Author: VD

The Flight From Taiwan

And so it begins. They can explain it away all they like, but it’s apparent that multinational corporations are beginning to prepare for the island’s reunification with the mainland:

Taiwan chip giant TSMC announced on Thursday plans to build a new factory in Japan to meet long-term appetite for chips and said, near-term, tight supplies will likely continue into 2022 amid booming demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a key supplier to Apple Inc (AAPL.O), said it would set up a chip plant in Japan that will use older chipmaking technology, a segment currently under a severe supply shortage due to robust demand from automakers and tech companies. But production from the plant is only likely to begin by late 2024.

The company and Taiwan in general have become central in efforts to resolve a pandemic-induced global chip shortage, which has forced automakers to cut production and hurt manufacturers of smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances.

This doesn’t mean war in the Straits. In fact, I doubt there will be any need for a war; it’s more likely that Russia will be forced to invade and occupy Ukraine due to the insane neoclown puppet government there. But it does suggest Chinese domination of the semiconductor market.

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China Bets on Surrender

Now that the USA’s “strategic ambiguity” is no more, China is openly putting pressure on the Taiwanese leadership to prepare for a quick surrender:

The Tsai Ing-wen authority has said that the island will defend itself “to the very last day” if the Chinese mainland attacks. Most people know they are bluffing. A recent Wall Street Journal report quoted several experts as assessing that Taiwan’s military has “poor preparation and low morale”. Also, “adult men in Taiwan don’t actually want to fight”. The article doubted the island would stand much chance against China’s People’s Liberation Army. The report also advised that the Taiwan military could become far more effective by training with the US.

How could it be possible to boost the low morale of the Taiwan military by training with the US army? In 2003, I asked a former soldier in Taiwan “whether the island is able to defend itself if a war breaks out?” He made it very clear that the answer is “no”. I then asked him how long he thinks the island could hold, he answered that, “Maybe dozens of hours.” That was a long time ago. Today, the military capability comparison between the Chinese mainland and the island of Taiwan is completely different from that of 18 years ago.

From my point of view, first of all, the mainland doesn’t want to fight a war. It has the will to safeguard peace and take war as the last resort. Second, the Democratic Progressive Party authorities dare not fight. They are making bluffs, but they know very well that the island’s military forces are weak. They cannot withstand even a single blow. If there is a war, Taiwan will be surely defeated and collapse….

My prediction is that a war in the Taiwan Straits may eventually be avoided. That is when the strong military pressure of the mainland bows down the will of pro-independence forces in Taiwan island. The situation is changing. The goodwill and patience of the mainland is not to be consumed by DPP authorities endlessly. If the Taiwan question escalates so that it can only be solved through military means, the sudden surrender of Taiwan authorities who dare not fight is within everyone’s expectation.

That’s my expectation as well. As the rule of lies has made it ever more clear that nothing that comes out of the mouths of the rulers of the West should be trusted, more and more people around the world are grasping that what we perceived to be reality in the past was never anything more than an illusion meant to cause us to defeat ourselves through fear.

At this point, the only thing protecting Taiwan island is the mainland’s desire to avoid harming the population and the techno-industrial infrastructure.

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Seeing Through Shapiro

It’s been 16 years since I first pointed out that Ben Shapiro is a gatekeeper, a liar, and a fraud, but finally Christians and other influencers on the Right are seeing through his deceitful act.

Ben Shapiro hates Christ, rejects Christ, and is therefore by definition Anti-Christ. Christians should not be lending their time and money to this man. They should be sharing the Gospel with him instead and praying for his acceptance of Jesus Christ the King of Kings.
– Andrew Torba

Ben Shapiro wrote a new book telling us the real enemy we face, which is the “authoritarians,” both on the left and on the right, like the Jan 6th protestors who tried to overthrow our government so they could personally seize power over all of us. Nobody buys these books. I’ll bet Ben Shapiro has fewer honest fans than I do. But he has a $24 million dollar budget for his website, to run a massive staff, to spew all of this. And he does that all while a grossly criminal, illegal conspiracy, commits crimes which are not just technically illegal, but which utterly savages the very essence of the concepts of American freedom, privacy, and the United States Constitution. And Shapiro is a knowing paid agent of this enemy. And he is getting paid very well for it.
– Anonymous Conservative

Now the Zoomers are starting to publicly call him out.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So in 2019 you went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and you had a religious conversation with him. You were asked about your view on Jesus Christ, and you said “Jesus was a Jewish rebel who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and was killed for his trouble.” My question is, Jesus said to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and the roman governor even said it first that he was not guilty of any crime. So, given all of this, how can you argue that he tried to lead a revolt against the Romans.

SHAPIRO: Right, so I mean, you’re assuming, so I said, from the Jewish perspective, right, I’m not arguing from the Christian perspective, I presume that nearly everyone in this room knows the New Testament better than I do.

I do know the Jewish perspective on Jesus better than most people who are Christian, right, because it’s the Jewish perspective on Jesus. The Jewish perspective on Jesus does not accept the historicity of the gospels, if it did, then we’d all be christian, right? So the Jewish perspective on Jesus is that like many people at the time and this was true throughout that entire period, there were a lot of Jews who were attempting to lead political revolts against the Romans. The Jewish definition of a Messiah is very different from the Christian definition of the Messiah. The Christian definition of the Messiah and of Jesus is of course a unification of God and man, right? This doesn’t exist in the notion of Jewish philosophy. In Jewish philosophy, the Messiah is a person who accomplishes particular goals according to Maimonides: the gathering of the exiles, the reestablishment of a Davidic kingdom, the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, right? So from a Jewish perspective, if someone was trying to be the Messiah, they would be a political figure. When I said that he was killed for the trouble, that was not demeaning of him. I assume that if I had been living at the time, I also would have been attempting to lead a revolt against the Romans, just like half the Jews were, right? This is why the temple was destroyed, this is why Jews were put into exile, several times, so that was not a smear against Jesus as a Jew, it’s just a recognition that Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a divine figure. And if we did then we’d be Christian.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, then I probably would’ve changed the phraseology of that, because, then again, if that was the case, then he would’ve been going against Jewish law, and since that would’ve made him a political figure, then he would’ve been going against Jewish law, not Roman law.

SHAPIRO: No, leading a revolt against the Romans wouldn’t have been going against Jewish law either. We don’t want to get into a long, complex debate over what Jews think about the historicity and the take on Judaism that’s in the Gospels. That’s a pretty long conversation, honestly it’s really interesting and it’s kind of fascinating, but under Jewish law, even if you read the New Testament, Jesus’s claims aren’t punishable under Jewish law by death, actually.

What a despicable little weasel.

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Of All the Things That Never Happened

This never happened the most:

Mr. Hubert was sent to Buchenwald. ”In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. ”Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.” ”But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor. ”It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, ”but it happened.”

Time ‘Too Painful’ to Remember, New York Times, 10 November 1988

No it didn’t. Even if the story wasn’t obviously absurd, it was also impossible.

  1. Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders.
  2. The brown bear was considered extinct in Germany after the last bear was shot in 1835 in the Bavarian Alps near Ruhpolding. In May 2006, 171 years later, a young male bear made headlines after wandering 250 kilometers (155 miles) from northern Italy to Bavaria.

As always, the only thing one can be absolutely certain did not happen is whatever passes for the mainstream media’s official story. And remember, what they’re telling you today will one day be seen to be as ridiculous as what they were reporting in 1988.

Where Have All the Pillows Gone?

Another classic Boomer Patrol tune for your listening and philosophical pleasure. You can hear it at Soundcloud. You can also get the full seven-song Boomer Patrol set there.

Where Have All the Boomers Gone?

Where have all the pillows gone, long time passing?

Where have all the pillows gone, long time ago?

Where have all the pillows gone?

Justice served by every one

When shall we forget them?

When shall we forget them?

 

Where have all the Beatles gone, long time passing?

Where have all the Beatles gone, long time ago?

Where have all the Beatles gone?

Gone with Lennon and a gun

When shall we forget them?

When shall we forget them?

 

Where have all the Hippies gone, long time passing?

Where have all the Hippies gone, long time ago?

Where have all the Hippies gone?

Dead and buried every one

When shall we forget them?

When shall we forget them?

 

Where have all the vinyls gone, long time passing?

Where have all the vinyls gone, long time ago?

Where have all the vinyls gone?

Gone to downloads, every one

When shall we forget them?

When shall we forget them?

 

Where have all the Boomers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the Boomers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the Boomers gone?

Pillows silenced every one

Now we can forget them!

Thank God we’ll forget them!

Now It’s Their Turn

The media hasn’t been so much indifferent as sneeringly amused by the complaints of American workers whose jobs have been eliminated by the financial rapine of Wall Street under a false flag of creative destruction. But they aren’t sneering or laughing anymore now that the financial parasites have figured out how to prey upon their industry:

The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone….

What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

Hey, it’s just capitalism, right? It’s just capitalists maximizing efficiency, right? Besides, all those journalists can just learn to code, right?

After all, these days, people don’t need newspapers any more than they need buggy whips.

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Never Laugh at God

Because He will have the last laugh. And sometimes, He’ll even have a chuckle or two while you’ve still got time to repent:

Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.

Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”

Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.

About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.

Back in 2014, Jillette bragged on his podcast about how he’d raised Moxie to “laugh at God.”

There’s an old saying I just coined: “When you laugh at God, He laughs back and best.” Because now Jillette—Mr. “no pseudoscience,” Mr. “no cults or flimflam”—has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!

Abracagender!

There’s no such thing as anyone who “believes in science”. That’s nothing but rhetoric from people who need an excuse to justify their disbelief in anything that causes them emotional pain or prevents them from doing what they want to do.

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