Category: Uncategorized

Journolist 2

Left-wing activists plotting together. Again:

A low-profile Google Group used by over 1,000 state and national leftwing leaders and activists has been discovered thanks to Wisconsin’s open records law. A Media Trackers inquiry into the actions of a University of Wisconsin professor turned up records and communications from “Gamechanger Salon,” an online community that provides a forum for leftwing activists and leaders to share tactics, strategies and opinions….

The group has the self-described goal of creating a “more coordinated” movement for liberals across the country. Among those included on the membership list are:

Damon Silver, Policy Director for the AFL-CIO
Benjamin Joffe-Walk, Chief of Staff at Change.org
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK
Elizabeth Rose, Director of Communications at the Economic Policy Institute
Philip Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace until earlier this year
Ilyse Hogue, President of NARAL
Raven Brooks, Executive Director of Netroots Nation
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee
Deirdre Schifeling, National Director Organizing & Electoral Campaigns for Planned Parenthood

The group’s policy manual directs members to abstain from forwarding emails to recipients outside the group. It does warn, however, that with 1,000-plus members, anyone emailing the group should not say anything “you wouldn’t want to be subpoenaed by a Grand Jury or broadcast on Fox News.”

Here is the complete membership list in PDF format. I didn’t recognize any names. There are also more groups than you have ever heard of. It is appalling to think about the massive amount of totally unproductive capital that is being misdirected toward these societally destructive wastes of space so they can further interfere with Western civilization.

Fred calls out Derbyshire and the Darwinists

Fred Reed, who is “a thoroughgoing agnostic”, poses a few questions based on his inferences from observation for the advocates of the Theorum of Evolution by (mostly) Natural Selection In Addition To A Panoply of Less Famous Evolutionary Mechanisms:

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.

In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire….

  1. what selective pressures lead to a desire not to reproduce, and how does this fit into a Darwinian framework?
  2. Why should I not indulge my hobby of torturing to death the severely genetically retarded?
  3. How many years would have to pass without replication of the [Abiogenesis]
    event, if indeed it be not replicated, before one might begin to suspect
    that it didn’t happen? 
  4. What are the viable steps needed to evolve from [two-cycle insect] to [four-cycle insect]? Or from anything to four-cycle? 
  5. Does not genetic determinism (with which I have no disagreement) lead to a paradox: that the thoughts we think we are thinking we only think to be thoughts when they are really utterly predetermined by the inexorable working of physics and chemistry? 
  6. Why do seemingly trivial traits proliferate while clearly important ones do not?
  7. If one believes in or suspects the existence of God or gods, how
    does one exclude the possibility that He, She, or It meddles in the
    universe—directing evolution, for example?  

Of course, anyone here who still subscribes to believe in abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection is more than welcome to take a crack at one or more of these themselves. However, before answering any of them, I would highly recommend reading the complete article, as Fred goes into more details regarding why he is asking each of the questions there.

2014 Hugo Award Recommendations

From Loncon: We are in the final hours of voting for the 2014 Hugo and 1939 Retro Hugo awards!  The voting page for the 2014 Hugo Awards is located at http://www.loncon3.org/hugo_vote/hugo_vote_form.php.  The voting page for the 1939 Retro Hugo Awards is located at http://loncon3.org/hugo_vote/retro_hugo_vote_form.php.  The deadline for voting is Thursday 31 July 2014, 11:59 PM PDT.

This is how I am voting, and how I encourage other Hugo voters to vote. I am voting in some of the other categories, but have not prepared detailed recommendations for them and so will not address them this year. Remember, voting ends tomorrow night, so if you haven’t finished filling out your ballots, you should probably do it now.

BEST NOVEL

  1. Warbound by Larry Correia
  2. No Award
  3. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Left off ballot: Ancillary Justice, Neptune’s Brood, and Parasite.

BEST NOVELLA

  1. The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen
  2. The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells
  3. No Award
  4. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente

Left off ballot: Equoid and Wakulla Springs.

BEST NOVELETTE

  1. “Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day
  2. “The Exchange Officers” by Brad Torgersen
  3. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
  4. No Award

Left off ballot: “The Waiting Stars” and “The Lady Astronaut of Mars”.

BEST SHORT STORY

  1. No Award

I recommend leaving the ballot otherwise blank. This category is illustrative of how far the genre has fallen. 

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM

  1. Toni Weiskopf
  2. Sheila Gilbert
  3. Ginjer Buchanan
  4. No Award

1939 RETRO AWARDS

Best Novel

  1. Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (The Bodley Head)
  2. Galactic Patrol by E. E. Smith (Astounding Stories, February 1938)
  3. The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (Collins)
  4. The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1938)
  5. No Award

Left off ballot:  Carson of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs


Best Novella

  1. Anthem by Ayn Rand (Cassell)
  2. “Who Goes There?” by Don A Stuart [John W. Campbell] (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938)
  3. No Award

Left off ballot:  “A Matter of Form” by H. L. Gold, “Sleepers of Mars” John Beynon, “The Time Trap” Henry Kuttner.

Best Novelette

  1. “Rule 18” by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1938)
  2. “Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, May 1938)
  3. “Dead Knowledge” by Don A. Stuart [John W. Campbell] (Astounding Stories, January 1938)
  4. No Award

Left off ballot: “Hollywood on the Moon” by Henry Kuttner,  “Werewoman” C. L. Moore

Best Short Story

  1. “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma” by Ray Bradbury (Imagination!, January 1938)
  2. “How We Went to Mars” by Arthur C. Clarke (Amateur Science Stories, March 1938)
  3. “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938)
  4. “The Faithful” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)
  5. “Hyperpilosity” by L. Sprague de Camp (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)

Best Editor

  1. John W. Campbell
  2. No Award

Left off ballot: Farnsworth Wright, Mort Weisinger, Raymond A. Palmer,  Walter H. Gillings

Is POTUS Bibi’s bitch?

The Israeli media apparently has cause to think so:

Israel’s Channel 1 decided to publish a Hebrew transcript of a portion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama’s telephone conversation which took place on Sunday, in which Obama was insistent that Israel unilaterally halt all military activities in the Gaza Strip. As is quite clear by now, Israel rejected, and the bloodshed continued. The transcript, as shown by the Times of Israel was as follows:

The following is an English translation of the Hebrew account of the talk given in the report:

Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agrees to an immediate, unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities, in particular airstrikes.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And what will Israel receive in exchange for a ceasefire?

BO: I believe that Hamas will cease its rocket fire — silence will be met with silence.

BN: Hamas broke all five previous ceasefires. It’s a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

BO: I repeat and expect Israel to stop all its military activities unilaterally. The pictures of destruction in Gaza distance the world from Israel’s position.

BN: Kerry’s proposal was completely unrealistic and gives Hamas military and diplomatic advantages.

BO: Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities, Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the 2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the siege and restrictions on Gaza.

BN: Qatar and Turkey are the biggest supporters of Hamas. It’s impossible to rely on them to be fair mediators.

BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that it can choose its mediators.

BN: I protest because Hamas can continue to launch rockets and use tunnels for terror attacks –

BO: (interrupting Netanyahu) The ball’s in Israel’s court, and it must end all its military activities.

One can quickly see why the US would quickly disavow any credibility of this report: after all it wouldn’t look very good for the leader of the free world if the leader of another state, one which on top of it all is reliant on the former for continued military and economic support, flat out rejected what amounted to a demand from the US. As expected the denial was prompt with the US administration calling the quotations “fabrications”, “shocking”, and “disappointing”

It took mere minutes for the National Security Council to deny the transcript was even remotely accurate:

We have seen reports of an alleged POTUS-Netanyahu transcript; neither reports nor alleged transcript bear any resemblance to reality 1/2
    — @NSCPress (@NSCPress) July 29, 2014

Shocking and disappointing someone would sink to misrepresenting a pvt convo between POTUS and PM in fabrications to Israeli press 2/2
    — @NSCPress (@NSCPress) July 29, 2014

Sure enough, it wouldn’t look good if only the US denied so Netanyahu had to step in, which he did:

The Prime Minister’s Office says in a statement that the Channel 1 report is false, using precisely the same words as the White House.

“We have seen these reports, and neither the reports nor the alleged transcript bear any resemblance to reality. It’s shocking and disappointing that someone would sink to misrepresenting a private conversation between the President and the Prime Minister in fabrications to the Israeli press,” the PMO says.

Despite the denials, Israel’s Channel 1 refused to retract the leaked statement. Worse, it revealed the source of the leak as a “senior American official.”

Despite rejections by American and Israeli officials, Channel 1?s Or Nahari insists that the transcript leaked to him by a “senior American official” is authentic, but acknowledges that the quotes he published were merely an excerpt from a long conversation.

It’s easy for the administration to prove otherwise. Just release the recording of the conversation. Unless and until they do, they can’t simply claim that it is false and expect anyone to take their word for it. On the one hand, it sounds to me as if a “senior American official” is not at all pleased with Obama backing down to Netanyahu. On the other hand, the language is awfully stilted, which lends credence to the idea that it might be a fake meant to lend cover to Israel backing down sooner rather than later or get back at the Obama administration for Secretary of State Kerry’s performance.

In any event, Israel may as well stop its latest adventure in Gaza as the IDF is already rightly expressing its frustration with Netanyahu’s political dithering. From Debka:

“Senior IDF officer to government: The troops must go forward or quit.”

At this point, they should simply end the military operations. As per 4GW doctrine, they hit too soft and too slow. The IDF is saying go big or go home, but proceeding from this point will likely do more harm than good since Israel has no intention of removing the Palestinians from Gaza and settling it, thereby rendering the entire exercise pointless beyond the short term. At the moment, it appears to have been an exercise chiefly driven by domestic political pressure.

Blowing up a few tunnels and capturing a few rockets wasn’t worth the price of the additional global contempt that resulted from being caught on camera killing women and children. So, it’s just another one step forward, two steps back in the usual Middle East dance.

And as for the State Department’s Jen Psaki saying the leak is a “severe violation of a private discussion”, she might want to recall that she works for an administration that has the NSA spying on every conversation and email exchange in America.

A close call

Unless you lived in Minnesota 30 years ago, I can’t possibly explain how insane it sounds to hear that there are Africans living in Coon Rapids. I wonder how long it will be before they decide that the name of the town is racist:

Ebola victim who sparked fears of a worldwide outbreak was American: Father who died of incurable virus in Nigeria after taking international flight was going to visit his children in Minnesota…The couple, who both hold US citizenship are originally from Liberia and Decontee arrived in the country with her family in 1991 and Patrick came in the early 2000s. The couple are part of the large Liberian community in Minnesota, who moved there in the aftermath of the nation’s two civil wars in the 1980s and late 1990s.

The imported Somalis are bad enough, what with their suicide bombers and the occasional “gas leak” explosions that mysteriously blow up their residences. But Ebola-carrying Liberians too? This is Night of the Comet-level lunacy.

I’m as familiar with the melting pot mythology and Ellis Island rhetoric as anyone else. I get the idea that time plus geographic location is supposed to magically transform people from anywhere into something they previously were not. But seriously, even if you are one of those people whose grandparents were immigrants and are emotionally tied to the idea that you are too a Real American like George Washington because you are resident in a certain geography and there is a piece of paper that says you are, do you really think this is all going to end well? If so, how?

What, specifically, is the positive end result that is somehow going to be produced by establishing Mogadishu on the Mississippi and sending 30 underage Guatamalans to every town in America? Do you see America remaining the same, is it changing for the better, or for the worse? And if diversity is good, then why has every country in the world been predominantly homogenous until very recently?

Perhaps if the unfortunate Mr. Sawyer had lived long enough to bring the Ebola virus to Coon Rapids, that would be enough to convince the American public that this whole “we is the world” sentiment is fundamentally misguided. But I doubt it.

Gamma spin in action

Here is how Dave Futrelle attempted to characterize the abortive debate on women’s suffrage I posted at Alpha Game, which he fled once it became apparent that he couldn’t get away with simply declaring himself the winner and would have to actually make a coherent case in support of female suffrage instead:

The very notion of two dudes earnestly debating female suffrage – in 2014, no less – struck me as beyond absurd, so I sent back what I thought was an appropriately dismissive Tweet.

    @voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste Yes, women should have voting rights, because they, like men, are human. I win the debate! The end.Thanks!—
    David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 25, 2014

Apparently Mr. Day saw this tweet as my opening gambit in a debate that was now on, and replied with an attempted gotcha. Against my better judgment, I replied:

    @voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste No. I vote where I live, in the US.. So are you contending that no women live in the countries they vote in?—
    David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 25, 2014

He replied, and I sunk deeper into the quicksand of this ridiculous “debate.”

    @voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste There are a few basic requirements for having the right to vote besides being human but being male isn’t one—
    David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 26, 2014

At this point I realized I needed to shut this thing down as quickly as possible. So I posted a couple of quick tweets:

David Futrelle
There are a few basic requirements for having the right to vote besides being human but being male isn’t one

David Futrelle
There is no reasonable reason to deny anyone the vote because of gender.

David Futrelle
… and that’s preetty much the end of the argument, despite whatever spurious reason you come up with to deny women the vote. Debate over.

This is classic Gamma behavior. Their fear of failure is so great that in the rare instance they don’t completely avoid conflict, they engage only insofar as they can later claim that they weren’t really trying. They want their audience to believe that, of course, they COULD have roundly defeated their opponent, but they couldn’t bother for [insert excuse here]. Of course, they somehow always find the time to explain their various justifications for not really trying, which often takes longer than simply engaging in the first place would have.

Notice how Futrelle falsely claims I said I defeated him in the debate. That’s absolutely untrue. All I did was expose his inability to hold his own or to make his case on the subject. My only claim was this: “I was able to show Futrelle’s reasoning to be incorrect twice.”  Which was undeniably true. There was no winner of the debate since it never reached a conclusion. Futrelle simply ran away and now he is trying to provide a narrative to justify that abject retreat.

Futrelle’s fellow Gamma male, PZ, who has run away from a few debates himself, was quick to embrace Futrelle’s narrative:

Actually, Day proposed a debate on a subject that was settled in the USA about 95 years ago, and Futrelle laughed dismissively, and Vox Day declared himself the winner.

“Critics such as Futrelle and Scalzi are of low socio-sexual rank, which means that they have the usual gamma male’s distaste for conflict that has a clear winner. The reason is that as long as they can avoid losing, they can still claim victory in their delusional gamma style.”

Wait. But it was Vox Day who threw out a few non sequiturs and declared himself winner…this is confusing.

Again, note that I did absolutely nothing of the sort. It may be helpful to be reminded of the Gamma male’s core mindset, as provided by a self-admitted former Gamma male: “It’s not about being stupid, or even a chubby nerd, it’s about lying to yourself relentlessly about what’s right in front of your eyes.”

That’s how Gammas like Futrelle and Myers can lie so blatantly about me declaring myself the winner when in fact Futrelle was the only one who did so. They relentlessly lie, to others and themselves, because the truth is too painful for them to accept. Notice, too, that only one commenter on PZ’s site points out the obvious; other than him, no one calls them on their observable lies.

Can you even imagine that happening here? On a complete tangent, this pair of comments made me laugh:

daintydougal
rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic… *head kasplodes*

fibinachi
Yeah! I second daintydougal. Out of all that, that’s the one that threw me off the most too. Just wow.

Keep in mind that these are the people who claim to be the intelligent and educated side. Then again, we were warned:

“[B]efore some audiences not even the possession
of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge
implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”

Why home buyers aren’t buying

Back in June 2009, I introduced a concept I called the Limits of Demand, which pointed out that the Austrian Business Cycle did not revolve around a shift in capital vs consumer goods, but rather the “finite limit to the maximum consumable quantity of every consumer good available”. I stated: “Once the artificially enhanced demand limits are reached, or even worse,
consumers cannot afford to service their debt on the goods they
previously purchased, the boom will come to a hard and fast end.” As Neil Cavuto’s lamentation for the housing market suggests, we appear to have finally reached those demand limits, as the six-year stagnation in L1 also indicates:

You can now nab a 30-year fixed mortgage for under 4%. That’s the second week in a row, by the way, that rates have been so low. As of this writing, the numbers tick slightly, but the range remains remarkably low – 3.96% to 4.08%. In either extreme, extremely weird, and stunning when you consider we are supposedly in the latter stage of a recovery.

Usually at this point in an economic turnaround, things are rocking, and interest rates are jumping. But we all know the economy isn’t rocking. And as a result, interest rates are not jumping. What’s weird is those rates are dropping, which usually presages something bad happening.

Then again, this hasn’t been your father’s recovery, has it? Even with absurdly-low interest rates for what’s been years now, it’s hard to make the case they’ve triggered any kind of housing boom. Sales of new single-family homes fell 4.9% through the first six months of the year. They were down 8.1% in June. So let’s just say the trend is not the housing industry’s friend.

Economists and real estate experts offer a variety of reasons for this mortgage malaise. Some argue it’s still pretty tough to qualify for a loan, and bankers aren’t making it any easier, demanding more upfront money from borrowers to avoid any of the problems they encountered post-meltdown.

But it’s been more than six years now, and some very sharp numbers crunchers are getting worried. Even bankers who are lending tell me they aren’t seeing a lot of customers lining up. “Caution is the word,” said one. “They just seem very tentative, even skeptical.”

Cavuto says that history “suggests one of two things eventually happens during such periods: either the prices come down or the demand picks up.” This chart I made to explain the Limits of Demand shows that prices will not only come down, but come down further than the experts are presently anticipating.

The credit-driven demand for housing has pushed up prices along the S curve, far beyond where the homebuyers’ natural demand (based upon what they could afford without the credit expansion) intersected it. When the credit contraction begins, unless the supply somehow contracts, the demand for housing can be expected to fall from the point where the Dcredit curve intersects the S curve to the point on the original D curve. Where that is in practical terms, I do not know, but a rough guess would be a two-thirds collapse in home prices. And it is this collapse that will spur the economy-wide deflation that I have been predicting for the last six years.

Remember, while we haven’t seen deflation, we also haven’t seen the predicted inflation, let alone hyperinflation, either. That is because the Fed’s desperate attempts to hold up the housing market to protect the banks has led to a six-year period of credit disinflation and the subsequent six-year “mortgage malaise”.

That is the core problem with credit money. Central banks can print more paper, but they cannot print more credit-worthy borrowers. And with the median net wealth of Americans down by one-third in the last decade, few Americans can afford to borrow the money required to pay the credit-inflated housing prices even at these historically low interest rates. This should be patently obvious, especially in light of how “35.1 percent of people with credit records had been reported to collections for debt that averaged $5,178.”

When even cheery, optimistic cheerleaders such as Cavuto start using phrases like “we are supposedly in the latter stage of a recovery”, it should be readily apparent that there has been no recovery at all. As I have been pointing out for more than five years now, this is an economic contraction at least one order of magnitude bigger than the Great Depression. Focusing on GDP and CPI and U3 statistics is rather like trying to measure the precise size of the waves on the beach as a tsunami looms offshore.

Who is the real problem?

It’s not Putin, observes Pat Buchanan:

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

What has Putin done to rival the forced famine in Ukraine that starved to death millions, the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels or the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of Czechoslovakia?

As a general rule, the moment you see an American politician pointing at to someone and claiming he is Hitler, you know he’s probably innocent of whatever he’s being accused of doing. It’s not a perfectly reliable device, but when they’re obviously engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric, the chances are they are doing so because they can’t make a reasonable case based on his actual deeds.

It is somewhat remarkable that even the least competent administration in American history is managing to screw up the Middle East, Russia, and the southern border of the USA all at the same time. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama ordered the bombing of London and an amphibious invasion of Uganda.

It’s obvious that the USA is the real problem here. But what is more difficult to understand is what their motivation might be, beyond a short-term pecuniary interest in pillaging Ukraine.

There is NO PLACE for anti-palestinianism….

It’s been interesting to read up on 4th Gen War theory while watching the events take place surrounding the war in Gaza. And I have to say, it appears to be an almost textbook example of Israel winning the conventional Clausewitzian levels while Hamas is winning at the more important moral level. For those unfamiliar with this military theory, this doesn’t say anything about which side has the right of it, only the moral perception of the two sides on the part of the neutral observers. For example, this sort of thing works directly against the Israeli interest:

One Direction star Zayn Malik has been bombarded with death threats by outraged Israelis after posting a #FreePalestine message on Twitter. The 21-year-old, who was brought up a Muslim in Bradford, Yorkshire, shared the #FreePalestine hashtag earlier today to his 13million followers, who retweeted it 140,000 times. However, moments after the post appeared, Zayn began receiving messages telling him to ‘kill himself’ and one even read: ‘Let me kill you’.

The young man has 13 million followers, about .00001 percent of whom actually know or care anything about Gaza. How are death threats against him going to fly in their barely sapient eyes when all he did, as far as they can see, was share a message of freedom? Meanwhile, some Jewish leaders are making the dreadful mistake of demanding that European governments censor their citizens and impose regulations upon them, which would be an excellent way to ensure that those governments, already very unpopular due to the Euro crisis and the corruption of the EU, will be thrown out at the first opportunity:

“We are potentially looking at the beginning of another Holocaust now. These events [violent demonstrations and expressions of anti-Semitism] will only grow in scale across Europe,” he asserted. Addressing the legislators and representatives of a number of European governments, including those of Denmark, Holland and France, the oligarch and former head of the Russian Jewish Congress called for Jewish communities across the continent to “unite and consolidate.”

Sloutsker also called on all European governments to impose what he called “strict regulations” on the format and content of demonstrations in order to prevent further violence against Jews. Citing a recent proposal by Belgian Jewry to establish a position of Special European Commissioner to monitor and combat anti-Semitism and racism, Sloutsker said such measures would “help send a strong message that European leadership is united and committed to combating anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”

The Israelis have yet to learn that in a global media battle, they simply cannot expect to have it both ways. Everything eventually makes its way out. If you want to claim popular anti-semitism is beyond the pale, then you simply cannot engage in anti-palestinianism. And it is truly bizarre to see complaints about the European conflation of diaspora Jew and Israeli, even as other Jews openly conflate them.

The state will not allow one Jew to remain undefended, MK Yisrael Hasson chimed in, asserting that the fates of European and Israeli Jews are intertwined.

Jews is Belgium are being asked “why are you killing children in Gaza?” Rafael Werner, a representative of Belgium’s Jewish community recounted, asserting that there is little distinction being made between Jews and Israelis.

So, are they intertwined or not? Considering that Martin van Creveld, one of the leading theoreticians of state vs non-state war, is an Israeli, I think both the Israelis and the diaspora Jews would do well to familiarize themselves with his books. From what I see from my very limited vantage point, based on basic 4GW principles, Netanyahu has made a common, but critical mistake in attempting to compromise between the De-Escalation model and the Hama model.

And to bring it full circle, I fully support the legality of both anti-semitism and anti-palestinianism. Die Gedanken sind frei. And keep in mind that once one embrace thought and speech policing, one reduces the question to a simple game of will to power.

The bad science of food

You can’t trust scientistry. You simply can’t. Think about how many times, over the last few DECADES, you were told that eating fat and butter and cream and cheese was bad for you. Remember how fettucini alfredo was once called “a heart attack on a plate?” Then read this belated mea culpa from a doctor who admits that he has been giving out worse than useless advice to his patients for years.

Milk, cheese, butter, cream – in fact all saturated fats – are bad for you. Or so I believed ever since my days as a medical student nearly 30 years ago. During that time I assured friends and family that saturated fat would clog their arteries as surely as lard down a drain. So, too, would it make them pile on the pounds. Recently, however, I have been forced to do a U-turn. It is time to apologise for all that useless advice I’ve been dishing out about fat.

The roots of our current confusion lie in a paper by an American scientist called Ancel Keys in 1953. It covered the increasingly common problem of clogged arteries. Keys included a simple graph comparing fat consumption and deaths from heart disease in men from six different countries. Americans, who ate a lot of fat, were far more likely to have a heart attack than the Japanese, who ate little fat. Case solved. Or was it?

Other scientists began wondering why Keys chose to focus on just six countries when he had access to data for 22. If places like France and Germany were included the link between heart disease and fat consumption became much weaker. These were, after all, countries with high fat consumption, but relatively modest rates of heart disease. In fact, as a renowned British scientist called John Yudkin pointed out, there was actually a much stronger link between sugar consumption and heart disease.

But Yudkin’s warnings about sugar were denounced by a fellow scientist as ‘nothing more than scientific fraud’. He was, as one of his colleagues colourfully put it, ‘thrown under a bus’.

Meanwhile, the war on fat gradually gained momentum, to the extent that by the time I reached medical school in the Eighties, there was no mention of Yudkin’s findings. People were cutting down on dairy products and switching to sugary carbohydrates and vegetable oils. This, it turns out, was a mistake. To turn vegetable oil into margarine, manufacturers used a process called hydrogenation (gas pumped through oil at high temperature), which produces trans fats. These are the Darth Vader of the fat world: good fats turned bad.

Unlike saturated fats, there is clear evidence that trans fats damage your heart. They were found in most shop-bought biscuits and cakes until they were removed in 2007.

Think about how many people have suffered ill effects from eating a bad, science-recommended diet. The amazing thing is that this doctor clung to what he “knew” even though “I put on over two stone, despite regular exercise. My cholesterol soared past the healthy range and two years ago I discovered I was borderline diabetic.”

Observation is an important part of the scientific process. Not publishing. Not peer review. And it is eminently clear that too few people in the scientific and medical communities are observing anything.