Vote until you get it right

The EU never changes its totalitarian tactics:

EU leaders sparked a backlash last night after calling for a second referendum to allow voters to ‘change their view’ on Brexit. In separate interventions, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta urged Theresa May to drop her opposition to a second referendum.

Their comments prompted an angry response in the UK, with Mrs May responding: ‘There will be no second referendum.’

Maltese PM Joseph Muscat, who has been dogged by questions about a corruption scandal, claimed EU leaders were ‘almost unanimous’ in wanting Britain to change its mind…. The EU has a long history of ignoring inconvenient referendum results or forcing countries to vote again. The most famous example is Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, which was overturned in a second referendum after intense pressure from Brussels.

But Mrs May has repeatedly said she will not countenance a second referendum – a message she repeated to EU leaders ‘very firmly’ at a dinner in Salzburg on Wednesday night.

Fortunately, the fallout from this typical tone-deafness should be strong enough to let Britain simply Brexit without any deal, which is the best possible path forward and will save it more than $40 billion in an exit tax.

Brexiteers and Remainers today declared Theresa May’s Chequers plan dead after it was brutally savaged by the EU at a crucial summit.

The Prime Minister made a plea to European leaders to compromise as she desperately tries to get a deal agreed with less than two months to go in negotiations.

But leaders across the EU lined up to savage her plans in a series of scathing press conferences at the Salzburg summit today.

EU council chief Donald Tusk insisted her Chequers proposal ‘will not work’ while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said ‘substantial progress’ is still needed.

A visibly angry Mrs May hit back at the EU – insisting that her plan remains the only serious and credible proposal on the table. But she was hit with a fresh onslaught by her own MPs in Britain who said the damning verdict has killed off her Brexit blueprint.

Tory MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘I think Chequers now has no supporters at all. I doubt even the Downing Street cat is any longer backing the Chequers plan. ‘I think the time has come for Mrs May to say “This is not going to work”.’

And fellow Conservative and arch Remainer Anna Soubry said: ‘Having been nailed to its perch this Chequers parrot is no more, it is bereft of life, it rests in peace, it is indeed an ex parrot.

Now it is time for Italy and Hungary to arrange their own escapes from the Fifth Reich.

The excuses start early

The media is already planting the seeds for explaining away the mysterious absence of the Democrats much-predicted “Blue Wave” in November:

Many Texas Democrats were demoralized Tuesday, when Republican Pete Flores defeated Democrat Pete Gallego in a runoff special election for the Texas Senate seat vacated in June by the resignation of Democrat Carlos Uresti.

They should be demoralized. It was a potentially consequential loss. Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for it. Flores’ victory doesn’t necessarily suggest that a “red wave” is coming to Texas in this year’s midterm elections, as many Republicans were quick to claim. But the Texas Democratic Party’s response to Gallego’s defeat does not augur well for their prospects of competing successfully.

I have said before, and I will say again, there will be no “Blue Wave” in November. I don’t know if I am more amused or disappointed in those of you who – again – insist on falling for the mainstream media narrative.

Have you truly not figured out yet that they cannot be trusted? Do you truly not realize that they knowingly speak falsehoods, hoping to transform those falsehoods into truth by convincing you to accept their false narrative?

Even when the economy is not doing well, even when the Democrats are not nominating their most left-wing, most diverse, most unelectable candidates, the average Republican midterm loss is only 11 seats. This would reduce the Republican majority from 43 seats to 32 seats. Hardly a cause for panic.

UN backs Soros

The UN and the EU are desperately trying to get nationalist Hungary to back down and accept foreign invasion before more countries are inspired to defend themselves against the globalist evil:

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has accused the UN human rights watchdog of “spreading lies” about his country, saying that immigration was not a “fundamental human right.”
The official took aim at the “independent experts” with the UN Human Rights Council, stating they “should not be independent from the truth.”

“Recently, unfortunately, some UN officials started to spread lies against and about my country,” Szijjarto told the UN body’s meeting on Wednesday.

Such officials would like to “force on us impossible things,” namely allowing illegal migrants into the country, Szijjarto stated. “They say that migration is a fundamental human right, which is a lie,” he stressed.

The harsh statement of the foreign minister came as a response to criticism against Hungarian anti-immigration policies. Last week, the UN rights body blasted the so-called ‘Stop Soros’ law, adopted by the country’s government back in July. The UN paper said Hungary “attacks against civil society, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers” with the law, adding that it’s against the international human rights law and poses a threat to the “values” of the whole European Union.

It added that it targets the critical “civil society” and fuels “hostility, xenophobia and … discrimination against migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and all those trying to provide them support.”

The ‘Stop Soros’ law has imposed restrictions on foreign NGOs, which work with migrants, obliging them to seek licenses from the government. It also criminalized aiding migrants, namely “providing financial or property benefit” to them or simply informing them about the asylum-seeking procedures. Those who do so could now face 12 months in jail.

Hungary is nationalist because Hungary understands the long-term costs of being invaded much better than most nations do. The Hungarian leadership is doing what the Right far too often fails to do, which is go on the offensive against its enemies. If all you do is play defense, you will lose. It’s guaranteed. Every party of the Right, from Myanmar to the USA, would be well advised to start aggressively pushing for laws banning the principles, funding, activities, and organizations of the Left.

So-called “freedom of speech” was always a trap. As others have noted, they simply define your speech as violence even as they define their violence as speech.

Mediocre author denies authorial intent

One of the reasons John Scalzi has never been able to lift himself out of mediocrity except by coloring Robert Heinlein by the numbers is that he doesn’t understand the first thing about understand and creating characters. Or, apparently, self-contradiction.

“I created Bert,” says Frank Oz. “I know what and who he is.” And no, he isn’t gay.

John Scalzi
Frank Oz says that Bert’s not gay and he should know because he created him. I mean, Frank, a lot of parents feel the same, but then their kids come out anyway.

John Scalzi
To the folks who are asserting that fictional characters don’t have genders, or orientations, or have physical sex: I think you may be doing fiction wrong.

Mark Kern
Okay Scalzi, all your characters in all your novels are Trump loving, cis, Republicans. I demand you acknowledge that. You too, JK Rowling. I don’t care if you created them.

McRapey is so dumb that he doesn’t even understand the intrinsic self-contradiction of his expressed positions. First, Frank Oz is correct; the creator defines the character. If we can unilaterally declare, ex post facto, that Bert and Ernie are gay, then we can also declare that Darth Vader is not Luke’s father, but rather, Luke’s Sigma Chi fraternity brother, that Gimli is not a Dwarf, but a short, bearded Elf, and that Dumbledore is a pedophile who repeatedly abused Harry Potter.

Actually, it might not be long before JK Rowling, in her enthusiasm for all things LGBTP, self-righteously announces the latter. It would explain a lot about those tedious novels.

In any event, the idea that fictional characters have genders, orientations, and engage in sex, but that their characteristics and behaviors are not established by their creators is not only self-contradictory, it is as intrinsically nonsensical as claiming that a man is really a woman.

Of course, if Scalzi’s monovocal dialogue is any guide, all of his characters, male and female, human and alien, are actually himself. Which may explain his incompetence with regards to these matters.

Quotes to live by

The Maximally Pathetic Schema: Xs who labor to convince Ys that “I’m not one of those despicable Zs!,” when in fact it is obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Ys see no difference between Xs and Zs, don’t care anyway, and would love to throw both Xs and Zs into a gulag.
– Adrian Vermeule

The winning side is Chaos and Unreason—mythologically, the monsters—but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The second invasion of America

The ongoing foreign invasion of the USA is now larger than the population of the UK or France and comprises the 21st largest “nation” in the world:

Nearly half of the residents in the nation’s five biggest cities do not speak English at home, choosing instead their native language, according to the latest Census Bureau data that details the impact of a decade of soft immigration policies.

Overall, a record 67 million do not speak English at home, said the bureau. That is nearly double in 27 years.

In its just-released analysis of the Census data, the Center for Immigration Studies said, “As a share of the population, 21.8 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — roughly double the 11 percent in 1980.”

The Center added, “In America’s five largest cities, 48 percent of residents now speak a language other than English at home. In New York City and Houston it is 49 percent; in Los Angeles it is 59 percent; in Chicago it is 36 percent; and in Phoenix it is 38 percent.”

Based on the historical precedents, the War for the Magic Dirt is going to be of a similar scale to WWII, only it has the potential to be considerably more vicious due to the complete absence of national borders. The only good news is that the various invader population centers are fairly isolated and are almost entirely incapable of self-sustenance.

No “Blue Wave” in November

I’ve said it before, and I have no doubt that I’ll be saying it again. There will be no “Blue Wave” of Democrats being elected in November:

Voters elected political newcomer Pete Flores to the Texas Senate on Tuesday, flipping a Democratic district red for the first time in 139 years and bolstering Republicans’ supermajority in the chamber ahead of the November elections.

A retired game warden, Flores defeated former state and U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego for the Senate District 19 seat after receiving backing from some of the state’s most prominent politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and U.S. Sens John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

“We conservatives are conservative in the way we make approaches. The gunfight’s not over until the last shot’s fired,” Flores told the Express-News after Gallego conceded in a phone call just before 9 p.m. “The last shot’s been fired.”

According the Secretary of State’s website, Flores won with 53 percent of the vote to Gallego’s 47 percent with 44,487 ballots cast.

In his victory speech, Flores reflected about the historic significance of his win and the job ahead.

“This district has not been Republican since Reconstruction. And in September of 2018, it’s Republican once again,” Flores told supporters. “The work starts tomorrow.”

Christian Archer, Gallego’s campaign strategist, said he was shocked by the results.

Hillary Clinton won the district by 12 percentage points in 2016. Looks likes Trumpslide 2020 is already gathering momentum.

Arkstream: The Ember War campaign

From the transcript of the Arkstream:

I’m excited about this. We we have another crowdfunding campaign that’s going on, that’s been very successful, Alt-Hero: Q, some of you are probably already backing that one, but Ember War is significant in a different way. It’s significant because this is the first time that a major science fiction writer is doing a comics-related crowdfunding and so this is potentially quite significant. Just like the original Alt-Hero, this is an experiment. The magic of crowdfunding is not that you can get people to give you a lot of money if you’re lucky, if you happen to hit the right sweet spot at the right time, the magic of crowdfunding is that it tells you where the demand is ahead of time.

And you know, we weren’t that serious about getting into comics originally. I’d had people lobbying me for three years to do it, and finally I said, “okay fine,  we’ll see if there is genuine demand for it.” As it turned out as you know there turned out to be ten times more demand for it than we ever imagined, and so this is a test, this is an experiment. If you like military science fiction, if you want to see more military science fiction turned into graphic novels, it would be a very,  very good idea to support the Ember War campaign even if you’re not familiar with either Richard Fox or the Ember War Saga. I don’t think that you’ll be disappointed because it is a really good story.