Author: VD

Terror attack in Toronto

  1. 9 dead, 16 injured after van strikes pedestrians in Toronto, sources say suspect is Alek Minassian.
  2. Minassian is an Armenian name.
  3. Armenia’s opposition leader has demanded a snap parliamentary election in the wake of former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation over widespread anti-government demonstrations.
  4. Why was Armenia mentioned recently? Clowns losing control. Q
Which makes me wonder if the Toronto attack could be revenge for Sargsyan being forced from office. Then again, it may be just another case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

In defense of the Deep State

Even its proponents are now admitting its existence and are worrying that it might have gone too far:

America doesn’t have coups or tanks in the street. But a deep state of sorts exists here and it includes national security bureaucrats who use secretly collected information to shape or curb the actions of elected officials.

Some see these American bureaucrats as a vital check on the law-breaking or authoritarian or otherwise illegitimate tendencies of democratically elected officials. Others decry them as a self-serving authoritarian cabal that illegally and illegitimately undermines democratically elected officials and the policies they were elected to implement.

The truth is that the deep state, which is a real phenomenon, has long been both a threat to democratic politics and a savior of it. The problem is that it is hard to maintain its savior role without also accepting its threatening role. The two go hand in hand, and are difficult to untangle.

The deep state has been blamed for many things since Donald Trump became president, including by the president himself. Trump defenders have used the term promiscuously to include not just intelligence bureaucrats but a broader array of connected players in other administrative bureaucracies, in private industry, and in the media.

But even if we focus narrowly on the intelligence bureaucracies that conduct and use information collected secretly in the homeland, including the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and National Security Council, there is significant evidence that the deep state has used secretly collected information opportunistically and illegally to sabotage the president and his senior officials – either as part of a concerted movement or via individuals acting more or less independently.

As deep state officials get a taste for the power that inheres in the selective revelation of such information, and if the leaks are not responded to with severe punishments, it is easy to imagine the tools that brought down Flynn being used in other contexts by national security bureaucrats with different commitments and interests.

Even the most severe critics of Trump should worry about this subtle form of anti-democratic abuse. The big loser in all this will probably be the national security bureaucracy itself and, to the extent it is weakened, the security of the American people.

This is just a Stage One admission. “Yes, it’s real, but it’s not that bad, and besides, it means well.” That means we still have a few stages to go before everyone understands that the Deep State is the Praetorian Guard of New Babel, acting to preserve the secrets and the rule of the the elite Satanist pedophiles.

Right Ho, Jeeves #3

Right Ho, Jeeves #3: Bertie at Bay is now available in Kindle format.

BERTIE AT BAY is the third issue in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series, which tells of the travails of the inimitable Bertie Wooster, summoned from the comforts of #3A Berkley Mansions, London to Brinkley Manor by his imperious Aunt Dahlia. Love is in the air and Wodehousian shenanigans are afoot, as Wooster’s well-meaning attempts to help out his friends sort out their romantic difficulties only leads to one hilarious disaster after another.

Adapted from the classic Wodehouse novel by comics legend Chuck Dixon and drawn by SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN illustrator Gary Kwapisz, BERTIE AT BAY is issue #3 of 6 in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series

But that is not all. There is more good news on the Castalia front. Both Hitler in Hell and The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon are now available in paperback editions. The former is 472 pages in our standard demi-octavo size, the latter is 550 pages in royal octavo. Due to our desire to keep them under the $19.99 price point on Amazon and the discount structure required to do that, both books are slightly more expensive on the Castalia Direct Store.

We do our best to keep our prices down and are continuing our efforts in that vein. This sometimes leads to anomalies, such as the $3 comic price and the occasional higher price on the direct store.

Beyond irreproducibility

As I observed in my most recent Voxiversity, Why the West Needs Christianity, the most serious challenge now facing science is the historical decline in the percentage of scientists who are Christians, and the concomitant decline in the personal and professional ethics of scientists that has inevitably resulted from this demographic change. And this lack of ethics is having a profoundly negative effect on science, including some unanticipated consequences.  In his book Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich laments the decreasing willingness of American Indian tribes to permit their DNA to be studied by genetic scientists as a result of bad behavior and broken promises by previous scientists.

Modern genomics offers an unexpected way to recover the past. African Americans—another population that has had its history stolen as its ancestors descend from people kidnapped into slavery from Africa—are at the forefront of trying to use genetics to trace roots. But if individual Native Americans often express a great interest in their genetic history, tribal councils have sometimes been hostile. A common concern is that genetic studies of Native American history are yet another example of Europeans trying to “enlighten” them. Past attempts to do so—for example, by conversion to Christianity or education in Western culture—have led to the dissolution of Native American culture. There is also an awareness that some scientists have studied Native Americans to learn about questions of interest primarily to non–Native Americans, without paying attention to the interests of Native Americans themselves.

One of the first strong responses to genetic studies of Native Americans came from the Karitiana of Amazonia. In 1996, physicians collected blood from the Karitiana, promising participants improved access to health care, which never came. Distressed by this experience, the Karitiana were at the forefront of objections to the inclusion of their samples in an international study of human genetic diversity—the Human Genome Diversity Project—and were instrumental in preventing that entire project from being funded. Ironically, DNA samples from the Karitiana have been used more than those of any other single Native American population in subsequent studies that have analyzed how Native Americans are related to other groups. The Karitiana DNA samples that have been widely studied are not from the disputed set from 1996. Instead, they are from a collection carried out in 1987 in which participants were informed about the goals of the study and told that their involvement was voluntary. However, the Karitiana people’s later experience of exploitation has put a cloud over DNA studies in this population.

Another strong response to genetic research on Native Americans came from the Havasupai, who live in the canyonlands of the U.S. Southwest. Blood from the Havasupai was sampled in 1989 by researchers at Arizona State University who were trying to understand the tribe’s high risk for type 2 diabetes. The participants gave written consent to participate in a “study [of] the causes of behavioral/medical disorders,” and the language of the consent forms gave the researchers latitude to take a very broad view of what the consent meant. The researchers then shared the samples with many other scientists who used them to study topics ranging from schizophrenia to the Havasupai’s prehistory. Representatives of the Havasupai argued that the samples were being used for a purpose different from the one to which its members understood they had agreed—that is, even if the fine print of the forms said one thing, it was clear to them when the samples were collected that the study was supposed to focus on diabetes. This dispute led to a lawsuit, the return of the samples, and an agreement by the university to pay $700,000 in compensation.

The hostility to genetic research has even entered into tribal law. In 2002, the Navajo—who along with many other Native American tribes are by treaty partly politically independent of the United States—passed a Moratorium on Genetic Research, forbidding participation of Navajo tribal members in genetic studies, whether of disease risk factors or population history. A summary of this moratorium can be found in a document prepared by the Navajo Nation, outlining points for university researchers to take into account when considering a research project. The document reads: “Human genome testing is strictly prohibited by the Tribe. Navajos were created by Changing Woman; therefore they know where they came from.”

However, David Reich manages to completely miss the point and fails to learn the obvious lesson of not lying to people and failing to deliver on one’s promises.

Scientists interested in studying genetic variation in Native American populations feel frustrated with this situation. I understand something of the devastation that the coming of Europeans and Africans to the Americas wrought on Native American populations, and its effects are also evident everywhere in the data I and my colleagues analyze. But I am not aware of any cases in which research in molecular biology including genetics—a field that has arisen almost entirely since the end of the Second World War—has caused major harm to historically persecuted groups. Of course, there have been well-documented cases of the use of biological material in ways that may not have been appreciated by the people from whom it was taken, not just in Native Americans. For example, the cervical cancer tumor cells of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman from Baltimore, were distributed after her death, without her consent and without the knowledge of her family, to thousands of laboratories around the world, where they have become a mainstay of cancer research.

But overall there is an argument to be made that modern studies of DNA variation—not just in Native Americans, but also in many other groups including the San of southern Africa, Jews, the Roma of Europe, and tribal or caste groups from South Asia—are a force for good, contributing to the understanding and treatment of disease in these populations, and breaking down fixed ideas of race that have been used to justify discrimination. I wonder if the distrust that has emerged among some Native Americans might be, in the balance, doing Native Americans substantial harm. I wonder whether as a geneticist I have a responsibility to do more than just respect the wishes of those who do not wish to participate in genetic research, but instead should make a respectful but strong case for the value of such research.

Yeah, attempting to justify ethical lapses and avoid the responsibility to obtain consent on the grounds that you’re ultimately doing more good than harm isn’t exactly convincing when the argument is being presented by a group of godless, amoral individuals who are already known to be corrupt, untrustworthy, and ethically challenged.

Inadvertent special edition

We made a minor error and a slightly more serious one on the initial printing of the Rebel Dead Revenge teaser. You can see the former in this photo from a happy Arkhaven supporter. Another Arkhaven supporter shared his thoughts.

The postman took his sweet time, but I am finally able to comment on the second issue of Arkhaven’s Dixon/Kwapisz adaptation of Wodehouse, and I continue to be impressed. Margins are better this time out (my only quibble last time, IIRC), coloring remains marvelous (no page 1 credit for the colorist, or is that Gary doing double duty?), Chuck’s script hits all the right notes, and Gary’s art is absolutely delightful. I think I may prefer Cartoony Gary to Representational Gary – the exaggerated body language is fantastic. There’s a meatiness to these comics – I don’t sail through them like I used to with a Mark Millar Wolverine (a three-minute read, maybe), and they’re worth going back over. And of course – Gold Logo. Can’t beat owning a collector’s item. Or three.

Now, if you look at the gold logo on RDR in the picture linked above, you can see there is a sliver of the main image in between it and the black border. That is a mistake and we corrected it almost immediately, but 64 copies were sold and shipped before we caught it. The image now on the store, and on Amazon, correctly displays the cover the way it is now.

That initial set also printed with a slightly higher than optimal ink density, which can cause some very slight warping or wrinkling on the interior pages. This has also been fixed. In any event, if you’ve got one of them, you now have confirmation that you own one of the first 64 copies of Rebel Dead Revenge.

That explains the lack of investigation

Apparently English paedos are not inclined to interfere with Pakistanis who share their interests:

Social services chief is one of three politicians exposed as paedophiles as Telford child sex grooming scandal grows. County councillor Graham Bould groomed 15-year-old he met at a church group. He chaired Shropshire social services department when abuse in town was rife.

The shocking revelation comes just a week after authorities in the Shropshire town voted to commission an independent inquiry into child abuse after years of inaction. Up to 1,000 children are feared to have been groomed and abused by predominantly Asian paedophile gangs.

Now it has emerged that former county councillor Graham Bould groomed a 15-year-old boy in the early 1980s after meeting him at a church group. The 60-year-old is the third politician to be exposed as a convicted child sex offender in the West Midlands town.

The disclosures are only going to get worse and more serious. These are the third- and fourth-tier predators that they’re rounding up now.

The skinsuits come off

The Hollywood Lawyer who has been playing a Fake Republican for over a decade has finally left the GOP. Of course, (((Jennifer Rubin))) is also a Fake American, so it probably won’t be long before she leaves the USA as well. Good riddance on both accounts.

Hours after Paul Ryan announced his retirement last week, President Donald Trump tweeted a photo of the House speaker and the rest of the GOP congressional leadership at dinner together at the White House. All did the traditional Trump-style smiling thumbs-up—a big show of unity to rebut anxiety about the party collapsing.

What Jennifer Rubin saw while looking at that photo: a Republican Party that “has become the caricature the left always said it was—the party of old white men. And that has become more so in the age of Donald Trump, when he is actively courting and stoking white resentment.”

Trump’s use of identity politics, Rubin told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is a dead end for the party. It’s a dead end because it’s immoral and anti-American to base an entire political movement on one racial group, and it’s a dead end because that’s not America and what America is becoming.”

For Rubin, author of the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, it’s been a fast trip from conservative apostle to apostate.

Rubin was hired in late 2010 to be a forceful conservative presence, the counterpart on the right to the Post’s liberal blogger, Greg Sargent. But since Trump’s election, she’s been one of the president’s most strident critics, attacking him multiple times a day as an “arrogant fool” and “flat-out racist.” In the process, she’s becoming a leading voice for a group of conservative intellectuals who don’t fit comfortably in either political party.

Conservatives are so dumb that they actually looked to a Hollywood lawyer from Berkeley as one of their opinion leaders because she told them she was one of them. Talk about controlled opposition! I wonder how long will it be before the Littlest Chickenhawk removes his Republican skinsuit in favor of this Fake Right party?

The Fake Right is collapsing

And yet, the Alt-Right remains inevitable. Now that it is of no further use to them, the media is finally killing off its cartoon parody of the Right. But the Right is not, and never was, based on races or states, but rather, on nations. The material distinction between nationalism and imperialism is the easiest way to distinguish between true Right and Fake Right. Meanwhile, the genuine nationalists are growing steadily in popularity and influence, and taking over entire nations:

Eight months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests and banishment on social media platforms. Taken together, they’ve exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement’s biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s most public figure, cancelled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

“Things have become a lot harder, and we paid a price for what happened in Charlottesville. . . . The question is whether there is going to be a third act,” said Spencer, who coined the name of the movement, which rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign, advocates a whites-only ethno-state, and has posted racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic memes across the internet.

This is why it is vital for nationalists to adhere religiously to the philosophical truth rather than to various dogmas and ideologies. Any departure from the truth and the media will adroitly exploit that gap and use it to discredit and disqualify you. Speak the clear and unvarnished truth and they will fear to even mention your name because there is little they can do to effectively spin what you are saying into something that it observably is not. They really, really, really do not want to permit any discussion of which narrative is closer to the observable truth, because that calls their own veracity and legitimacy into question.

Reject the Fake Right. Reject the neoconservatives. Reject the cuckservatives. Reject the conservatives. They are all fakes. They are all frauds. None of them are able to speak the truth reliably, and that is why the media is always able to successfully exploit the vulnerabilities exposed by their dishonesty.

UPDATE: Yes, in the unlikely event you still take any of them seriously, reject the libertarians, the communists, and while we’re at it, the Whigs.

The Storm approaches

It is safe to assume that the arrest of this Trudeau associate and the arrest of Smallville actress Alison Mack are not unrelated.

A former London lawyer who left the legal world more than 30 years ago to become an expert in international humanitarian work with street children has been arrested in Nepal on suspicion of sex crimes against children.

Reports out of Kathmandu say Peter Dalglish, the 60-year-old founder of Street Kids International, was taken into custody last weekend on suspicion of pedophilia.

Dalglish, who has worked with the United Nations on child poverty issues, was arrested at a home about 50 kilometres north of Kathmandu on April 8. Two girls aged 12 and 14 were also found in the home. Authorites said they suspect there may be other children involved.

Dalglish, a graduate of California’s Stanford University, has been operating the Himalayan Community Foundation for two years, helping to educate and support children.

He has been working in Nepal for decades after being drawn to humanitarian work in 1984 during the Ethiopian famine. His journeys made him a leading expert on street kids, child labour and child soldiers — and a subject of admiration in his hometown, London.

In 2002, he became the United Nations adviser on child labour in Nepal while working for a non-government organization called NGO Terre des Hommes. He was also involved with programs to send millions of laptop computers to children in Third World countries.

Remember, we’ve been told that this thing is much bigger, and the evil is far more widespread, than the average individual is going to be able to easily credit. That, I suspect, is why we’ve been seeing these arrests taking place on a regular basis, without too much media attention. But if you’ve noticed, the names, and the names to whom the arrested individuals are connected, just keep getting bigger and more recognizable.

Peter Dalglish appointed to the Order of Canada
January 5, 2017

His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, announced 100 new appointments to the Order of Canada just before the start of the new year.

Peter Dalglish (LLB’83, LLD’08) is among the 75 new Members of the Order (C.M.) to receive one of Canada’s highest honours. Residing in London, Ont., Dalglish was appointed “for his efforts to alleviate child poverty worldwide, notably by establishing and leading Street Kids International.”

A festive evening and a false alarm

This season has been a difficult one for me so far. Four games (including two friendlies), two starts, no goals. I had a horrible game last week, which was of some concern to me because it’s the first time I felt as if I was playing like a fragile old man afraid to go in and win a contested ball. One thing I’ve noticed with age is that it’s harder to play in cold weather and that one tends to become more contact-avoidant for fear of injury. Then again, the last time we played our most recent opponent, one of our defenders snapped the leg of an attacker like a twig with a late tackle, so it could be argued that this is more late-onset wisdom than cowardice. It also doesn’t help that I’m now playing at 180 instead of 190, which helps with the speed and endurance, but puts you at a distinct disadvantage when going shoulder-to-shoulder with a 200-pound defender.

Anyhow, I had a distressingly bad game last week. Even when I am overmatched in terms of speed or fitness I can usually keep at least the defensive half of my wing under control, but the left defender and I were completely out of sync and allowed two crosses that led to goals, at least one of which should have never happened. We both stood there, waiting for the other to close on the guy with the ball, and gave him the opening he needed to cross it. In fairness, I probably shouldn’t have been playing at that point, as I’d already taken myself out of the game earlier after receiving a hard knee to the thigh that left me limping for three days afterward. But still, I had told the captain I was okay to go back in, so that was entirely on me.

The problem was that the bruise slowed me down just enough to inhibit me from trying to move the ball forward myself, and we had changed our stopper from an attack-minded player to a defensive-minded one, so when I received the ball on the wing, I looked to pass it in to the middle right away rather than pushing it up myself. This would normally have been all right, but with our new stopper, instead of advancing the ball he invariably passed it back to one of the other defenders. More than once, I ended up with the ball again, which meant our attacks were going precisely nowhere.

It was probably one of the worst games I’ve ever played, and my on-field plus-minus was uncharacteristically negative at net -1, but fortunately we were playing a weak team so we ended up winning 5-3 anyhow. The problem was that our next game was against the second-best team in the league, and one which we have always had to be on our game in order to beat. And, of course, at my age, there is always the looming possibility that one simply can’t play anymore.

At practice, I played hard for more than two hours despite the bruised thigh, finished fourth in the team penalty kick competition, and that served to get my mindset back to normal, more or less. However, on game night I knew we were in trouble when two of our three best players showed up but did not suit up due to injury, and was even more alarmed when the captain started me at attacker despite last week’s debacle. I like playing up front, but not when both our starting wings are more inclined to push forward and assist the attack than getting back to help out the defense. Sure enough, despite controlling the ball for most of the first 10 minutes, we went down 1-0 on their first serious attack coming from the wing. We produced little in the way of chances, except for a header on a corner that just missed and one cross that I put just inches too deep in front of our other striker. At halftime were down 2-0 on a beautiful free kick that struck the underside of the far corner and banked in. It wasn’t even one of their best players taking it either; these guys are really good. Not even Buffon at his best could have saved that one.

I was out for a while, and we went down another goal, but they were starting to wear down a bit, and I went back in on the left wing, which helped us start putting pressure on both wings. I burned the defender on the side once, but my pull-back pass into the box was too fast for our captain to put in the net, although he scored a beautiful goal on the following post-corner chaos. The ball came low and hard, bounced off my shins on the far side, and ricocheted off a defender. As they pushed forward on the clearance, our captain retrieved it, turned, and shot high just as the goalie was moving up, catching him completely off-guard. 3-1.

We kept attacking, but that was all we managed and that’s how it ended. It was a good game, all in all, and they deserved to win. We get along with them well despite last season’s unfortunate incident, and there were two or three amusing “here, it’s your ball – no, really, it’s your ball” situations after someone went down and both sides called for a halt in play. It was a festive evening, as Ender’s team was playing on our other field and won their game 5-2. It was fun to introduce him afterwards to one of the former pros who plays for the team that beat us, as Ender has a lot of respect for the retired pros and internationals, and they are always pleased to be recognized by the younger generation of players.

So, false alarm on the age front. The former pro and I were talking about the challenges our years pose, as we are of an age, and he figures we can both play until at least 55. My original goal was to make it to 50, but I am happy to revise that in view of his professional opinion.