Category: Uncategorized

A dangerous parting shot

The Washington Post belatedly begins to understand that perhaps those crazy people saying Obama is, at the very least, pro-Muslim, weren’t necessarily so crazy after all:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S decision to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements reverses decades of practice by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The United States vetoed past resolutions on the grounds that they unreasonably singled out Jewish communities in occupied territories as an obstacle to Middle East peace, and that U.N. action was more likely to impede than advance negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The measure, approved 14 to 0 by the Security Council Friday, is subject to the same criticism: It will encourage Palestinians to pursue more international sanctions against Israel rather than seriously consider the concessions necessary for statehood, and it will give a boost to the international boycott and divestment movement against the Jewish state, which has become a rallying cause for anti-Zionists. At the same time, it will almost certainly not stop Israeli construction in the West Bank, much less in East Jerusalem, where Jewish housing was also deemed by the resolution to be “a flagrant violation under international law.”

By abstaining, the administration did not explicitly support that position, which has not been U.S. policy since the Carter administration. In explaining the vote, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power pointed out that the council was sanctioning Israel even while failing to take action to stop a potential genocide in South Sudan or the slaughter in Aleppo, Syria. Yet in failing to veto the measure, the Obama administration set itself apart both from previous administrations and from the incoming presidency of Donald Trump, who spoke out strongly against the resolution.

Israeli officials charged that the abstention represented a vindictive parting shot by Mr. Obama at Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he has feuded more bitterly than he did with most U.S. adversaries. The vote could also be seen as an attempt to preempt Mr. Trump, who appears ready to shift U.S. policy to the opposite extreme after naming a militant advocate of the settlements as his ambassador to Israel. Whatever the motivation, Mr. Obama’s gesture is likely to do more harm than good.

It boggles the mind how the American Left fails to understand that importing people from countries where the population is anti-Israel was always going to move the US in an anti-Israel direction.

Family SJWs and the holidays

Remember, SJWs have no respect for decorum or regard for their families or the holidays:

In a discussion with my son and his girlfriend, I said that their city’s homogeneity (it is almost all white) was behind the low crime rate when it was mentioned that there was a stabbing behind a bar the other night. This led to an accusatory, ‘What do you mean by homogeneity?’ by the SJW girlfriend and so I spilled the next fact – that blacks are more likely to commit crimes. The SJW girlfriend of my son quickly went nuclear and said I was a racist and that when controlled for socio-economic factor blacks do not commit crimes at higher rates than whites and that discussion of racist ideas was not tolerated in her house. The evening was ruined. The relationship with son and girlfriend is forever changed.

I have read SJWs Always Lie, and would appreciate your advice on how you suggest to use rhetoric instead of dialectic with known SJWs that are also family? Any suggestion on how I recover from this?

You don’t “recover” from unmasking an SJW. Remember, they always lie, they always double down, and they always project.

At this point, the correct thing to do is to refuse to have further contact with her, or to allow her in his home until she apologizes for calling him a racist. Most people won’t do this, of course, especially when faced with the inevitable female pressure for everyone to humor the most volatile member of the family in the interest of a false peace. I would have laughed at her willful ignorance, told my son that he really needed to rethink the wisdom of potentially allowing an idiot like her to contribute to the family gene pool, and left.

Yes, family is important, but girlfriends aren’t family. And life is far too short to waste any of it on putting up with SJWs. Tolerating SJWs is the intellectual equivalent of putting up with someone who insists on using the living room as a toilet. Why would you even consider doing it?

Nearly everyone makes the fatal mistake of trying to be reasonable with them. That is a category error. SJWs respond only to emotional pain, so the only way to get them to stop doubling down on their misbehavior is to make them feel more pain by failing to behave as members of a civilized society. The more one apologizes and negotiates and pleads, the more intransigent they get. The harsher you treat them, the more likely it is that they will sheepishly return to the fold.

However, in light of how family SJWs are going to be even more easily triggered than usual this year due to the imminent Ascension of the God-Emperor to the Cherry Blossom Throne, I would recommend not only avoiding political conversations, but refusing to permit others to start them in the first place. If a family SJW does insist on bringing up politics, especially if they do so in that passive-aggressive way that assumes agreement with the speaker’s statement, the best thing to do is probably to express your delight about the Ascension of the God-Emperor – in those precise terms – and begin a debate concerning whether Donald Trump will be the greatest U.S. president since a) Ronald Reagan, b) Andrew Jackson, or c) George Washington.

The shock of the cognitive dissonance should be sufficient to put your family SJW in a socially catatonic state, which will be appreciated by everyone else.

In general, I find that smiling, refusing to back down in any way, and treating their antics like an indulged child usually works best.

If you’re not convinced

Perhaps you will be after reading the reviews of the recently released A SEA OF SKULLS, Book Two in the Arts of Light and Dark epic fantasy series. If you haven’t started the series yet, you will probably want to start with Book One, A THRONE OF BONES, which is available in Kindle Unlimited.


Worthy successor series to LOTR
“A Sea of Skulls” picks up and accelerates the pace from “A Throne of Bones”. We see some well-developed characters killed off, but encounter other interesting characters of multiple Selenoth races. Amorr and its former allies and provinces gird for war, while a Lost Legion allies with X to defend against a major orc invasion. The elves and dwarves gather their forces to defend against orcs, and also to keep a sharp eye on Man. At several places, you feel a cold chill as you realize one of the minor characters might well be one of the first race, hiding in shadows, biding its time and waiting to seize power for their own ends (enslaving or destroying the younger races). The action and lead characters are spread across the continent, where military action or political intrigue in one realm affects three or four others. The story line is woven more deftly than the first book, and increases the pull of action and intrigue.

Each race has its backstory and cultural values; gruesome as some may be, the cultures, assumptions, and lifestyles are internally consistent. Vox Day also describes each race’s military merit well, showing a consistent triad of strategy, tactics, and logistics that fits with the race’s culture. There are no all-powerful and ever-victorious species in Selenoth; the trick is in understanding your own strengths and then using you enemy’s weakness to best effect. Coalition forces work or don’t work, based on how well the commanders enhance strength and mitigate weaknesses. Political and social life are well written and reasonable for each race. Some of the best moments in the character views are watching how one observer looks in amazement or bemusement at how another race or culture lives – the fish out of water scenario. The set of viewpoint characters is finite and severely bounded, so it’s possible to keep several scattered event tracks in mind with minimal searching for a reminder.

There is a comparison to be made with A Song of Ice and Fire. By comparison, the Arts of Dark and Light is written much richer, more coherently, with a better span of scope, and with a definite conclusion in mind.

A Genre Revisited
From the moment you pick up, and/or scroll through your epub device, you will not be able to put this book down until you have finished it…. If ASOS were an MMA fight, you will be punched in the face in the first thirty seconds, and continually pummeled until the end. There is no respite, no pauses in the action…you will experience Ali fighting Frazier from the moment you begin until the instant you reluctantly put the book down. Each POV character introduced is both interesting and endearing. The characters are so expertly written, that you find yourself wondering who you are rooting for. You will not need to continually consult the appendix to figure out who is speaking…the characters are immediately apparent and recognizable.

I slogged through Jordan’s Wheel of Time series years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled through, Martin’s endless introduction of characters in his later books. Regarding both great authors, I must admit that there were times where I scrolled quickly through the flotsam to get to the action. ASOS requires no such recklessness. For those who disregard Vox Day as a Christian seeking to further his evangelistic agenda, have no fear. There is none of that. The prelude itself will avail you of any attempt to evangelize the Christian agenda…. Vox Day has successfully taken a genre and, as no author has done in the past decade, rewritten the rules for fantasy and violence.




Great novel: Better than the first
As others have noted, this sequel is better than the original. The writing is better. The characters get better. The dialog gets better. Everything is better. And the first was great.

There is a love that Vox has for his characters. It shows in the richness of vision that describes them, and the way he holds them true to themselves and the culture that created them. It is easy to suspend disbelief in Selenoth and to get caught up in the narrative, carried along by the vivid “lifefullness” of his creations. Even the antagonists in the story, fighting for the “wrong” side, are delivered with an empathy to allow the reader to ride alongside them: Thinking what and how they think, feeling what and why they feel.

Wrap those characters around a exceptionally good story line and you come out with the absolute best novel of the year. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.




Fantastic Epic Fantasy
I have hours poring through this monster…. and I can say it is superior in every way to its predecessor. Be forewarned… if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones recently it may be worth your while to refresh your memory a bit. This book doesn’t hold your hand. There is no backtracking to catch you up on important details you may not remember. And if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones then you absolutely cannot start with this one.

The writing is more taut. The different races… orcs… elves… dwarves… are treated much better than the standard fantasy offering and genuinely feel like distinct cultures. Some of the best chapters of the book are actually written from an orc invader’s perspective. The book is courageously written. It doesn’t play nice with your modern sensibilities… and it does not shrink from the brutal realities of invasion, warfare, and barbarism

The ultimate argument for atheism

Even the formidable vocabulary of John C. Wright struggles to find the words required to address the most cogent argument in defense of atheism ever articulated:

When George Lucas sat down some autumn afternoon out on one of the verandas at Skywalker Ranch and began penning The Phantom Menace, with its two-dimensional characters and pointless plot, no all-powerful god living somewhere in the clouds stopped him.

When the first test footage of Jar Jar Binks surfaced and Lucas said something to the effect of, “Great job, guys. This really fulfills the vision of what I had in mind for this character,” no omnipotent deity struck him dead. There was no lightning from the sky, no sudden cardiac arrest. When we needed God most, he was silent.

He didn’t come to judge Lucas at any point during the travesty that was Episodes I-III. Any good and powerful god would have turned Skywalker Ranch into a smoldering crater where nothing else could ever grow, and yet your god remained silent.

I posit, then, that your “god” is no god at all. Either he was powerful enough to stop the Star Wars prequels from happening and didn’t, meaning he can’t possibly be all-good—or else he wanted the prequels stopped and couldn’t do it, meaning he can’t possibly be all-powerful.

Even the evils of Mao and Stalin and Hitler can be rationally explained by the ruthless pursuit of power. But there is no explanation for the so-called prequels. Free will? Nonsense! Nobody willed that. Natural selection? Even a blind and random process would not have chosen thusly.

It is a conundrum indeed.

Fake reviews as SJW weapons

I’ve been pointing out that fake reviews on Amazon are a potentially serious problems for years, but SJWs have repeatedly tried to claim that I am being a bully when I identify an individual has posted a fake review. I doubt they’re going to be able to get away with it much longer, though, as in addition to attacking the likes of Roosh, Cernovich, and me, they’re now attacking the President-Elect’s daughter:

Reviews of the Ivanka Trump Women’s Issa boots, which tout a list price of $180, included this: “These boots were perfect for wiping my feet on the Constitution and trampling the civil liberties and basic human rights of my fellow Americans,” wrote a user named Susan Harper. “The spike heel is ideal for grinding democracy into the ground, or simply kicking the downtrodden as you stride past.”

Amazon user AR called them “two extremely right boots” in her one star review and added that the “sizing and all other info is in Russian, but they are made in China.”

The stinging insults go on and on. Virtually every Ivanka Trump product on Amazon has at least one scathing review designed as a barb against the businesswoman, particularly as she relates to her father’s political agenda.

Rise of the ‘Activist Reviews’

This is hardly the first time products on Amazon (which did not return request for comment) have been assailed by trolls — just recently Megyn Kelly’s book “Settle For More” was targeted, and the site worked to scrub the hateful comments. These guerrilla attacks, if you will, have become more common in recent years.

“We’ve seen these ‘activist reviews’ for several years but they appear to be getting more common,” said Jason “RetailGeek” Goldberg, ‎SVP commerce and content practice at Razorfish.

“In some ways, these smear campaign reviews are the natural extension of ‘funny fake reviews,’ which have been occurring for a number of years. Amazon even embraced these joke reviews by curating a list of their favorites. So now that the ‘funny’ reviews have taken a negative turn, retailers need to crack down on them in order to preserve the credibility and trust in the whole review system.”

Speaking of fake reviews on Amazon, here is the latest, left on SJWAL by one “Em”.

There are much better critiques of the left out there. Skip this one.
By Em on December 22, 2016
Format: Paperback

The book is comical in its lack of self awareness and hypocrisy. I agree that there are some strains of liberalism that are obnoxious and bad and anti-free speech and so on. But Milo is one of them! One of the many examples: He complains about liberals getting others fired for their beliefs and then is smugly self-congratulatory when it happens to liberals after Gamergate. His examples of “the left” behaving badly include individual nobodies tweeting him. The whole book struck me as petty and quite frankly kind of pathetic.

Amazon is taking fake reviews seriously, but they haven’t designed a proper system for detecting them yet. I expect they will in the next year or two. Once they start banning fake reviewers from being able to access their system at all, and paying a bounty to people who correctly identify them, they’ll be able to clean up their system in no time.

Gisela Hausmann, Amazon e-commerce expert and author of “Naked Truths About Getting Product Reviews on Amazon.com” noted: “Amazon’s algorithm notices disproportionate numbers of negative reviews [and] weeds out these reviews according to their criteria, as defined in their Community Guidelines.”

In time, these reviews will be plucked from the site, and aggressive trolls could face lawsuits for their words, even if they were simply horsing around. Retailers are taking an aggressive stand to crack down on fake reviewers; Amazon has sued more than 1000, for example,” said Goldberg.

There are no “refugees”

It is neither “compassionate” nor “humane” to grant refugee status to any individual. It is now clear that granting residence on the basis of refugee status is an act of war against your own nation and society:

TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested two Turkish nationals currently applying for refugee status for allegedly raping a woman in Kita Ward, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Feb. 22).

At approximately 12:30 a.m. on December 27 of last year, Onder Pinarbasi, 22, and a 16-year-old boy allegedly took the woman, aged in her 30s, to a public toilet near JR Akabane Station and sexually assaulted her. The suspects also stole 9,000 yen in cash from the victim.

Pinarbasi, who has been charged with rape and robbery, claims the boy committed both crimes. The boy admits to only the robbery charge. “I did not force myself upon her,” he is quoted by police in denying the rape accusation, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun (Feb. 22).

The incident occurred after the suspects called out the woman, who was visibly drunk at the time, as she was walking home.

The suspects arrived in Japan last year. They applied for refugee status in August and October, telling the Immigration Bureau of Japan that they did not want to return to Turkey due to “problems that exist between relatives.” While their applications were being examined, the suspects received a visa status granting “special permission to stay in Japan.”

The two men are reportedly two of only 27 refugees recently allowed to enter Japan.

Refugees and immigrants have destroyed America. Other refugees are now attempting to destroy Europe. The very concept of “refugee” needs to be eliminated from the international system. There is no possible benefit to either the nations of the West, or in the long term, the world, to permitting foreigners to invade other countries under the guise of “refugee” status.

There is nothing humane or compassionate about ensuring that there are no safe or civil societies anywhere on Earth.

Berlin truck attacker dead

Shot to death by Italian police at a train station in Milano:

The Berlin attack suspect has been shot dead after a gunfight with police in Milan this morning, Italian police have said. A major international manhunt had been launched for Anis Amri who is suspected of ploughing a lorry into crowds of revellers in the German capital on Monday night, killing 12 and maiming dozens of others.

But the 24-year-old Tunsian asylum seeker has been shot dead in the suburb of Sesto San Giovanni in the northern Italian city of Milan shortly after stepping off a train from France. He pulled a gun on a police patrol after being stopped for a routine ID check before shooting an officer in the shoulder leaving him seriously injured. A shoot out then took place at about 3am local time and he was reportedly heard shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he tried to flee.

He is said to have run for cover and cowered behind a car before being shot dead by a trainee officer who had only been in the job for a matter of months. Police, who had been made aware Amri may have been in the city, had earlier seen a man in his twenties, of North African appearance, outside the deserted Sesto San Giovanni station in the north of the city at 3am. When the patrol approached him, he pulled a 22 calibre pistol from his backpack and shot one of the two police officers in the shoulder, according to Corriere della Sera.

On his body police found a train ticket that helped reconstruct the attacker’s movements in Berlin, revealing how he took a train from Chambery in France and then from Turin to Milan.

That tends to bring events a little closer to home. I’ve been at that train station two or three times. Believe it or not, the Italian police are pretty competent; over the last 50 years they’ve had run-ins with everyone from the Red Brigades to the Sicilian and Calabrian mafia, and have generally kept the peace more successfully than the US police have managed. They train a lot, too; I’ve had the opportunity to watch their training exercises on several occasions.

It wasn’t just the Democrats

In fairness, Obama left America in a weaker, more untenable state too:

The top candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee are positioning their campaigns as a repudiation of what they see as the political legacy of President Barack Obama.

Though they rarely mention the president by name or address his policies, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have sent a clear message that Mr. Obama has left the party in a weakened state.

Messers. Perez and Ellison—along with state chairmen Jaime Harrison of South Carolina and Ray Buckley of New Hampshire, who are also candidates for chairman of the DNC—are seeking a mandate to reverse Obama-era tactics that cut funding and attention to local parties and left Democrats with far less power in Congress, governorships and state legislatures than when his presidency began.

Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. George W. Bush defeated Afghanistan and Iraq, although he blew the occupation. Even George Bush oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama managed to lose a proxy war in Syria, turn Libya into a Somali-style failed state, and abetted the invasions of Europe and the USA.

I’m not saying he was the worst president ever; that disgrace probably has to go to LBJ considering that he was responsible for Vietnam, the Great Society, and the 1965 Immigration Act. But he wasn’t even mediocre.