http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/hunting_innocent_patriots_on_a_pretext
Apparently Breivik, the right-winger who killed several dozen civilians in Norway, "liked" a letter this fellow Hamilton wrote. Consequently, British Counter Terror units came down on Hamilton and commenced smearing him and lying about his activities. His real crime was opposing the replacement of Englishmen in England with Muslims and blacks. I don't often hear about Muslim preachers being prosecuted when some terrorist "likes" their babblings toward a new Caliphate.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Monday, July 29, 2013
The Pope Decides to Tolerate His Priests
http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pope-francis-says-gays-should-not-be-judged-20130729,0,3689944.story
I suppose at this point the "Church" is just about ready to give up religious faith in order to ensure that it retains or recovers people's "moral faith." And the only way to acquire moral faith under the American hegemony is to follow the US Gov leftward. That is, it's more important for the Pope to be politically correct than Catholic.
I suppose at this point the "Church" is just about ready to give up religious faith in order to ensure that it retains or recovers people's "moral faith." And the only way to acquire moral faith under the American hegemony is to follow the US Gov leftward. That is, it's more important for the Pope to be politically correct than Catholic.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Media Omissions
http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/490926/jury-finds-roderick-scott-not-guilty/
Just a little companion piece to the trayvon fiasco. Note that this case got no national publicity. Lies of omission are the media's best weapon, because they are the most difficult to discover--and the majority have no time for it. The omissions are legion and sprawl all over the spectrum of topics. Essentially, if you have not acquired independent expertise in a given topic, the fair assumption is that the media has manufactured your opinion on it--the only question is which media did formed your mind for you, that is, which generation of media (the 40s, the 60s, the 90s). In the long run, which media brand you consume hardly matters at all. Fox follows MSNBC with an average 20 year lag, just as republicans follow democrats.
Just a little companion piece to the trayvon fiasco. Note that this case got no national publicity. Lies of omission are the media's best weapon, because they are the most difficult to discover--and the majority have no time for it. The omissions are legion and sprawl all over the spectrum of topics. Essentially, if you have not acquired independent expertise in a given topic, the fair assumption is that the media has manufactured your opinion on it--the only question is which media did formed your mind for you, that is, which generation of media (the 40s, the 60s, the 90s). In the long run, which media brand you consume hardly matters at all. Fox follows MSNBC with an average 20 year lag, just as republicans follow democrats.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Unthinkable Patterns
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-hunt-for-great-white-defendant.html
Most people have only a subconscious awareness of this pattern--and all that their subconscious actually picks up is that white men are evil. Consider that the time factor may be The Cathedral's crucial advantage. These "great white defendants" are typically smeared by the media for months before they are vindicated. Not being especially bright or rational in any of us, the subconscious ineluctably absorbs months of anti-white propaganda. Is this long training in "good thinking" supposed to be effectively counterbalanced by one day of articles that offer quiet, subdued, coldly factual confirmation--not of innocence, of course--but of dubious acquittal? The Cathedral can fail every attempt to generate its ideal defendant--that is mere tactical failure--the powerful subterranean current of its endless propaganda will continue to win the war, will continue to erode away the foundations of Western civilization.
And didn't Sailer provide a convenient collection for us? Do you know of anyone out there today--or even any publication--that does better journalism, within such a range of specialization, than Steve Sailer?
Most people have only a subconscious awareness of this pattern--and all that their subconscious actually picks up is that white men are evil. Consider that the time factor may be The Cathedral's crucial advantage. These "great white defendants" are typically smeared by the media for months before they are vindicated. Not being especially bright or rational in any of us, the subconscious ineluctably absorbs months of anti-white propaganda. Is this long training in "good thinking" supposed to be effectively counterbalanced by one day of articles that offer quiet, subdued, coldly factual confirmation--not of innocence, of course--but of dubious acquittal? The Cathedral can fail every attempt to generate its ideal defendant--that is mere tactical failure--the powerful subterranean current of its endless propaganda will continue to win the war, will continue to erode away the foundations of Western civilization.
And didn't Sailer provide a convenient collection for us? Do you know of anyone out there today--or even any publication--that does better journalism, within such a range of specialization, than Steve Sailer?
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Maverick Wisdom
This is my rather lengthy selection from an interview of Edward Luttwak in Tablet Sept 2011
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak?all=1
I'm especially interested in his interpretation of the trajectory of Iranian society, his compare/contrast of intelligent government with "innocent" leaders against ineffective government with clever leaders, and his insight into the typically third world government of Pakistan, a government with "no institutional integrity":
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
You believe the story about the courier who led us to bin Laden?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak?all=1
I'm especially interested in his interpretation of the trajectory of Iranian society, his compare/contrast of intelligent government with "innocent" leaders against ineffective government with clever leaders, and his insight into the typically third world government of Pakistan, a government with "no institutional integrity":
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
You believe the story about the courier who led us to bin Laden?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
Monday, July 8, 2013
The Tide Comes Back In
From the Wire Services:
Jeb Bush came out in favor of this amnesty + new immigration wave not long ago.
And I'm sure Bush Sr. supports the notion as well--he certainly did not oppose Reagan's amnesty in 86'. That amnesty produced the largest immigration wave in American history, and a baby-boom among the immigrants.
This is seen by "La Raza" (the race), as Mexicans prefer to call themselves, as an invitation to the Reconquista--the reconquering of the territory lost in the Mexican-America War. Here is the progress they've made so far in the states that we formed out of our conquest of Northern Mexico in 1848:
Pop % Hispanic
CA: 38M 39%
AZ: 6.5M 31%
NM: 2.1M 47%
TX: 26.1M 38%
NV: 2.8M 27%
UT: 2.8M 13%
CO: 5.2M 21%
Total: 83.5M 36%
Whether they try to make a clean break with the Union or not (and I do hope they provide the Western World with a lesson sorely needed), they will have at least de facto political control over most of the old Mexican Cession within 10 years. Considering how Mexicans run Mexico, optimism here would be a lie so large that only our elite could get away with it. And, remember, La Raza recovers its lands with or without the pending amnesty. As usual in America, it's merely a question of whether leftist results are achieved quickly or slowly. The direction is always Left. We live in a one party state that showers the blessings, and only the blessings, the rewards without the risks, of capitalism upon the elite and inflicts socialism upon the vast remainder. The only decent political position that remains to us is dissidence, outright opposition to the sick alliance of egalitarian moral fanatics and crony capitalists who now run the country untrammeled.
Former President George W. Bush wants Republicans to consider immigration on its own merits, not just as a party saving piece of legislation, he said during an interview on ABC's This Week. "Sometimes, it takes time for some of these complex issues to evolve. And it looks like immigration, you know, has a chance to pass," Bush said. "The reason to pass immigration reform is not to bolster a Republican Party -- it's to fix a system that's broken. Good policy yields good politics as far as I'm concerned." The bill's uncertain future in the House after the Senate passed it last week is causing some concern. But Bush argues the bill is too important not to pass. "It's very important to fix a broken system, to treat people with respect and have confidence in our capacity to assimilate people," Bush said. "It's a very difficult bill to pass because there's a lotta moving parts. And the legislative process is-- can be ugly. But it looks like they're making some progress."
Jeb Bush came out in favor of this amnesty + new immigration wave not long ago.
And I'm sure Bush Sr. supports the notion as well--he certainly did not oppose Reagan's amnesty in 86'. That amnesty produced the largest immigration wave in American history, and a baby-boom among the immigrants.
This is seen by "La Raza" (the race), as Mexicans prefer to call themselves, as an invitation to the Reconquista--the reconquering of the territory lost in the Mexican-America War. Here is the progress they've made so far in the states that we formed out of our conquest of Northern Mexico in 1848:
Pop % Hispanic
CA: 38M 39%
AZ: 6.5M 31%
NM: 2.1M 47%
TX: 26.1M 38%
NV: 2.8M 27%
UT: 2.8M 13%
CO: 5.2M 21%
Total: 83.5M 36%
Whether they try to make a clean break with the Union or not (and I do hope they provide the Western World with a lesson sorely needed), they will have at least de facto political control over most of the old Mexican Cession within 10 years. Considering how Mexicans run Mexico, optimism here would be a lie so large that only our elite could get away with it. And, remember, La Raza recovers its lands with or without the pending amnesty. As usual in America, it's merely a question of whether leftist results are achieved quickly or slowly. The direction is always Left. We live in a one party state that showers the blessings, and only the blessings, the rewards without the risks, of capitalism upon the elite and inflicts socialism upon the vast remainder. The only decent political position that remains to us is dissidence, outright opposition to the sick alliance of egalitarian moral fanatics and crony capitalists who now run the country untrammeled.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Leviathan Their Puppet
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-journalism-official.html
Like the authors of these two articles, I too believed, and for a long time, that I was savvy enough to "interpret" the press--that I could discount the known prejudices of press institutions and writers. But, in the course of a few years in my early thirties, the truth came to me. It is a thing impossible to accomplish. And the most insidious category of lies of which the press stands guilty--a category fully functional only in an atmosphere in which no effective opposition exists--are the lies of omission.
I ought to note that I have not read all the material on the anthrax, POW, and nuclear espionage stories in the first article. The other matters mentioned there are well-known.
Of the second article, may I submit that I do not frequently happen upon a writer possessed of an almost egregiously superlative talent--but, when he turns his talents to the provisioning of my entertainment and edification by means of firing a forest of dead lies and clearing the land for new growth, and prophecies rebirth in allusive, many-tentacled, metaphor strewn prose, I count myself blessed. Consider his comparison of official journalism to its predecessor, an implicit admission that no simple solution to the problem of accurate information exists. Yet, as a de facto branch of the civil service, the pseudo-apolitical caretakers of the people, see how we find ourselves closely mewed up in a statist circle of thought. State education and the state-adjunct press determine (with condolences to Emerson) the horizon beyond which almost no one can think. From within that horizon an occasional chink of light only may sparkle from the great beyond, to be interpreted by most inmates as a random reflection of the real world within the horizon, since either they do not realize an horizon exists or they believe what lies beyond it is mere madness; but in fact the potentially saving light emanates either from the internet or an old book.
Examples of journalistic fraud and negligence:
No press outlet thought through the meaning of the real estate bubble before it burst, though some saw the bubble (eg The Economist).
"Paleo" nutrition was excluded from the press, though convincing scientific literature extends back 100 years, and the world grows obese.
The press carefully excludes the real effects of immigration policy in the white world, though America is threatened with socialism economically and a recapitulation of Brazil's social experience--while Europe faces submission to the Caliphate.
Reporting on trade policy ignores the collapse of strategic industries in the US and Europe, in process of being systematically overrun by state-financed corporations of the Far East.
Crime reporting ignores the black on white race war in America: blacks commit 83% of violent inter-racial crimes between blacks and whites, and 20,000 black-on-white rapes occur per year compared to less than 10 white-on-black rapes per year.
Reporting of racial inequalities ignores the IQ differences, the cultural differences, the different criminal propensities, different levels of accomplishment--or ascribes black/mestizo deficits in each area to racism, thereby inciting racial animosity among both the superior and the inferior.
War reporting tilts against the US at every opportunity, while giving the enemy the benefit of the doubt. Also, war reporters rarely explain that a "humanitarian" counter-insurgency is just another way of saying "guaranteed failure with profoundly anti-humanitarian consequences."
The list of mindlessly idealistic official wisdom and state-sanctioned-and-sanctioning bullshit never ends--is there a field of thought or action in which the official press is actually right?
The unexampled power of the press in pseudo-demotic society is similar to that which Hobbes ascribed to state officials who "resembleth the Nerves, and Tendons that move the severall limbs of a body natural," one of whose responsibilities it is "to teach the people their duty to the Sovereign Power." Hobbes also remarks on the ultimate spiritual guides directing the goals of his Leviathan, men such as Jesus and Paul, and those with authority to expound upon these men. Our ultimate guides today, though, our cultural Marxists, deem themselves holier than these, present themselves as supra-Christians and Platonic philosopher-kings, presume themselves, in short, more idealistic than their forerunners and more consciously divorced from (transcending?) reality. Oh, and godless as well, since their ascetic stance and posture would be incomplete if they were to nestle themselves under the warm, comforting promise of divine succor.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-journalism-official.html
Like the authors of these two articles, I too believed, and for a long time, that I was savvy enough to "interpret" the press--that I could discount the known prejudices of press institutions and writers. But, in the course of a few years in my early thirties, the truth came to me. It is a thing impossible to accomplish. And the most insidious category of lies of which the press stands guilty--a category fully functional only in an atmosphere in which no effective opposition exists--are the lies of omission.
I ought to note that I have not read all the material on the anthrax, POW, and nuclear espionage stories in the first article. The other matters mentioned there are well-known.
Of the second article, may I submit that I do not frequently happen upon a writer possessed of an almost egregiously superlative talent--but, when he turns his talents to the provisioning of my entertainment and edification by means of firing a forest of dead lies and clearing the land for new growth, and prophecies rebirth in allusive, many-tentacled, metaphor strewn prose, I count myself blessed. Consider his comparison of official journalism to its predecessor, an implicit admission that no simple solution to the problem of accurate information exists. Yet, as a de facto branch of the civil service, the pseudo-apolitical caretakers of the people, see how we find ourselves closely mewed up in a statist circle of thought. State education and the state-adjunct press determine (with condolences to Emerson) the horizon beyond which almost no one can think. From within that horizon an occasional chink of light only may sparkle from the great beyond, to be interpreted by most inmates as a random reflection of the real world within the horizon, since either they do not realize an horizon exists or they believe what lies beyond it is mere madness; but in fact the potentially saving light emanates either from the internet or an old book.
Examples of journalistic fraud and negligence:
No press outlet thought through the meaning of the real estate bubble before it burst, though some saw the bubble (eg The Economist).
"Paleo" nutrition was excluded from the press, though convincing scientific literature extends back 100 years, and the world grows obese.
The press carefully excludes the real effects of immigration policy in the white world, though America is threatened with socialism economically and a recapitulation of Brazil's social experience--while Europe faces submission to the Caliphate.
Reporting on trade policy ignores the collapse of strategic industries in the US and Europe, in process of being systematically overrun by state-financed corporations of the Far East.
Crime reporting ignores the black on white race war in America: blacks commit 83% of violent inter-racial crimes between blacks and whites, and 20,000 black-on-white rapes occur per year compared to less than 10 white-on-black rapes per year.
Reporting of racial inequalities ignores the IQ differences, the cultural differences, the different criminal propensities, different levels of accomplishment--or ascribes black/mestizo deficits in each area to racism, thereby inciting racial animosity among both the superior and the inferior.
War reporting tilts against the US at every opportunity, while giving the enemy the benefit of the doubt. Also, war reporters rarely explain that a "humanitarian" counter-insurgency is just another way of saying "guaranteed failure with profoundly anti-humanitarian consequences."
The list of mindlessly idealistic official wisdom and state-sanctioned-and-sanctioning bullshit never ends--is there a field of thought or action in which the official press is actually right?
The unexampled power of the press in pseudo-demotic society is similar to that which Hobbes ascribed to state officials who "resembleth the Nerves, and Tendons that move the severall limbs of a body natural," one of whose responsibilities it is "to teach the people their duty to the Sovereign Power." Hobbes also remarks on the ultimate spiritual guides directing the goals of his Leviathan, men such as Jesus and Paul, and those with authority to expound upon these men. Our ultimate guides today, though, our cultural Marxists, deem themselves holier than these, present themselves as supra-Christians and Platonic philosopher-kings, presume themselves, in short, more idealistic than their forerunners and more consciously divorced from (transcending?) reality. Oh, and godless as well, since their ascetic stance and posture would be incomplete if they were to nestle themselves under the warm, comforting promise of divine succor.
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