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Ground forces enter Gaza

It appears Netanyahu has not been reading van Creveld, as he has ordered the IDF infantry and armor into Gaza:

Israeli ground troops have attacked Gaza as its air force bombarded targets and officials ordered everyone living within miles of the border to go to bunkers amid fears of fierce retaliation from Hamas.

The Israel Defense Force tweeted from its official account on Thursday night: ‘IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.’

Military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus confirmed: ‘There are ground troops attacking in Gaza, together with air forces as well.’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted moments later: ‘I said that we would charge a very heavy price from Hamas. We do it and we will continue to do it with great intensity. The last word was not said and this operation will continue as long as necessary.’

It is not yet clear whether the offensive was to destroy rocket sites or Hamas leaders or part of an extended campaign to invade Gaza.

Earlier Israel called up 9,000 reservists to bolster its forces as it deployed troops to the border in preparation for the ground assault.

One can’t help but wonder what Hezbollah has in the works, or if they want to see Hamas destroyed by the Israelis. 

The media “corrects” the model

Don’t read too much into my posting this. I’m just a little surprised by the current spin on the latest phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being pushed by the mainstream media. I mean, it has literally never occurred to me to pay any attention to anything that Bella Hadid, or any other fashion, swimsuit, or glamour model, happens to say.

Large numbers of Jews began moving to Ottoman Palestine – a predominately Arab region – following the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, which promoted the idea of a haven for Jews in their ancient homeland to escape anti-Semitism in Europe. There has been a community of Jews in the region for millennia.

The exact population balance is hard to tell, because at the time people frequently avoided the census. According to the Ottoman census of 1878, the Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre districts were home to 403,795 Muslims, representing 85.5 per cent of the population.

Christians made up 9.2 per cent (43,659); Jewish people 5.3 per cent (25,000).

So Bella is wrong to describe Israel as a colony, because Jewish people had already been in the region for centuries. 

The Holocaust increased the pace of arrivals with Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, and many emigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia.

In 1947, after years of Arab-Jewish violence, the UN General Assembly voted for the establishment of two states in Palestine – one Jewish and the other Arab. 

Bella is incorrect in describing ethnic cleansing and a military occupation, because the redrawing of boundaries was done under UN auspices.

Shortly after the UN ruling, the Jewish community in Palestine declared Israel an independent state, prompting hundreds of thousands more Jews to emigrate, and precipitating a war launched by neighboring Arab states.

She is also incorrect in describing the region as being under apartheid, because Israelis and Palestinians are free to choose their own leaders and live under their own rules. 

For their part, Palestinian Arabs say Jews have usurped their ancestral homeland with help from Western powers, including the United States and the United Kingdom. 

The current conflict is notable for pitting Israelis against Israelis, in addition to the depressingly familiar exchange of rocket fire.

Israel’s 21 per cent Arab minority – Palestinian by heritage, Israeli by citizenship – is mostly descended from the Palestinians who lived under Ottoman and then British colonial rule before staying in Israel after the country’s 1948 creation.

First, it’s strange that the British media felt it necessary to cover and “correct” Bella Hadid’s statements. This wouldn’t have happened in years past, and tends to indicate a public shift toward the Palestinian perspective and rather less of the Boomer sympathy for “plucky little Israel, our greatest ally.”

Second, whoever is handling the “corrections” is almost ludicrously incompetent. If the mere idea of troubling to correct a model’s opinion wasn’t bad enough, doing so in an obviously inept manner just makes it that much worse. A “colony” is defined as “a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.” This means the fact that there were already a few thousand Jews in the region doesn’t change the fact that groups of people left Poland, Russia, and other places where their ancestors had resided for generations in order to settle in British Palestine.

Nor is it incorrect to describe the ethnic cleansing and military occupation taking place there as ethnic cleansing and military occupation simply because the UN drew some boundaries. The UN also recognized the India-Pakistan boundary after the 1947 partition, and the post-partition movement of peoples that took place there was arguably the largest in human history. And no one hesitates to describe that movement as religious cleansing.

While it is incorrect to refer to any political system as “Apartheid” other than the historical South African policy, it is also indisputable that the laws of Israel are specifically designed to ensure that the nation of Israel is dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation’s Jewish population, as per the Basic Law’s assertion that the Jewish people have the unique claim to national self-determination in the State of Israel. While technically incorrect, apartheid is a perfectly reasonable way to describe these policies at a rhetorical level.

My personal opinion is that all of the historical posturings on both sides are pointless. The original Jewish claim is based on the right of conquest of the Land of Canaan, so they cannot reasonably complain if any other group of people decides to lay claim on the same basis. The situation is difficult, but it is hardly insoluble; a positive resolution will simply require a lot more carrot and a lot less stick.

Of considerably more concern to me is the fact that those who claim that Palestine is not a country and the Palestinians are not a people are the exact same individuals who claim that America is just an idea, Americans are not a people, and Western Civilization is nothing more than combination of Judaism and Greek philosophy.

The modern constant

Is the low-intensity violent squabbling over territory between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Israeli Martin van Creveld provides his usual insightful perspective.

Several factors explain the low number of casualties. First, the rockets coming from Gaza are enormously inaccurate. They hit targets, if they do, almost at random. Second, the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system works better than anyone had expected.  The system has the inestimable advantage in that it can calculate the places where the rockets will land. Consequently it only goes into action against those—approximately one in five or six—that are clearly about to hit an inhabited area. The outcome is vast savings; in some cases, realizing that the incoming rockets are not going to hit anybody or anything, the authorities do not even bother to sound the alarm. Third, civil defense seems to be working well; people obey instructions and are, in any case, getting used to this kind of thing. Fourth, as always in war, one needs luck.

In turn, the small number of Arab casualties and the limited amount of damage inflicted has enabled the government of Israel to keep the lid on its own actions in the face of extremist demands. It suggests a degree of control and precision never before attained or maintained in any war in history. But while the Israelis have been extremely effective in avoiding collateral deaths, the impact of their strikes against Hamas’ short-range rockets in particular is limited.

Israel’s lucky run will not last forever.  Sooner or later, a Hamas rocket that for one reason or another has not been intercepted is bound to hit a real target in Israel and cause real damage. Imagine a school or kindergarten being hit, resulting in numerous deaths. In that case public pressure on the government and the Israel Defense Forces “to do something” will mount until it becomes intolerable.

What can the IDF do? Not much, it would seem. It can give up some restraints and kill more—far more—people in Gaza in the hope of terrorizing Hamas into surrender. However, such a solution, if that is the proper term, will not necessarily yield results while certainly drawing the ire of much of the world. It can send in ground troops to tackle the kind of targets, such as tunnels, that cannot be reached from the air. However, doing so will almost certainly lead to just the kind of friendly casualties that the IDF, by striking from the air, has sought to avoid.

Whether a ground operation can kill or capture sufficient Hamas members to break the backbone of the organization is also doubtful. Even supposing it can do so, the outcome may well be the kind of political vacuum in which other, perhaps more extreme, organizations such as the Islamic Jihad will flourish. Either way, how long will such an operation last? And how are the forces ever going to withdraw, given the likelihood that, by doing so, they will only be preparing for the next round?

And so the most likely outcome is a struggle of attrition. 

Now, consider that he wrote that in July, 2014….

Canceling biology

Richard Dawkins certainly never saw this coming. I warned him, and everyone, that post-Christianity is not compatible with science, indeed, that Christianity was not only necessary for scientody, but is arguably necessary for a functional scientistry as well. Now we’re learning that even the history of science is being canceled:

A university has been slammed by academics for putting Charles Darwin on a list of ‘racist’ scientists as part of a guide to ‘decolonise’ its biology curriculum. 

Sheffield University has created a handbook for students and lecturers in its science department to help ‘tackle racial injustice’ by ‘reflecting on the whiteness and Eurocentrism of our science’.

As part of the guide, the department created a list of 11 ‘problematic’ scientific figures – including Darwin – whose views ‘influenced the type of research they carried out and how they interpreted their data’. 

An explanation next to the 19th century naturalist’s name says that Darwin ‘believed that his theory of natural selection justified the view that the white race was superior to others’.

With the exception of James Watson, the list of problematic scientific figures reads like a who’s who of atheist heroes. Atheists have falsely claimed that science and Christianity are incompatible for decades, but what they’ve learned in just three short years is that it is science and social justice which are totally incapable of coexisting.

Ronald Fisher

Known for: Pioneered the application of statistical procedures to the design of scientific experiments. He was a Professor in the Eugenics department at University College London.

Sheffield’s view: He believed that races differed ‘in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development’.

One of his works, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, ‘endorses colonialism, white supremacy, and eugenics and discusses his belief in the higher and lower genetic value of people according to their race’.

Carl Linnaeus

Known for: Formalising the modern system of naming organisms

Sheffield’s view: He applied his system of classification to position human races, with white Europeans at the top, and black, indigenous, and other people of colour groups gradually descending his hierarchy.

James Watson 

Known for: Proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule with Francis Crick

Sheffield’s view: The 93-year-old has previously made outwardly racist public comments about the innate inequality of people from different races, particularly with regards to intelligence.

Thomas Henry Huxley 

Known for: Supporting Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and proposing connections between development of organisms and their evolutionary histories.

Sheffield’s view: Huxley’s belief that ‘no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes, that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man’ was used as justification for segregation. 

Francis Galton

Known for: Coining the term ‘eugenics’, he was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences.

Sheffield’s view: He was obsessed with a eugenic ‘utopia’ in which the genetic elite were encouraged to breed, segregated from the sterilised underclass. It has been said that his work ‘invented racism’.

Karl Pearson

Known for: Pioneering work in mathematical statistics and creating a methodology to identify correlations.

Sheffield’s view: He believed strongly in racial segregation and that races other than his own were inferior. 

Alfred Russell Wallace

Known for: Co-developing the theory of natural selection and evolution with Charles Darwin, something Darwin is most often credited for.

Sheffield’s view: He carried out all of his field observations in a colonial environment. In a similar concept to the ‘Wallace line’ separating biological realms, he drew a boundary line between what he classified as different ethnic groups in the colonial Dutch East Indies.

Henry Walter Bates

Known for: Expeditions of the Amazon rainforests where his studies led him to propose the idea of mimicry in unrelated animal species. 

Sheffield’s view: Like Darwin and other explorers, he travelled and collected specimens from colonial South America and was a proponent of colonialism in the Amazon.

Julian Huxley

Known for: Supporting the theory of natural selection, he also worked for the Zoological Society of London and was the first director of UNESCO. His brother was the writer Aldous Huxley.

Sheffield’s view: He was a prominent figure in British Eugenics Society and believed that the lower classes were genetically inferior and should be prevented from reproducing and even sterilised.

JBS Haldane

Known for: Introducing the ‘primordial soup theory’, which became the foundation for the concept of the chemical origin of life.

Sheffield’s view: He published a book in 1924 describing the use of in vitro fertilisation for eugenics purposes. 

More useless than the French

 After 60 years of completely failing to defend America’s borders or protect the nation from invasion, a group of retired US military officers is… encouraging everyone to get involved in local and state politics.

More than 120 retired generals, admirals, and military officers signed a letter that warned that the United States is embroiled in an existential fight and called on “all citizens” to get involved in local and state politics.

“We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty,” stated the letter (pdf), which was signed by 124 former generals and admirals, released by “Flag Officers 4 America.”

The letter also posited that opposition to proposed bills and laws that would strengthen election initiatives has troublesome implications.

“Election integrity demands insuring there is one legal vote cast and counted per citizen. Legal votes are identified by State Legislature’s approved controls using government IDs, verified signatures, etc. Today, many are calling such commonsense controls ‘racist’ in an attempt to avoid having fair and honest elections,” the letter added.

According to the Flag Officers 4 America website, it is a group of former military leaders who “pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,” who are “domestic” and “foreign.”

Of note, signatories of the letter include retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc—a Senate candidate in New Hampshire, retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and retired Vice Adm. John Poindexter—who was the deputy national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan.

“China is the greatest external threat to America. Establishing cooperative relations with the Chinese Communist Party emboldens them to continue progress toward world domination, militarily, economically, politically, and technologically. We must impose more sanctions and restrictions to impede their world domination goal and protect America’s interests,” their letter also said.

OK, Boomers. The extent to which this letter completely misses the point and the problems is downright amusing. Civnattery and vooting harder will accomplish precisely nothing.

What a joke. With an officer class like this, no wonder the USA hasn’t been capable of defeating any foe bigger than Panama. 

Leaving Los Angeles

The Golden Age of the Golden State is long over:

California’s population fell by more than 182,000 last year, the first yearly loss ever recorded for the nation’s most populous state. The decline halted a growth streak dating to its founding in 1850 on the heels of a gold rush that prompted a flood of people to seek their fortune in the West.

The figures released Friday followed last week’s announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that California would lose a congressional seat for the first time because it grew more slowly than other states over the past decade. Still, California’s population of just under 39.5 million and soon-to-be 52-member congressional delegation remain by far the largest.

California’s population has surged and slowed in the decades since its founding, with notable increases following World War II and the tech boom of the 1980s and ’90s that put Silicon Valley on the map.

In recent years, more people have left California for other states than have moved there, a trend Republicans say is a result of the state’s high taxes and progressive politics. The average sale price of a single-family home in California hit a record $758,990 in March, a 23.9{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} increase from a year ago.

“The numbers don’t lie. People are leaving our state because it’s not affordable to live here,” tweeted Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego and one of the Republican candidates hoping to unseat Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in this year’s expected recall election.

But the Newsom administration says California’s population decline is an outlier, blaming it on the coronavirus pandemic that turned everything upside down in 2020. In a normal year, California might have between 140,000 and 150,000 people move in from other countries. In 2020, it was just 29,000 people — a direct impact, state officials say, of the Trump administration halting new visas for much of the year.

It’s a good test for how magic the dirt of California is. I, for one, tend to suspect that no one will be wishing they could all be California girls in 2050.

The Free Speech fraud

 A former believer in free speech belatedly comes to realize that it was never anything more than an intellectual weapon designed to destabilize the Christian West by the Promethean intellectuals operating under the perverse banner of the Enlightenment.

The question is not, “Should we be absolutely free to speak?” The question is really, “Who should be the censors, and what should be censored?” We understand this intuitively, but the mantra of free speech propaganda often causes us to miss this.  

There are always blasphemy laws in any culture, even a libertine culture, where it is blasphemy to say, “That is immoral”, or “Maybe you should have self-control,” or, “Do you really need another cookie?”. We Christians and conservatives in the West fell into the trap of believing that neutrality could exist in a nation. That is, we thought a society based on a secular public sphere, allowing a freely expressed marketplace of ideas was possible. But this was always a lie, and this is why such a society didn’t last very long.

Really, those who sought to break the boundaries of what could and could not be said, were just using that as a means of usurping the Christian nature of the West, and taking power for themselves, so they could then enforce their version of blasphemy laws. Have you noticed how todays almost exclusively leftist cultural elite are not even slightly interested in encouraging the free market of ideas any more? They want no part of free speech. Why is this? Their goal of taking power has been achieved. There is no desire for the anti-establishment to let people freely continue to criticize the establishment, once they become the establishment. No, it actually becomes a threat to their systemic control.

This is not my opinion of what has happened, either, elements of society have been agitating for the disestablishment of the church for some time, and they have been utterly successful. Here in Australia, it is not uncommon to see the media go after politicians who are open in their Christian faith, even if their advocated policies are not all that Christian. The eminent historian and Medievalist, J B Bury, told us that progressives viewed free speech as a means of achieving this goal of destabilizing the Christian West.

First tradition had to be undermined, “It is only recently that men have been abandoning the belief that the welfare of a state depends on rigid stability and on the preservation of its traditions and institutions unchanged.” The process of dismantling tradition was encouraged by the effective and continued challenging of Western heritage, by the very elites who were supposed to preserve it. “DURING the last three hundred years reason has been slowly but steadily destroying Christian mythology and exposing the pretensions of supernatural revelation.”

This was not the dispassionate scientific process that it is often presented as being in the movies. Humanity did not just wake up one day in a state of “enlightenment” and determine based on scientific reason that all tradition must be rejected. It was guided in that direction, by ideologues and freedom of expression was the tool used to achieve this end. As Bury says, “…nothing should be left undone to impress upon the young that freedom of thought is an axiom of human progress.” By “human progress” Bury, and many other enlightenment thinkers really mean less Christian. Indeed, this is explicit in Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought, for example: “In this sense it might be said that ‘distrust thy father and mother’ is the first commandment with promise.” This is an explicitly anti-biblical command. This brings to mind Richard Dawkins misguided attempt to create a new 10 Commandments in his book The God Delusion, to replace the real ones.

These attempts to create new commandments are always foolish, because if mankind sees very little reason to follow God’s commands, why would he care about some enlightenment professors list?   

It is important to understand that freedom of expression was only ever a tool for the enlightenment anti-Church thought leaders, to replace the authority of the Church, with their own values and Dogma, and authority. Previous generations of enlightenment thinkers argued for, and even genuinely defended the principles of free speech. But once they had completely replaced the authority of scripture and the Church in guiding society, the doors began to close on anti-establishment sentiment, which Bury conceived as possible,

“It is by no means inconceivable that in lands where opinion is now free coercion might be introduced. If a revolutionary social movement prevailed, led by men inspired by faith in formulas (like the men of the French Revolution) and resolved to impose their creed, experience shows that coercion would almost inevitably be resorted to.”

Those who still champion free speech today are well-intentioned, but they are still well behind the curve, because they don’t understand how it is incompatible with Western civilization, or that it was only a phase in the decline to which Western societies can never be reasonably expected to return. Now that the intellectual infection has metastasized into full-blown convergence, either it will be cured or it will kill the infected victim.

When one considers that the primary goals of the Enlightenment were to a) legalize usury and b) legalize blasphemy, it should be readily apparent that there was something deeply evil behind it. This really shouldn’t have been that hard. When someone is offering you the promise of knowledge, you must always look for the snake.