrine to terrorists from the Muslim world. …

Truth to tell, the US and its Western allies provided money and materiel to Bin Laden and his followers in the late 1980s to help them overthrow the Soviet domination of Afghanistan. But that fact does not in any way detract from the validity of Greenfield’s case.

The earlier phase of Islamic organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, had been inspired by fascists who were seeking to use them in their own wars. Over this layer of secret societies plotting takeovers and building networks of front groups, the Soviet Union added the terror tactics that had been employed by the left. And the leftist mad bomber became the Muslim suicide bomber. Terrorism in the Muslim world has evolved from functioning as a Third World proxy army for the left, in much the same way as guerrillas and terrorists from Asia, Africa and Latin America had, to a diaspora whose migrations lend a domestic terror arm to a Western left whose own spiteful activists have grown unwilling to put their lives on the line and go beyond tweeting words to throwing bombs.

With the Muslim Brotherhood, the origin organization of Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas, among many others, so tightly integrated into the American and European left that it is often hard to see where one begins and the other ends, Islam has become the militant arm of the purportedly secular left. Western leftists and Islamists have formed the same poisonous relationship as Middle Eastern leftists and Islamists did leading to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Arab Spring. Leftists expected Islamists to do the dirty work while they would take over.

But then something happened that the Leftists did not expect – and that they still haven’t learned from:

Instead the Islamists won and killed them.

Having learned nothing from the Hitler-Stalin pact, the left has replayed the same betrayal with the Mohammed-Stalin pact in the Middle East and now in the West. But the end of the Mohammed-Stalin pact will not be a Socialist totalitarian utopia, but an Islamic theocracy of slaves, terror and death.

On September 11, I saw with my own eyes how eager and willing leftists were to rush to the aid of Islamic terrorists even while their fellow Americans were dying.

Nothing has changed. Every Islamic act of brutality is met with lies and spin, with mass distraction and deception by the treasonous left. Every effort to fight Islamic terrorists is sabotaged, undermined and protested by the enemy within.

Since September 11, the left has trashed the FBI’s counter-terrorism and has now succeeded in destroying the NYPD’s [New York City Police Department] counter-terrorism while transforming the FDNY [New York City Fire Department] into an affirmative action project.

What the September 11 hijackers could never accomplish on their own, the leftists did for them by defeating the three forces that had stood against Islamic terrorists on that day. And it would not surprise me at all if some of the “No War” scribblers have gone on to play an influential role in that treason.

The left has crippled domestic and international counterterrorism. American soldiers are not allowed to shoot terrorists and the FBI and NYPD can’t monitor mosques or even be taught what to look for. Islamic terrorism has achieved unprecedented influence and power under Obama. ISIS has created the first functioning caliphate and Iran marches toward the first Jihadist nuclear bomb. The mass Muslim migration is beginning a process that will Islamize Europe far more rapidly than anyone expects.

The Jihad would not be a significant threat without the collaboration of the left. Without the left standing in the way, it’s a problem that could be solved in a matter of years. With the aid of the left, it threatens human civilization with a dark age that will erase our culture, our future and our freedom.

We cannot defeat Islam without defeating the left. That is the lesson I learned on September 11. It is a lesson that appears truer every single year as the left finds new ways to endanger us all.

At Townhall, John C. Goodman presents and discusses two views of capitalism as expounded by Professor Johnathan Haidt.

The two views are summed up by these videos, made by Professor Haidt.

Capitalism as Exploitation

Capitalism as Liberation

John Goodman comments:

Now I would argue that one of these views of capitalism is factually incorrect. It’s not just a matter of “political and moral values” [as Haidt asserts]. In fact, in a video presentation of his theory, Haidt shows a chart mapping per capita income throughout all of human history. The chart shows (and this should be well known to all economists) that up until the last few hundred years the average human lived on about a dollar a day – in modern terms. At times and places, they might have enjoyed two dollars a day. If they were really, really lucky they might have hit three dollars a day. But that was it.

In other words, for 100,000 years our ancestors lived at the subsistence level. And then [with the advent of the Industrial Revolution – ed] we got capitalism. By that I mean not just free exchange, but also the institutions of capitalism, including enforceable property rights …

In all its guises the exploitation theory has one central message: the reason why some people are poor is because other people are rich. Here is Paul Krugman explaining why middle income families don’t have higher incomes. …

Soaring incomes at the top were achieved, in large part, by squeezing those below: by cutting wages, slashing benefits, crushing unions, and diverting a rising share of national resources to financial wheeling and dealing. Perhaps more important still, the wealthy exert a vastly disproportionate effect on policy. And elite priorities — obsessive concern with budget deficits, with the supposed need to slash social programs — have done a lot to deepen the valley of despond.

Really? J K Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series) is the richest woman in the world. Did she get rich by “cutting wages, slashing benefits, crushing unions,” etc.? I thought she got rich by writing books. How about Oprah? Has she “slashed” any benefits lately? What about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett? When is the last time they were out there encouraging scabs to cross a picket line?

Krugman’s point about political influence is almost as silly as his view of the economy. Earth to Krugman: the real base of the Democratic Party (the party of the left) has become the ultra-wealthy. And their political goals are harmful to the middle class, but not in the way that Krugman imagines. …

The problem for Democrats is that the party is increasingly ruled by the “new oligarchs”  … [who]  are basically anti-job creation and anti-economic growth – which they see … as a threat to their life style. This puts them squarely at odds with the working class voters who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party. …

The Democratic Party is [now] the party of the poor and the rich. It’s the middle class that is bolting and voting Republican. And what do the rich want from Democrats? Contra Krugman, they’re not demanding smaller deficits or smaller social programs or even lower taxes. What they want – in addition to looney environmentalism – is for government to protect their life style.

Once the plutocrats settle in a community they become fiercely anti-development and shape their communities in ways that price the middle class out of the housing market. As a result, wherever wealthy liberals tend to congregate, housing is more expensive …

Limousine liberals are a threat to the average worker. But not because they are wage-suppressing, union-busting, exploiters. It’s because their anti-capitalist goals are at odds with the aspirations of ordinary Americans.

It seems to be the case that most – probably all – of the successful entrepreneurs who live in Silicon Valley vote Democratic. Having achieved their own riches in the freedom of opportunity for the individual that the capitalist system gave them, they vote for socialism and the removal of individual freedom that it ensures, so others cannot do what they did.

In lands whose history goes back millennia, there are ruins of great buildings that rulers ordered their subjects and slaves to construct. They stood proud and splendid once, monuments to the prowess of the rulers and the nations. Now, although ruined, they remain as memorials.

Obamacare will be Obama’s memorial. The difference is that it starts off as a ruin.

Mark Steyn tells the story of how the ruin was built here:

For much of last year, a standard trope of President Obama’s speechwriters was that there were certain things only government could do. “That’s how we built this country — together,” he declared. “We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together.”

As some of us pointed out, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, you could have built 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges — or one mega–Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Boston to just off the coast of Ireland. Yet there isn’t a single bridge, or a single dam (“You will never see another federal dam,” his assistant secretary of the interior assured an audience of environmentalists). Across the land, there was not a thing for doting network correspondents in hard hats to stand in front of and say, “Obama built this.”

Until now, that is. Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who’ve been saying for five years it would be a disaster.

It’s as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland.

Obama didn’t have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website’s a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker’s heaven, and all that’s left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.

For the last half-century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present.

And then one day came the day when it wasn’t enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can’t. He’s not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And Healthcare.gov is about what you’d expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under-Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.  …

[Obama] broke the lifelong rule that had served him so well — “Don’t just do something. Stand there” — and for the first time in his life did something, terribly.

It will bear his name forever.

A socialist society is a stagnant society. And stagnation is a terminal illness of powers and peoples.

Invention springs from one brain, even if the development of it is advanced by other brains. A committee, a commune, a community, a jolly gathering of drinking chums will never do it.

Not only is there no incentive under socialism for an inventor to invent, there is also a lack of what he (have you noticed an inventor is always a “he”?) needs to do it: spare money, spare time, and above all freedom. No one interfering with him, no one saying you may or may not do this or that. No one directing him how to use his time. No one sharing his facilities and tools.

Only freedom fosters innovation.

Look how little in the way of important invention has come out of socialist Europe since WW2. It’s not because Europeans can no longer invent, it’s just that they have to go to non-socialist countries to do it. (Vide Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented the World Wide Web – in capitalist Switzerland.)

Fortunately in America, despite Obama’s efforts to turn the United States into Big Sweden, there are still some of the right conditions – some freedom and capital and incentive – for invention. But already ideas conceived in America need to be taken elsewhere for their development. Where? Shamefully, to communist China, because it has a freer economic system, less government regulation, and no pestilential environmentalist lobby. 

Here’s the story of an American inventor and his idea, from an article by Carl Shockley in the National Review:

An extraordinary pair of events occurred this week. They concerned the future of energy and two of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. No one took much notice but they have remarkable implications for the future of the American economy.

First, Gates returned from a secret visit to China where, it was revealed in the Chinese press, he struck a deal with the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation to develop the Travelling Wave Reactor, a highly innovative technology that Gates has been developing with his spin-off company, TerraPower.

The Travelling Wave is a profoundly sophisticated technology that, thus far, exists only on paper. The idea is this: First, you design a fuel assembly in the shape of a long cigar, so that it burns slowly end-to-end. The uranium first “burns,” producing heat and electricity and transforming into plutonium and other highly radioactive isotopes in the process – creating what is usually called “nuclear waste.” But this is no “waste,” as the design of the reactor then allows the plutonium to “react” with itself as well, producing another round of nuclear fission and burning up the “waste” fuel in the process. By the time the “wave” has travelled end-to-end it will have generated up to 1000mW or more of electricity for a century with no refueling and very little waste remaining at the end of the process.

The Travelling Wave is the brainchild of Nathan Myhrvold, the legendary chief of research at Microsoft who, a decade ago, founded his own company, Intellectual Ventures, to research futuristic technology. Myhrvold settled on the Travelling Wave as the wave of the future and convinced Gates to fund TerraPower in order to develop it. The company is now working on the design with the aid of “1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers,” which is a cluster that has “over 1,000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer,” according to its own report. TerraPower President John Gilleland estimates that a demonstration model can be assembled within ten years, with commercialization in 15.

But where to do all this? Developing nuclear technology in the United States means squeezing through the portals of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that 11-story building in Beltsville, Md., that serves as corporate headquarters and clearinghouse for all new ideas in the nuclear industry. Right now, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko is complaining he doesn’t have enough staff to conduct license-renewal applications for aging reactors such as Vermont Yankee and New York’s Indian Point (which will conveniently allow him to postpone these contentious issues until after the 2012 election, thereby protecting President Obama’s environmental flank). Getting approval from the NRC to build anything new is basically a lost cause. …  Several start-up companies have been trying to commercialize small-modular reactors but so far they have barely managed to get a foot in the door at the NRC.

So where to go with your revolutionary ideas? Why, China, of course! There they don’t have a mandarinate bureaucracy or hordes of environmental lawyers waiting to oppose your every move. So Gates has taken his pet idea to China — which means, of course, that if the Travelling Wave ever becomes a reality, China will be manufacturing them.

But wait — don’t we have “alternative technologies” that are going to make all this fossil fuel and nuclear stuff unnecessary? That’s what Warren Buffett thinks. Last week his MidAmerican Energy Holdings plunked down $2 billion to buy the 550-megawatt Topaz Solar Farm in the Central Valley of California. This is one of those projects in which about five square miles of photovoltaic panels are deployed in order to produce slightly less electricity than the 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear facility — and only when the sun shines. During the night, when nuclear power just about runs the whole country, we’ll have to try something else.

Is Buffett riding the wave of the future? Does he see something that Gates and others don’t recognize? Well, not really. What he is perceiving most clearly is the array of federal and state subsidies, plus California’s “renewable portfolio standard” that requires utilities to build and buy solar electricity regardless of whether it’s reliable or even needed. … Even if these projects produce off-and-on electricity at four times the price of today’s power, they will be guaranteed a profit.

Under redistributionist big-government regimes there is always Obama-type “crony-capitalism”, which is not capitalism but the destruction of it.

We may soon see a wave of American inventors emigrating to anomalous China where, among other favorable conditions, fossil-fueled and nuclear power will reliably provide the energy to drive progress.

 

(Hat-tip Andrew M for the link)