Author: VD

The Promethean on the US justice system

The first shots have been fired by Promethians attempting to shut down the public revelations of its blackmail network, although The Washington Post attempts to bury the lede:

A gunman disguised as a delivery driver shot and killed the son of a federal judge and wounded her husband at their New Jersey home on Sunday, law enforcement confirmed to The Washington Post.

U.S. District Judge Esther Salas was not injured in the shooting, which the FBI, U.S. Marshals and local authorities are investigating.

The gunman showed up to Salas’s home in North Brunswick, N.J., wearing an outfit described to police as a FedEx uniform, law enforcement said. Both Mark Anderl, 63, a defense attorney and former Essex County assistant prosecutor, and Daniel Anderl, 20, a student at Catholic University in Washington D.C., were shot after one of them opened the door for the gunman around 5 p.m., ABC News reported.

“He was shot through the heart,” North Brunswick Democratic Mayor Francis “Mac” Womack told ABC News of Daniel Anderl.

Salas’s son died and her husband was rushed to the hospital for surgery, the Associated Press reported. Mark Anderl is now in stable condition, Womack told NJ Advance Media.

The FBI said it is looking for one suspect. The Marshals Service said it is also investigating, adding in a statement to HuffPost that the agency “is responsible for the protection of federal judicial officials and we take that responsibility very seriously.”

Authorities have not given any indication of a motive in the shooting. Womack, who is friends with Salas and her husband, told ABC he wasn’t aware of any specific threat against the judge. “As a judge, she had threats from time to time, but everyone is saying that recently there had not been any,” Womack said.

Salas, 51, was New Jersey’s first Hispanic woman to serve as a U.S. district judge. President Barack Obama nominated her for the position in 2010, and she was confirmed by the Senate in 2011. Salas previously served as a magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey….

She’s been on the bench for recent cases involving the Grape Street Crips, according to NJ Advance Media, a gang charged with running a drug trafficking operation. Salas has more recently taken on a lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors alleging the bank failed to follow its anti-money laundering policies by taking on “high-risk” clients including Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, the AP reported.

Whatever could the motive to kill the judge assigned to an Epstein-related case possibly be? It’s just a complete mystery! RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA. Also, China.

The dismay of the conservative

They can’t believe that they’ve been written out of the catalog of “respectable persons”:

On June 3, 2020, I was fired from my post as department chairman for publicly opposing and mocking the inherent terrorism of the Black Lives Matter movement. A doxxing-type petition arose against me early in the day; I was “canceled” before dinnertime.

Notably, unlike others who have faced similar forms of cancellation, I was not dismissed from a large secular state college or a public institution of secondary education, where capitulation to the mob is somewhat to be expected. This was a conservative, Catholic high school, whose theology department (which I chaired) rejects ab initio the ontological essentials of BLM . In other words, most of the recent firings by openly Marxist employers—such as the Regents of the University of California—boil down to nondescript “dog bites man” ledes. But my narrative falls far closer to “man bites dog,” given the antipathy with which Roman Catholic theology has typically regarded the Marxist neo-terrorism that postconciliar parochial schools are lately endorsing or condoning.

The high school at which I taught was also vaunted for fostering community. So one easily can imagine my surprise at the termination…. My firing is the perfect test case for measuring the profundity of conservative, Christian cowardice. It is, as the ghost of Marley tells Scrooge, “a ponderous chain.” Since I was the well-liked Catholic face of my former school—with a daughter whose continuing medical needs were well-known to everyone—my ruthless firing raises the question: just how frantic are Christians and conservatives to capitulate—and to telegraph their capitulation—to the new race-class-and-gender Marxists terrorizing American streets?

While his article is still rife with the stench of civnattery and “BLM R the Real Racists”, there is a glimmer of hope that conservatives like him are beginning to wake up. For he also writes:

Further, American conservatives rarely, if ever, circle the wagons around the few champions of the West who are willing to fight. Envying the dauntless courage of such midnightly few, the cowards on the Right practically celebrate the downfall of the unaided resistors in their midst. 

If you want to win, embrace your extremists and your warriors. You don’t have to like them, you just have to materially support them. And, above all, you have to stop attacking them and start attacking the enemy that wants to kill you, kill your children, destroy your nation, and eliminate your faith. Enlightenment, equalitarianism, and ecumenicism are the three seductive evils that have been draining the good, the beautiful, and the true from the West for decades, and the conservatives are going to have to realize that they have to their addictions to all three.

No, there will be no naval war

The answer is clear due to two reasons. First, the USA cannot lose an economic war with China. And second, the USA cannot win a naval war with China.

Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing’s claims to the rocks, reefs and resources of the South China Sea?

For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week.

“The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” thundered the secretary of state.

“America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources … and (we) reject any push to impose ‘might makes right’ in the South China Sea.”

Thus did Pompeo put Beijing on notice that the U.S. does not recognize its claim to 90{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the South China Sea or to any exclusive Chinese right to its fishing grounds or oil and gas resources.

Rather, in a policy shift, the U.S. now recognizes the rival claims of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines.

To signal the seriousness of Pompeo’s stand, the U.S. sent the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz carrier battle groups through the South China Sea. And, this week, the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson sailed close by the Spratly Islands.

But what do Mike Pompeo’s tough words truly mean?

While we have recognized the claims of the other littoral states of the South China Sea, does Pompeo mean America will use its naval power to defend their claims should China use force against the vessels of those five nations?

Does it mean that if Manila, our lone treaty ally in these disputes, uses force to reclaim what we see as its lawful rights in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy will fight the Chinese navy to validate Manila’s claims?

Has Pompeo drawn a red line, which Beijing has been told not to cross at risk of war with the United States?

If so, does anyone in Washington think the Chinese are going to give up their claims to the entire South China Sea or retreat from reasserting those claims because the U.S. now rejects them?

Consider what happened to the people of Hong Kong when they thought they had the world’s democracies at their back.

For a year, they marched and protested for greater political freedom with some believing they might win independence.

But when Beijing had had enough, it trashed the Basic Law under which Hong Kong had been ceded back to China and began a crackdown.

The democracies protested and imposed economic sanctions. But the bottom line is that Hong Kong’s people not only failed to enlarge the sphere of freedom they had, but also they are losing much of what they had.

The U.S. Navy currently can’t stay out of the way of cargo containers or park a ship in port without setting it on fire. It’s not going to win a naval war against anyone, let alone a nation with considerably more manufacturing capacity than it has.

Remember, in the industrial age, war isn’t about how many tanks, ships, and planes you have, but how many you can manufacture. The USA can’t beat China at sea for the same reason that Japan couldn’t beat the USA. The fact that drones and hypersonic missiles make ships much more sinkable now than in recent decades only underlines the importance of manufacturing capacity.

If the USA is concerned about the the threat posed by China, they should probably worry more about Vancouver and the Ivy League than the South China Sea.

No anonymous defamation

At least not in California anymore:

Two women who used Twitter to anonymously accuse Justin Bieber of sexual assault may be identified after a judge ruled that the star is allowed to subpoena the social media platform for the info.

Deadline reports that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Terry Green ruled in Bieber’s favor Thursday, allowing the “Sorry” singer and his attorneys to demand Twitter turn over the identities of these alleged victims.

“We just want to uncover who is behind these two accounts, and it may be the same person,” Bieber’s lawyer, Evan N. Spiegel told the court. He also called the claims “provably false” through eyewitness and photographic evidence.

This would appear to be a very bad time to be someone who posts anonymous written defamation about people on a site operated by a California corporation.

A bad and unnecessary idea

We really don’t need to communicate any better with the animals than we do:

A rock star, a vegan financier and a pioneer of the internet are backing a project to find ways for humans to communicate with animals using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Interspecies I/O forum on Friday announced the Coller Prize for Interspecies Conversation, a $1 million research award, according to a statement. The effort kicks off this weekend with a video conference on subjects running from the language of bonobo apes to the music of elephants.

Can you imagine how incredibly irritating it would be to actually understand what your dog was saying all the time? It would be like taking a long trip in a car with a little kid who keeps asking “are we there yet?” Except your dog would be alternating “I’m hungry, is it time for dinner yet?” with “hey, hey, hey, there’s a BIRD out there!” all day every day.

Reclaim the Net

The word about Patreon’s legal dilemma is rapidly spreading, as an activist site, Reclaim the Net, has picked up the story about Owen and the Bears fighting back against Big Tech censorship and deplatformings:

Tentative ruling against Patreon could provide a legal workaround for Big Tech censorship. If the final ruling goes against Patreon, it could have to pay millions of dollars in arbitration fees and leave other companies such as PayPal open to a similar fate.

A California Court has issued a tentative ruling against fan-funding platform Patreon and denied its request for an injunction against 72 claimants who are seeking arbitration against the company.

If the final ruling goes against Patreon, which it looks like it might, lawyer, commentator, and producer Mike Cernovich believes that it would serve as “a HUGE workaround for Big Tech censorship” where the former backers of large creators who are banned from Patreon or other similar sites such as payments service PayPal could file similar motions and force these companies to pay huge arbitration fees that could total millions of dollars.

At this point, I see no serious probability that the final ruling will not go against Patreon. And the bizarre behavior of Patreon`s lawyers in response to the recent demands for arbitration by various independent parties has made it very clear that they, at least, recognize the significance of the full text of the tentative ruling, to which most of the public has not yet been made privy.

Not only that, but there is a very good chance that at least some of the arbitrations addressed by the lawsuit will be declared to be in default by the arbitrators before the next court hearing, which would be significant in light of the signaling by the judge about his reluctance to interfere with either the arbitrators or the arbitration process.

This reluctance should not be a surprise to anyone, given the deference that state and federal courts have given to arbitration. For example, here is one precedent from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which the judge could cite in his final ruling, if he were so inclined. The key words here are “he bargains for the process”. And in the case of Patreon, it not only bargained for the process, but drafted and imposed it.

The parties bargained for arbitration. When one bargains for arbitration, he bargains for the process as well as the results. If Ocean had wanted to have the rigors of a federal court proceeding, it could have had them. Instead, it compelled arbitration and now, dissatisfied with the result, seeks a different outcome.
Kergosien v. Ocean Energy, Inc., 390 F.3d 346 (5th Cir. 2004)

A number of people have noted Ebay`s recent changes to its Terms of Use  and assumed they were made in response to Patreon`s situation. That may or may not be so, but regardless, the tweaks Ebay has applied to its dispute process don`t really address its intrinsic vulnerability to mass consumer action.

The evil of the Devil Mouse

The pure evil of Disney appears to go back considerably further than you might think. Remember its version of Pinocchio, circa 1940? Disney was already talking about a “Pleasure Island” to which small boys were taken, and from which they never returned, decades before the Magical Kingdom Cruise Line was offering excursion trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Stone knows

Roger Stone is aware of the true nature of the enemy:

“I really do believe that those who are trying to undo this president, those who are trying to destroy me, trying to destroy Michael Flynn — who’s a very good man and great American patriot war hero — I do believe they’re satanic,” Stone tells Just The News in a podcast interview for The Pod’s Honest Truth. “I don’t believe that any of these people involved in my prosecution are really believers in God.” 

They are, quite literally, Satanic. The “god” they worship is “the god of this world” as opposed to the Creator, the Heavenly Father, who sent His son Jesus Christ to save Man.

The Prometheans are evil beyond anything the average individual can even comprehend. And Christianity is the only force that is capable of not only standing against them, but defeating them, which is why they are hell-bent on converging, diluting, and diverting Christians in every way possible.

The Left-Right ideological struggle is not real. Even the Nationalist-Globalist conflict is essentially a proxy for the real war, which is between Christian and Promethean, between the servants of the Creator God and the servants of the god of this world.

It’s not like it matters

EA leaps to distance Maddens from the Redskins:

We don’t know what the Washington NFL team’s name and logo will be this season, but in Madden 21, the team will have no name or logo.

EA Sports says that Madden 21 will have a generic Washington team, until updates are available when the team has chosen its new name and uniform designs.

“We are pleased to see Washington’s decision to change their team name and visual identity,” EA said in a statement. “We are quickly working to update Madden NFL 21 to feature a generic Washington team, while we await final word on the updated team name and logo design.”

I doubt this will be much of an issue, since I am skeptical there will be much of a 2020 NFL season. But it will be informative to see if the game contains the retro uniforms or not.

Hea culpa

Paul Krugman admits that he may, perhaps, have been a little incorrect about that whole global economy thing, at least in the short term:

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.

Economists took these concerns seriously. Standard models of international trade say that trade can have large effects on income distribution: A famous 1941 paper showed how trading with a labor-abundant economy can reduce wages, even if national income grows.

And so during the 1990s, a number of economists, myself included, tried to figure out how much the changing trade landscape was contributing to rising inequality. They generally concluded that the effect was relatively modest and not the central factor in the widening income gap. So academic interest in the possible adverse effects of trade, while it never went away, waned.

In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed.

There’s been a lot of this going around. Leading globalists such as Kissinger and Fukuyama have published learned tomes explaining why globalism has “unexpectedly” failed. Of course, it never occurs to them to admit that nationalist skeptics like me were correct all along, hence these revisionist self-critiques that are primarily intended to salvage the tattered remnants of their award-winning reputations.

In the meantime, I will patiently await my Quasi-Nobel Prize in Economics for creating the Labor Mobility proof of the impossibility of free trade.

And I will also fisk Krugman’s entire column on the Darkstream this weekend.