Cuba Joins BRICS

As a partner-state rather than a full member-state, however:

Cuba and Bolivia are expected to officially join BRICS as partner states on January 1, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said. In an interview with the Izvestia newspaper on Friday, Ryabkov confirmed that both countries had received invitations.

“We are confident that everything will work out in terms of their joining the group as partners,” the diplomat said.

The new ‘partner country’ status was approved at the BRICS summit in October, hosted by Russia in Kazan, and is intended to serve as an alternative to membership after more than 30 nations applied to join the organization.

I think the more noteworthy item is the absence of an invitation for Türkiye. One would have thought they would be a shoe-in, but perhaps the Turkish invasion of Syria was more than the BRICS members were willing to accept. I also find it curious that neither Malaysia nor Vietnam were accepted, but it might be that there will be a separate announcement concerning the new Asian member-states coming from China.

DISCUSS ON SG

Christmas and the New Covenant

Andrew Torba calls out the Churchians and their falsehoods.

The book of Hebrews makes it crystal clear: the Old Covenant is obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). It’s done. Finished. Over. The New Covenant in Christ’s blood has replaced it entirely. The Church fulfills God’s promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through him (Genesis 22:18) and his seed, who is Christ. (Galatians 3:16-18)

The belief that ethnic Israel retains a distinctive status apart from the Church misinterprets Scripture. It neglects the transformative nature of Christ’s work. He did not simply enhance Israel; He fulfilled its purpose and extended it to embrace all who believe.

If your pastor is preaching anything else on this subject, you’re not in a church.

You’re in a synagogue of Satan.

One thing that is fascinating about the inability of many Christians to pay attention to God’s Word is that we are warned, over and over again, about the various ways in which deceivers will attempt to deceive us. And yet, even in the face of obvious and documented deceit that flies directly in the face of the words of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul alike, Churchians will insist that their Gospel of Niceness takes precedence over Church tradition, secular history, current observation, and the Bible itself.

But they could not be more wrong. The fruit of Churchianity has been the decline of not only the Church and the nation, but the descent of civilization itself.

DISCUSS ON SG

FBI Front Disbands

As I pointed out on numerous occasions, there has never been a faker or more obviously glowy “grass roots movement” than the so-called “Patriot Front”. From their gay little matching khakis to their police protection, it was always obvious that they were an FBI trap for young nationalist men of the sort that the “Unite the Right” and January 6th protests were. And now that they’re about to find themselves in a position to be exposed as a false front by the incoming Trump administration, they’re “disbanding.”

WASHINGTON, DC—The white nationalist group Patriot Front has declared it will disband on the same day FBI Director Christopher Wray announced his retirement. This surprising synchronicity has sparked widespread speculation and debate. Patriot Front’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, stated, “We’ve decided to return to our roots,” hinting at a return to less public activities or perhaps disbanding entirely. The timing of this decision aligns precisely with Wray’s departure from his role as the head of the FBI, leading to numerous questions about the connection between these two events.

Translation: “Return to our roots” = “going back to our day jobs at the bureau.

Now there are two possible explanations. One, this report of their disbanding is fake. That’s possible, and if so, I’m sure we’ll see another flag parade soon. Two, they have succeeded in their stated mission of saving America. That does not appear to accord with events. Or three, they were fake and glowy from the start. Which, of course, has been my contention from the first time I saw one of their little police-protected parades that ended by disappearing into an underground parking ramp.

And to be honest, I have always been deeply, deeply dubious of anyone who publicly defended them or insisted that they were just a group of genuine American patriots trying to save their country through parades, flags, and matching trousers.

DISCUSS ON SG

First Star Wars, Now Middle Earth

The Hellmouth is methodically destroying the intellectual property it manages to acquire. Star Wars is effectively dead, so now it’s abusing Middle Earth.

Pop culture critic Gary Buechler aka Nerdrotic shared his review for Warner Bros. latest release The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim by deeming it a “boring slog.”

In a recent video upload, Buechler makes it clear the film does indeed feature a girl boss in the form of Helm Hammerhand’s daughter, Hera, who has no name in Tolkien’s original work and is only mentioned in a single sentence.

He says, “They went with a girl boss.” After noting the movie is not as bad as The Rings of Power, he says, “What [Warner Bros.] did manage to do was girl boss better.”

He explains, “War of the Rohirrim is about some unnamed daughter who ends up being the impetus of the story leading around a bunch of incompetent men who should have listened to her in the first place.”

“What could have been the story centered on Helm Hammerhand and the tragic events that led to the naming of Helm’s Deep turned into something else,” he added.

It’s all so tedious. Tolkien wrote less about women, and had less interest in the female perspective, than nearly any author not writing gay space dinosaur porn. So, naturally, the Hellmouth sees the mere mention of one character having a daughter and promptly throws out everything in order to tell her story.

It’s a remarkable form of arrogant non-creativity to both a) require someone else’s story and then b) refuse to tell it as is. What’s fascinating is the way in which it clearly never occurs to the non-creators that absolutely no one is interested in their stories, which is why they require the rights to the IP in the first place.

Tolkien’s legacy would have been much better served by putting his work into the public domain upon his death. Or, at the very least, upon his son Christopher’s death, as Christopher Tolkien was an excellent steward of his father’s work.

DISCUSS ON SG

Unprecedented Evil

The wickedness of Clown World is proving too great for Great Britain:

The UK has banned puberty blockers for minors,

“The United Kingdom indefinitely banned puberty blockers for children after warnings about an “unacceptable safety risk” on Wednesday. Wes Streeting, the U.K.’s secretary of state for Health and Social Care, announced the ban would affect everyone younger than 18. “We need to act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice,” Streeting said.

The declaration from the British government comes after the Commission on Human Medicines found there is “an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”

With the commission’s report revealing that puberty blockers were prescribed to minors who filled out only one online questionnaire and completed a single Zoom call, Streeting said Wednesday that there was “particular concern” about whether the “children and their families were provided with enough time and information to give their full and informed consent.”

Now the prosecutions of the doctors who prescribed these puberty blockers to children should begin. This was only and ever child abuse, and it is about time that this practice was banned.

I remember when I was a kid you would hear teachers at school often talk about how evil China was for allowing the practice of foot binding. This was the practice of binding little girls’ feet to stop them fully growing. I remember thinking how cruel and evil it was. I am not sure what sort of support this practice has in modern China, but blocking the natural development of children through puberty is just as, if not more, cruel than binding little girls feet.

The comparison to historical Chinese foot binding is both apt and illustrative. There can be absolutely no doubt that the historians of the future will look back at this time as a period of insanity. As awful as foot-binding is, it’s nowhere nearly as cruel and evil as blocking a child’s natural development under the guise of “changing” their sex.

DISCUSS ON SG

This Very Night

Today marks the release of THIS VERY NIGHT by Cradle to Calvary, which is a new Christmas carol written in the traditional sense. Which is to say that it is a religious carol about the Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ rather than a cheerful song about Santa Claus, the local weather patterns, or urban shopping experiences. The version you can listen to here is an alternative and previously unreleased one, an acoustic take on the more traditional carol that was released today on iTunes and Spotify. Unauthorized subscribers can also listen to it and download it from UATV.

You can hear a preview of the released single, the Holy Call mix, by clicking on the image below. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

DISCUSS ON SG

Paul Krugman is Done

After 24 years of leading opinions into intellectual dead ends, America’s leading cheerleader for neoconnery and Neo-Keynesian economics is ending his run as a New York Times columnist with an exhibition of the same sort of dishonest cluelessness that rendered him such a helpless punching bag for the entirety of that run.

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.

In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.

Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest… So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.

Even at the end of his very undistinguished career, Krugman cannot admit that he and his fellow ethnic elites completely blew the opportunity that their grandfathers and fathers so painstakingly prepared for them. They assumed near-complete control of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen at a time when the rest of the world was still digging itself out of the rubble of WWII, and instead of devoting themselves to the benefit of the American people, spent the last fifty years looting their host nation and abusing their power and their influence in a manner so obviously stupid and short-lived that it’s hard to even describe it as self-serving.

The reason people around the world have lost all faith in elites is the direct result of the complete failure by Krugman and his fellow elitists to govern reasonably, let alone responsibly. Their core assumptions were wrong, their objectives were insane, their policies were societally destructive, and their eventual failure was inevitable.

It’s not so much that Paul Krugman will not be missed. He will not even be remembered.

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Bet Against Him

On Wednesday, the unbelievable happened. Bill Belichick agreed to become the head coach at North Carolina. It’s an incredibly exciting and interesting development for the football world as a whole, and there will be many eyes on Chapel Hill over the next 12 months as the all-time great NFL coach makes his mark in the collegiate realm.

So much has changed in college football that it wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if Belichick managed to figure out how to game the system and take UNC to the college football playoff. I don’t think this would have happened in the time before NIL, the transfer portal, and the professionalization of college football. And I have to admit, I’m more interested in college football than I’ve been since I was nine and watching SWC teams play the option with tearaway jerseys.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World Declares a Winner

Foreign Affairs declares Türkiye and Erdogan to be the winners of the sudden Syrian collapse:

In most capitals across the Middle East, the news of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall sparked immense anxiety. Ankara is not one of them. Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Chief among the rebel forces that ended Assad’s rule on Sunday is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the United Nations. Despite those designations, Turkey has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

All this has given Turkey influence over HTS. In October, Erdogan quashed plans for a rebel offensive in Aleppo; when rebel forces launched their campaign late last month, they likely did so with Erdogan’s approval. For years, Assad had been dragging his feet as Erdogan sought to mend ties with Damascus and repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees whose presence in Turkey undermined support for his ruling party. With Assad’s regional allies weakened by the Israeli campaign in Gaza and Lebanon, and Russia distracted in Ukraine, Erdogan saw an opportunity to force the Syrian leader to the table.

The rebels’ whirlwind success came as a surprise. Now, Assad is out of the picture altogether, and Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia—Turkey’s main rivals in Syria—are chastened; a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees; and Assad’s departure could even open a window for remaining U.S. troops to leave, fulfilling a long-sought goal of Ankara’s. If it can avoid the potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

Obviously Israel is one of the immediate winners; the Lebensraum advocates are already grabbing Syrian territory in the name of “self-defense”. But I’m not certain that convincing the rest of the world that any accommodation with the USA is impossible is likely to benefit the Netanhayu regime in the intermediate term.

Also, at some point, the Turkish desire for an Ottoman revival and Israeli dreams of a Greater Israeli Empire are bound to collide. And the numbers would appear to favor the Turks.

DISCUSS ON SG