Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part I of IV

The biological title Sapiens is intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as ‘the next stage in the continuum of physics to chemistry to biology’, and our ultimate destiny, and not so very ultimate either, is to be replaced by intelligent machines. It is a summary of human cultural and social evolution from stone age foraging bands through the agricultural revolution, writing and the rise of the state and large-scale societies, through the gradual process of global unification through empires, money, and the world religions, to the scientific revolution that began the modern world and its consequences.

As an anthropologist who has trodden roughly the same path as Harari in a number of books (Hallpike 1979, 1986, 2008, 2016) I was naturally curious to see what he has to say, but it soon became clear that its claim to be a work of science is questionable, beginning with his notion of culture. Language is obviously the basis of human culture, but one of the central themes of the book is the idea that not just language but what he calls ‘fiction’ has been crucial in the ascent of Man:

…the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled…But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. (p. 27)

The claim that culture is fiction is not an important insight, but is simply a perverse way of stating the obvious fact that culture is a set of shared ideas, and ideas by their very nature can’t be material objects. Language has been revolutionary because it has allowed human beings to be linked together by shared ideas into roles and institutions. One cannot see or touch the Prime Minister, for example, but only a human being, and someone who does not know what ‘Prime Minister’ means has to be told. This can only be done properly by explaining how this role fits into the British Constitution, which in turn involves explaining parliament, cabinet government, the rule of law, democracy, and so on. This world of roles, institutions, beliefs, norms, and values forms what we call culture, but just because the components of culture are immaterial and cannot be seen, touched or smelled does not make them fiction, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, or the myths of Genesis or the Australian Aborigines. We can’t see, touch, or smell truth because truth is not a material object, but that does not make it unreal or fictitious either.

If Harari’s test of reality is only what we can see, touch, or smell then mathematics, like truth, should also be a prime example of fiction. Maybe simple integers might just pass his reality test, since we can see groups of different numbers of things, but how ‘real’ in his sense are zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers like π or imaginary numbers like the square root of -1? And if mathematics is fiction, then so is the whole of science including the theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, which Harari would find very embarrassing indeed because he loves science. He is just in a philosophical muddle that confuses what is material with what is real, and what is immaterial with fiction. But the opposite of fiction is not what is material but what is true, and what is fictional and what is true can both only exist in the immaterial world of thought.

When it comes to the task of explaining social institutions, the idea of culture as fiction is about as useful as a rubber nail:

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together round the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. (p. 31)

Really? He takes the Peugeot motor company, with its image of a lion, and tries to argue that the company itself is no more real than an ancient tribal totem, but nevertheless can form the basis on which large numbers of people could co-operate:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history…It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them…In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was formed. (p. 34)

Harari seems unable to distinguish a belief from a convention, presumably because neither is a material object. Beliefs in ghosts and spirits may be shared by members of particular cultures, but derive from the nature of people’s experience and their modes of thought: they did not sit down and deliberately agree to believe in them. Conventions, however, are precisely the result of a collective decision, consciously taken to achieve a certain purpose, and as such are completely different from myths in almost every respect. Peugeot SA rests on the legal convention of a limited-liability company, which performs a very useful social function, and another very useful social convention is the rule of the road by which in Britain we all drive on the left. Neither beliefs in spirits nor social conventions are material objects, but they are still quite different sorts of thing, as are legal documents and magical rituals, and Harari achieves nothing by confusing them.

More unsustainable claims do not take long to appear. It may well be true that by about 400,000 years ago Man became able to hunt large game on a regular basis, and that in the last 100,000 years we jumped to the top of the food chain. There also seems little doubt that after humans migrated out of Africa in the last 70,000 years or so they exterminated large mammals in Australia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. But part of his explanation for this is that:

Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump (pp. 12-13). 

No, we’re not full of fears and anxieties about our position in the food chain, and never have been, because a species is not a person who can remember things like having been the underdog of the savannah tens of millennia in the past. Knowledge of our life on the savannah has only been vaguely reconstructed by archaeologists and anthropologists in modern times.

He then describes us as ’embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees’ and claims that:

Our societies are built from  the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks – sensations, emotions, family ties – the less difference we find between us and other apes. (42)

In fact, however, if we study the research on the differences between human infants and chimpanzees, such as Tomasello’s Why We Co-operate (2009), the greater we find the differences between us and other apes. Tomasello’s studies of pre-linguistic human infants between 12-24 months and chimpanzees showed marked differences in behaviour related to co-operation, for example. Human infants start co-operating at about 12 months, and when 14 – 18 month infants were put in situations where adult strangers needed help with problems, the infants, unlike chimpanzees, spontaneously provided it. Even before speech develops human infants will try to provide information to adult strangers who need it by pointing, whereas apes do not understand informative pointing at all. Infants also have an innate grasp of rules, in the sense of understanding that certain sorts of activities, like games, should be done in a certain way, whereas apes do not. 14 – 24 month old infants also collaborate easily in social games, whereas chimpanzees simply refuse to take part in them, and infants can also change and reverse roles in games. Human collaborative activity is achieved through generalised roles that can potentially be filled by anyone, including the self. This is the basis of the unique feature of human culture, the institution, which is a set of practices governed  by rules and norms. ‘No animal species other than humans has been observed to have anything even vaguely resembling [social institutions]’ (Tomasello 2009: xi – xii).

For Harari the great innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa, which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. ‘At the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history…Survival in that area required superb mental abilities from everyone’ (p. 55), and  ‘The people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have’ (p. 44). 

Not surprisingly, then,  ‘We’d be able to explain to them everything we know – from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics – and they could teach us how their people view the world’ (23).

It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon in Peru (Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind, They could teach Everett how they saw the world, which was entirely confined to the immediate experience of the here-and-now, with no interest in past or future, or really in anything that could not be seen or touched. They had no myths or stories, so Alice in Wonderland would have fallen rather flat as well.

Part II of Dr. Hallpike’s review will be posted tomorrow.

Hollywood values in the media

Breitbart reports on a 6th reported sexual assailant in the mainstream media:

Mother Jones’ David Corn Is Sixth Member of Elite Media Accused of Misconduct Towards Female Staffers

Just coming to light are two emails written by former staffers for the hard-left Mother Jones magazine, who allege that Washington bureau chief David Corn inappropriately touched female employees and made jokes about rape and “women’s sexuality and anatomy.” In just a month, Corn is the sixth member of the media elite under investigation for alleged misconduct.

The left-wing Politico just obtained the emails, written in 2014 and 2015, and in a statement, Mother Jones’ CEO Monika Bauerlein and editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery said, “[N]ow that they’ve come to us, we are going to take them seriously and investigate.”

David Corn. That sounds pretty generic. But, we shall check nevertheless. Infogalactus investigatus!

Let’s see. Brown University. Winner of George Polk Award for Journalism, 2012. Chief of Washington bureau for Mother Jones. Washington editor for The Nation. Oh, well, there it is. Again.

“Corn was raised in a Jewish family in White Plains, New York.”

And now Wall Street too!

At this point, it’s getting just a little bit difficult to feign surprise anymore. Or pretend that the Judeo-Christians in Hollywood and the media, and on Wall Street, do not have a serious sexual assault problem. Again, read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth for details. I wonder how long it will be before Ben Shapiro’s name comes up; he white-knighted for Michelle Fields to the point of protesting too much.

But as the #DailyMemeWars noted, all of this is just prelude until the Hollywood Values scandal goes critical when Lucas and Spielberg go down. Remember, Marion was supposed to be ELEVEN.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

Mailvox: It is none of your business

Non-Hollywood Reporter finally manages to be on-topic.

Vox, your greatest mate who you said you’d stand by forever said he attended several Hollywood parties where he witnessed “very young” boys being raped. You knew this at the time.

Your best friend who you stand by also said he wouldn’t name the rapists because it would be “indiscreet”.

Have you asked your best friend Milo to name these pedophiles publicly, or at least make a statement to the police?

If not, why not?

Why do you keep deleting these questions and never answering them?

Do you think you can delete them forever?

First, Non-Hollywood Reporter is lying and has been banned and spammed for spamming unrelated topics in a monomaniacal manner. Milo is my friend. Milo is not my best friend. Second, it is absolutely none of Non-Hollywood Reporter’s business what I have discussed with Milo or anyone else. Nor is it anyone else’s business. One of the reasons even people who don’t particularly like me tend to trust me is because I am demonstrably capable of keeping things in confidence. Third, I do not owe any answer to the Non-Hollywood Reporter or anyone else for someone else’s decisions and behavior, be they ally, friend, or foe.

I will never permit anyone to use me to put additional public pressure on a friend or ally. Go ahead and try to attack me on the basis of questions I will not answer if you like. You will do so in vain. My track record on this particular issue more than speaks for itself and will continue to do so in a very material way. So, for that matter, does Milo’s, as he has publicly identified three more pedophiles than virtually every journalist and reporter who has condemned him for not doing more than he has.

I have outed THREE pedophiles in my career as a journalist. That’s three more than any of my critics and a peculiar strategy for a supposed pedophile apologist.
(a) Luke Bozier, former business partner of Louise Mensch
(b) Nicholas Nyberg, anti-GamerGate activist who self-described as a pedophile and white nationalist
(c) Chris Leydon, a London photographer who has a rape trial starting March 13 thanks to my reporting.

I have never defended and would never defend child abusers, as my reporting history shows.

I kept deleting the questions because they were a) off-topic, b) obviously rhetorical, and c) primarily intended to discredit and disqualify me and others. I certainly can delete them forever if I so choose; the moderators and I will simply prevent any comment by Non-Hollywood Reporter from even appearing momentarily on this blog. However, I chose to address them today to make several points.

  1. No commenter will ever succeed in pressuring me to do anything. Even the attempt to do so is sufficient grounds for banning and spamming. /pol/ is not your private army. Neither am I, my VFM, or the Dread Ilk.
  2. I do not even betray the confidences of my enemies. I absolutely do not betray the confidences of my friends and allies.
  3. Your ignorance of my actions is not evidence of the non-existence of my actions.
  4. I am not perfect. I am as fallible as any man. But as those who know me and work with me can attest, I am consistent.
  5. I do not answer to anyone but my Lord and Savior, and His Father.

SJWs will SJW

As I expected, it turns out that the deactivation of the God-Emperor’s Twitter account was intentional:

A Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job deactivated President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes Thursday evening, the social media company reported.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.

Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.

Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”

Note that Twitter’s first response was to lie. They may also by lying about it having been the employee’s last day before he deactivated the account. This sort of behavior is increasingly common among SJWs; we had a similar problem with an SJW at Amazon when we released Corrosion: The Corroding Empire Book One.

An SJW at Amazon repeatedly pulled it out of publication status. It took three times before a manager would believe me, and a fourth time for her to catch the guilty party. I don’t know what the consequences were, but I was assured that the individual would never be able to do it again.

Which, of course, is why you must NEVER hire SJWs or permit them to continue working for you, even if you are of the Left yourself. They will not even hesitate to pursue their social justice objectives even when those objectives directly conflict with the organization’s interests. If you doubt this, or wish for a more substantive analysis, you should read SJWs Always Double Down.

And this is why I avoid Hollywood

It’s one of the few places where “guilt by association” actually is a genuine form of guilt. The whole place is like a citywide Satanic cult.

Yesterday and last night a studio (___________) was in crisis mode with executives flying in and lawyers summoned. All because this perverted jerk director (____________) and his company (_________) are such a major part of the studio’s project slate that the studio itself may be in jeopardy – especially being taken over by a publicly traded company that requires Congress’ approval.

Last night during the investigation into the damage done by the director, and how damaged the studio can be, they discovered some bizarre business interests. Seems the director is a major investor-partner in several adult porn websites. The studio and even the director’s managers didn’t know it.  One of the porn sites in particular is so disgusting, perverted, and possibly illegal in the USA that the studio is scrambling to cut all ties and remove the director from everything, before the media uncovers this.

The site, hosted offshore and hidden beneath layers of front companies, is so awful that the analysts refused to explore it – and only finally did so after a lawyer and ex-FBI man at the studio both agreed to monitor the investigation. If the director and his pals see that website as their normal views of sex? Then those abuse allegations are just the beginning of his slide into the gutter. Even a national official (_______________) is scared. He sent a representative of his to meet studio brass all because of his own former association with the director which still reaps financial income for the official. They’re trying to quietly cover up all ties to Russian investors and Arab investors before people start looking deeply at those relationships.

This is almost certainly related.

Warner Bros. is severing ties with embattled filmmaker Brett Ratner after six women publicly accused him of a range of sexual harassment and misconduct. A person with knowledge of the matter said the Burbank studio will not renew its production deal with Ratner and the fate of his company’s $450-million co-financing agreement beyond 2018 is unclear. 

The “national official” is most likely the Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin.

Brett Ratner may lose $450M Warner Bros deal as company he launched with billionaire James Packer and Steve Mnuchin

Why I never seek investors

They’re worse than a waste of time.

Hedge-fund billionaire Bob Mercer, a major Republican donor who supported Donald Trump, announced Thursday that he would be selling his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters; pulling his funding from Milo Inc., the controversial entertainment venture run by Milo Yiannopoulos; and relinquishing his co-C.E.O. title at Renaissance Technologies, where he oversaw more than $50 billion in assets, to take a non-management role.

In an open letter to investors, the 71-year-old strongly denounced the white nationalist movement that has come to be associated with several of his far-right political causes, tainting his reputation and putting Renaissance Technologies in the crosshairs of a divestment campaign. “Of the many mischaracterizations made of me by the press, the most repugnant to me, have been the intimations that I am a white supremacist or a member of some other noxious group,” he wrote. On the contrary, he said, “a society founded on the basis of the individual freedom that flourishes under a limited federal government has no place for discrimination . . . Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, creed, or anything of that sort is abhorrent to me. But more than that, it is ignorant.”

Mercer also sought to distance himself from Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser who issued his own half-hearted rebuke of Yiannopoulos last month in an attempt to shake off his reputation as a white-nationalist sympathizer. While Mercer said he respected Bannon, he clarified that, “I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon’s.”

Fortunately for Robert Mercer, he’s old enough that banking on being eaten last is probably a viable strategy for him. Not so much the kids and grandkids, but then, he is a Boomer, so what does he care? I’m not surprised that he pulled his funding from Milo, I’m merely surprised that such a successful man could produce such a remarkably stupid statement about the idea that a society founded on the basis of individual freedom can possibly survive WITHOUT discrimination.

I mean, kudos for recognizing that culture trumps politics. For a Republican, that’s genuinely advanced thinking. But race and religion both trump culture.

Just in case

Ivan Throne and the Safe Streets Project will be ready for Antifa in case they aren’t just bluffing:

An organization called Refuse Fascism has more far-left protests planned all over the country to commemorate the election of Donald Trump and the right’s upset on November 4 that could spin out of control quickly. “Regime change,” as they call it is the goal and yet they claim they are not trying to overthrow the government or disenfranchise millions of voters who voted for Donald Trump. The idea is to take to the streets until Trump and Pence resign. Seriously. This footage of Refuse Fascism activists hyping the coming chaos was taken on Halloween night on the streets of Chicago.

Refuse Fascism claims their protests will be nonviolent. But domestic terror groups Antifa and Black Bloc, may have other plans. Ivan Throne’s organization, Safe Streets Project, is planning to be in Austin, Texas this weekend to document, identify, and help curb any violence. Throne, author of the philosophy bestseller The Nine Laws , and owner of the DARK TRIAD MAN® platform has been organizing against Antifa and Black Bloc violence for the last year. The Safe Streets Project is a peaceful volunteer effort that allows individuals to quickly, securely, and privately identify and flag violent street rioters for prosecution. PJ Media reached out to Throne for more information on his work.

“Our core team consists of senior military, threat intelligence, business leaders, technical, S.W.A.T. and private military contractor professionals determined to use their deep convictions and connections to put an end to violent Antifa riots and associated crimes against decent men and women who believe in free speech in the United States,” he said. “Antifa and Black Bloc rioters on the streets can be safely and anonymously referred to prosecution and convicted by the work of decent men and women in the street who use our digital platform to submit intelligence reports, images, video, and more information where it is cross-referenced using facial recognition and other technology,” he explained.

“A Safe Streets Ground Dominance team will be physically deployed for the first time in Austin, TX this Saturday,” he continued. “We do expect that there will be sporadic bursts of individual acts of violence from Antifa and associated groups,” Throne warned. “As is true in any crowd gathering, mob mentality can certainly ensue. We will have cameras and work with law enforcement to make sure that people are not harmed and that Antifa crimes are prosecuted. This is a major evolution of our work.”

Personally, I consider the spaghetti-armed socialists of Antifa to be little more than a joke. 20 VFM would make mincemeat of them. But, it’s always best not to underestimate your enemy. Just in case.

Hollywood values at NPR

Another one bites the dust. This time, it’s the Senior VP of News at National Public Radio:

NPR’s senior vice president for news, Michael Oreskes, has resigned following allegations of sexual harassment from several women.

The accounts of two women, first published by The Washington Post, describe Oreskes unexpectedly kissing them during meetings in the late 1990s, while he was Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. An NPR employee has also come forward publicly about harassment that allegedly occurred during a business meeting-turned-dinner in 2015.

“This morning I asked Mike Oreskes for his resignation because of inappropriate behavior,” NPR CEO Jarl Mohn wrote in an email to NPR staff on Wednesday. “I have received his resignation, effective immediately.”

One guess as to Mr. Oreskes ethno-religious identity. That’s right, another Eskimo. What an utterly astonishing coincidence!

Here is my explanation: the combination of low socio-sexual status and power over women is simply more than most gamma males can stand. Throw in the absence of Christian values putting the brakes on the temptations they face, and you’ve got the perfect storm for creating a serial sexual harassser, if not a full-blown sexual predator.

And I also suspect that what we’re seeing here is a defensive burn. They’re cutting loose the lesser villains in what we can hope is a futile attempt to protect the more serious ones.

UPDATE: Crazy Days and Nights discusses the possibility of an actor who may be Kevin Spacey cracking Epstein Island and the Lolita Express wide open:

Apparently with all types of local governments looking into sexual assaults and rapes committed by Hollywood people coming into the light, the situation on the island they all thought they had carefully extricated themselves from is back. Could be barely back or could be back where everyone goes to jail.

Today I am just going to focus on three of the players. They all have been on the island. They all have done some horrible things to tween boys and girls. No one they were with on the island was anywhere close to being the legal age of consent.

So, most likely to flip and throw everyone under the bus is this A list mostly movie actor who is an Academy Award winner. He is the one who almost killed several of the boys to the point where his host no longer invited him. Our actor had a preference for tweens who didn’t speak English. He didn’t want to hear anything they had to say. Probably one of the cruelest people around. He lied to the feds like crazy the first time around and said he only went to the island to fish and lay out and relax. He also told the feds he never saw anything happen with anyone and that he usually was alone when there. He is by far facing the most time in jail if caught so would first flip our second a-hole.

A few years ago it looked like this A list director was going down. He never even was interviewed by the feds that I can find. Apparently he always went to the island via a boat just because he is smarter than most and didn’t want any record. No record means the feds didn’t even know he was a guest on the island. Our director would come for 24-48 hours of nonstop sex. Apparently he would take enough drugs to stay awake the entire time. The host flew in guys the director always wanted but was afraid to go near in Hollywood. In Hollywood, he would never go below 16 or 17. On the island, he would go way lower.

One person I think would actually kill himself rather than face any kind of public scrutiny is this permanent A list director. He too was interviewed by the feds but said it was all relaxation. Funny how the relaxation never included his wife. It was just him and a bunch of tween girls he made call him grandpa. Apparently there was not much sex but he assaulted the girls and touched them and made them touch him. He took a lot of photos. I don’t know if the photos exist. My guess is the feds thing before probably would have scared him to death. He seems to have recovered though because he is definitely been back to his creepy self the past 18 months or so.

A strange, newfound respect

Rod Dreher is on a roll.

Donald Trump, in his rough way, is right:

President Donald Trump, during a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday, said he wants to terminate the Diversity Visa Lottery, a program that distributes around 50,000 visas to countries where there is a low rate of immigration to the US.

“I am, today, starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,” Trump said, seated next to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program, diversity lottery, diversity lottery. Sounds nice, it is not nice, it is not good. It hasn’t been good and we have been against it.”

He added: “We’re going to quickly as possible get rid of chain migration and move to a merit-based system.”

Trump added that based on preliminary information, the attacker in New York “was the point of contact, the primary point of contact for, and this is preliminarily, 23 people, that came in or potentially came in with him and that is not acceptable.”

Of course the God-Emperor is right. The USA has to get rid of a) birthright citizenship, b) chain migration, c) dual nationality, and d) post-1965 immigrants and their descendants if it is going to survive intact.

Which is why it probably won’t. But it’s not over until it is actually over.

It is amusing how Dreher still has to qualify that he does not approve of the God-Emperor’s tone. After all, saving the nation would be so much more palatable if it were done wearing the proper bowtie.

The fictional war on Trump

Marvel is worse, but DC Comics isn’t exactly hiding its opposition to the God-Emperor:

DC Comics have already given us a number of Trump analogues in their comic books.  Nathan Domini, businessman and land developer, turned politician in Green Arrow was familiar…But the new Aquaman cover suggests that the creative team may be doubling down on this one. #Resist…

However, as the comics stores are reporting, Marvel’s descent into SJW-converged madness is not going well.

Making more money off Marvel back issues than current Marvel issues. Marvel needs to get their mojo back. Not a single Marvel book in our top ten this week. DC took every spot in the top ten. Which is odd sense other than their Metal hotness right now their other books are just holding steady. Amazing Spider-man now sells less than XO Manowar. Spider-man just had a hit movie this year yet is unable to sell at least double digits here. This week another person dropped the title. That’s mind blowing.

Marvel only had one title in the top ten (and it wasn’t a Legacy book): Weapon X #10. The highest charting Legacy title was Amazing Spider-Man #790, which sold exactly the same number of copies on Day One that the last pre-Legacy issue sold. Some titles actually saw a decline in sales over pre-Legacy numbers (Despicable Deadpool, Jean Grey, Black Panther, X-Men Blue). The worst was US Avengers, which lost almost half its Day One readers in our store–largely due to a cover that DIScouraged new superhero readers rather than ENcouraging them. This is a troubling trend; it shows that Marvel’s initiative hasn’t convinced readers to buy into program, and it bodes very poorly for the remaining months of Legacy initiatves. Marvel has to break out of its “encourage retailers to overbuy” mindset and make books–and covers–that readers want to spend their money on.

Remember, SJW convergence represents opportunity, because SJWs will always double down. If you want to understand why, read this.