The crime of noticing

West Ham United is under fire because the director of transfers is both astute enough to realize that fielding an all-African soccer team is sub-optimal player management and naive enough to have explained his reasoning.

Henry sent an email on January 27 — in response to an inquiry about a footballer of Cameroonian descent — to another senior West Ham official and an agent. In the email, Henry wrote: ‘We don’t want any more Africans and he’s not good enough. I sent Thomas to watch him and the other lad last week and he said no. If Palace take them good luck.’ Sportsmail knows the identity of both recipients but a stipulation before being sent the email was that they should remain anonymous.

Henry was asked if there is a club policy regarding African players. Initially he replied ‘no’, only to be informed that we understand he has told more than one agent in the last month that the club does not want any more African players.

Henry then confirmed it was true and suggested it was a policy supported by club management. ‘Yeah,’ Henry replied. ‘Because we had three and we felt we didn’t particularly want any more African players.’

Asked why, Henry replied: ‘Erm, no reason. It’s nothing racist at all. It’s just sometimes they can have a bad attitude.

‘We had problems with Sakho, with Diafra Sakho. We find that when they are not in the team they cause mayhem. It’s nothing against the African race at all.

‘I mean, look, there are top African players. There’s not a problem with them. It’s just sometimes they cause a lot of problems when they are not playing, as we had with Diafra. He’s left, so great. It’s nothing personal at all.’

Asked if he thought his view was discriminatory towards African players, Henry asked: ‘In what way?’

Asked then if he thought his comments amounted to a slight on African players, he replied: ‘No. I don’t know what you are trying to get at here. All I said was, look, we have a great lad in Kouyate, he’s brilliant, a great player for us, he’s a good lad.

‘But the likes of Sakho have caused mayhem. When he’s not playing … he always wants a new deal. That’s all it was. It was nothing discriminatory at all.

‘I could say we get offered Russian players. I just find with Russian players that they don’t settle in England. It’s like Italians. How many Italians come and settle in England? As a club we are not discriminatory at all.

‘If you’ve got too many, they all sit together and it becomes a situation where you can have problems. But then you can have problems with English players. I don’t know what you are driving at.’

The ironic thing is that West Ham already has six Africans on the first team that the director brought in. So, the man is clearly not racist or unwilling to employ Africans. What is he supposed to do, bring in more players they think aren’t good enough to start and are likely to cause trouble because they have too much time on their hands?

This is one reason I never explain myself or my reasoning to anyone anymore, except when I feel that doing so is going to serve my objectives in some way. I certainly don’t explain myself in response to questions, much less demands that I do so. It is almost as important to never explain your reasons for your actions as it is to never apologize. Just as an apology is taken by some as an admission of guilt, an explanation is taken as an invitation to a debate.

Consider the difference when you’re asked if you are going to go somewhere you don’t want to go.

  1. Are you going to the meeting? No. Why not? I am not going. Um, well, okay….
  2. Are you going to the meeting? No. Why not? Well, I’m busy. Come on, I can see that you’re not that busy. Well, also, I don’t like so-and-so. I don’t think he’s going to be there. And even if he is, you can just ignore him. But… but I don’t want to go! Well, you have no reason not to go. Disqualified. See you there at three!

No matter what reasoning you provide, someone can always invent an excuse to not accept that reasoning and then insist that you have to do what you don’t want to do or that you truly are what you deny being. So don’t give them the opening. All Henry should have said was “no, we don’t want him.” That would have saved him his job and his club a considerable amount of trouble.

And when people ask “why”, just tell them “what part of ‘no’ did you find hard to understand? I am not in the habit of explaining myself.” While there are those to whom we owe explanations, the vast majority of people who ask for explanations do not merit them. I get emails every day asking me to explain my position on X, Y, or Z. In most cases, I simply ignore them.

The only correct response to “I don’t understand why you believe XYZ” is “I don’t care what you understand.” The vast majority of people demanding explanations are not seeking to learn, they are seeking to argue.

The new line in the sand

Democrats must really be nervous about what is in the Nunes memo. They’re getting increasingly desperate about keeping the contents out of the public eye:

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are accusing Republicans on the panel of secretly making changes to a controversial, GOP-drafted memo alleging abuse of spying laws before sending it to the White House for potential public release.

In the latest partisan exchange between members of the committee, Democrats say the committee now must recall the memo from the White House, where the president is currently weighing whether to release the document, arguing that the document is not the version members voted to declassify earlier this week. The memo purports to show FBI abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

Adam Schiff@RepAdamSchiff
BREAKING: Discovered late tonight that Chairman Nunes made material changes to the memo he sent to White House – changes not approved by the Committee. White House therefore reviewing a document the Committee has not approved for release.

“After reviewing both versions, it is clear that the Majority made material changes to the version it sent to the White House, which Committee Members were never apprised of, never had the opportunity to review, and never approved,” Schiff said in a letter to committee chairman Devin Nunes, whose staff wrote the memo.

“This is deeply troubling, because it means that the Committee Majority transmitted to the White House an altered version of its classified document that is materially different than the version on which the Committee voted,” Schiff said. “The White House has therefore been reviewing a document since Monday night that the Committee never approved for public release.”

Schiff said it’s “now imperative that the Committee Majority immediately withdraw the document that it sent to the White House.” He urged Nunes to re-do the vote to declassify the document on Monday, when the committee is also expected to vote to declassify a memo drafted by Democrats to counter the one put forth by Republicans.

But in a statement, a spokesperson for Nunes downplayed the changes cited by Schiff.

“In its increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication of the memo, the Committee Minority is now complaining about minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the Minority themselves,” the spokesperson said. “The vote to release the memo was absolutely procedurally sound, and in accordance with House and Committee rules. To suggest otherwise is a bizarre distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo, which the public will hopefully soon be able to read for themselves.”

It’s amazing how much like little children they are. How on Earth have Republicans been losing to these guys for generations? There are whole classes of people who simply should not even be allowed to use the word “therefore”.

Now release the memo already!

EXCERPT: Hammer of the Witches

An excerpt from HAMMER OF THE WITCHES by Kai Wai Cheah.

Hesperians loved to see themselves as the good guys fighting for the underdog against powerful foes. If he ever caught a glimpse of what she really thought and felt, he would abandon her in an instant. And Hexenhammer would be finished.

Pausing at a streetlamp, she smoothly spun on her heel and powered her holobuds. In her peripheral vision she checked for unwanted attention. Notifications flooded her screen. She checked the first.

BREAKING: REFUGEE MASSACRE IN HELLAS

She blinked and followed the link.

A barrage of photos: first responders tending to the wounded and evacuating civilians, burning and collapsed tents, killers machine-gunning a crowd of innocents.

And in the news summary, a bold bullet point stood out.

New Phosterian terrorist group Hexenhammer claims responsibility.

She fought down a curse and read the entire article. Three times.

Terrorists attacked a refugee camp on the island of Chios. Hundreds dead. Between four to eight terrorists. Killers still at large. Island on lockdown.

Hexenhammer claims responsibility.

Eve forced herself to breathe. It was time to be her other self again: an arm of the anonymous Kraken who terrorized the terrorists. A woman who brought down the hammer on the witches plaguing Pantopia. She opened her secure mail app and fired a message for Luke.

You must have heard about Hellas. We did NOT do it. We must meet. Call me.

***

“Eve didn’t do it,” I said.

“Why? Because she told you?” Pete said.

“No. Because this doesn’t have the hallmark of a Kraken operation, much less Hexenhammer.”

O’Connor’s voice issued from my holophone sitting on the table, reverberating in the secure conference room. “Just so we’re on the same page here, what is the hallmark of a Kraken operation?”

I rubbed my eyes. It was half past three in the morning, and despite the adrenaline in my veins, I was still jet lagged. I paused for a breath, composing my thoughts.

“Hexenhammer prides itself on proportionality and precision. They conduct information warfare and propaganda campaigns against their ideological enemies. They only target gangsters and terrorists—people who’ve caused actual harm—for assassinations. They’ve got a high standard for selecting targets. They post the target’s details on their internal forum, they talk about it among themselves, and they only go ahead if an admin is satisfied the target meets the standard of harm.”

“When they do strike, they rub out only the target,” Pete said. “No one else, except maybe nearby bad guys. And they attribute the hit to a mysterious figure they call Die Kraken.”

“Exactly,” I said. “They don’t kill innocents. They never had. Why would they start now?”

“To ‘strike a blow against the forces of globalization and Wahism threatening Western Phosterian civilization,’” O’Connor replied. “Or so their manifesto goes. They left it at the scene and mailed copies to the press.”

“BS. They don’t think like that.”

“You mean Eve doesn’t think like that. It doesn’t mean others in Hexenhammer don’t. Hexenhammer isn’t necessarily a monolithic organization.”

“This doesn’t fit their MO,” I said.

“Maybe they are changing how they do things,” Pete offered.

“Without telling their founder?”

“Or maybe Eve just didn’t want to tell you.”

“That’s not Eve,” I said. “She’s a killer, but she’s surgical. This? This is mass murder. She’s not psychotic enough to even think about it.”

Pete crossed his arms. “Okay, so who did it?”

“We’re going nowhere with this,” O’Connor declared. “It’s hasn’t even been an hour since the attack. Until we know the big picture, we can’t say for sure what’s going on.

“How about this: I’ll fly out to your location. I should be there in… twelve hours. By then I should have more to share with you, and we can plan our next step.”

“What do we do now?” Pete asked.

“Consider this a warning order. We need to figure out what’s going on with Hexenhammer. Get ready for an overseas trip to meet and assess Eve and the rest of Hexenhammer.”

“All right. And the Kalypso readiness report?”

“I’ll need that, too.”

Pete groaned. “You just had to ask, didn’t you?”

No point going back to bed. Pete went off to collect coffee. I re-read Eve’s email. At the end of it was a phone number. Knowing her, it was a disposable one-time-only number. I generated my own burner number with a holophone app and called her with it.

She picked up after the first ring.

“Grüezi,” she said.

It was Swiss German. My language implant kicked in, returning Hello.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, switching to Anglian. “Thanks for calling.”

“Thanks for reaching out to me. What happened out there?” In the background I heard a car honking. Was she out on the street?

“I don’t know. I didn’t authorize what happened at Hellas. Neither did anyone I know in my organization.”

She was deliberately being vague to avoid tripping telecom intercept programs—the kind every First-World nation ran on the rest of the world.

“That’s not much for me to work with.”

“You can’t prove a negative.”

Boo-freaking-hoo

I don’t think the FBI understands that nobody gives a quantum of a damn about what they happen to think regarding the upcoming release of information concerning corrupt and criminal behavior on the part of the FBI:

FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a striking signal to the White House Wednesday, issuing a rare public warning that a controversial Republican memo about the FBI’s surveillance practices omits key information that could impact its veracity.

The move sets up an ugly clash with the President who wants it released.

“With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the agency said in a statement. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

We don’t care about your “grave concerns” because you’re a bunch of corrupt Deep State swamp creatures. At this point, literally every single FBI document ever written should be declassified and released to the public.

I expect most criminals have “grave concerns” about their behavior being investigated.

This isn’t that hard. Release the memo. Then release all of the supporting documents. Then release all the information about the full extent of the corruption and criminality that has been kept hidden. The intelligence agencies and all their handwringing about how this will make their job harder is irrelevant. They are no longer worthy of the public trust and their concerns and their protests should be completely ignored.

“Apparent suicide”

I noticed that the tone of the media coverage of Mark Salling’s death has gradually changed from “suicide” to “apparent suicide”. Crazy Days and Nights appears to be confident that it was actually another murder staged to look like one.

No note. Defensive wounds on his hands, where he tried to fight off his attacker. Supposed to not be found for weeks where clues would have been tough to piece together. Arranged plea deal. Dead four days before he had turn over a list of names. They had been coming after him ever since he took the plea deal because they knew he would have to name names. I wrote about that pressure before. He bought most of his photos. One person who was feeling the heat was this former A+ list mostly television actor. As far as I know, he didn’t sell him the photos, but apparently many of them came from his collection. The person that was feeling the most pressure and had the most to lose was an A list producer. Their high and mighty world would have come crashing down. There is no way he was going to let that happen.

I realize that Hollywood is not the most literate world, but you’d think SOMEONE there would have read at least one or two detective novels. It would appear that in Hollywood, as in the Agatha Christie world, no one has a shorter expected lifespan than the guy who knows something but isn’t prepared to talk about it yet.

It appears the big pedos are getting scared. They know the law is finally closing in on them.

More than 500 suspects were arrested and 56 people were rescued during a statewide human-trafficking crackdown, officials said. The Los Angeles County Regional Human Trafficking Task Forces announced the arrests of 510 suspects during the three-day sweep, called Operation Reclaim and Rebuild.

America is not the world

Pat Buchanan tries to explain to civic globalists that nationalism isn’t color-blind and race does, in fact, matter:

Today, issues of immigration and race are tearing countries and continents apart. There are anti-immigrant parties in every nation in Europe. Turkey is being bribed to keep Syrian refugees out of Europe.

Boatloads of Africans from Libya are being turned back in the Med. After building a wall to keep them out, Bibi Netanyahu has told “illegal aliens” from Africa: Get out of Israel by March, or go to jail.

Angela Merkel’s Party may have suffered irreparable damage when she let a million Mideast refugees in. The larger concentrations of Arabs, Africans and Turks in Britain, France and Germany are not assimilating. Central European nations are sealing borders.

Europe fears a future in which the continent, with its shrinking numbers of native-born, is swamped by peoples from the Third World.

Yet the future alarmed Europeans are resisting is a future U.S. elites have embraced. Among the reasons, endless mass migration here means the demographic death of the GOP.

In U.S. presidential elections, persons of color whose roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4-1 Democratic, and against the candidates favored by American’s vanishing white majority. Not for the first time, liberal ideology comports precisely with liberal interests.

Mass immigration means an America in 2050 with no core majority, made up of minorities of every race, color, religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica of the wonderful diversity we see today in the U.N. General Assembly.

It’s interesting to see rock-solid conservatives finally getting on board with the Alt-Right conceptually, even though they will probably continue to resist openly identifying with it. Which is fine. The important aspect of a political philosophy is the adoption of the ideas, not the label, the identity, or the brand. I very much doubt that Aristotle lost any sleep at all over what those who adopted his ideas elected to call themselves.

Whenever you see people talking about “the brand” or purity-signaling, you can be confident that they are either shills of some sort, they are attention-seekers, or they harbor ambitions of leadership. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with any of these things – I would have to be the last to criticize anyone else for trying to sell books – but from the philosophical perspective, they are all irrelevant. Sure, it must be annoying when you hear others spouting your ideas, or in some cases, your literal words, without crediting or acknowledging the source of them. But at the end of the day, it’s really the propagation of the ideas throughout the population that matters.

There is no such thing as “civic nationalism”. It is a self-contradictory concept that confuses the state with the nation and “civic globalism” is the more precise term. There is also no such thing as “ethno-nationalism”. The term is redundant.

All ur rhetoric are belong to us

“Americans are Dreamers too.” Magnificent. Since some who don’t speak rhetoric were obviously confused by this, let me explain what the God-Emperor was doing when he said that last night, and why it infuriated Democrats and the media.

During the height of GamerGate, the Ghazis, as the SJWs who actively opposed GamerGate called themselves, frequently tried to introduce new anti-GG hashtags. Every time they did, we promptly flooded those hashtags with pro-GG memes, thereby converting their hashtag into ours. We did this so frequently that it spawned a meme of its own – ALL YOUR HASHTAGS ARE BELONG TO US – and eventually demoralized them so completely that they gave up trying to generate new hashtags.

What the President did last night during the State of the Union speech was steal the media’s hashtag with regards to illegal aliens. And they know it. 

Trump’s biggest insult to immigrants in his State of the Union. The president pulled an “All Lives Matter” on DREAMers. Miss that reference, and this passage is just standard Trumpian “America First” boilerplate: the idea that America has put immigrants ahead of its own citizens, and that Trump is showing love for Americans by calling for fewer immigrants to be allowed to join them. But it’s in fact something more pointed: an attempt to reclaim the label of “dreamer” from the group that has used it for the last 17 years.

Perhaps more importantly, he also promised a Congressman that he would, “100 percent”, release the Nunes memo. The lesson, as always, is wait patiently and assume that President Trump knows what he is doing. It’s been three years now. Have you learned nothing?

Corporate fraud

I imagine there are probably a lot of violations that merit investigation, particularly among the Trump-hating technology companies.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple Inc. violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed older iPhone models, according to people familiar with the matter.

The government has requested information from the company, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the probe is private. The inquiry is in early stages, they cautioned, and it’s too soon to conclude any enforcement will follow…. Several weeks ago, the company admitted to slowing down the performance of older iPhones models to make their batteries last longer. Apple released a software update early in 2017 that throttled older iPhones, but didn’t specify that the action slowed the devices. In December, Apple apologized for not clearly communicating this information and vowed to release another update to mitigate the concern.

What, they think everyone forgot how Clinton and Obama audited and investigated conservative organizations and corporations?