You’re not one of them

And also, you have to go back.

Hats, as Racked explored earlier this year, have historically signaled that the wearer is part of a team — and when is the desire to belong more acute than in middle school? Of course, teams don’t exist without opponents, and for some to feel like they’re on the inside, others need to be left out.

It was clear to one mother, who asked to remain anonymous, who fell into the latter category and who didn’t when she picked her son up from his middle-school trip to DC: “Our school district has a good amount of minorities in it, but we were all stunned. Every single white kid besides maybe one or two walked off the bus with a red hat on,” she said.

While she, her husband, and their children were all born in the United States, they are Muslim-American and not white, and the hats were just the most recent and most visible symbol of a racial divide that, she says, her son has seen escalate since November.

“I think 12-year-old boys use it as a form of bullying — identifying themselves as part of this group to the exclusion of others just for the fun of it. That’s what it seemed like to me,” she says. “Us over here with the red hats, and you over there… you’re not even an individual anymore. Now you’re just one of the brown kids and you’re not one of us.”

The God-Emperor’s winning never ends. The Red Hats are the sans cullottes of the 21st century. Never forget that homogeneous nations are usually derived from heterogeneous empires.

You may not like these developments. You may think that they are cruel, racist, and wrong. And your opinion of that matters about as much as your opinion of a melon striking the pavement after being dropped from 100 meters high. Civic nationalism has observably failed. The melting pot was always a propagandistic lie. Human nature did not change when the Declaration of Independence was written, and in any event, it was not written for the 80 million post-1965 invaders of America.

The company knew

 So much for the protestations of innocence.

Harvey’s brother and fellow co-founder Bob Weinstein, as well as the company’s president, David Glasser, had told concerned staff as recently as Tuesday that they were shocked and unaware of the confidential settlements made with various women.

However, according to a clause in his 2015 contract, if the movie mogul was charged with sexual harassment he was in charge of all legal payouts and had to pay an additional fine to the company.
‘You [Weinstein] will pay the company liquidated damages of $250,000 for the first such instance, $500,000 for the second such instance, $750,000 for the third such instance, and $1,000,000 for each additional instance,’ the contract reads.

According to the document, as long as Weinstein pays it constitutes a ‘cure’ for any misconduct and no further action can or will be taken.

In more simple terms, that means that no matter how many times he is sued – as long as he is willing to pay he won’t be fired.

If Weinstein were to ever be indicted for a crime the contract contains language that would allow the Board of Directors to fire him.

No, but you see, it was only “to cover consensual affairs.” Sure it was. Good luck trying to hold that line of defense.

UPDATE: And the knives are now out, now that it is clearly safe to declare opposition.

Hachette Book Group is disbanding the company’s Weinstein Books imprint, effective immediately.

“Going forward, titles currently under the Weinstein Books imprint will be published by our Hachette Books imprint, and the Weinstein Books imprint team will join Hachette Books,” the company said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Perseus Books, which is part of Hachette, has had a co-publishing agreement with The Weinstein Co. that has produced about 10 books a year.

UPDATE: Ronan Farrow deserves all the credit he is getting, and then some. When NBC shut down his investigation, he kept it going on his own dime, then brought it to the New Yorker. Suffice it to say this is NOT normal journalistic behavior.

If you’re worried about story

One of the concerns that keeps being raised about Alt★Hero by people who are observably unfamiliar with the fact that I am a novelist is that the comic is going to be nothing more than anti-SJW preaching and attempts to trigger SJWs. But this is nothing more than confusing the advertisement with the product.

But consider the following review for one of my more recent novels, A Sea of Skulls:

Better then GOT

I read a lot of fiction. Vox’s writing skill is superb. He takes no shortcuts with weaving his tale. Explores many different approaches in his books. In throne of bones he spans the life of one character in one chapter. In another he tries his hand a describing a battle from many many different soldiers views as they fight and die. In sea of skulls he pulls back a bit on experimentation and instead explores each major race in his universe from their perspective. Each perspective is unique and masterfully done.

Now, you may well be dubious about the possibility that my Arts of Dark and Light series is genuinely better than A Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you haven’t read A Dance with Dragons. After all, HBO hasn’t even made a television series about it yet. But if you look at the reviews of both books over time, you’ll see how the initial comparisons to Martin begin to fade away and are replaced by comparisons – admittedly, unfavorable – to Tolkien.

This is not indicative of a writer who is unable to tell a story, create memorable characters, or is prone to sacrificing either in the interest of delivering dogmatic, heavy-handed lectures. I don’t believe in either cheap heroism or cheap villainry, as both are the product of mediocre writers with insufficient imagination. While I would consider Captain Europa to be a villain and the Global Justice Initiative to be evil, he most certainly does not.

Nor do I believe that my favored side must always win. After all, the ultimate heroism is self-sacrificial, and I am not even remotely hesistant to kill off even my favorite characters if the story’s logic demands it. (The fact that this also helps solve the fatal perspective-character-inflation problem is merely a fortunate side-effect.) Nor do I ever indulge in the storytelling fraud that is so often present in Martin, Marvel, and DC stories; there are few literary devices for which I have more contempt than “bringing back” an obviously dead character. It’s not only lame and fake drama, it is unnecessary for the sufficiently skilled writer.

Here’s the thing: EVERYTHING triggers SJWs. It’s not as if we have to go even remotely out of our way to set them off. We can focus 100 percent on telling excellent stories and we probably won’t even need to go back and add anything in order to have them REEEEEEing at frequencies higher than have ever been recorded at the Metropolitian opera. Not that I won’t insert the occasional shiv and twist, out of nothing more than the pure joy of it, but we simply don’t have to. In these forsaken days of the Forgettable Squirrel She-Thing, just having pretty women with attractive bodies is more than enough.

So, if you are genuinely concerned about the storytelling aspects of the new series, you can either read my novels or you can simply wait to see what sort of stories we deliver in Alt★Hero. As for me, all I can say is that I am enjoying the challenge of raising my storytelling game in order to keep pace with the legendary Chuck Dixon.

And that, I suspect, is the real concern of the comics SJWs. They’re not at all concerned about our prospective failure. They’re concerned about our prospective success.

Attention Dread Ilk

This strikes me as an opportunity to put some steel in the nonexistent spine of National Review.

We’re hiring! NR is looking to add a multi-talented individual to help build our social media presence. Apply here.

We’ve infiltrated Antifa and other left-wing organizations. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t do the same to the leading cuckservative organizations. If you’ve got the credentials, give it a whirl.

Retreat in Catalonia

Spain and the EU managed to call the Catalan bluff:

Don’t let the cheers in the Catalan Parliament fool you. There’s been a full-blooded retreat from the separatists. After rowdy demonstrations, a covert referendum (which drew a violent response from Spanish police) and vows to set up a new republic, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont blinked.

Many lawmakers gathered for a special session of the regional legislature were hoping to hear a declaration of independence. Instead, he put the process on hold to make another appeal for talks with the Spanish government. No deadline. No leverage. And Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s response was powerful: he started the process that could see Puigdemont’s administration stripped of its powers.

Already last night cracks were opening up in the separatist coalition, suggesting a regional election may be necessary next year.

Perhaps Puigdemont had no real choice. The EU made it clear an independent Catalonia would be isolated. The region’s biggest companies were pulling out. And elite Spanish police officers were waiting to arrest him.

The reason the Catalan bid for independence is going to fail is that they don’t want actually want to be independent. They simply want to move up one rung on the EU totem pole. And that isn’t something that anyone in their right mind is going to fight or die for.

The Spanish misplayed this situation badly, but were ultimately saved by the fact that the Catalans were always ultimately hoping for the EU to swoop in and tell its member state that it had to let Catalonia go. Once the EU belatedly clear that it had no intention of doing so and called the Catalan bluff, the secessionists had no choice but to blink. Because they never, ever, intended to fight.

Robbed of their culture

No wonder the West is dying, raising children like young trees with their roots all severed:

At breakfast, in the glass-towered city of Vancouver, five-year-old Abigail looks glumly at her half-eaten bowl of cereal.

“What is it, honey?” I brush the bangs back from her face.

She lets out a big sigh. “I wish I wasn’t white.”

I start. Nothing in the parenting manuals has prepared me for that.

“All we’ve ever done is hurt people,” she continues. “I wish my skin was dark and that I had a culture.”

We live in a part of the city where immigrant families abound. Our neighbours are homesick, first-generation Mexicans, which means that salsas and pinatas and Aztec legends feature prominently at shared social gatherings. Our family regularly eats in Little India where we gush over the flavours of curry and dhal, and every February, we attend the Chinese New Year parade in the slanting rain. Plus, my husband and I are children of missionaries and harbour an acute guilt for the cultural imperialism of our forebears. To compensate, we’ve raised our children with a deep appreciation of non-Western cultures.

So when Abigail laments the colour of her white skin, part of me is programmed to protest. Is it not my moral obligation to tell her that her feelings of poor self-worth are nothing compared with the psychological ruin of real racism? Girl, everything about Canadian culture weighs in your advantage and you have no right to snivel!

Instead, I feel a sadness settle over me. We thought we were raising the enlightened child of the 21st century. We thought we were doing our part in setting the history record straight. Yet, in doing so, it seems we have robbed our oldest child of something primal to psychological health, something elemental to her well-being as a human being: cultural roots.

And it’s not going to end well just because you teach them about tea time. The word “fundamentalist” stems from those who go back to the basics of the religion, back to the fundamentals. It is time for us to become cultural fundamentalists, and our roots are Christianity, the Greco-Roman legacy, and the European nations.

The alternative is this societal suicide in the name of not being called racist. Of all the reasons for a society to die off, this simply must be the most utterly stupid ever witnessed on this planet.

Trumps smells blood

The God-Emperor is not going to let the Hollywood Pig pull a Polanski:

FBI opens investigation into Harvey Weinstein on orders from Trump’s Justice Department – who fear mogul will ‘do a Roman Polanski’.

‘Suicidal’ Harvey Weinstein begs stranger for a ride while trying to flee his daughter’s home, leading LAPD to visit and make sure ‘depressed mogul does not harm himself’. Harvey Weinstein tried to flag down a passing motorist and flee his daughter Lily’s home after the two argued on Wednesday. Once he returned to the house, Lily reportedly called authorities to say her father was ‘suicidal and depressed’  Weinstein, 65, fled again before LAPD arrived on the scene, and soon after Lily had a change of opinion, saying her father was not at risk of self-harm. He said on Tuesday that he was boarding a plane to fly to rehab in Europe so that he could treat his sex addiction.

Considering what he knows, it wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if he is discovered to have committed Arkansas-style suicide in the next week.

The Boy Scouts, converged

This result was baked in the cake ever since the Boy Scouts started allowing gays. This is what social justice convergence looks like; once social justice enters, it replaces the core purpose of the organization:

The Boy Scouts of America’s board of directors has unanimously agreed to welcome girls into the Cub Scout program and to forge a path for older girls to pursue and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout, the organization said Wednesday.

“The historic decision comes after years of receiving requests from families and girls,” Boy Scouts of America said in a statement. “[T]he organization evaluated the results of numerous research efforts, gaining input from current members and leaders, as well as parents and girls who’ve never been involved in Scouting — to understand how to offer families an important additional choice in meeting the character development needs of all their children.”

BSA said the move is also aimed at helping busy families consolidate programs for their children. “Families today are busier and more diverse than ever. Most are dual-earners and there are more single-parent households than ever before, making convenient programs that serve the whole family more appealing,” the BSA statement said.

Boy Scouts of America has about 2.3 million youth members between the ages of 7 and 21 and about 960,000 volunteers in the United States and its territories.

What a pity I didn’t write SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down back when I was a Boy Scout in the Order of the Arrow. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before they ban the latter in order to avoid offending American Indians.

You can be absolutely certain that after the initial rush of girls to join the Boy Scouts, the number of youth members and volunteers will begin to drop even more precipitously than it has already; membership is down 63 percent since it peaked in 1972. And in case you’re wondering, the time to start an alternative organization on the guidelines of the original Boy Scouts is about five years ago. You want to have the infrastructure in place and get it up and running before the mass outflow starts.

From SJWs Always Double Down: As Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian has noted, the more women enter any professional field, the more men leave it. And as the men depart, so to do the prestige and the economic rewards provided by the field. This creates a vicious cycle that both expels existing men from the field while repelling new men from entering it.

This is also true of academic institutions, social organizations and entertainment as well. It won’t be too terribly long before, the Boy Scouts of America will be shocked and dismayed to discover that they can’t get boys to join it anymore.

The decision to allow girls to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout is significant for several reasons.

The rank of Eagle Scout is a prestigious and widely recognized achievement, one that can have long-term benefits in academic, professional and even military spheres. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Neil Armstrong and Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are just a few notable men who have attained the rank of Eagle Scout.

While there is a rough equivalent in the Girl Scouts — the Gold Award — the honor is not nearly as well-known as the Eagle Scout distinction.

And we can now anticipate that the prestige and the long-term benefits of achieving the rank of Eagle Scout will rapidly disappear along with the boys. This is what ALWAYS happens when you fail to police your organization in order to keep the SJWs out.

You know the government is inept

So why trust its advice when it comes to food? Do you really think they’re going to handle such a complicated subject more effectively than basic highway maintenance or the Department of Motor Vehicles?

What lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

Government diet gurus and health charities have long been engaged on a salt reduction crusade, but what has been missing from this noble effort is the awareness that excessive salt is a problem of processed food. High salt is essential to that larger-than-life processed food taste. Without salt, and a sub-set of assorted chemical flavour enhancers, processed foods would be exposed for what they are: products that have lost their natural savour and nutritional integrity. Salt-free cornflakes, for instance, would be well nigh inedible. No one would want to buy them because they would see that they are a heap of nutritional uselessness. But where is the evidence that salt added as normal seasoning to home cooked food constitutes a health risk?

With salt, as with sugar, the public health establishment is too cowardly to take on the powerful processed food companies and their lobbyists by drawing a distinction between home-prepared food cooked from scratch and industrial convenience food.

Eat less, exercise more, and eat more protein and fewer carbs. My father figured that out 25 years ago. Remember, science that is actually reliable is not called science. It is called “engineering”.