And yet still curiouser

DC surgery resident on call the night of Seth Rich’s death says Rich’s gunshot wounds were non-fatal, access to him by the doctors was blocked by DC police, and no code was called when he died.

That’s not fishy, right?

The insanity of the imperial USA

This is a solid analysis of the lunacy of US imperialism and its intrinsic weakness:

When the leader of some imperial territory or vassal acts against U.S. interests, or even just gets strong enough that they might, U.S. assets stir up “popular movements”, “moderate rebels”, and “refugee” crises, or subvert their internal operation with NGOs, diplomats, and “grassroots” activism. Or, if that isn’t working, in case we have all forgotten 2003, the U.S. military directly invades in the name of “human rights” and “democracy”, neither of which need to ever materialize for this to work. One way or another, the leader in question ends up deposed.

The occasional genocide, mass rape, persecution of Christians and actual moderate minorities, enormous expense, damage to civilization, loss of historic sites, damage to our reputation, loss of the cultural and material produce that order would bring, destabilization of regions and populations that later need to be bailed out at our own material and demographic expense, and hostile mass-migration into the lands of our own people, which are the byproducts of this indirect form of rule, are overlooked as necessary collateral damage, unfortunate random happenstance, or, when the victim is of our own white race, even celebrated.

Why does this happen? Why are we, good people most of us, caught up in an evil empire? It’s easy enough to blame traitors and Jews and the devil, but the problem goes deeper.

The root of the problem is the principles by which the empire is administered. To start with, we don’t call it an empire, we call it “the international community”, composed not of vassals, provinces, states, territories, colonies, and protectorates, but of “sovereign” “democratic” “nations”.

In other words, we don’t even have language to talk coherently about the empire, which means it’s hard to think about it; we can’t issue orders to our “sovereign” subordinates, have no widely understood imperial authority, and can’t extract straightforward imperial tax, but still have to administer an empire. So, American foreign policy grabs the next-best mechanisms available to it: rebel groups, NGOs, subversion, “human rights” and associated leverage and inconsistencies, petrodollar shenanigans, exports of easily subverted democracy, weaponized mass-migration, and so on.

The worldview attempting to govern the empire and build coherent sub-states fails, because it doesn’t dare recognize what it is actually doing, and doesn’t dare use the “enemy” methods of effective statecraft that actually work. Instead of clear rights and duties of imperial provinces, states governed by clear chains of command and authority, and open negotiation for tribute and protection, we are forced to use destructive, clandestine methods to govern our empire, which in turn create the evilness of the empire.

Obviously, the people in charge of it are the bearers and purveyors of this destructive ideology, but they are not senselessly evil; there is a twisted logic to it all that is generated from the deep structure of modern political thought. Replacing the elite would be insufficient to fix our problems without a new imperial and political ideology. Any replacement elites, though they might go in with the best of intentions, would have the same incentives and would develop the same characteristics and ideology, if the formal structure of the thing stayed the same.

If we had a different imperial ideology, it would be possible to allow the components of the empire a much greater degree of peace and leeway to do what is right, while simultaneously exerting more efficient and fine-grained control over those aspects for which it is in our interest to do so. And we would no longer have to bear the negative by-products of a destructive and evil imperial operating system.

Don’t deceive yourself. The US is an empire that is held together by force and has been since 1865. The lack of a formal emperor doesn’t mean that it’s not an empire nor does its false veil of “democracy”; the US is observably less democratic than the Athenian and British Empires were. And the complete inability of the electorate to even acknowledge what the empire is means that it’s not even possible to discuss what it should, and should not, be doing.

Moreover, the empire is divided and schizophrenic. As the author notes, this has not escaped the attention of the other two global powers, China and Russia. There is absolutely no chance either of them, or a number of the lesser powers, are going to be inclined to follow the imperial USA’s lead, as it is inevitably leading to decline, collapse, and war. Indeed, if they are smart, they will gently assist the empire as it moves even deeper into self-destructive madness, in self-defense if nothing else.

Mailvox: the next Literally Hitler

Is apparently not from the Middle East at all. The news from Austria is encouraging, and not entirely unexpected.

In Austria the coalition of the center-left and center-right party broke up and there will be a new election in October 2017. Currently, the center-right and right-wing party have nearly half the seats in the parliament already. The green party is expected to loose voters, while the left-liberal and right-liberal partie (Neos and Team Stronach) will maybe and surely drop out of the parliament, respectively. The center-left party is not expected to make gains. The big winners will be, and must be, the right leaning parties.

Usually I would not put much faith into the conservative cucks, but now Sebastian Kurz has taken over leadership. Despite being 30 years old, he has already done a much greater service to Europe and Austria than most conservatives do in their whole life. Being Austria’s foreign minister since age 27, he was the single most important political figure responsible for closing the Balkan route, thus keeping hundreds of thousands if not millions of invaders out. He is in the process of closing the Italian route and already has publicly called out NGOs for cooperating and actively assisting the human traffickers bringing the Africans over. From an Austrian point of view his most bally move was to politically break with the Germans, thereby doing what no other Austrian politician dared to do in many many decades. His recent immigration laws aim towards removing islam from public life.

The left leaning Austrian media and all of Germany’s media are already writing their hit pieces on him. Apparently, he is the first Austrian politician since Haider deserving the title literally Hitler, which these days appears to be a compliment.

Our next government will likely be strongly right leaning. It seems as if you were right, and the times are really changing. Note also that according to polls, if there was a vote right now in Vienna, around 40% would vote for the right wing party, giving them a vast edge over the social democrats coming second at around 25%. The same social democrats that have won every single Viennese election since 1919.

The tide has turned. The EU is dying. The forces that will propel Reconquista 2.0 onward and restore a revived Christendom are beginning to grow and gather.

This is the time for courage and confidence, not cowardice and cuckery. Within eight years, we will see NGOs being banned and the surviving architects of the invasion being put on trial for treason in multiple countries.

As the young Sweden Democrats say, Europe belongs to us.

Old advisors, outdated strategy

Mike Cernovich explains why the Trump team is having such a difficult time with the media.

When WaPo or NY Times drops a “devastating” story on Trump, do you know who reads these stories — liberals!

Thus one can see the problem with Trump’s media team. They are spending all of their time, energy, and focus responding to news that most Trump supporters won’t even see, and if we see it, won’t believe it.

Trump was right (for the wrong reasons) when he jokingly claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Ave. Most of his supporters would never see the story, and absent a clear video, wouldn’t believe the story if they saw it.

Want to know how out “out of touch” Trump supporters are with what liberal media is saying? I don’t even notice most of the media hit pieces on me, and even with a massive online following, people rarely ask me about anything nasty the media is saying about me. My readers, like me, aren’t reading liberal propaganda outlets.

Trump’s media team is playing defense, running around responding to stories that most of Trump’s base will never read, and if they read, would never believe.

He’s absolutely right. When the battleground is disadvantageous, refuse to play on it. Force the enemy to meet you on your chosen ground. This isn’t new, it’s literally ancient strategy.

All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved. 

New heights of cuckery

I have no doubt that someone will manage it eventually, but it’s going to be hard to top this virtue-signaling lunacy. And Sweet Saint Darwin, but is physignomy real or what? You could not design a more flawless case of cuck-face if you held a competition of award-winning portrait artists.

Even though the year is 2017, racism and prejudice continue to pollute our world. Many people retain narrow-minded and over-simplistic views on what a family should “look like”.

Aaron and Rachel Halbert have experienced such prejudices up close – despite that they deserve loads of love and respect for several courageous decisions they took.

The Halberts first adopted two children – and then chose to take things a step further – after learning about embryo adoption.

The parents were determined to offer a home to more children who would otherwise not have a family – and decided not to forget those frozen embryos who seem to be forgotten.

Love and respect? They don’t deserve love and respect for hating their own people and helping to destroy their community, their society, and their nation. There is a reason that people instinctively feel contempt and disgust for their literally anti-social actions; condemn it if you like, but it exists for a very good reason. And it’s not a coincidence that the husband has cuckface and the woman has seriously crazy eyes. Their decisions weren’t courageous, they were crazy.

These are without doubt the Crazy Years. They will be followed by the Rivers of Blood Years. There is nothing new under the sun, and humanity violates history’s time-hallowed patterns at its peril.

The ugliness of reality

And the logical gibberish of the anti-intelligent:

“No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.”

And they wonder why they’re so reliably wrong. You can certainly fight science, reason, and observation with “ethical principle” if you like, but it’s not going to work very well. Nor is it going to convince anyone with the intellectual ability to penetrate your rhetoric and understand the irrelevance of your ethical principles.

The idea that Chinese people are not smarter on average than Africans because the idea is ugly is like a programmer insisting that his code works correctly, despite the constant crashing of the program, because it is more elegantly written than the code that actually functions. Sometimes, indeed, very often, reality is ugly, or at least falls well short of what our aesthetic preferences would wish it to be.

Calling out Comey

It appears the former FBI Director may have badly misplayed his hand when he raised the issue of his memos:

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that former Director Comey created memos regarding his interactions with President Trump, “a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence an ongoing investigation.”‘ ‘The article stated that “Mr. Comey created similar memos – including some that are classified about every phone call and meeting he had with the president.” More generally, the article stated “Mr. Comey was known among his closet advisers to document conversations that he believed would later be called into question.” Presumably, this means that Mr. Comey created similar memoranda relating to other controversial conversations, whether with officials in the current administration or the prior one.

We are writing to request that the FBI provide the Committee with all such memos, if they exist, that Mr. Comey created memorializing interactions he had with Presidents Trump and Obama, Attorneys General Sessions and Lynch, and Deputy Attorneys General Rosenstein, Boente, and Yates regarding the investigations of Trump associates’ alleged connections with Russia or the Clinton email investigation. Please provide these documents by no later than May 24, 2017.

So, either Comey will be revealed as an unreliable source if he has no other memos, or he’s going to have to spill whatever dirt he’s been hiding in defense of Hillary Clinton to the Senate committee. What is interesting is that this is a bipartisan senatorial effort; further complicating the matter is the fact that recordings of some of these meetings may exist as well.

If Comey thought that he could damage the President by artful hintings and bluffing, it looks like he miscalculated.

Mailvox: a call to edit

HJ explains why he has begun to get active as an Infogalactic editor:

The other day I was interested for no particular reason in the founding of Oxford University, and looked it up on IG.  The content was the original material pulled from Wikipedia.  To my astonishment, or maybe I was naive, there was no mention of the crucial role of the Church in laying the foundations of the university system.  Here’s what it said:

“Teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being.  It grew quickly in 1167 when English students returned from the University of Paris.  The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188 and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190.”

So apparently those were the highlights of the one-hundred-year period that began with a handful of monks and ended up setting the world standard for institutions of higher learning.  Fortunately, there was an entire section on the history of women’s blahblah, in which I was informed that “Oxford and Cambridge were widely perceived to be bastions of male privilege.”  Until they were converged, of course.

Needless to say, this cannot stand, so I jumped in and made some edits.  Much more can and will be done.  If anyone out there is wondering what the point of Infogalactic is and why it’s important to get involved, hopefully this example will demonstrate why Wikipedia needs to be disrupted.  It’s biased, and SJWs have smeared their feces all over the place as a form of territorial display.  And yet to many people Wikipedia is an impressive and reliable source.  We will do better.

Someday it may be possible to view IG content from the perspective of a Christ-hating SJW sperg.  When that day comes, I suggest we call that perspective “Wikipedia.”

People often ask me why this Infogalactic page doesn’t have X or why that Infogalactic page has Y. To everyone, my answer is the same: because you haven’t fixed it.

I am not the reality police. The Techstars are not occupying themselves with trying to fix all of the egregious errors and propaganda that litters Wikipedia, and which Infogalactic has inherited by virtue of its nature as a dynamic fork. What we’re doing, rather, is giving the truth-oriented community the ability to fix these things themselves, for their own benefit, on their own time. With 7 million pages to date, that’s all the dev team can reasonably expect to do.

So get involved. Do one edit per day. Join the Burn Unit. Start using IG News and IG Tech for your headlines. Get a group of five editors together and launch your own IG Francais or IG Finance or IG FPS. All of these things are possible, but all of them require action, not mere intentions. And, in doing so, help Infogalactic continue to grow into the replacement for Wikipedia that it is designed to be.

Global Rank: 55,991
US Rank: 15,340 

We have a long, long way to go, obviously, seeing as Wikipedia is currently 5 and 6. But we are considerably closer than we were six months ago.

She’s got THE POWER

A book review of The Power by Naomi Alderman by an author who shall remain nameless.

One of my favorite hobbies is asking just what would happen if humanity encountered an ‘Outside Context Problem,’ something that would change our society in unpredictable ways.  The return of magic, first contact with an alien race … it doesn’t even have to be something completely out of this world.  How many early writers – Rand, Asimov, Doc Smith – failed to anticipate the birth of the microchip, the internet, smartphones … things that have already reshaped parts of our society?  What next will change the world?

The Power asks just such a question.  And, in many ways, the answers are disturbing.

The basic premise of The Power is that, all over the world, teenage girls are developing the ability to generate and channel bursts of electricity.  (Not unlike electric eels.)  The ‘power’ can push someone away … or kill them.  Furthermore, younger women can awaken the power in older ones.  The handful of early ‘awakenings’ rapidly becomes a river, then a flood.  The Power makes its way around the world before human society quite realizes what is going on, chaos following in its wake.

The story is told through four viewpoint characters – Margot, an American politician; Roxy, the daughter of a British gangster; Allie/Eve, an American runaway; Tunde, a student who becomes a roving reporter.  All four of them have their lives uprooted and reshaped by the Power – Margot starts climbing the latter to the very top, Roxy takes over her father’s ‘business,’ Allie/Eve founds a whole new religion and Tunde documents everything, travelling the world to film the effects the Power.

Beyond this, The Power is framed as a historical novel written in the far future (perhaps not unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, although it has been years since I read it.)  I actually forgot this as I started reading the main story, only to be reminded of it at the end.  The author deserves full credit for this as the epilogue explains some of the odder parts of the story, the bits that didn’t quite make sense.  But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The Power presents itself as an ‘event’ story – it tries to touch on the lives of all four characters and tell a global story.  And it does, to a very large extent, a very good job – three of the main characters remain localized, while the fourth walks the world and provides a global perspective.

Indeed, Alderman deserves credit for not forgetting that there is a world outside the US and UK (she’s British).  The Power causes disturbances in America – Britain doesn’t seem to be so badly affected, at least at first – but it causes immediate upheaval in places like Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and India.  Alderman has no truck with the belief that women are uniquely oppressed in the West.  Saudi women, feeling their strength for the first time, rise up against the religious police and a social structure bent on keeping women firmly under control.  In India, women make shows of force against rape culture; in the Balkans, women trafficked and sold into slavery fight back, first against the traffickers themselves and then against their entire society.

I’ve heard the book described as a SJW rant.  It is not.  Alderman clearly does not believe that a world run by women would be a kinder, gentler place.  Given power – the Power – women can be just as bad as men, if not worse.  Throughout the second half of the book, as the world starts to slip further and further off its axis, it becomes clear that the Power is something akin to a drug.  Women can get drunk with power, just like men.  And the results can be just as devastating.

Alderman does very well in presenting a world where some societies have fragmented and others have an uneasy sense that they’re on thin ice, trying to find ways to tame or remove the Power before it’s too late.  I wish, in many ways, that she’d actually written a longer book, because the details are fascinating.  On the other hand, it would be easy to get lost in detail if there was more of it.

On the other hand, there is something subtly wrong about the main characters.  It actually took me some time to put my finger on the true fridge brilliance.  The Power doesn’t just feature a change in human biology, it predicts a change in human nature itself.  The three female characters become more and more like men as they go along – Margot starts out as a likeable character, then devolves into a parody of a powerful and untouchable man.  Indeed, the roles have reversed themselves completely.  Roxy, midway through the book, recounts being molested as a child and how her gangster father taught the bastard a lesson; later on, it is Roxy who avenges her brother after he is raped.  By the end of the book, the reversal is striking – women act like bad parodies of men and vice versa.

This also leads to another deconstruction – deliberate or otherwise – of the ‘all girls want bad boys’ trope.  Tunde’s early reaction to encountering the Power has a lot in common with female scenes from bad bodice-rippers (or Twilight, for that matter); he is poised between arousal and fear.  And while the idea of having a super-strong vampire stalker or a millionaire with a BDSM kink for a boyfriend may sound cool, it doesn’t take long for the real unpleasant implications to sink in.  Alderman may well be pointing out the true dangers of the trope – it blinds Tunde to the danger of losing his rights and freedom until it is almost too late.  

Indeed, there is an air of inevitability about the ending.  I found that annoying at first, then I was reminded that the whole thing is presented as a historical novel, written by a man in a matriarchal society.   The outcome, as far as he is concerned, is preordained.  Indeed, the social collapse at the end of The Power is so far in the past that the male-dominated world is believed to be a myth.  They literally don’t believe in it, to the point where the female editor regards the male writer with amused condensation.

I don’t know how likely that actually is to happen.  Our society took the shape it did for many reasons, not just male physical strength.  But if you smash human society into fragments, what takes its place might be very different.

One of the odder aspects lies in the legal response to the Power.  One (American) politician insists that women with the Power are effectively comparable to people walking around with loaded guns.  He wants them banned from government offices.  Alderman clearly wants us to draw a comparison between the Power and male strength, but there is a legal response to physical assault.  A man who attacks his co-worker – male or female – will be arrested, tried and imprisoned.  Why would this be different when a woman attacks her co-worker with the Power?  On the other hand, Alderman could have been pointing out the fallacy of the ‘I couldn’t control myself’ argument.

Another odder point lies in politics.  Margot did very well when it came to handling the early problems caused by the Day of the Girls.  She certainly had an excellent opportunity to parley her success into greater political power.  Men – and women too, I think – admire movers, shakers and … achievers.  (Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, love them or hate them, were definitely achievers; Hillary Clinton conspicuously was not.)  Margot made a series of correct calls and her political career benefited.  On the other hand, she semi-accidentally attacked her opponent during a political debate and won anyway.  Even she wonders at her victory after that.  I am unaware of any American politician in recent history who did anything of the sort and got away with it.

And, in the end, I couldn’t help wondering if Alderman was commenting on identity politics too.

Most historical societies operated on the rule of force – the strong issued the orders and the weak did as they were told or got thumped.  The ideal of the West is something different – the rule of law.  Our society is based on the legal principle that all are equal before the law, regardless of every little detail.  This is true equality.  Feminists – and everyone representing a marginalized group – should be very careful not to imperil this.  This is the bedrock of our society.

Identity politics are gnawing away at our vitals.  If the group identity of a criminal is more important than the personal identity, we lose.  If one group is seen to have power and privileges that other groups lack, those groups will demand it for themselves and/or turn against the whole concept.  The recent attempt to brand people who didn’t make eye contact as racist, for example, was so stupid that people could be forgiven for ignoring all suggestions of racism forever.  They might not be right, but they would have a point.  This, perhaps, is the true problem facing modern-day feminism.  It’s in danger of losing sight of what is truly important.

Alderman, in an interview, proposes that every girl be given self-defense training.  It is actually a very good suggestion, one that feminists should adopt.  When seconds count, help is minutes away.  It’s certainly a more practical suggestion than many others I’ve seen from Social Justice Warriors.  The men who pay attention when they’re told not to rape aren’t the ones who need the lessons.  What are you going to do about them?  Or about women who make fake accusations of rape, casting doubt on genuine reports?

Several other reviewers have commented on other aspects of the book.  It largely ignores race and makes little mention of transgenders.  (Of course, a crueler society might mock the transgendered rather than taking them seriously.  Argus Fitch can self-identify as a wizard, if he wishes, but he’ll be lucky if he only gets laughed at.)  Truthfully, The Power covers so much ground – in a relatively small book – that I don’t blame Alderman for not touching on everything.

Overall, The Power is a thought-provoking book … although there is plenty of room to disagree with some of the answers!  I don’t generally like the present tense format Alderman used, but she made it work.  The letters framing the story are amusing, yet bitterly ironic.  On the other hand, a cynic might argue that the true moral of the book – and of a society ruled by force – is that the world is always divided into ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’ and that it is better to be a ‘victimizer’ than a ‘victim.’

Personally, I consider that rather sad.  And it is a demonstration of precisely why we need the rule of law.