Gun rights in the capital

It’s another step forward for Gun Freedom in America:

A federal judge on Saturday overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on carrying handguns outside the home, saying it was unconstitutional.

“There is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny,” said Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. of the District of Columbia District Court.

“Therefore, the court finds that the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional,” he added in his 19-page ruling on the case, Palmer v. District of Columbia, which has been dragging on for five years.

The court ordered the city to allow residents to carry handguns outside their homes and to let nonresidents carry them as well.

I’d prefer to see the Constitutional language implemented more completely and for all gun-related laws to be thrown out, but it’s good to see gun rights advancing, however slowly. Always make it harder for the government to kill its people. The harder it is for the government to do it, the higher the risk to its agents to try it, the less likely it is to happen.

Celebrate Palmer this week and buy a handgun.

Hamas is Israel’s al-Qaida

Keep the history of Hamas in mind when you read about how terrible they are and how Israel has no choice but to eradicate it due to its implacable religious opposition to the existence of Israel. And notice that the article is twelve years old, although it reads as if it was published yesterday.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were “weak and dormant” until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da’wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran….

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

“Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with,” he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

“The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy,” said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, “the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it,” he said.

And notice how the utterly idiotic meme that some Jews like Howard Stern are trying to push, that to be “anti-Israel is to be anti-America”, is based in part upon this 2002 theme about Israel being “the only democracy” in the Middle East.

The plan of the Israeli Right may well be at work here in the 2014 conflict. Hamas’s implacability may permit them to convince the Israeli moderates that ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is ultimately necessary. Which, thousands of years of military history suggests, is absolutely true. But don’t shed too many tears or spare too much sympathy for a strategic plan playing out exactly as it is supposed to. If the strategists of the Israeli Right decided to sacrifice a few hundred Jews in order to justify the PR cover necessary for the expulsions, it’s a bit much to expect Americans to be overly concerned about the fate of those sacrificial lambs.

However, the growing world disapproval of Israel, and the declining level of American approval, indicates that no PR-based strategy is likely to succeed in the short- or long-term. Then again, perhaps the Hamas Plan is primarily intended for domestic consumption.

UPDATE: Speaking of Jewish strategy, I’m not sure this is the optimal way to convince Muslims that Jewish women are not the collection of whores they are often accused of being.

Women and the civilizational cycle

The materially deleterious effect of women working on a society is illustrated in a paper entitled “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation and Government Size”

The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all
countries, by two changes in the structure of the economy, namely an
increase in the share of government spending in GDP and an increase in
female labour force participation. This paper suggests that these two
changes are causally related. We develop a growth model where the
structure of the economy is endogenous so that participation in market
activities and government size are causally related.

Economic growth and
rising incomes are accompanied by a greater incentive for women to
engage in labour market activities as the opportunity cost of staying at
home increases. We hypothesize that government spending decreases the
cost of performing household chores such as, but not limited to, child
rearing and child care so that couples decide to engage further in the
labour market and chose a higher tax rate to finance more government
spending.

Using a wide cross-section of data for developed and
developing countries, we show that higher participation by women in the
labour market are indeed positively associated with larger governments.
Furthermore, we investigate the causal link between the two variables
using as instrumental variables a unique and novel dataset on the
relative price of home appliances across OECD countries and over time.
We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the
labour market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in
the labour market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size.
This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of
controls in the spirit of Rodrik (1998).

This is also an implicit argument against female suffrage. However, the researchers’ hypothesis is incorrect, as government spending observably does not decrease the cost of child rearing and child care; one reason European families have so few children is that the cost of raising children is exorbitant despite the greater amount of spending by European governments. Free day care and year-long maternity leave doesn’t make up for the fact that food and gasoline cost considerably more than in the USA.

Voting is not freedom. The conflation of voting with freedom is one of the key deceptions upon which feminism rests. And like all ideologies based upon deception, the more powerful feminism becomes, the more likely it is that the polity in which it has become influential will collapse on the basis of the weight of its contradictions.

Flirting with Hultgreen-Curie

On the plus side, at least she didn’t manage to get herself killed while sinking the ship. Compared to the average female pioneer, the soon-to-be ex-commander is practically a success story:

The first female commander of a Royal Navy warship has been sent home after allegedly having an affair with another officer. Commander Sarah West, 42, took charge of the frigate HMS Portland in May 2012, but has been sent home from duty after claims she was having a relationship with a male officer on the same ship.

This would breach the Armed Forces’ Code of Social Conduct, which prohibits personnel from having relationships with subordinates if they compromise ‘operational effectiveness’. While the Royal Navy is investigating the affair, Cdr West, from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, retains her position as commander of HMS Portland. It is not known whether the male officer is married.

It’s certainly an interesting idea to have warships commanded by women. It poses a fascinating question: does the entire ship stay in port when the captain pulls the common Navy trick of getting herself pregnant right before a scheduled deployment? Since Commander West was “sent home from duty” but “retains her position as commander of HMS Portland”, I suppose we have our answer. This may prove a whole new front of 4GW.

“Mr. Lee, this is your mission. You are ordered to seduce and impregnate Captain Mary Wettlaufer, commanding officer of the USS Stennis. Our informants report that her carrier group is being sent to the South China Sea. Under no circumstances can the Stennis be permitted to leave Bremerton!”

“Yes, sir. This agent will do his duty, sir. But what is in this bottle, suicide pills?”

“Viagra, Mr. Lee. I fear you will need it, as Captain Wettlaufer is said to put the “dog” into “running dogs of capitalism”… your sacrifice in this regard will be noted by the Party and the Central Committee.”

And now, a moment of silence

For Our Friend Damien’s abortive SF career:

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
I don’t believe I can claim to belong in SF any longer. That makes me a little sad, but also excited.

While I did advise Our Friend that he ought to go ahead and quit as per his declaration concerning his distaste for the true demographics of the SF community, I don’t think I can take all the blame for this sad loss to world literature. Any reasonable mind will clearly conclude that it is mostly the fault of that dreadful D-List author, Larry Correia: 

The Official Alphabetical List of Author Success

A List – High upon Mount Olympus They Gaze Down Upon the Pathetic Mortals = All the $

  •  Authors who are worth more than the GDP of some countries.
  •  Authors who build their houses out of gold bars.
  •  Characters from their books get their own theme parks.
  •  The lady who wrote Twilight.

B List – The King(s) =$$$$$$$$$$

  • Authors who have TV shows about their books starring Peter Dinklage.
  • Authors who sleep on large piles of money.
  • Politicians who get illegal campaign contributions masquerading as advances.
  • Oprah’s Book Club

and all the way down to:

X List – The X

  • Writes violent pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little
    Ponies, Voltron, and Breaking Bad on the internet, while dressed in a
    stained bunny costume that looks like a strange gimp version of that
    thing from Donnie Darko.
  • Don’t make any sudden moves.
  • We’re just going to walk away real slow now.

Y List – The Yama

  • A primordial creature barely capable of vomiting words onto a page in a
    blasphemous impersonation of the act of writing, so mind shattering and
    terrible that a single story threatened to end language forever. He is
    The Thing That Should Not Be. To read his foul creations will summon the
    Black Goat of the Woods with its Thousand Young, and it will kill your
    muse and sodomize the corpse.
  • Is confident that he’d be a much
    more successful writer than A-X, if only he wasn’t too busy stalking
    Asian women on the internet to actually submit any of his crayon
    scribbles.
  • The reason sci-fi conventions have security.

Z List –  The Guardian’s Village Idiot = ($)

  • A kind of Anti-Author.
  • Motivated by delusions of relevancy, crowd sources witch hunts against writers higher on the list.
  • Collects the opposite of royalties, and actually has to be paid a strange sort of “Book Welfare” to produce a book.

I’m sure we will all be waiting, with no small amount of anticipation, to learn what genre Our Friend Damien will be not writing in next.

The fakers

This rings true of my experience of the Ivy League and its uptight denizens.

A young woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he’s painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he’s incurious, but because there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.

My freshman year, I spent a few days at Harvard and Dartmouth with a Bucknell girl whose two best friends were at those superior learning establishments. Dartmouth was exactly like Bucknell, only the girls were shorter and uglier and the temperature was colder. But Harvard… I have never, in my entire life, been around a bigger group of hapless posers.

The description of the Yale guy who reads the first and last chapters of a book rings very true. It’s become a common phenomenon online, but Harvard was the first place I encountered people who regarded having heard of something as being synonymous with knowing it. That’s why I developed the habit of asking a question or two about the contents of a book someone has mentioned because I’ve learned that many people will pretend to have read things they have not.

Seriously, if you haven’t read something, it’s no big deal. There are a lot of books out there. There are hundreds that I think I should read that I haven’t and probably never will. It’s no big deal not to have read a book… unless, of course, you’re writing a review of it.

I’ve mentioned this part before, but the most egregious example I’ve encountered was the big guy who kept telling girls about how he “played hockey for Harvard”. Unfortunately for him, I happen to be from Minnesota and I also happened to know that the Harvard hockey team was in Minneapolis that night, playing the Gophers. I think one of my friends back home was going to the game or something. I asked him if he was hurt, which he denied in a puzzled manner, and promptly fell into the trap. When pressed, he finally admitted that he played INTRAMURAL hockey. Right.

Not everyone I’ve met from an Ivy League school that isn’t Dartmouth or Brown is a lying, pretentious poser, but a surprisingly high percentage of them are. And while it may be a character flaw, I’ve discovered that there are few things more entertaining than intellectually bitchslapping the unsuspecting, insecure little bastards.

Even if I was going to send my children to an American university, and I can’t imagine I would, I wouldn’t send them to any Ivy League school.

Speaking of preferential treatment

A longtime member of the Dread Ilk has a job opportunity in Ohio:

I have a Dread Ilk job opportunity. My local sales firm in the Ohio region is hiring two sales people, one experienced and one entry-level. They plan to make decisions in the next month. If anyone is interested, could they communicate through you? This is a golden opportunity for an entry-level sales person to break into the oil and gas industry.

The successful person will be working for my rep firm, and indirectly working for me so I would only pass on quality people, obviously. Would love to see one of the Ilk get hired so whatever you can do I would appreciate it.

If you’re interested shoot me an email with Ilk Job in the subject and I’ll pass it on.

How do you say “taqiyya” in Hebrew?

In the comments, Steve offered the excuse of superior motivation and “training” to explain the inordinate amount of Jewish success, first in Germany, now in the USA:

Whenever I read complaints about Jewish success, I wonder if people really want the totalitarian control which would be necessary to stop a high IQ, highly motivated, creative, hard working people from achieving it, because that is what is necessary to stop it. You have to give up your freedom to repress the successful and promote the mediocre and that is quite a price to pay, just because you don’t like Jewish billionaires or bankers or whatever. But as America has already travelled a way down that road (promotion of mediocre anyway), it probably won’t be too much of a stretch. In any event, a little secret for your readers. When Jews succeed they do not look around and say to themselves: “so many Jews have succeeded before me, I had better stop now, because the Gentiles around here are going to get mad.” There is no “group strategy” like that, – isn’t that what McDonald calls it? No they are trained to think: “if that Jew made it, I can make it – only faster and better.” Yes, that is the “secret” of the Jews. I myself don’t think lazy and stupid and resentful would be better, but from the looks of things, I may be in the distinct minority…  I just
think [ethnic nepotism] is complete BS. Wanting to believe someone else succeeded
because someone else got the break.

I pointed out that the real “secret” of Jewish success is that Jews “relentlessly and
ruthlessly promote other Jews at the expense of non-Jews while furiously
fighting to prevent any efforts of the majority to do the same.” Steve offers zero evidence in support of his assertions, raising numerous questions such as this one: do Jews actually work more hours in six days per week than every other group does in seven?

Now, there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with favoring one’s own. It is normal human behavior. You see it in the NFL all the time; when Denny Green was hired as the Vikings head coach, the coaching staff suddenly went from being all-white to nearly half-black. Was that wrong? One could hardly criticize Green for bringing in the likes of Tony Dungy (later Super Bowl-winning head coach), Tyrone Willingham (later head coach at Stanford and Notre Dame), and Willie Shaw (Hall of Fame cornerback, father of current Stanford head coach David Shaw). And small groups will tend to stick together more successfully than large groups. But to simultaneously attempt to deny other groups the ability to do the same, and moreover, to deny doing what is observably being done, is both wrong and mendacious.

I’ve personally witnessed this in-group promotion in several different industries. To give one example, I have seen how the Littlest Chickenhawk was handed multiple opportunities to fail upward; he was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate as a teenager despite the fact that his WND column was banal and one of the least-read; my weekly readership there was 4.1 times larger than his. Now, at 30, he is editor-at-large of Breitbart News, guest hosts regularly for major talk show hosts, and appears regularly on news channels including CNN, Fox News, and Sun News Network in Canada. Is Ben Shapiro THAT much more talented or intelligent or insightful than I am? Than every other contributor at WND is? I doubt Shapiro himself would make such a claim?

And there is considerable evidence of that relentless in-group promotion described, both anecdotal and statistical. Ron Unz exposed the corruption in Ivy League admissions offices in an article entitled “The Myth of American Meritocracy”:

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father….

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”

Steinberg’s description of the remaining handful of Wesleyan applicants seems to fall into a very similar pattern, indicating that our elite admissions process operates under the principle of “Ideology and Diversity tempered by Corruption.” 

One wonders how many of the “honors” students shared her background. Steve and Miss Jannol may believe her “success” is the result of her innate Jewish superiority, but the facts demonstrate otherwise. And even the familiar appeals to intelligence are increasingly outdated; as the demographic math would indicate was bound to happen, Jews have been completely surpassed by elite Asians in the National Merit Scholarship program and have therefore resorted to using the very sort of quotas they once complained WASPs used to keep them out of the Ivy League.

As Unz observed: “The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians
winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National
Merit Scholarship semifinalists. It seems quite suspicious that none of
trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and
other top Ivy League universities.”

These are the facts. Facts are not anti-semitic, they are merely the truth of the world as it is. And the truth, however uncomfortable, will be sought after and observed here: the more any commenter attempts to obscure the truth, the more I will take the time and effort required to expose whatever it is he is trying to hide. I had actually moved on from the subject until commenters like Steve started showing up and attempting to pass off transparent deceit as truth. And before Steve attempts to dig himself in any deeper, it may be helpful to keep in mind that I am one of those National Merit semifinalists and I am not easily baffled with bullshit. Every assertion made will require evidential support. Every statement made will be dissected, and every retreat into rhetoric will be noted as such.

For whatever reason, Steve is attempting to hide the observable fact that the inordinate success presently enjoyed by Jews in America is not the inevitable result of working harder, being more intelligent, or innate ethnic superiority, but is primarily due to a laudable dedication to in-group promotion being expressed in a variety of means, some legitimate, and some not. I assume he is doing so in an attempt to prevent an anti-semitic reaction, but whatever his motivation may be, I will point out that deception and misinformation do not work for long on those with open eyes and functional memories.

People are certainly free to ignore my warnings. Most have in the past and I assume most will in the future. But if Steve thinks Americans are going to meekly accept the financial pillaging of their nation any more tamely than the European nations historically have, especially when they have also suffered the demographic demolition of their country, I think he is woefully mistaken. And, I note, there are more than a few Jewish leaders who more or less agree with my concerns.

It’s not a real problem yet. The difference between Israel’s disapproval rating in the USA and in France, (which is a reasonable proxy) is nearly 50 percent; 27 percent vs 65 percent. If that percentage begins to rise in the next five years, it will be an initial indication that my read of the situation is correct.

Of Apple and NSA

This is not exactly shocking news, but it is disappointing all the same to learn that Apple is making it even easier for governments to spy on its users.

Apple has endowed iPhones with undocumented functions that allow unauthorized people in privileged positions to wirelessly connect and harvest pictures, text messages, and other sensitive data without entering a password or PIN, a forensic scientist warned over the weekend.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS jailbreaker and forensic expert, told attendees of the Hope X conference that he can’t be sure Apple engineers enabled the mechanisms with the intention of accommodating surveillance by the National Security Agency and law enforcement groups. Still, he said some of the services serve little or no purpose other than to make huge amounts of data available to anyone who has access to a computer, alarm clock, or other device that has ever been paired with a targeted device.

Zdziarski said the service that raises the most concern is known as com.apple.mobile.file_relay. It dishes out a staggering amount of data—including account data for e-mail, Twitter, iCloud, and other services, a full copy of the address book including deleted entries, the user cache folder, logs of geographic positions, and a complete dump of the user photo album—all without requiring a backup password to be entered.

So much for that whole liberal countercultural vibe Apple has been riding for decades. It was one thing to construct a walled garden. It’s another to hand Big Brother a secret key to it.

Smells like Lusitanian spirit

The more hysterical the charges we see directed at Putin, and the more strident the demands, the more I suspect that the Russian leader had nothing to do with the downed Malaysian airliner. Mish has been increasingly dubious about the proposed scenario as well:

As I suspected would happen, the exclusive Reuters interview in which “Commander Alexander Khodakovsky acknowledges rebel fighters had BUK missiles” has been challenged.

In my analysis of the Reuters article (see Ukraine Rebel Commander Admits Having BUK Missiles; Damning Contradictions?),  I point out considerable discrepancies in what Reuters author Anton Zverev wrote and actual quotes Reuters presented.

The discrepancies were so big I stated “It appears to me Reuters may have stretched this interview quite a bit.”

Thus I am not surprised to discover Khodakovsky challenged huge aspects of that interview, in terms of things he stated, did not state, and even timing of events….

Khodakovsky neither admitted nor denied the rebels had Buks. Once again, here is the damning contradiction as I presented earlier.

    “Khodakovsky said his unit had never possessed BUKs, but they may have been used by rebels from other units.”

    Now look back at the opening Reuters lead-in: “Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok Battalion, acknowledged … the rebels did possess the BUK missile system and said it could have been sent back subsequently to remove proof of its presence.”

    Here is the major contradiction: “What resources our partners have, we cannot be entirely certain. Was there (a BUK)? Wasn’t there? If there was proof that there was, then there can be no question.”

Zerohedge is reporting that the US State Department has not been able to find any signs of Russian involvement. And the Russians themselves are pointing out some awkward facts that may be indicative of Ukrainian responsibility for shooting down the passenger plane.

Remember, many, if not most, wars involve some level of deception, false flags, and deceitful finger-pointing. So it’s always wise to reserve judgment in such matters as long as possible. And it’s also worth pointing out that the Ukrainian puppet government just collapsed and the US-installed prime minister has resigned:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has announced his resignation following turmoil in government. Yatsenyuk made the announcement from the dais of the parliament after two parties said they would pull out of the governing coalition. “I am announcing my resignation [in connection] with the collapse of the coalition,” Yatsenyuk said.

This is not the action of a nation prepared to fight a war with Russia.