We won’t see this on YouTube

I tend to expect any videos of the reported shooting at YouTube will be censored in a hurry:

Police have confirmed an active shooter at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno Tuesday afternoon. The shooting appears to have happened in an outdoor cafe on the grounds of the facility.

Police were seen laying down evidence markers near the seating area of the cafe. People near the area reported hearing shots fired, police activity and lockdown procedures.

KPIX 5 reporter Andria Borba said at least two Homeland Security units were responding. Police radio transmissions describe casualties being taken to local hospitals. San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the hospital received patients from the incident but could not confirm a number.

I’m not saying this was necessarily a false flag, but it’s pretty obvious at this point that the gun control nuts weren’t getting sufficient traction out of the Parkland crisis actors.

UPDATE: Or perhaps it was just Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

ABC reports that she is a white woman wearing a dark top and a headscarf.  She reportedly came through the back door and fired at least 20 shots, according to an unnamed law enforcement source. Witnesses say there were multiple injuries but no fatalities have been reported.

Perhaps they should rethink that whole “gun-free zone” concept.

UPDATE: No, it’s a domestic.

Woman ‘shoots her boyfriend before killing herself’ after going on gun rampage at YouTube’s California HQ and injuring four people 

Government by Facebook

This strikes me as an astonishingly horrific idea:

The Facebook founder is fighting to wrest back control of the data breach scandal alarming the world, but his ambitions for the social network are nothing short of chilling.

The founder of the world’s most popular social platform outlined his ambitions for Facebook to act as a democratic system, with an independent “Supreme Court”, which people will be able to petition for their content to be restored.

“I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal,” said the 33-year-old, positioning the social media network almost as its own state, although staff are not elected. “I think we can build that internally as a first step.

“What I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.”

Considering that the Zuckerbot has spent years learning Mandarin, one would think that he would be smart enough to do the math and realize that global democracy necessarily means rule by Chinese social norms and values.

And yet, that would be preferable to rule by the Zuckerbot’s bizarre values… which one certainly cannot describe as “norms”.

Google, the Damned

Fox News notes that the satanists at Google ostentatiously refuse to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For the 18th year in a row, Google has no doodle to celebrate Easter, and Christians are angry on this holy day.

Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars editor-at-large, tweeted Sunday about Christianity’s most joyful day: ‏”So Google has a doodle for every obscure ‘woke’ person/event imaginable, but nothing for Easter? #EasterSunday”

James Woods retweeted it, saying: “They loathe Christians. Plain and simple.”

A spokesdemon defended the depraved corporation with all the adroitness and honesty of its Father, the Devil.

‘Doodles may appear for some non-religious celebrations that have grown out of religious holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, Holi’s Festival of Colors, Tu B’Av and the December holiday period, but we don’t include religious imagery or symbolism as part of these.’

 Yes, who doesn’t celebrate whatever 2B’@Vz  is supposed to be? You know, there appears to be an observable pattern here….

I’m not angry, myself. I’m just amused. Because one day every knee shall bow before Jesus Christ and every tongue will admit that he is Lord, including those belonging to these angry, evil people exhibiting their impotence in such a foolish and petty manner.

In fairness, he’s not a conservative

The Atlantic magazine hired conservative columnist Kevin Williamson as a contributor March 22. Liberal outlets are already calling for his firing.

Williamson is a veteran columnist from National Review. He’s one of four people The Atlantic tapped to head up its new ‘Ideas’ section wherein writers discuss the political philosophies of the day. It doesn’t matter to the writers at Slate and The New Republic that liberals outnumber Williamson on the page three to one — even a single conservative is too many.

Why we crack down hard

Takimag’s elimination of its comment section underlines why the moderators and I act so swiftly, and ruthlessly, to eliminate commenters who even appear to be inclined to attempt disrupting the discourse, hijacking the mic, changing the subject, or disqualifying and discrediting me.

While we would prefer to have a free and open forum for our readers, a few bad eggs seem incapable of communicating as though they were in good company and have in so doing, ruined it for the the rest of you. So in a way, yes, you can blame (((them))), or at least those who blame (((them))), for this gag.

However, many of you do have something to add, and we would like to hear from you. Please email the mailroom so that we may post a selection of letters from our readers on a weekly basis, and in so doing, perhaps raise the bar above the pale from where it fell off.

As many of you will appreciate, Takimag is run like a dictatorship, rather than a nanny state, and therefore a moderated site is not an option we are considering at this time. Up until now moderation has been ineffective and seems to only encourage the bastards who ruin the exchanges many of you enjoy and will likely miss.

At this point, we would be ever so grateful if you would kindly give the steady stream of childish threats to abandon Takimag forever a rest and be grateful we provide this platform for you and our writers, and that they have something intelligent to say week after week.

For more than a decade, we kept the comments open and anonymous while primarily focusing our moderation efforts on the trolls, of the psychologically unstable, ideological, and professional varieties, as they popped up. This approach was fairly effective, but time-consuming. However, as our understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy has developed and deepened, we’ve come to understand that there are certain classes of commenters who will reliably, over time, become disruptive even if it is not their intention to do so. We also found the task of moderation to be increasingly Sisyphean, as the more stubborn trolls simply changed their names again and again and again. Hence my decision to lock down the comments and limit them to registered commenters.

Now, one of the strengths of this blog is the pattern recognition possessed by both me and the long-term commenters. If we haven’t seen it all before, we’ve seen an awful lot of it. So, if you’re a monomaniac, an attention seeker, or someone who is “just having fun”, the chances are that you’re not going to last long before going into the spam trap. To summarize, if you insist on creating work for me and the moderators, for any reason, then we don’t want you here. Don’t ignore or blow off a warning, because the chances are there will not be a second one. The blog was here before you started commenting and it will be here long after you stop.

Given the trouble that some commenters appear to be having with Blogger not playing nicely with their browser, I should also point out that I will always tell you that you are being spammed. If you have not been so informed, then you should assume that the issue is with your browser, not your commenting status, and that the only possible fix is on your end. So, if you are having problems commenting, please don’t ask me or inform me about it. There is literally nothing I can do for you in that regard, except tell you to try different browsers and browser settings.

It’s been two months or so since I locked down the comments and I have to say that despite a few dire predictions, the end result has been entirely satisfactory. Traffic remains strong, the number of trolls has been significantly reduced, and the amount of spam has fallen by more than 95 percent.

Chicago Typewriter: Gold Logo edition

Chicago Typewriter is now in print and is already available from Castalia Books Direct! It is 60 pages and printed in Dark Legion’s premium 10×7 format, and retails for $7.99. If you buy one of the first 2,500 copies, you will receive a Gold Logo edition, as shown on the image here.

In 1920s Chicago, the criminal underworld is more than vice, racketeering, and bootlegging.

During a brutal territory dispute with the Chicago Outfit, Emilio Enzo and his associates discovered just how deeply involved the criminal underworld is in the occult and supernatural. Using hidden pathways to our world, forces of pure evil have worked in secret to maintain their dark stronghold on the city. Now those forces are back to take their revenge on the one man willing to challenge their reign by stealing the soul of his girlfriend Kat.

While visiting an old shop full of oddities, Emilio comes across an antique ribbon for a typewriter with an unusual history. And after bringing the strange red ribbon home and spooling it into his machine, he is startled when it begins to communicate with him at night….

1920s Prohibition-era Chicago collides with the hidden world in this debut graphic novel from Brandon Fiadino.

You can see all four Arkhaven and Dark Legion Comics currently available in print here. The gold Logo edition of Chicago Typewriter should be available via Amazon soon.

The Lightbringer+

The God-Emperor continues to be more popular with the US electorate than Obama ever was.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating hit 50 percent in Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll Monday, which puts him ahead of his predecessor at the same point in the presidency. The last time Trump hit 50 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll was February 27. At the time, he was generally within the 47-50 percent range. The President’s approval rating outpaces that of former President Barack Obama, who sat at 46 percent in Rasmussen’s tracking poll on April 2, 2010.

But the more important thing about Trump’s persistent popularity is the way this reveals the increasingly limited ability of the US media to influence the way the American people think. They are throwing literally everything and the kitchen sink at this man and yet none of it sticks to him.

At this point, he could go down to the border, personally machine gun invading immigrants, and his popularity would increase 10 percent. The Stormy Daniels affair reveals that we have reached the point of negative returns for media hit pieces on the president.

The Washington Post is complaining that Trump is becoming increasingly hardline on immigration.

President Trump’s sharp shift in tone on immigration this week from would-be dealmaker back to the hard-line stance he campaigned on comes amid signs that some of his conservative base is growing impatient for him to fulfill promises on the border wall and other measures to crack down on illegal immigration.

Over the past two days, Trump has issued declarations on Twitter that shut the door on a legislative deal to protect young undocumented immigrants from deportation, blamed Democrats for the failure, demanded the Mexican government take stronger action to close the border, and conflated a refu­gee crisis from Central America with the Obama-era deferred-action program that Trump ended in the fall.

Here is hoping that we will see truly hardline policies put in place soon. His conservative base is right. It is time to send them back and build the wall.

But what about the economy?

Clearly the West cannot permit the Israelis to deprive their economy of the benefit of these tens of thousands of hard-working immigrants who are merely seeking a better life for them and their children.

Israel has announced it will cancel its plans to deport tens of thousands of African migrants after a deal was agreed to send 16,000 of them to Western countries.

A minimum of 16,250 migrants will be resettled in Canada, Italy, Germany and other Western nations under the agreement announced in a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

Under the deal with the UNHCR, Israel said it plans to relocate more than 16,000 migrants to Western countries.

‘This is a unique agreement between the UN commissioner and the state of Israel, that takes 16,250 people out, takes them out to developed countries like Canada, or Germany and Italy – that is the commitment the UN High Commissioner has made – to organise it and even to fund it,’ Netanyahu said on live television.

The God-Emperor should inform Prime Minister Netanyahu that the USA will subsequently be providing all of its aid to Israel in the form of economy-boosting immigrants. I understand there are a few thousand candidates on their way from Central America.

Behavioral scaling and immigration

From Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson

The availability and quality of food can also move groups along behavioral scales. Well-fed honeybee colonies are very tolerant of intruding workers from nearby hives, letting them penetrate the nest and even take supplies. But when the same colonies are allowed to go without food for several days, they attack every intruder at the nest entrance. In general, primates also become increasingly intolerant of strangers and aggressive toward other group members during times of food shortages.

I tend to doubt it is a coincidence that this unprecedented and uncharacteristic openness to immigration and disregard for national borders is entirely unrelated to the fact that the West is fatter and more overfed than ever before in human history.

With societies, as with individuals, lean is mean, hard, and dangerous. Fat is soft, weak, and defenseless.

A noble act

Peter Hitchens highlights the sacrifice of a new Christian who became a martyr for the faith:

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been. We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.

But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.

He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.

Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.

Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.

But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he (knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.

Beltrame’s noble sacrifice demonstrates once more that Christianity is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of Western civilization.