Let them learn

The God-Emperor is considering pulling Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of California:

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he’s considering pulling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers out of California.

Why? Because he feels the state is giving his administration “no help” in targeting the violent MS-13 gang, especially in Los Angeles.

“We’re getting no help from the state of California,” Trump said from the White House. “Frankly, if I wanted to pull our people from California you would have a crime nest like you’ve never seen in California. All I’d have to do is say ‘ICE and border patrol, let California learn.’”

Trump made those remarks during a meeting at the White House where he also spent a few minutes scolding California.

“You would see crime like nobody’s ever seen crime in this country,” he said of California without federal immigration agents. “And yet we get no help from the state of California.”

He also took a shot at leadership in the state.

“They are doing a lousy management job,” Trump said. “They have the highest taxes in the nation and they don’t know what’s happening out there. Frankly, it’s a disgrace, the sanctuary city situation, the protection of these horrible criminals in California and other places. If we ever pulled our ICE out and we ever said, ‘hey, let California learn and let them figure it out for themselves,’ in two months, they’d be begging for us to come back. They would be begging.”

Would the president really do such a thing?

“You know what, I’m thinking about it,” Trump said.

He absolutely should do it. Abandon California to the Left and let the Mexicans wipe out Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Sacramento, and the rest of the Left Coast lunacy. But ignore their begging. Ignore their screams for help. Send in camera drones to record the inevitable atrocities. Then round up everyone who still advocates immigration, magic dirt, and diversity, and ship them to the Golden State to enjoy the consequences of their favored policies.

That would be true justice. Because they aren’t going to learn any other way, and better to let them learn from the collapse of a single state than from the collapse of the entire United States. They really won’t. Quoth one SJW:

He should do it. The imaginary crime wave will never materialize and I bet California would be a better place without innocent people being ripped from their families. 

Mailvox: Management from below

At Brainstorm last night, one of the subjects we discussed was the common practice of management from below and how some of its effects can be downright devastating on a business. In fact, several of the biggest failures I have ever witnessed were the direct result of subordinates knowingly hiding information from their superiors. It was a spirited discussion, as more than a few people copped to regularly utilizing the practice, and one participant emailed a few of his subsequent thoughts:

I wanted to share some thoughts from last night’s Brainstorm on “Managing from Below”.  No real solutions; just some experiences from work.

My experience with “management from below” comes as part of mentoring junior officers and enlisted on the larger concept of Leadership.  I’m currently group lead for [single-digit] people, all junior to me in rank.  We have about [double-digit] projects or tasks ongoing at any one time.  My peer and I dole out tasks to the group members and pick the critical ones to keep for ourselves.  These projects usually are interrelated or are builders – one relying on another.  We layout processes for completion where needed and lay down internal timelines to meet external requirements. Pretty standard.

For the more junior of the staff, the challenge is how to balance responsibility for their project with how much decision authority do they have, or as my guys would say, flexibility in solution.  In most cases, before they start the work, we’ve talked about what output is needed, the deadlines to hit, external groups who require coordination along the way, possible roadblocks, and how to get past them. Guidance I give is (1) I want the output we agreed upon, (2) I want to meet the time line we agreed to follow, (3) I want to know if there are internal or external factors or “bad actors” the staffer can’t sort out, and (4) I want periodic status updates.  Outside these parameters, unless it’s illegal, immoral, or unethical, find me a solution and get the output to me on time.

The threat for the junior staff is that they don’t want to be seen as someone who needs hand-holding or someone who can’t do their job, so they struggle with things longer than they should, trying to find the solution on their own and avoiding help.  Just as you pointed out last night, they start dissembling and getting vague with status.  The problem is they now unknowingly (or knowingly) violate Rule 3 above.  We call that “Blindsiding Your Boss”, and its a no-no.

A solution that worked for me is the 15-minute stand-up.  A weekly meeting where each team member has about 90 seconds to give hard facts on project status and a meets/does not meet status for the project time line.  Invariably, the people who are having problems with Rule 3 go soft on data.  The “softy” gets pulled aside after the stand-up to get some private questions and sort what the real issues are.  Rule 3 compliers fess up and tell the boss what’s up.  At this point, one or more other staff usually volunteer to help and its tabled.  We finish the 15-minute meeting and go into a huddle to discuss how to resolve the road block.

The staffer who needs help either gets a support intervention to solve an external threat by me or my peer, or a leg up from another junior staffer.  The staffer in the bind still leads the project unless they
ID themselves as unable.  We’ll juggle the projects a bit in most cases and figure out how to get the staffer spun up through another task or project.

This method seems to work in most cases.  Most staffers who see roadblocks or issues now don’t wait for Monday to let my peer and me know about issues they can’t solve.  Often a short huddle gives them a couple fresh ideas and they go back at it.  Sometimes we have to do more to sort the issue, but we aren’t surprised by it before it is too late to recover.  We call this “managing the boss” and its really about keeping the boss informed so the project can succeed, but it’s not what you were talking about last night.  What you were talking about is “assuming responsibility you don’t have”.

My concern with some of the folks in Brainstorm is that as subject matter experts, we get to thinking we *know* the real solution.  Why can’t management see it?  Why can’t the boss understand it?  This is usually due to the subject matter expert having a very narrow view of the problem.  This then devolves into taking actions without talking to management and leadership, due to either fear or pride.  Problem is if the SME has no clue as to the larger organizational challenges or direction they can tank the larger projects.  People get used to your version of “managing the boss”, thinking they are saving the company when they do it or it became a self-preservation tool, and they stick with it when they go elsewhere in many instances.  It’s hard to break someone out of this once they fall into this habit.

Cannibalism is a social construct

Who are the indigenous French to complain about the dietary customs of the new French? After all, the customs of the New France are just as legitimate as the frog-eating, cheese-mongering, wine-drinking customs of the old one, right?

Three men have been arrested in the heavily migrant-populated Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois for attacking a man by biting at his face and then eating the pieces of flesh they had bitten off.

The men, who all originally came from the African island nation of Cape Verde, were arrested on Sunday after they attacked a man who was walking in the Hector-Berlioz alley at around 6 pm and bit off pieces his ear and lower lip, Le Parisien reports.

The victim was able to fight off the attackers, wounding one of them in the ankle, before police arrived a short time later and arrested the three Africans.

Both the victim and the injured man were then taken to Montfermeil hospital.

Meanwhile, archeologists remind us that the land is yours only as long as you are willing to defend it against immigrants.

Stonehenge has a proud place in Britain’s history as one of the wonders of the world and the best-known prehistoric monument in Europe. But, according to a major new study, modern-day Britons are barely related to the ingenious Neolithic farmers who built the monument 5,000 years ago.

Instead the British are related to the ‘Beaker people’ who travelled from modern-day Holland and all but wiped out Stonehenge’s creators. Many experts believed it was just Beaker pottery-making and culture which was exported to Britain between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago – not the people themselves. But the new evidence comes from DNA analysis of 400 prehistoric skeletons, some from after Stonehenge and others born before it was created…. The genes of these ancient people provide enough clues to determine that Beakers travelled here from Holland and took over in a few centuries. They replaced 90 per cent of the Neolithic farmers who built the monument and had lived here for 1,500 years.

The average American can’t imagine that he and his culture will ever go the way of the Stonehengens and the American Indians. And yet, it is already half-gone and the land is already more than half-occupied by Not Americans. Frankly, given the propensities of his replacements, white Americans aren’t even going to end up with reservations or casinos.

It worked so well for Zimbabwe

South Africa’s new president is following in Mugabe’s footsteps:

If you’ve been following much international news, you’ve probably heard that, after literally years of scandal, abuse, and incompetence, South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma was finally forced to resign last week.

This is a big deal for South Africa. The country has been suffering for nearly a decade under Zuma’s corruption. And people are certainly hoping that the new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, will represent a positive, new chapter for South Africa.

Yesterday Ramaphosa addressed the nation’s parliament in Cape Town and made clear that his priority is to heal the divisions and injustice of the past, going all the way back to the original European colonists in the 1600s taking land from the indigenous tribes.

Ramaphosa called this “original sin”, and stated that he wants to see “the return of the land to the people from whom it was taken… to heal the divisions of the past.”

How does he plan on doing that?

Confiscation. Specifically– confiscation without compensation.

“The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.”

Ramaphosa minced no words: he’s talking about taking land from white farmers and giving it to black South Africans.

Astonishingly, he followed up that statement by saying, “We will handle it in a way that is not going to damage our economy. . .”

Wow, what a relief. For a minute it sounded like South Africa wants to do what Zimbabwe did several years ago.

Oh wait a minute.

That’s exactly what Zimbabwe did.

At least South Africa’s whites being dispossessed of the uninhabited, once-barren land that their forefathers settled and made fertile can content themselves with the knowledge that no one will be able to call them racist.

Wait a minute….

In any event, I look forward to the future tear-stained appeals on behalf of the poor children of South Africa, who through no fault of their own are starving and are in desperate need of European assistance. No doubt they will be very moving indeed. Are we not the world?

Wait a minute….

Cerno, Posobiec banned by Medium

The political censorship of Big Social continues to get worse:

The online publishing platform Medium has suspended the accounts of prominent far-right figures Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer. Medium spokesperson Sandee Roston told The Hill that the company does “not comment on individual accounts.”

Roston did point to a Feb. 7 post detailing an update to its rules.

“We have all seen an increase and evolution of online hate, abuse, harassment, and disinformation, along with ever-evolving campaigns of fraud and spam,” Medium’s rules update reads. “We have strengthened our policies around this type of behavior. We do not allow calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above,” the new rules specify.

The platform’s new rules include banning misinformation campaigns and lets the company consider “off-platform action,” in its decision to ban users.

In its previous set of rules, the company had billed itself as a “free and open platform for anyone to write their views and opinions,” and said it believes “free expression deserves a lot of leeway, so we generally think the best response to bad ideas is good ideas, not censorship.

This language has been scrubbed from the current version of its platform rules.

Notice that careful avoidance of the label “Alt-Right” did nothing to save any of them from targeting by SJWs. This is why we absolutely MUST build our own platforms. Without them, the Left will be successful in its determination to deny a platform to everyone who refuses to publicly submit to its dogma of Tolerance, Equality, Progressivism, Inclusivity, and Diversity.

EXCERPT: African Adventures

Just another tale of Darkest Africa, courtesy of one Lawdog, Esq. Also available in audiobook and paperback.

FILE 13: Flying Monkeys

The company that contracted to fly into, and out of, the Bendel State of Nigeria wasn’t real picky about the background of the pilots it hired. Matter-of-fact, near as I could tell, there were two big requirements: 1) You had to be able to fly, and, 2) You had to be able to land. Pretty sure that #2 was the more important.

The local company that supplied aero service into, and out of, Warri International Aeroport had a pilot named Bob.

Bob wasn’t Russian. Matter-of-fact, Bob would go on at length, in a nigh-unintelligible Russian accent, usually while potted on vodka, and waving his arms with their Cyrillic tattoos, as to his not-Russian-ness.

This being West Africa at the time, the old hands simply agreed with him, and ignored his singing of Soviet marching songs at the top of his lungs at three in the AM.

Bob was also an excellent pilot, and his baby was a C-119 Flying Boxcar that was the major hauling aeroplane for our little patch of the jungle.

The company that Bob worked for had an extremely logical training process. If you were brand-new to Africa, you would fly with an old Africa hand until said worthy decided you were less inclined to prang an expensive aeroplane and kill yourself in the process, and you got a plane.

Well, Bob got this new kid with a brand-new pilot’s licence and a hankering to see Africa, and it was not a happy match.

Seems like Africa wasn’t exactly matching up to the kid’s expectations; high on the list being the fact that Bob was frequently one-and-a-half sheets to the wind when flying.

One day the kid stomped onto the plane past the locals, past the livestock, past something angry in a sack, up to the flight deck. It is a fact of life in Africa that if you get on a bush cargo plane with bunch of locals, there is always something angry in a burlap sack. Upon reaching the flight deck, he learned that Bob was not aboard.

A subsequent search found Bob, completely and totally fit-shaced, asleep in the pilot/radio shack/tower.

This was the Last Straw as far as Junior is concerned. There are regulations, damn it!

Junior went and grabbed another newbie, this one apparently still with egg yolk behind his ears, and our intrepid pair of birdmen mounted their steed for the trip into Lagos.

The locals, who aren’t exactly gormless, immediately grabbed Co-Pilot Egg-Tooth, gently lofted him out the back door, carried Bob from the pilot shack, planted him in the left seat and began to ply him with coffee, all much to the sputtered indignation of Junior.

Bob surfaced enough to figure out up from down, which is fairly important for a pilot, I’m told, and they took off.

They were not very long in the air before the locals decided to celebrate their victory by building a fire on the back deck and spit-roasting Angry Sack for brekkie. Angry Sack apparently held opinions most firm about this, and as soon as the sack came open, did a runner.

This, of course, led to the locals snatching up machetes and tear-arsing off after their breakfast. Angry Sack made three laps through the flight-deck to the locals two before Junior lost his tiny little mind, screamed, leapt to his feet, vaulted into the back and began to utter thundering denunciations of Africa in general, and the passengers in particular. Fingers were waved! Regulations were cited! Heritage, manners, sexual proclivities, and levels of civilization were denounced in fine rolling language to the deep appreciation of the locals, who were passing a gurgling jug around the back deck in silent admiration of a fine oration.

Unfortunately, Junior didn’t realize that his vault into the back of the aerocraft had landed him standing four-square in the campfire built for the roasting of Angry Sack.

When the C-119 landed in Lagos, Junior was carried off in a litter to a standing ovation, which, sadly, he apparently did not appreciate in the least, but before being loaded into the ambulance, he managed to snarl a series of promises at Bob, not the least of which was that Junior believed that not even the Nigerian government would let Bob fly anywhere without a co-pilot, and that would give Junior enough time to have Bob’s license to fly yanked, with prejudice.

Bob belched meditatively, and while the plane was being refueled, he wandered over to the edge of the tarmac, paid ten Naira for a chimpanzee, and another Naira for the gimme hat the chimp’s previous owner was wearing.

He then boarded the plane, buckled the ape into the co-pilot’s seat, crammed the gimme hat onto the chimpanzee’s head, clamped the radio headset over the hat, and took off for Warri International.

Brainstorm tonight

Regardless of what it said on your invite, it is tonight at 7 PM EST. While their system is quite good for the most part, I’m still wrestling with the way they handle time zones. So, it’s at 7 PM. It’s quasi-open, which means that at 6:55 PM, I’ll release the password here to fill up the remaining spots. (We only have 100). So, if you’re an invited Brainstormer who intends to attend, please try to log in by then.

I already have a request in to create reserved seats. For some reason, none of these webinar services seem to grasp the obvious need for them.

UPDATE: We have about 40 open seats tonight. To attend go here: https://voxday.clickmeeting.com/open-brainstorm-february. Password: idka

Phone Participant PIN: 361133#

Gone to his reward

“The GREAT Billy Graham is dead. There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man.”
– President Trump

The world’s best-known evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, died Wednesday. He was 99. From the gangly 16-year-old baseball-loving teen who found Christ at a tent revival, Graham went on to become an international media darling, a preacher to a dozen presidents and the voice of solace in times of national heartbreak. He was America’s pastor. 

I once heard Billy Graham preach in person in a football stadium. It was… utterly uninspiring. But the experience was also one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen. Because, you see, when he finished, I was thinking to myself, well, that was certainly a bust.

But then people started coming forward. First dozens, then hundreds. In the end, thousands of people came forward in response to the call. It was totally inexplicable. I had seldom been more astonished in my life, before or since.

A few years later, I read something Billy Graham said about his crusades. He said that before he goes anywhere to preach, he asks thousands of Christians in the area to commit to pray for the events, to pray for God to prepare the hearts of those who will be attending. These volunteers pray for months ahead of time. Then, Rev. Graham explained, he shows up, tells the crowd little more than, “God loves you and you need Jesus Christ,” and the Holy Spirit does the rest.

Now, I can’t prove that is what happened with science, but all I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever it is that made Billy Graham such an astonishingly powerful preacher of the Gospel, it wasn’t his eloquence, his rhetoric, or his logic. But he was a true servant of God and follower of Jesus Christ. May his reward be great indeed.

More science fraud at NOAA

Weather science is increasingly little more than historical fiction.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating  ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data.
This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees….

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

Homewood first smelt a rat when he examined the New York data sets.

He was particularly puzzled at NOAA’s treatment of the especially cold winter that ravaged New York in 2013/14.

It seems we need a fourth neologism…