Category: Uncategorized

Extradition bill withdrawn

The Hong Kong government backs down

Hong Kong authorities officially withdrew the extradition bill that has sparked months-long massive protests and violent riots across the city. The city’s security chief John Lee announced that the bill was effectively withdrawn on Wednesday. In response, several opposition lawmakers tried to heckle Lee’s speech, demanding his resignation.

The bill, which would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong, China’s self-governing territory, to mainland China triggered massive protests in summer. Protesters and human rights campaigners feared that Beijing may use the legislation to target dissidents.

My guess is that this is a smart tactical move by the Chinese government to defang what had become an entry point by the CIA and the NGOs attempting to transform the organic protests into a Color Revolution. It surgically removes the nominal basis for the protests, thereby removing the moral high ground – such as it is – from the protests if they continue.

I don’t see this as being much of a victory for the protesters, though. I understand the fears concerning extradition being applied to dissidents, but is it really good news that murderers can continue to live in Hong Kong without fear of even being arrested, much less charged and convicted, for their crimes? It seems to me a compromise that limited extradition to being applied to those suspected of murder would be reasonable and serve the interests of both the mainland and the SAR.

They have no one

Democrats are gradually coming to the horrifying conclusion that they don’t have anyone who can beat the God-Emperor:

When the 2020 Democratic presidential contest kicked off earlier this year, the massive field was hailed as the most diverse in history, with candidates who spanned the ideological spectrum and offered enough in a broad buffet of options to entice any voter. But after 10 months of campaigning and 15 hours of nationally televised debates, another emotion is rising: anxiety.

Party leaders and activists are citing weakness in all of the leading contenders, including former vice president Joe Biden, who has been forced on the defensive about his family’s ethics, performed haltingly in debates and set off alarms with his poor fundraising. They also fret that the two other top-ranking candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are too liberal to win a general election. Other candidates have had moments to shine, but none yet has fully transformed that into anything approaching momentum.

Oprah Winfrey, an early backer of Barack Obama who was initially enthusiastic about former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, has repeatedly begged Disney CEO Bob Iger to jump into the race. Hillary Clinton, according to two people close to her, has not ruled out jumping in herself, a sign that she is hearing similar dissatisfaction.

“You can imagine much stronger candidates,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic National Committee member. She pines for Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who declined to run, or an outsider like retired admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

John Coale, a major donor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, was more blunt. “They don’t have anybody who can win the general,” he said.

Smells like Trumpslide 2020 to me.

It’s clear who won in Syria

The Turks, Russians, and Syrians have reached an agreement to keep both ISIS and the Kurds under control now that the USA is no longer getting in the way.

Russian military police and Syrian servicemen will be deployed to northeastern Syria, while Turkey’s operation ‘Peace Spring’ will continue in a limited area, presidents Putin and Erdogan have agreed after lengthy talks.

Moscow understands the reasons behind the ongoing Turkish military incursion into Syria, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said, though he stressed it must not play into the hands of terrorists and that the territorial integrity of Syria must be preserved. Ultimately, the country must be freed from all “illegal foreign military presence,” the president added, reiterating Moscow’s long-time position.

The almost-seven-hour-long talks in Sochi, Russia between Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan were focused on the situation in Syria, particularly the ongoing offensive in its northeastern region.

Kurdish forces to withdraw

The agreement says the Kurdish-led militias – the prime target of the Turkish operation – must withdraw into Syrian territory beyond 30km from the Turkish border. Erdogan’s operation, meanwhile, will continue in a limited area – between towns of Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn – up to 32km inside Syrian territory.

Syrian army to be deployed to the border

Other parts of the Syrian border – from Kobani to Tell Abyad and from Ras al-Ayn to the Iraqi border – are set to be controlled by the Syrian military and border guards, supported by Russian military police.

Joint Russia-Turkey patrols along the border

At the same time, areas not affected by the Turkish military operation, will be jointly patrolled by the Turkish military and Russian military police up to 10km deep into Syrian territory.

Well, that’s one way to get out of NATO, I suppose.

Mailvox: the rot is creeping in

A veteran with multiple active-duty deployments in Iraq confirms a young officer’s observations about the state of the US Army, and specifically, its Officer Candidate School:

I wanted to comment on and, sadly, confirm a good chunk of what your recent OCS attendee wrote.

“Equal” Opportunity: 

Women and especially brown and black women were absolutely given preference. Nothing so brazen as ignoring stated orders and being given a pass, but things like being told to our faces that our waste-of-a-cadet black nurse would be held to a lower standard (supposedly because nurse), or seeing women given consistently higher marks for actions that would have been given at best a “nice job” had she been a man. Some instructors were happier about this than others, but it was obviously an understood thing.

Second Generation Modern Warfare Training: 

Yes, and lots of it. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) cannot deal with innovative thinkers. Not will not, cannot. Everything is cookie cutter down almost to the last detail and any deviation is punished. I watched our Ranger-tabbed cadet get his ass chewed for not doing things exactly the TRADOC way, never mind that he had met with success by the instructor’s own admission. While the units can and often do beat this out of junior officers, to say that newly commissioned 2LTs are hidebound and risk-averse as a rule is an understatement, and too many continue to be so as their careers progress. If the US Army retains any vestiges of 3rd generation capability, it’s in spite of TRADOC.

The F-Word and A Culture of Gullible Murderers: 

This is also true, but it’s also the fastest one to change with experience. Most of these men are young and fresh out of college, and all of them know that the way you get ahead in the Army is to in part be more bloodthirsty than the next guy. You don’t get points for being thoughtful or even remotely isolationist. Fortunately, much of it is posturing and many change their tunes after deploying a time or two. Not to say it isn’t a problem, just that it’s probably the most superficial and fastest to change of all the so far published points.

What I Call the “NuBoomer” Sub-Generation: 

This one’s a bit more complicated. Do they exist? Yes, but part of it is inexperience, part of it is social conditioning, and the rest is telling the boss what he wants to hear. There are a lot more open dissidents in the Active and Guard ranks, especially in combat arms, including commanders. Of the several commanding officers I’ve served under, the closest I ever saw to this was a disgruntled Gen Xer who by virtue of his wife and where he lived, had a tendency to spout the Narrative. The incoming officers, at least in combat arms, will more often shuck the Narrative as soon as they see no one else is buying, though the superficial sense of religion is sadly spot on. They are, however, just as post-literate as the rest of their generation and civnattery is the last of the Narrative to go, if it ever does. Racism and sexism remain the only unforgivable sins in the Army.

Based on your source’s published letter, the rot I saw has gotten worse. From the view of a veteran, most of it is still confined to the support elements. Their reputations as hives of LGBT+, feminism, and all of the other contaminants of the Clown World are, from what I’ve observed, sadly merited. Combat arms still tries to focus on warfighting, but we are not immune and the rot is creeping in.

The Trump dynasty rises

One has to rather enjoy the magisterial sound of the God-Emperor Donald II in 2024:

The shout of “2024!” from the crowd was unmistakable. It stopped Donald Trump Jr. cold.

President Donald Trump’s eldest son had been in the midst of a humor-laced screed in which he decried Joe Biden as too old and Elizabeth Warren as too liberal and insisted his father’s 2016 campaign was too disorganized to possibly collude with the Russians. As many in the crowd of several hundred laughed, Trump Jr. held a dramatic pause before exclaiming his response:

“Let’s worry about 2020 first!” he yelled.

The son has become the prime warmup act for the father at political rallies, often appearing more than an hour before the president speaks, another bombastic provocateur who revels in the tribal loyalty of the supporters who pack Trump rallies. It is a call to arms to a fawning crowd and Donald Jr. has become a master preacher.

His speeches are laced with the same incendiary, sometimes false rhetoric as his father’s, at times even questioning whether Democrats can call themselves Christians. But in these venues, his word is gospel.

The “2024” call from the audience at a San Antonio convention center room on Tuesday underscored the rising stardom of the president’s eldest son, who has become the swaggering embodiment of the “Make America Great Again” ethos.

The God-Emperor’s primary weakness is his bone-deep civnattery. His secondary weakness is his strong preference for negotiation with his implacable enemies to war with them. But his rightful heir and successor gets it. If the father can drain the swamp, the son can actually begin making America American again.

You can almost hear that sweet sound of the helicopters flying. San Augusto, prega per noi pecattori.

Who broke Jordan Peterson?

He’s actually breaking down and crying in interviews because he’s out of meth someone tweeted mean things at him.

I’ve enjoyed his work, but Jordan Peterson is lost. He had a horrific mental break during his recent interview with Rex Murphy where he literally cries about getting mean tweets. 

Here is the transcript:

You were asking about courage earlier, you know, um, one of the things that I have watched quite frequently is the way people respond to being mobbed on Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, I’ve almost stopped looking at Twitter. It’s been about three months that I’ve taken a Twitter hiatus, let’s say. I still post… I don’t even have my password anymore. I send what I want to post to a third party and they post it because it keeps me out of

An antiseptic distance.

That’s right. Exactly. And that’s exactly the right way of thinking about it. You know, people, civilized people, and I mean that civilized, social people cannot tolerate being mobbed. Because there’s a reason for that, you see. You said, with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, if there’s 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right.

More or less.

Right, right! But you think of the situation where you said something on Twitter and a thousand people mob you. Publicly! Your first response, if you’re… your first response is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed. It’s not really much different psychologically… I mean it’s lesser… it’s not that much different than waking up one morning, coming to your door, and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily aggregated on your lawn! It’s a terrible shock for people. It really hurts them! They’re often, often, by all accounts, damaged for lengthy periods of time by this.  And their first impulse is to apologize, which is truly the wrong thing to do!

It is.

Well, the right thing to do is to understand that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t apologize. Now that’s very difficult. Very difficult. And to wait. If you wait two weeks, people will come to your defense.

Yeah, they will.

But it takes two weeks for them to get their act together, whereas it takes the activists, who are unbelievably organized, fifteen seconds to mob.

This guy is such a drugged-out emotional train wreck, it’s almost not even funny anymore. Almost. Not that he doesn’t deserve every single bit of criticism and mockery he receives, because he merits it on the basis of being a complete charlatan who should never have posed as any sort of lifestyle philosopher for young men. He’s now quite obviously the frail and weepy shadow of the towering intellectual figure he pretended to be.

And remember, this is the very same man who claimed community doesn’t matter, family doesn’t matter, and every man should stand on his own, by himself, and without any allegiance to a group identity, because group identities are “pathological”. Now he’s literally crying in public because others don’t come to his defense soon enough when he’s legitimately attacked for his charlatanry.

What a pathological liar. What an utter freaking fraud. And, of course, he gets it absolutely wrong, as Captain America explains the correct way to address a howling, wrongheaded mob.

Psychopathy is fit

A science experiment backs up the PUA theory concerning the attractiveness of Dark Triad men:

In his research Mr Brazil recruited 46 men to produce two-minute videos of themselves to be shown to prospective romantic partners.

They were interviewed by a female research assistant in the clips, and spoke about what they’d do on a first date or what they looked for in a relationship. The same men were then tested to measure whether they had psychopathic personality traits, and to gauge their social intelligence and their views on sex.

A group of 108 women then watched the videos and rated the men on their attractiveness in general, how sexy they thought they were, and their confidence.

Mr Brazil found that the higher a man scored on the psychopathy test, in general, the more attractive he was considered to be by the women.

Stop trying to be “nice”, gentlemen. There is a reason why “the Perfect Gentleman” was an involuntary celibate. And don’t believe the music, ladies. It’s not mere coincidence that the guy who sings about how he can treat you better and how you deserve a gentleman is a closeted homosexual.

A world without books

Is a world that can be revised at will and knowledge can be erased by those who would rule over you:

The vast treasure trove of information contained on Google, our modern Library of Alexandria, torched by Julius Caesar’s soldiers in 48 BC, is vulnerable not only to some catastrophic event, like an asteroid strike or, potentially worse, a cloistered pimply hacker, but to the manipulations and contraventions of those who seek to rewrite world history.

The greatest threat to man is the ennui and apathy that comes with the belief that there is no great threat. And what threat could be greater than that of the leather-bound, typeface word – painstakingly and somewhat redundantly in the age of laptops and smartphones – imprinted onto the palpable, creamy pages of parchment known as books, falling into the black hole of oblivion?

In 2010, the world got a ‘canary in the coalmine’ moment with the announcement that Encyclopedia Britannica, after a 244-year-long run, would cease publication of its paper editions.

The Guardian’s obituary for the “dinosaur,” owned by Swiss banking magnate Jacqui Safra, deserves repeating.

“Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity’s achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.

And now it’s going out of print.

For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die.”

There are other harbingers of impending disaster that demand some handwringing, and not just for nerdy bibliophiles. Webster’s Dictionary, for example, aside from honoring “justice” (hint: think ‘social justice’ lunacy as opposed to sober-minded legal justice) as its word of the year for 2018, has shown a marked tendency for allowing the more questionable elements of modern culture to seep onto its pages like a coffee stain.

Fight for the West. Preserve human knowledge. Support the Junior Classics. Because this is a generational and existential project, and it’s just getting started. As evidence for the strong interest in this, the campaign is now at 700 percent of goal.

Books hold insight into a world that cannot be altered or destroyed from the distant data overlords hunkered down in Silicon Valley. Books are anchors in a storm-tossed sea of change, where it is nearly impossible to get a secure footing. Books provide harbor from the tyranny of men, hell-bent on destroying any vestige of the past so that their plans for some future dystopia will meet less resistance. Books, the ultimate source of wisdom and knowledge, handed down through the ages, remain the last bulwark against tyranny. Treasure your books and never turn them in; they’re our lifeline to a benevolent and decent future.

Clueless cowards

It’s reprehensibly stupid when sports reporters not only can’t stick to sports, but insist on publicly demonstrating both their complete ignorance of geopolitics as well as their intellectual cowardice.

Enough already with the politics. From John D.: “We get it. You’re liberal and you hate the POTUS. Just shut up already about it.”

I will spend some words from time to time calling it the way I see it.

I am a coward for not addressing China last week. From Jeff Cannon Sr.: “You’re a coward, Peter. A quiet coward. Thank the ghosts that your industry is dying an accelerated death … Avoiding the subject of China while taking another needless shot at the president cost you a loyal reader. Good day.”

You mean you don’t want me to stick to sports?

One overriding thought about the NBA-China-United States-LeBron-Morey story: If Daryl Morey expresses his opinion wishing good luck to Hong Kong for its freedom fight from China, and if China gets incredibly ticked off about it, that is understandable. China is not as free as the United States. So of course China will be angry. So what? The Chinese run their country their way. We run our country our way. Why should anyone in the United States—particularly someone who has benefited from the freedoms of the United States like LeBron James—kowtow to China? Our belief is that our citizens can speak freely, which is what Daryl Morey was doing. China should understand this is who we are. Who cares if China is offended? If the Chinese don’t accept that we have a right to criticize them, well, tough. And if it costs the NBA billions, such is life.

I get it: It’s not my money at stake. But it’s outrageous, honestly, that China would be outraged at us. If they want to prevent their citizens from speaking freely, that’s their business. We allow our citizens to express opinions, on everything. They should understand that.

Why should the Chinese understand that? Why should anyone understand that, especially when it is observably false? Peter King would disemploy, disavow, and forcibly silence anyone in his power who expressed an opinion of which he did not approve on race, sex, or sexual abnormalities. Why should he affect outrage that China should wield its economic power as it sees fit?

If Sports Illustrated had simply stuck to sports, it might not be circling the drain now.