- Smith: Feminism Is A Disease – And Masculinity Is The Cure
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
It seems these days like everyone and their gender-fluid grandma has some “profound” insight into the minds and world of men. Men and masculinity are spoken of in the media with sharp tones of fear mixed with disdain, as if we are a dangerous aberrant genetic anomaly that needs to be studied under a special microscope that will protect the observer from being influenced by our vitriolic pheromones. The problem is, most of these “experts” on manhood are not men at all, or, their observations of male behavior are tainted with deep-seated resentments. That is to say, they are hardly objective.
I recently came across an article by The Atlantic titled ‘Psychology Has A Healthier Approach To Building Healthier Men’. Written around the same time as the embarrassing failure of Gillette’s “Toxic Masculinity” ad campaign, I assume The Atlantic like many other mainstream media outlets was privy to this coming propaganda push and is attempting to rally the leftist troops to defend an ideological partner in crime. YouTube itself has even been aiding Gillette by removing dislikes from the video’s vote count, which just goes to show that YouTube (owned by Google) is not a business but a propaganda machine, pure and simple.
As I’ve noted in past articles on the psychology not only of globalists, but the useful idiots on the political left they like to exploit, these kinds of people often exhibit many of the traits of narcissistic sociopaths. It has been my observation that narcissistic sociopaths tend to come to the aid of other narcissistic sociopaths when they are facing discovery or prosecution. They are not as isolated from each other as many assume. They do in fact “organize”, and act to help each other as long as there is mutual benefit. If one vampire is hunted down by the villagers with their pitchforks, they know that ALL vampires might eventually be hunted down.
There is nothing particularly special about The Atlantic’s analysis of men; it merely regurgitates all the typical feminist misconceptions and fallacies, but more subtly and in a way that might appear “rational” to the unschooled.
I do ask readers to study the article, because it is a perfect all around example of the kind of advanced propaganda men are facing: The dangerous mixture of pseudoscience and cultism. It presents itself as scientific while lacking any scientific foundation. It presents itself as fair while being ideologically biased in the extreme. It acts as if it wants to “help” men while treating men as if we are suffering from a mental illness called “traditional masculinity”.
The fact is, feminism itself is so disjointed from observable reality that nearly every viewpoint the floundering movement adopts is the exact opposite of the truth. Often this is by design – these people are not interested in being scientifically or morally correct in an argument, they only want to “win” the argument by any means necessary. Leftist Gatekeeper Saul Alinsky’s method of debate and revolution has always been about removing all morals and principles when pushing an ideology. The goal is to slander your opponent in the manner most effective, even if the slander is entirely fraudulent, while avoiding the facts at all costs if the facts are not in your favor.
That said, I also think that social justice warriors have so immersed themselves in cultism and zealotry they have truly lost sight of the real world and concrete evidence. In many cases they may not even understand that the lies they promote are actually repelling the public rather than indoctrinating them. This works to our advantage; their delusions are our gain, for now. But delusions can be powerful, and they can sometimes take on a life of their own. What if one day soon the lies about men and masculinity become so entrenched that our society is enraptured by the anti-man religion?
Well, we can already see some of the damage done today. So, what are these lies about masculinity? Why not start with the Atlantic article’s suggestive title and manipulative content…
Men Must Be ‘Built’ Or ‘Molded’?
The social justice cult has an obsession with molding society. Not just molding public opinion on a large scale, but molding each individual to a specific ideological standard – a perfect cog in a perfect machine. They want full spectrum control of people’s minds and they would do anything to get it. The problem is men are not “built”, they are born. There is no such thing as “traditional masculinity”, there is only biological masculinity.
The brains of men and women are different. This is biological fact. We are not only different in terms of hormonal effects, but our brains function differently at a neurological level. The social justice cabal spends an immense amount of time and energy attempting to deny genetic realities using junk-science presented as fact. A little tip for feminists: If a group initiates a study with a preconceived outcome in mind, then their study is in no way scientific.
Masculine traits are a product of our biological imperatives. These imperatives manifest psychologically in the majority of men as a desire to protect, to provide and to leave a lasting legacy. These male standards are predominantly inborn, they are a product of millions of years of evolution, not some arbitrary product of “society” as feminists claim. Masculinity has always been a survival necessity for humanity, which is why it exists in the first place.
Only in the past 30 years or so has biological manhood suddenly been treated as if it is an anomaly, or unnatural.
Male Drives Are ‘Social Constructs’?
The biological drives inherent in most men lead to certain behaviors: For example, we tend to be more likely than women to take life threatening or life changing risks, which means we might do something rather stupid, or we might do something rather brilliant that improves our world for many years to come. Many men are constant gamblers in every aspect of life; women, not so much. Her biggest gamble in life is usually which man she chooses to spend her future with.
When pursuing legacy, men often seek to build a better mousetrap. They want to create something that they can put their stamp on and say “I added to the world, I made it better, remember me…” Women are more biologically inclined to develop legacy through the nurturing of children and family (hence the “biological clock” we always hear about).
Men also desire family, but first and foremost in the sense of continuing our genetic line. A preoccupation with sex has been painted as one of the defining “offenses” of men in general, but biologically, men are designed to pursue, and frankly, this is a necessity.
Western male testosterone levels are in steep decline for at least the past 30 years. The source of this problem is up for debate, but I would note that psychotropic drugs like anti-depressants are well established as testosterone killers. Ritalin, prescribed to boys by the millions today for ADHD to suppress what might otherwise be described as normal male hyperactive behavior, has also been linked in some studies to reduced testosterone and interference in puberty. Finally, opioids have also been identified as culprits for testosterone reduction. With the US enveloped in an opioid crisis, is it any wonder that boys are having so much trouble developing into men?
I would cite the feminist ideal of controlling male behavior (often with drugs) as part of the problem. Combine this with the demonization of masculinity in society and you have a recipe for the collapse of civilization as we know it. The results are becoming highly visible.
While feminist propaganda often presents women as the new “pursuers” and arbiters of all sexual activity in our modern times (the lie of role reversal), the results of less confident and aggressive men are becoming evident. In the West and in countries like Japan with heavy western influence, the admonishment of male virility has apparently led to extreme consequences. Population is no longer being replenished and some countries are even suffering abrupt declines.
In societies where leftist ideology has produced militant feminism as well as economic socialism, the irony of the consequences can’t be denied. In socialism an aging population requires ever larger youth replacement in order to economically support those who retire from the workforce, yet population reduction has created a growing void in the socialist framework. In response, leftists in these nations have suggested mass immigration to solve the problem. Yet, much of this immigration is coming from Eastern cultures which hold beliefs completely contrary to feminist ideals.
Feminist derision of masculinity has led to them importing the very “rape cultures” they originally accused western men of perpetuating. It’s okay to laugh, I know I have to.
Only under a politically socialist and collectivist setting can people survive at all without a strong masculine presence. Take away a consumer based economy where production has been cast aside, take away welfare and entitlement programs, take away the extreme helicopter nanny state and force people to be self reliant, and all that feminist nonsense goes straight into the garbage. When the system is no longer the provider, people always look to men and masculinity to save the day.
Masculinity Is Unhealthy?
Evidence suggests that we should reverse this claim entirely and say that masculinity is entirely natural, and feminism is unhealthy. Feminism is a disease, and masculinity is the cure.
As mentioned above, unlike feminism, masculinity is NOT a social construct or an ideology, it is an inherent biological reality. What feminists often present as “unhealthy” behaviors in masculinity are simply fabricated or exaggerated, and I am speaking from a Western perspective specifically.
While men are designed to be more sexually aggressive, there is no “rape culture” in western society. Nowhere in the western world is rape advocated as acceptable. Nowhere is it protected by law. The #MeToo movement is yet another propaganda initiative which is meant to take criminal actions of a select few men and apply them to ALL men and masculinity in general. The lie of rape culture is promoted through false and rigged statistics. The fact that a large portion of reported sexual abuse is perpetrated by women is also ignored. Clearly, rape is not the exclusive domain of masculinity.
Beyond the lie that “all men rape”, masculine energy and aggressiveness is admonished as ugly and disruptive. Everyone knows of course that men are savages. But after a long day of raping, how could we possibly have the energy to go out looking for a steady supply of fistfights? Apparently we do according to feminists, and we encourage our sons to do the same, which continues the cycle of violence that plagues the world.
In truth, male aggressiveness is channeled into many healthy things that help society. The competitive edge drives men to accomplish more – to succeed. And though in some cases this might be a selfish pursuit, it still benefits others as men continue to produce and build. In terms of physical violence, men are biologically evolved to protect and provide for others. The problem is not men or masculinity, but a minority of men AND women with inherent narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies.
Unless I missed something, the world is still a very dangerous place because of a minority of psychopaths. Men with protective natures will always be needed to defend against such criminality. Feminism is actually seeking to diminish the very masculine traits which make society safer and more balanced.
Masculinity Is The Cure
The western world overall is becoming a very unhappy place. Male suicide is spiking, but let’s not forget about how feminism is also hurting women. While men are more likely to successfully kill themselves, women are more likely to make the attempt. Even in the wake of the women’s rights movement, women’s happiness has continued to drop.
I would suggest that it is actually feminism and the social justice cult that has caused the misery of both genders by pushing them away from their biological roles. Men are no longer supposed to be providers and protectors, and their natural energy is attacked as destructive to society. Women are no longer supposed to be nurturing people with nesting instincts and a desire for children; they are supposed to abandon all of that to take on the roles of men. The loss of our biological imperatives is driving us to depression, suicide and the downfall of our civilization.
The only solution I can think of is for men to start acting like men again; to even organize around masculinity and to support each other in our efforts to achieve our goals We must return to our roots as producers, providers, builders and protectors and we have to ensure that we do this for the right reasons rather than reasons given to us by the establishment.
If you are wondering why many governments have taken such an active interest in supporting feminist aims and in some cases turning their ideology into law, consider this:
Masculinity can be independent, unruly and aggressive. A society in which masculinity thrives is a society that is harder to rule. A society that has made masculinity a taboo would be easier to dominate. Socialist governments in particular support feminism because it serves their interests – keeping people docile and dependent so that the ruling elite are forever secure in their positions of power.
What would happen, though, if masculinity was actually celebrated again? What if men organized as feminists have organized, into groups that promote the resurgence of masculinity as a natural part of a balanced society? This might not only help men, but also women who have been wrongly infantilized by the feminist movement for decades. What if victim politics was finally and fully abandoned like an unfunny joke or a meme well past its prime? This would be an utter nightmare for feminists, and a potential cure that could eventually reverse the damage their ideology has done.
* * *
If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here. We greatly appreciate your patronage.
- World's Largest Mobile Phone Carrier Halts Huawei Purchases
The largest mobile carrier in the world – outside of China – Vodafone, has gone on record that it is temporarily halting purchases of certain components made by Huawei. The fallout caused by security concerns at Huawei could pose a threat to its growth and further harm its reputation, according to the WSJ.
Vodafone said it will temporarily halt the purchase of gear from the company for use in its new 5G networks that it is in the midst of a European roll out. As the reason, the company cited uncertainty about whether or not certain governments will eventually ban the Chinese company’s hardware.
Vodafone says the suspension is only going to affect networks in Europe and it hasn’t ruled out Huawei components from other large markets like India and Turkey. The company is now in talks with European government officials about what the potential impact of a ban on Huawei could be.
While wireless carriers around the globe are spending massive amounts of capital in their roll out of 5G, Vodafone wants to make sure it gets it right the first time. Huawei equipment in question is “core” component gear that “directs calls and internet traffic”. It would not have an effect on non-core network components, like cell towers.
A spokesperson for Huawei came out and said that the gear it provides to Vodafone only represents a small portion of the company’s business and that it’s going to continue to work with Vodafone to try and find a solution.
“We are grateful to Vodafone for its support of Huawei, and we will endeavor to live up to the trust placed in us,” a Huawei representative told the Wall Street Journal.
In recent memos, Huawei’s founder told employees to expect growth to slow due to the global scrutiny that’s been placed on the company. Ericsson also said on Friday that security concerns have caused some uncertainty in planning for its new networks. For now, the company’s CEO said it was still too early to tell whether or not Ericsson’s business would be affected.
“We probably won some contracts that we wouldn’t have otherwise,” a smaller telecom competitor executive said about scrutiny on Huawei.
US officials have long held Huawei as a national security threat, a symbol of China’s relentless information transfer, worried that the Chinese government could compel it to use its infrastructure and know-how to spy or reverse engineer the latest western technologies. The U.S. scrutiny has led governments in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Poland and Japan to all examine their telecom supply chain, as well,while Australia and New Zealand have already restricted Huawei’s potential involvement in their coming 5G networks.
- Russia, China, India, & Iran: The Magic Quadrant That Is Changing The World
Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
With the end of the unipolar moment, which saw Washington dominate international relations, the richest and most powerful Eurasian countries are beginning to organize themselves into alliance structures and agreements that aim to facilitate trade, development and cooperation.
At the height of the US unipolar moment, Bill Clinton was leading a country in full economic recovery and the strategists at the Pentagon were drawing up plans to shape the world in their own image and likeness. The undeclared goal was regime change in all countries with unapproved political systems, which would allow for the proliferation of us-made “democracy” to the four corners of the earth. Clearly Eurasian countries like Russia, India, China and Iran were on top of the to-do list, as were countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
The bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia was the final step in the assault on the Russian Federation following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Yeltsin represented the means by which Western high finance decided to suck all Russia’s wealth, privatizing companies and plundering strategic resources.
China, on the other hand, saw a rebirth as a result of American and European manufacturing companies relocating to the country to take advantage of the cheap labor it offered. India, historically close to the USSR, and Iran, historically averse to Washington, were struggling to find a new balance in a world dominated by Washington.
Tehran was clearly in an open conflict with the United States because of the 1979 Islamic revolution that liberated the country from Western submission under the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. India understood the new reality, laying the foundations for a close cooperation with Washington. Previously, the use of jihadism in Afghanistan, through the coordination between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, had severely undermined relations between India and the United States, remembering that New Delhi was an important ally of Moscow during the Cold War.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the commencement of the unipolar era, India, Russia, China and Iran started down their paths of historical rebirth, though starting from very different positions and following different paths. India understood that Washington had immense economic and military power at its disposal. Despite the early embraces between Clinton and Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, relations between New Delhi and Washington reached unexpected heights during the Bush era. A series of factors helped to weld the bond. There was, firstly, the reality of India’s great economic growth. Secondly, India offered the opportunity of counterbalancing and containing China, a classic geopolitical scenario.
During this delicate unipolar period, there were two highly significant events for Russia and China that represented the beginning of the end for Washington’s plans to dominate the planet.
-
First of all, Putin became president of the Russian Federation on December 31, 1999.
-
Secondly, Beijing was accepted into the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Today’s Chinese economic power took flight thanks to the Western industrial companies relocating their manufacturing to China so as to see their dividends triplicate and costs more than halve. It was a winning model for the capitalist, and a loser for the Western factory worker, as we would come to see 20 years later. The strategic thinking of the newly elected Putin was geopolitically visionary and had at its base a complete revamp of Russia’s military doctrine.
China and Russia both initially sought to follow the Indian path of cooperation and development with Washington. Moscow attempted a frank dialogue with Washington and NATO, but the decision by the US in 2002 to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) marked the beginning of the end of the Western dream of integrating the Russian Federation into NATO. For Beijing, the path was more downhill, thanks to a vicious circle whereby the West relocated to China to increase profits, which were then invested into the US stock market, multiplying the gains several times. It seemed like the Americans were onto something until, 20 years later, the entire middle and working classes found themselves being reduced to penury.
In this period following September 11, 2001, Washington’s focus shifted rapidly away from confronting rival powers to the so called “fight” against terrorism. It was an expedient way of occupying tactically important countries in strategically important regions of the planet. In Eurasia, US forces settled in Afghanistan on the pretext of fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In the Middle East, they occupy Iraq for the second time and have made it an operational base from which to destabilize the rest of the region in the decades since.
While India and China mainly pursued peaceful growth as a means of economically empowering the Asian region, Russia and Iran early understood that Washington’s attention would eventually fall on them. Moscow was still considered the deadly enemy by the neoconservative Cold War warriors, while the Islamic revolution of 1979 was neither forgotten nor forgiven. In the decade following 9/11, the foundations for the creation of a multipolar order were laid, generating in the process the huge transitional chaos we are currently experiencing.
India and China continued on their path to becoming economic giants, even as there is a latent but constant rivalry, while Iran and Russia continued on their path of military rejuvenation in order to ensure a deterrent sufficient to discourage any attacks by Israel or the US respectively.
The breaking point for this delicate geopolitical balance came in the form of the “Arab Spring” of 2011. While India and China continued their economic growth, and Russia and Iran grew to become regional powers that were difficult to push around, the US continued its unipolar rampage, bombing Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq after having earlier bombed Yugoslavia, as the Pentagon devising light-footprint operations in the Middle East with the help of the Saudis, Israelis, Brits and French, who aided and armed local jihadis to wreak havoc. First Tunisia, then Egypt, and finally Libya. More dead, more bombs, more chaos. The warning signs were apparent to all regional powers, from China and Russia to India and Iran. Even if the synergies were still not in place, it was clear to everyone what had to be done. US destabilization around the world had to be contained, with particular focus on Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa.
Slowly, and not without problems, these four countries began a military, economic, political and diplomatic cooperation that, almost a decade later, allowed for the ending of the US unipolar moment and the creation of a multipolar reality with different centers of power.
The first confirmation of this new phase in international relations, favoured by historical ties, was the increasingly multifaceted cooperation between India and Russia. Another factor was China and Russia being drawn to the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the Obama administration’s actions in the Middle East with its Arab Springs, bombing of Libya and destabilization of Syria. They feared that prolonged chaos in the region would eventually have a negative effect on their own economies and social stability.
The final straw was the coup d’état in Ukraine, as well as the escalation of provocations in the South China Sea following the launch by the US of its so-called “Pivot to Asia”. Russia and China were thus forced into a situation neither had thought impossible for the previous 40 years: the joining of hands to change the world order by removing Washington from its superpower dais. Initially there were amazing economic agreements that left the Western planners stumped. Then came the military synergies, and finally the diplomatic ones, expressed by coordinated voting in the United Nations Security Council. From 2014 onwards, Russia and China signed important agreements that laid the foundations for a long-running Eurasian duopoly.
Obama’s legacy did not stop, with more than 100,000 jihadists unleashed on the country, financed by US and her allies. This led Moscow to intervene in Syria to protect its borders and obviate the jihadists’ eventual advance on the Caucasus, historically Russia’s soft underbelly. This move was hailed by the Pentagon as a new “Vietnam” for Russia. But these calculations were completely wrong, and Moscow, in addition to saving Syria and frustrating the plans of Washington and her confederates, greatly strengthened its relationship with Iran (not always a simple relationship, especially during the Soviet period), elevating it to the high level of regional cooperation.
Obama’s legacy was to inadvertently create a strategic triangle involving Iran, China and Russia and their development of high-level projects and programs for the region and beyond. It represents a disaster for US foreign policy as well as the unquestionable end of the unipolar dream.
Jumping forward a few years, we find Trump in the driving seat of the United States, repeating just one mantra: America First. From the Indian point of view, this has further aggravated the relations between the two countries, with sanctions and duties placed on India for what was a Western decision in the first place to shift manufacturing to low-wage India in order to further fatten the paychecks of the CEOs of Euro-American companies.
Modi’s India is forced to significantly increase its ties to Iran to guarantee its strategic autonomy in terms of energy supply, without forgetting the geographic proximity of the two countries. In this context, Russia and Iran’s victory against terrorism in the Middle East pacifies the region and stabilizes Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, thereby allowing for the development of such new projects as the mega Silk Road 2.0 investment on which Beijing places considerable importance.
We could go on in this vein, detailing how even China and India have overcome their historical mistrust, well aware that divide and rule only benefits those who are on the other side of the ocean, certainly not two countries experiencing great economic growth with a common border spanning thousands of miles. The meetings between Modi and Xi Jinping, as well as those between Putin and Xi Jinping or Putin with Modi, show how the intention of these three leaders is to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for their citizens, and this cannot be separated from a stronger union together with an abandonment of disputes and differences.
The synergies in recent years have shifted from the military and diplomatic arenas to the economic one, especially thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive policy of wielding the dollar like a club with which to strike political opponents. One last step that these countries need to take is that of de-dollarization, which plays an important role in how the the US is able to exercise economic influence. Even if the US dollar were to remain central for several years, the process of de-dollarization is irreversible.
Right now Iran plays a vital role in how countries like India, Russia and China are able to respond asymmetrically to the US. Russia uses military power in Syria, China seeks economic integration in the Silk Road 2.0, and India bypasses the dollar by selling oil in exchange for goods or other currency.
India, China and Russia use the Middle East as a stepping stone to advance energy, economic and military integration, pushing out the plans of the neocons in the region, thereby indirectly sending a signal to Israel and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are occasions for peacemaking, advancing the integration of dozens of countries by incorporating them into a major project that includes Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa instead of the US and her proxy states.
Soon there will be a breaking point, not so much militarily (as the nuclear MAD doctrine is still valid) but rather economically. Of course the spark will come from changing the denomination in which oil is sold, namely the US dollar. This process will still take time, but it is an indispensable condition for Iran becoming a regional hegemon. China is increasingly clashing with Washington; Russia is increasingly influential in OPEC; and India may finally decide to embrace the Eurasian revolution by forming an impenetrable strategic square against Washington, which will shift the balance of global power to the East after more than 500 years of domination by the West.
-
- Americans Fear The AI Apocalypse
One day, robots will take over and it’s going to be “bad” to “very bad”.
Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that according to a survey conducted byOxford University’s Center for the Governance of AI, many Americans fear a future where mechanisms of AI become too intelligent. When asked what kind of impact high-level machine intelligence would have on humanity, 34 percent of respondents thought it would be negative, with 12 percent going for the option “very bad, possibly human extinction”. Only 27 percent of respondents believed in a positive outcome, 21 percent thought AI wouldn’t change the future much and 18 percent said they didn’t know what impact AI would have.
When asked to consider a negative future outcome of AI technology, Americans ranked the AI apocalypse as more catastrophic than the possible failure to address climate change, even though respondents said that it was less likely to happen.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The respondents of the study said that they would trust university researchers most to build and responsibly manage AI technology. 50 percent said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in their ability in the field. The U.S. military at 49 percent came in a close second. Also, more Americans trust Microsoft with advanced AI technology (44 percent) than Amazon (41 percent), Google (39 percent), Apple (36 percent) or Facebook (18 percent).
Overall, a large majority of Americans agreed that robots and other systems of artificial intelligence needed careful supervision. Despite the fears, more Americans agreed that high-level machine intelligence should be developed than said it should not.
The survey also found that respondents underestimated the prevalence of AI technology. While Americans rightly assumed that driverless cars and virtual assistants use AI and machine learning mechanisms, fewer thought of Netflix recommendations, Google Translate or Google Search as products that use those technologies.
- Buchanan Warns Democrats' America Is The Heart Of Darkness
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.
Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday set aside to honor King:
“We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. … While Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well.”
At the headquarters of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, wrote The New York Times, Jeffries’ remarks were “met with … much cheering.”
At a Boston breakfast that same day, Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose to honor King’s memory in her way:
“Our government is shut down for one reason … So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.”
At a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker declaimed — in what could be taken as a shot at his New Jersey colleague, the lately acquitted Sen. Bob Menendez —
“We live a nation where you get a better justice system if you’re rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”
Booker urged the crowd “to apply the ideals of Dr. King” and avoid vitriol in dealing with political adversaries.
But his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, also in South Carolina, wasn’t buying it. Routed by Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina primary in 2016, Sanders is determined not to lose the party’s African-American majority that badly in 2020.
“Today we talk about racism,” said Sanders. “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a president of the United States who is a racist.”
Sanders apparently connected, with his remarks “drawing applause.”
Joe Biden spoke in D.C. in the full apology-tour mode made famous by his former boss, Barack Obama. He brought up the 1994 crime bill he shepherded though the Senate, which treated consumption and distribution of crack cocaine as more serious crimes than the use of powder cocaine, and then confessed to the crowd that it was “a big mistake.”
“We were told by the experts that, ‘crack you never go back,’ that the two were somehow fundamentally different. It’s not. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”
Biden meant that lots of black folks got locked up for a long time, unjustly, conceding, “We may not have always got things right.”
Biden then proceeded to slander the nation that has honored him as it has few of his generation:
“Systematic racism that most of us whites don’t even like to acknowledge” is “built into every aspect of our system.”
Is America, 50 years after segregation was outlawed in our public life, really a land saturated with systemic racism?
Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also in D.C.
The mayor’s problem with African-Americans is that he pursued a policy of stop-and-frisk with criminal suspects in New York. So, he sought to find common ground with his audience by relating “a series of events that had shaped his recent thinking about race.”
The mayor said he had “recently learned about the deadly race riots in which white residents destroyed the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and murdered several dozen black residents.”
But why did his honor have to go all the way back to 1921 and Tulsa to find race riots, when Harlem, in the heart of the town he served as mayor for 12 years, exploded in a riot in 1964 that spread to Brooklyn and Queens and lasted six days?
Why did Bloomberg not bring up the worst riot in U.S. history, when Lincoln sent Union veterans of Gettysburg to shoot down Irish immigrants protesting the draft in New York?
“It’s up to us to bring these stories out of the shadows so they never happen again,” said the mayor.
But where are black communities threatened by white mob violence in 2019? Was the Watts riot of 1965, were the Detroit and Newark riots of 1967, was the rioting, looting and arson that ravaged 100 cities after King’s death a result of rampaging whites assaulting black folks?
Was the LA riot of 1992, which targeted Koreatown, the work of white racists?
Monday, after a meeting with Sharpton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand offered her message of conciliation. Said the successor to Sen. Hillary Clinton, President Trump has “inspired a hate and a darkness in this country that I have never experienced myself.
“It is wrong to ask men and women of color to bear these burdens every single day. … White women like me must bear part of this burden.”
Does there not come a time when the pandering has to stop?
Ronald Reagan preached America as the Pilgrim fathers’ “shining city on a hill.” For Democrats today, America is the heart of darkness.
Can people lead a republic that they have come to see as a sinkhole of racism?
- Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Vegetarian Environmental Activist Criticized For Traveling Via Private Jet
Today in liberal hypocrisy news, Norwegian billionaire Gunhild Stordalen, who is behind a campaign to save the planet by reducing meat consumption, is being criticized for recently buying a £20 million private jet and regularly using it to fly to exotic destinations around the world.
As many of Elon Musk’s critics have also pointed out, pollution created by air travel is a major contributor to global warming.
Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs told the Mirror:
“The hypocrisy of this is breathtaking. This is a campaign telling ordinary people they should be eating less than half a rasher of bacon per day for the sake of the environment, while the patron is flying people around the world in private jets creating one enormous carbon footprint.
This is a classic case of do as I say not as I do. Militant environmentalists can’t resist the chance to tell people how to live their lives and demonise everyday items of food.”
Stordalen is a former model who is now a doctor. She recently provided the bankroll for the EAT-Lancet study, which concluded this week that people should, on a daily basis, eat no more than two thirds of a fish finger, a quarter of a chicken breast or a penny-sized beef burger.
Stordalen has been an active campaigner for the green agenda and a outspoken vegetarian, who founded the EAT foundation in 2013. The study itself had quite a carbon footprint, too. It involved 37 experts from 16 countries who were flown around the world to dozens of different locations to try and unveil the plan this week.
She is also active on Instagram, recently posting photos of herself vacationing in Greece, Mexico, Costa Rica and Cuba. Recently, Stordalen had also been photographed in a post where she was lecturing people to cut meat from their diets.
Speaking of hypocrisy, the model-turned-doctor reportedly served sushi at her £4 million wedding in 2010. And again there was significant air travel involved: people were flown in from 3500 miles away to Morocco (because of course), where her and her husband were married at a luxury hotel.
The EAT-Lancet study calls for better use of farming land and less meat consumption to reduce methane greenhouse gas emissions. As recent as this week, Stordalen was on stage in Oslo telling people that adopting her diet was “a matter of morals”.
In Oslo, she said:
“We all have a role to play. Whether we have power, knowledge, money, a voice, a piece of land or a piece of bread.”
…Or a private jet.
- When Science Isn't Science
Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute,
The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 21, no. 2 (Summer 2018). For the full issue, click here.
[The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017., Hope Jahren, ed., Wilmington, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2017, 352 pp.]
The Earth’s climate is extraordinarily complex. Unlike dinosaur fossils or organic chemistry or primate behavior, climate is always in flux, with countless factors influencing one another in an endless unfolding of diachronic stochastics. Given this complexity, one might presume that scientists who study planetary climate would be endowed with exceptional patience, scholarly integrity, and intellectual humility. After all, it takes a long time to learn even a little bit about such an intricate system, so part of the job description of climate scientist would seem to be acknowledging that there is only so much that is known about the 1.09 x 1044 or so molecules swirling about in the atmosphere. Even more complex than all that, though, is navigating the public’s interest in the field. Climate is contentious, and a climate scientist will have to keep his cool, sticking to the facts amidst even the most heated rhetorical environments.
And yet, this is precisely not how a startling number of climate scientists choose to behave. Former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen, for example, once made the rather alarming claim that “it will soon be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. We have reached a critical tipping point. […] We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” And what might happen if the Earth warmed by the five degrees Hansen was warning about? Hansen tells us in detail.
The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher. Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.
Rather discomfiting for Dr. Hansen, who thought we had “at most […] ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions,” those blood-curdling visions of hundreds of millions of drowning urbanites have now gone fully a dozen years without coming to pass.
Not to be dissuaded from his task—and traipsing rather lightly past the Climategate scandal, in which University of East Anglia scientists were caught in flagrante delicto discussing the doctoring of data to match the received narrative on anthropogenic climate change—Hansen next tried to set a new tone for the climate Armageddonists. The Earth’s failure to implode on cue led Hansen and others to blame the system instead. “The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working,” he said in 2009, for example (The Guardian, 2009). Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), connected the dots between Hansen’s rantings and full-bore income redistribution, hyping the “People’s Recovery,” which attempted to shunt tax dollars into communities experimenting in “nonextractive living” and “new democratic processes”:
Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of world-views, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect.
It would be hard to beat this orchestral crescendo of embarrassments to real scientific inquiry, this twisting of science into balloon animals shaped like either Chicken Little or Karl Marx. But in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017, series editor Tim Folger gives it a try. In large measure, he succeeds, calling into question whether “climate science” has not perhaps become an oxymoron.
First, a word about the 2017 iteration of the series. The editor for that year, Hope Jahren (the author of Lab Girl(2016)), has assembled a rather puzzling collection of genuinely interesting and valuable pieces, interspersed with tendentious politically-correct huff-puffing and special pleading. To take the good entries first, Robert Draper’s essay (reprinted from National Geographic), “The Battle for Virunga,” is a tightly-written piece on the intersection of economics, politics, and wildlife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. David Epstein’s ProPublica essay, “The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene,” tells the richly human story of Jill Viles, a muscular dystrophy patient whose extraordinary etiological insights helped track down important genetic information about lipodystrophy. And Ann Finkbeiner’s “Inside the Breakthrough Starshot Mission to Alpha Centauri,” taken from Scientific American, is a character-driven look at how new space technologies travel down the R&D pipeline. There are other fine essays in this volume, too: Tom Philpott’s on the political economy of chicken farm antibiotics, Kim Tingley’s on Polynesian navigation techniques, and Christopher Solomon’s well-researched look at Bureau of Land Management machinations in the American West.
Unfortunately, Jahren’s editorial heuristic, saturated in identity politics, leads her in the very unscientific direction of putting the scientist ahead of the science. This is especially odd, given that the writers who take the Cartesian plunge and delve into innerspace are forced to admit to having no idea who they are. Listless atheism marks Omar Mouallem’s “Dark Science,” for example. Ostensibly writing about light pollution and the efforts to combat it, Mouallem lets slip, “I once found myself in the middle of a field staring at a glistening sky. Had I still believed in him, I’d say it looked like God sneezed glitter.” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “He Fell in Love with His Grad Student—Then Fired Her for It” is the Glenn Close-esque tale of Christian Ott, a Caltech astrophysics professor who unburdens himself to his protégé about his deep-seated insecurities while publishing dozens of poems about her online. Sally Davies’ “The Physics Pioneer Who Walked Away from It All” tells us about physicist Fotini Markopoulou, who avers that “between the truth of the physical world and a physics theory, there’s humans. Of course, nothing happens there, because removing the person is the whole point of training as a scientist.” And then there is Michael Regnier’s heartbreaking true story of George Price, the man who literally did just that: removed himself, by killing himself in the name of the scientific study of altruism (“The Man Who Gave Himself Away”).
But the real editorial knifepoint of this book is its global warming agenda. Climate change crops up everywhere, from essays on Greenland (“A Song of Ice”) to Alaska (“The New Harpoon”). However, the pièce de résistance is Nathaniel Rich’s “The Invisible Catastrophe,” reprinted from The New York Times Magazine. This is passive-aggressiveness cranked up to eleven. Here, Rich manages to take a story about a methane leak in Aliso Canyon, outside Los Angeles, and turn it into a schadenfreude smorgasbord, with Rich secretly reveling in the fact that the wealthy residents of Porter Ranch—many of whom are Republicans—are finally getting a taste of their own medicine by being sickened by greenhouse gases.
But even this essay pales in comparison with Folger’s truly unhinged Foreword. Here, we find the favorite trope of the unscientific, namely, that everyone with whom one disagrees is a Nazi. Yes, a National Socialist. And not just any kind of National Socialist, but active, core members of the Party. To be more specific, bookburning Nazis. Here’s Folger:
Modern cosmology was born in Germany a century ago, and within two decades of its birth it almost died there. When Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in November 1915, it’s doubtful he could have imagined how profoundly deranged his country would become. On May 10, 1933—the same year Einstein left Germany forever—mobs of young Nazis and their supporters across Germany were feeding bonfires with his papers, along with works by Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, and others supposedly contaminated with undeutschen Geist—un-German spirit. More than 25,000 books burned on that day, including those of the 19th-century Jewish poet and playwright Heinrich Heine, who had once written, “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people. […]”
Where is Folger going with all this? Who are the modern-day Nazis in our midst? Why, climate skeptics and Trump supporters, of course:
One measure of the health of any modern society must be the degree to which it supports its scientists. A few days before I started to write this foreword, hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of cities across the country participated in the March for Science. It was an event at once inspiring and worrisome: inspiring because so many took a stand for rationalism—a public rebuke to the nation’s leaders that couldn’t be more different from the German book burnings of the 1930s; worrisome because who would have thought that in the 21st century scientists and citizens would feel the need to gather in support of something so self-evidently valuable as unfettered scientific research?
Yet the march was necessary, urgently so. Scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies have launched rogue Twitter feeds to counter the policies of a frighteningly uninformed president who once tweeted that “global warming was created by and for the Chinese.” We live at a pivotal moment in history[; …] climate change threatens not just “the environment” but civilization itself.
Now, to be fair to Folger, he is hardly the only “scientist” to have had a Hitler-themed meltdown over thermometer readings in Queen Maud Land. We are fallen creatures, and we all let our passions get the better of us from time to time. Scientists are people too, and when they get caught rigging the deck so that every card comes up the Ace of Hockey Sticks, they are apt to lash out at the whistleblowers just like anyone else. If anything, in his extremism Folger is simply following in the footsteps of his fellow “earth scientists.” Like Jacques Cousteau, for instance, who once opined that “world population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”
But there is much more to Folger’s brand of meteorological trolling than there might first appear. For example, there is the revealing research of William N. Butos and Thomas J. McQuade, whose 2015 paper on boom-and-bust cycles in the global warming industry shows the deep intertwinings of “scientific” research and the political economy. From the mid 1990s, global warming became a fashionable topic. From that point, governments increasingly began funding global warming-themed research to the exclusion of other projects. The much-touted “consensus” on global warming turns out to be little more than an illusion created by preferential funding by Washington and foregrounding by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As Butos and McQuade point out, science is supposed to be about hypotheses and experiments, but scientists turn out to be as susceptible to chicanery as politicians are once money for research starts to change hands.
Would that that were all. For what lies beneath even this fen of politicking under the rent veil of scientific disinterest is a deep uneasiness, felt most acutely by scientists themselves, over the true nature of their “scientific” enterprise. Folger is driven to accuse his critics of Nazism because he is afraid to confront their arguments head on. Why? Could it not be because of the epistemological bankruptcy of what passes as science?
Now, before the QJAE offices are deluged with hate mail, let me state that I am not a flat earther. I fully accept that pterodactyls and diplodocuses and trilobites were real, that the universe is billions of years old, that the earth goes around the sun, and that electricity is electrons, not voodoo. I also agree that carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, ozone, and other substances are greenhouse gases, and that reducing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will reduce the greenhouse effect that they cause. I watched Mr. Wizard, too, and I am not here to dispute whether force equals mass times acceleration, or whether energy equals matter times the speed of light squared.
No, the claim I make here is much more serious than the denial of these facts would be. I am saying, in short, that scientists today, with rare exceptions, do not do science at all. They do sociology. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), for instance, science lurches and stalls through a series of paradigm shifts, with the behavior of scientists themselves being the real dark matter moving research and consensus. And Karl Popper, were he alive today, might be interested in applying the falsifiability criterion to wild speculations such as Hansen’s and Folger’s. The line between science and pseudoscience might lie much closer to the latter than many in the general public suspect.
I began this review by arguing that climate is complex. What we need, then, is a science capable of investigating it, and real scientists, for a change, who can rise above herd behavior and try to figure out exactly what is going on with all of those 1.09 x 1044 molecules in our atmosphere. What we do not need are any more quacks or snake oil salesmen who see science as a bandwagon and scientists as responsible for keeping everyone on board. On that note, Friedrich Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (1952) would be a good place to start for learning the key difference between science and scientism, or the ill-starred attempt to bend science towards less noble ends than truth. Perhaps the next edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing will heed some of Hayek’s sound advice and feature much more writing of a scientific nature. But at the very least, let us hope that it has much fewer comparisons of honest dissenters—those who truly want empirical facts and dispassionate interpretations—to bookburning Nazis.
- Watch Smart Microbots Fold Like Origami To Travel Through Human Body
Researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have developed tiny elastic robots that can morph into various shapes depending on their surroundings.
The group of researchers – led by Selman Sakar at EPFL and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zürich – were influenced by bacteria to design smart, biocompatible microrobots that are highly flexible and can reach hard to get areas in the body; they stand to revolutionize the targeted drug delivery industry by making it possible to deliver medication to any area of the body.
“Because these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed, they can pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or maneuverability. They are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field,” said EPFL, in a statement.
In a report published in Science Advances, the researchers described how they designed the robot’s shape so that it can efficiently travel through fluids that are dense, viscous or moving at accelerated speeds.
The group integrated intelligence, in which the robot’s physical being is adaptive to the surrounding. The bots are constructed with an origami-based folding design which allows it to deform to the most efficient shape for any given situation. Once inside the body, the robots can either be controlled by an electromagnetic field or they can be left to make their own path to the targeted area.
“Our robots have a special composition and structure that allow them to adapt to the characteristics of the fluid they are moving through,” said Selman Sakar, Assistant Professor, Institute of Mechanical Engineering, EPFL, in a statement. “For instance, if they encounter a change in viscosity or osmotic concentration, they modify their shape to maintain their speed and maneuverability without losing control of the direction of motion.”
Watch these tiny microbots in action as they travel through the human body to the targeted area.
- When Headgear Becomes A Bullseye
Authored by Jeff Charles via Liberty Nation,
To the left, a MAGA hat isn’t a head cover; it’s a badge of evil…
The last few years have seen a dangerous shift in America’s cultural climate, especially when it comes to the expression of political beliefs. In the past, Americans could engage in heated debates over the issues while still maintaining a semblance of civility. But now, political discourse has been turned on its head, and it is unlikely that the nation will see a return to normalcy anytime soon.
The days when individuals could communicate their political leanings without fear of reprisal have morphed into an environment in which an article of clothing can invite attacks so vicious that lives can be upended. The story of the Covington High School students who became targets of a rabid left-leaning media mob is only the latest in a series of occurrences that demonstrate what can happen to a person for simply wearing a “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) baseball cap.
Political Expression Has Become Dangerous
Since President Trump began his campaign, progressives in the media have homed in on his supporters, smearing them as ignorant bigots who are working to build an American Third Reich. As a result, those who voted for the president have been subject to harassment and, in some cases, violence.
A man was pepper-sprayed by Antifa for wearing a MAGA hat.
Last year, a Texas 16-year-old was accosted in a restaurant for wearing a MAGA hat. A 30-year-old man verbally assaulted the young fellow, ripped the hat from his head, and threw his soda into the teenager’s face. In 2017, a New York man was denied service at a bar because he sported the infamous red cap.
It is also important to remember the numerous instances in which far-leftist protesters showed up at conservative rallies to physically assault the participants. The left has managed to take an act of political expression and use it as a weapon against those who oppose progressive ideas. To the wearer of the MAGA hat, they are simply expressing support for a political movement. To the progressive left, it is an identifier, a way to pinpoint evil.
How Did This Happen?
Many individuals, both on the left and the right, have contributed to the tense political atmosphere America is experiencing today. But it is evident that the primary culprit is the establishment media, whose members have sown division and resentment through their biased reporting, and the majority of Americans are aware of the role the press has played in pitting one group against the other. A recent study revealed that people believe that the media is more divisive than President Trump, who is constantly maligned for his aggressive rhetoric.
The Fourth Estate has used its various platforms to treat conservatives as if they are both ignorant and evil. Instead of portraying right-leaning Americans as individuals who simply disagree with progressives, they have chosen to launch a malicious campaign. Several outlets have attracted clicks and views by using extremely loaded language to describe President Trump and his supporters; comparisons to dictators like Hitler have become almost commonplace in the reportage of the most popular news outlets.
It is for this reason that many on the far left do not see an article of clothing when confronted with a MAGA hat; they see a symbol of oppression. Some have likened the cap to the swastika or white hood. Many of those on the left who are portraying conservatives as fascists are fully aware that their accusations are inaccurate. Put simply, they are lying.
However, because of the influence of the media, there is a significant number who truly believe they are opposing oppression when they attack people for wearing the wrong headgear. For this reason, they can easily justify implementing a nationwide smear campaign against high school students who committed the sin of wearing a MAGA hat. It is why they have no problem with doxing or even assaulting Americans who support the president.
The only solution to this problem is for reasonable people on both sides to call out those who dehumanize anyone with differing political beliefs. But it is individuals on the far left who are going to extremes to harm conservatives, and this will persist as long as they are allowed to do so without being checked by their own.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...