Drain the whole damn swamp

Go big and build the wall or go home, Mr. President:

At the urging of longtime friends and outside advisers, most of whom he consults after dark, President Trump is considering a “huge reboot” that could take out everyone from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, to counsel Don McGahn and press secretary Sean Spicer, White House sources tell me.

Trump is also irritated with several Cabinet members, the sources said.

“He’s frustrated, and angry at everyone,” said one of the confidants.

The conversations intensified this week as the aftermath of the Comey firing pushed the White House from chaos into crisis. Trump’s friends are telling him that many of his top aides don’t know how to work with him, and point out that his approval ratings aren’t rising, but the leaks are.

“The advice he’s getting is to go big — that he has nothing to lose,” the confidant said. “The question now is how big and how bold. I’m not sure he knows the answer to that yet.”

I’m a little skeptical that there will be any major shakeup while there are still reasonable prospects for a war with North Korea. I’m also skeptical that the God-Emperor is going to get rid of Bannon or Sessions; he’s never going to be able to drain the swamp or accomplish much with Establishment or pro-establishment types and I expect he is smart enough to realize that. And Spicer definitely has to go, as he’s simply not quick-witted enough or tough enough to serve effectively as the Mouth of the God-Emperor.

What I believe is that the President has learned that taking the advice of the moderates is no recipe for success, but rather, one for slowdown and failure. I could be wrong, of course, if there is a big shakeup, the nature of it will tell us a lot about the Trump presidency and its prospects for success. The report from Infowars is considerably more encouraging in that regard:

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could also be on the chopping block as President Trump begins a purge of moderate advisers whom he feels have performed poorly when it comes to investigating the source of leaks that have proved embarrassing for the administration. Having been guided by moderate advisers for the last 6 weeks, Trump tried working with the Washington establishment but has come to the realization that they do not want to compromise on any issue, don’t care about the country, and are merely concerned with blocking his policy agenda.

On the one hand, the God-Emperor can hardly be surprised that listening to establishment moderates has preventing him from making much headway while still putting him in the line of fire anyhow. It’s a little disappointing that he needed to discover that for himself, but then, he now has an excellent justification for continuing to disregard the moderates moving forward. And you may recall that I predicted there would be considerably more turnover in the Trump administration than in the average presidential administration. The God-Emperor has never been prone to tolerating failure and this is not the time to begin doing so.

Never forget that no matter how powerful a man may be, he, too, is subject to the great waves of history and social mood. And his success will largely be dependent upon whether he rides them or fights them.

Happy Mother’s Day

Best wishes, heartfelt gratitude, and a Happy Mother’s Day to Spacebunny and all the dedicated mothers raising the next generation of the West. These brave women fight a daily war with those who would tear them down and destroy both them and their families that is too little recognized, and they often do so with very little emotional support from anyone. The home front is the first and most important front.

One thing the Alt-Right must never forget is that the restoration of Western Civilization depends upon convincing the mothers of the European nations to cast their lot in with us rather than with the barbarians and destroyers. It is essential not to get too caught up in bitterness over feminism or negative personal experiences, but rather, to focus on the long-term objectives. The dyscivilizationists won many women over to their side, and it is up to the eucivilizationists to win them back.

Even the rabbits of Watership Down understood that a society without mothers will not survive.

That settles that

In last night’s Darkstream, I addressed the question of whether it is acceptable for a man to wear a shirt with another man’s face on it. Considering that my CERNOVICH shirt is on the way to me, my position is pretty obvious. And as far as I’m concerned, Boh settled the matter once and for all by playing this solo while wearing a shirt with Takayoshi Ohmura’s face on it while standing right next to Takayoshi Ohmura.

No matter how cool you might think you are, you are not as cool as the God of Bass. Not even close.

Sport and sorrow

I usually find the “mascot” custom in European football to be ridiculous, bordering on creepy, but there are occasionally circumstances that make it all worthwhile. American sports fans are probably unaware of how an English Premier League team has adopted a dying little boy befriended by its star striker as its mascot.

Bradley Lowery led out his beloved Sunderland for their final home match of the season against Swansea, just a day after his parents announced that his cancer is spreading. The brave five-year-old was the club’s mascot for their final Premier League match at the Stadium of Light this year and also featured on the front cover of the matchday programme. Wearing a Sunderland shirt which thanked the club and fans for their support, Bradley walked on to the pitch in the arms of England striker Defoe, with whom the five-year-old has struck up a close bond…. The five-year-old may have to spend his sixth birthday in hospital but he was able to fulfil his wish to be at the Stadium of Light for the final game of the season. 

There are a lot of things wrong with sports, and professional sports in particular. But there are things that are right about them too. In this case, it is a powerful reminder of how love can transcend the evils of a fallen world.

The war for free association

Is eventually going to have to go to either a) Congress or b) the Supreme Court, given the wide range of contradictory court decisions.

A Kentucky appellate court on Friday ruled that the Christian owner of a printing shop in Lexington had the right to refuse to make T-shirts promoting a local gay pride festival. The dispute represents the latest court fight testing the limits of antidiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide. The cases have led to a number of state court rulings against Christian-owned businesses that refused to bake cakes, design floral arrangements or take portrait photographs for same-sex weddings.

This would be an easy win for the God-Emperor. An executive order protecting free association for business owners would be extremely popular with every Christian who doesn’t want to bake a gay cake, every Jew who doesn’t want to print a Nazi t-shirt, and every black who doesn’t want to arrange flowers for the KK.

The fact is that everyone has the intrinsic human right to refuse to provide their services to anyone for any reason whatsoever. The only question is whether governments and laws respect that right or illegitimately infringe upon it.

Discrimination is both a logical necessity and an intrinsic human right.

Thanks, NSA

Who would have ever thought that a government bureaucracy would fail to adequately take safeguards against its tech-weaponry proliferating?

More than 100 countries across the world have been affected by the ‘unprecedented’ cyber attack using a computer virus ‘superweapon’ dubbed the ‘atom bomb of malware’. It is believed more than 130,000 IT systems are affected around the world, including hospitals in the UK, telecoms and gas firms in Spain, schools in China, railways in Germany and the FedEx delivery company.

The European Union’s police agency, Europol, says it is working with countries hit by the ransomware scam to rein in the threat, help victims and track down the criminals. In a statement, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3, said the attack ‘is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits.’

Security experts say the malicious software behind the onslaught appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was identified by the US National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes.

The NSA documents were stolen and then released to the world last month by a mysterious group known as the Shadow Brokers. The hackers, who have not come forward to claim responsibility, likely made it a ‘worm’, or self spread malware, by exploiting a piece of NSA code known as Eternal Blue, according to several security experts.

The idea that a government can adequately safeguard anything should have been exploded when the USA was unable to preserve its monopoly on nuclear weapons. If they can’t keep something as uniquely advantageous and powerful as that to themselves, what can they protect? Area 51?

A fascinating historical revision

The idea that the “Arab Conquests” might have actually been Persian may explain, in part, why Iran believes it should be the center of the Islamic world:

The two greatest powers in the Middle East at the beginning of the seventh century were Byzantium and Sassanian Persia. In 602 the Persian king Chosroes (Khosrau) II went to war against the Byzantine usurper Phocas, who had earlier murdered Chosroes’ friend and father-in-law the Emperor Maurice. The war did not end with the death of Phocas (610), but continued into the reign of Heraclius, and was to prove ruinous to the Byzantines. Jerusalem was taken by the Persians in 614, a disaster which was quickly followed by the loss of most of Asia Minor between 616 and 618 and Egypt in 619/20. Chosroes II now equalled the achievements of his Persian predecessors in the sixth century BC, with his forces marching across North Africa to annex the Libyan province of Cyrenaea in 621. The story told by the Byzantines of how Heraclius, in the face of this overwhelming calamity, rallied his armies and reconquered all the lost territories – only to lose the same territories again to the Arabs from 632 onwards – has a ring of fantasy about it, and historians have long viewed it with scepticism. Certainly there is no doubting the power and influence of the Persians in this epoch.

The earliest Islam, as revealed by archaeology, is in fact profoundly Persian; and indeed the first trace of Islam recovered in excavation are coins of Sassanian Persian design bearing the image either of Chosroes II (d. 628) or of his grandson Yazdegerd III (d. 651). On one side we find the portrait of the king, on the reverse the picture of a Zoroastrian Fire Temple. The only thing that marks these out as Islamic is the legend besm Allah (in the name of God), written in the Syriac script, beside the Fire Temple. (The Arabic script did not then exist). According to the Encyclopdaedia Iranica:

“These coins usually have a portrait of a Sasanian emperor with an honorific inscription and various ornaments. To the right of the portrait is a ruler’s or governor’s name written in Pahlavi script. On the reverse there is a Zoroastrian fire altar with attendants on either side. At the far left is the year of issue expressed in words, and at the right is the place of minting. In all these features, the Arab-Sasanian coinages are similar to Sasanian silver drahms. The major difference between the two series is the presence of some additional Arabic inscription on most coins issued under Muslim authority, but some coins with no Arabic can still be attributed to the Islamic period. The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations, since they were surely designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues, illustrating the continuity of administration and economic life in the early years of Muslim rule in Iran.” (“Arab-Sasanian Coins,” Encyclopdaedia Iranica, at www.iranica.com/articles/arab-sasanian-coins)

Note the remark: “The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations,” but were “designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues.” We note also that the date provided on these artefacts is written in Persian script, and it would appear that those who minted the coins, native Persians, did not understand Arabic.

It would also explain the seeming, and relatively sudden, vanishing of what had been for more than 1500 years one of the great world powers, if it was not a vanishing, but a mere transformation.

No gods, only reviews

If you like action SF/F but haven’t checked out Kai Wai Cheah’s NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS yet, you really should. This is why:

  • Great book, that took a surprising twist on the usual mixing of Urban Fantasy and Military cloak and dagger genre, plus a bit of alternate history. I”ll need to re-read it because there is a lot under the surface of this hard to put down well written book. The author is from Singapore and if I had not read the author notes, I would have had no idea. The action is fast paced and it reminded me of Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series that is just a fun read, but with a much more sophisticated, serious world view.
  • It was a fun book, I enjoyed reading it. The action scenes were exciting, fun to follow and the book quickly moved from point to point without getting bogged down in unnecessary details.
  • Mr. Cheah wrote a very good military spy/thriller, of the type that pulls you into intense action. The key difference is that he wrote the book for an alternate Earth where sufficiently advanced technology and sufficiently subtle magic become impossible to distinguish from each other. Following World War III, the Atlantic Alliance (Hesperia and its partners) face Persia and Musafiria. Both sides are armed with advanced weapons and alchemical elements aetherium and nythium. But the Persians also use ifriti and djinni like machine guns and cannon, and they seek stronger weapons from other realities. Think of Clancy and Thor novels wrapped into a supernatural setting.
  • I would compare this favorably with Larry Correia’s “Monster Hunter” series – action oriented, lots of weapons, but with supernatural elements. If you liked his books, you will like this book. I am definitely looking forward to the sequels from this exciting new author!
  • Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: it’s a magical universe Splinter Cell meets From Paris With Love, starring Harry Dresden if Harry had joined the Army instead of moping around Chicago letting policewomen punch him in the face. The plot is ripped from next Tuesday’s headlines, not that that’s a bad thing.
It’s available at the Castalia House bookstore as well as on Amazon.
EXCERPT:

“The three Musafireen are moving out,” I said. “The one in the middle with the suitcase is likely Selim.”
“Do we follow him?” Eve asked.
“Stand by.”
Moments later, the other two Musafireen threw money down on the table and left.
“Brick, the other two guys are following Selim. They are exiting now. Target has a four-man PSD.”
“Roger,” Pete replied. “I have eyes on them. They are turning left—your left—and are heading down the street.”
“Got it. Eve, let’s go. Get to the car.”
Eve and I packed up and headed out the door. The wait staff couldn’t stop us; we’d already paid. Eve had parked her car down the road on the other side of the street. As we power-walked to her sedan, Pete maintained a running commentary. The Musafireen turned left at a street junction. I got into the shotgun seat, Eve took the wheel, and she slid out from between a pair of cars.
“I don’t like these odds,” Eve said. “What’s the plan?”
“We hit them in transit,” I said.
“This is a public area. There will be witnesses.”
“If we let them return to their safe house, they can hole up in there, possibly access better firepower. This is the best of our bad options.”
“Fisher, they’re splitting up,” Brick reported. “Selim and two guys are going into a red BMW. Selim in the rear seats, PSD in front. The other two are entering a green coupe. Looks like they are forming a two-car convoy, with the coupe in the lead. Can’t make out license plates from this angle.”
“Sonofabitch,” I muttered under my breath. With two vehicles in play, it would become exponentially harder to set up an ambush—and much easier for them to spot and lose us. “Eve, speed up. Brick, we have to take them now. Circle around the block and set up for a side-on intercept. Hit the BMW. Say again, BMW.”
“Fisher, copy that. I’ll have to drive past them and set up ahead of the targets.”
“Acknowledged. Eve, get on them now.”
We took the left turn. The target convoy was dead ahead. Pete drove past them and turned right at the junction down the road.
So, of course, the cars turned left.
“Brick, the convoy turned left,” I said. “You’re going to have to circle around again.”
“Roger.”
Eve kept three car lengths away from the convoy. Cars and bikes slipped in to fill the gap between us. The convoy passed a couple of streets, steadily overtaking vehicles ahead of them. I continued radioing the targets’ movements, silently urging Pete forward.
“Fisher, Brick. I’m parallel to their track.”
“Roger that. They are coming up to another crossroads. Lights are turning yellow. Set up now.”
The cars ahead slowed to a stop. The BMW and the coupe slid out the lane, slipping into the gap between cars, and sped for the lights. It was a standard countersurveillance tactic: anybody who followed them was guaranteed to be a threat.
“Brick! They’re gonna run the lights!” I warned. “You ready?”
“Hell yeah!”
The convoy ran the lights. The coupe passed the intersection. Seconds later, Pete’s van shot in, striking the BMW’s trunk. The car spun uncontrollably and skidded to a halt. Pete hit the brakes, easing into a tight J-turn.
Eve didn’t dally. She broke out of the lane and rammed her way through. The car jolted and shuddered. Side view mirrors broke off and flew past the window. Breaking free, she jammed the brakes, bringing us to a sudden, skidding, stop.
“Go! Go! Go!” I called, opening the door.
“KTISTES NIKA!” Eve screamed unexpectedly.
What was that?
I drew my pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, then raised the light high and clicked it on. A man staggered out from the driver’s seat of the BMW. Not Selim. I pumped four rounds into his upper torso and face. Eve fired a burst too. He dropped.
A second threat jumped out the front passenger side. Pete lit him up, first with his light and then with his pistol. Four shots later, he went down.
We sprinted towards the BMW. I swept the car with my light and gun. Selim was in the rear, curled up into his seat. I closed in on him. Eve was to my left. I yanked the door open, and we put our guns in his face.

Mercury is mercury

And none of it is good for you, regardless of how it is ingested or administered:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) once again advised pregnant women to curb consumption of fish in order to limit fetal exposures to neurotoxic mercury. This warning raises the baffling query: How can the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) justify its recommendations that pregnant women get flu shots which are laden with far more mercury than what’s found in a can of tuna?

The CDC has long answered that nettlesome question with the controversial claim that ethylmercury in vaccines is not toxic to humans. Now, two CDC scientists have published research decisively debunking that assertion. As it turns out, there is no “good mercury” and “bad mercury.” Both forms are equally poisonous to the brain.

The CDC study, Alkyl Mercury-Induced Toxicity: Multiple Mechanisms of Action, appeared last month in the journal, Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. The 45-page meta-review of relevant science examines the various ways that mercury harms the human body. Its authors, John F. Risher, PhD, and Pamela Tucker, MD, are researchers in the CDC’s Division of Toxicology and Human Health Sciences, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

“This scientific paper is the one of most important pieces of research to come out of the CDC in a decade,” Paul Thomas, M.D., a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician who has been practicing medicine for 30 years, said. “It confirms what so many already suspected: that public health officials have been making a terrible mistake in recommending that we expose babies and pregnant women to this neurotoxin.

One would have thought that simply the term “neurotoxin” would be sufficient to dissuade scientists and doctors from recommending ingestion, but apparently not. Look, they can produce all the “metastudies” they like to claim that injecting any amount of poison into very small children is absolutely harmless, but the concept simply defies logic on multiple levels.

And one doesn’t have to be “anti-vaccine” to question the medical community’s mantra that all vaccines are equally efficacious, safe, and necessary. Or to be aware of the reality of corporate profit motives, their historical indifference to consumer health, and regulatory capture.

“Barbaric terrorist acts”

A tale of two historical vandalisms:

The United Nations Security Council on Friday condemned what it described as the latest “barbaric terrorist acts” in Iraq by Islamic State militants, including the destruction of priceless religious and cultural artifacts.

A video published by the ultra-radical Islamist militant group Islamic State on Thursday showed men attacking ancient Assyrian statues and sculptures, some of them identified as antiquities from the 7th century BC, with sledgehammers and drills, saying they were symbols of idolatry.

“The members of the Security Council strongly condemned the ongoing barbaric terrorist acts in Iraq by ISIL (Islamic State)” the council said in a statement. It also reiterated that the group “must be defeated and that the intolerance, violence, and hatred it espouses must be stamped out.”

Meanwhile, in Louisiana:

“Today we continue the mission,” Landrieu said in a statement on the Davis statue. “These monuments have stood not as historical or educational markers of our legacy and segregation, but in celebration of it.”

Landrieu, the first white mayor of mostly black New Orleans since his father Moon held the job in the 1970s, called for removal of the monuments amid the lingering emotional aftermath of the 2015 massacre of nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church. The killer, Dylann Roof, was an avowed racist who brandished Confederate battle flags in photos. The slayings re-charged the debate over whether Confederate emblems represent racism or an honorable heritage.

Davis’ statue was the second of four monuments to the Confederate era that the City Council, at Landrieu’s behest, voted 6-1 to take down. After legal battles delayed the work, the first – a granite obelisk honoring whites who rebelled against a biracial Reconstruction government – came down late last month.

What, precisely, is the difference? There is no difference. It’s just vandalizing history of which one does not approve.