Don’t believe Jerusalem Joe

If you weren’t inclined to believe everything that Baghdad Bob said about the great victories of the Iraqi military, you shouldn’t be stupid enough to take Jerusalem Joe at his word either. While more than a few philo-IDFites have swallowed the “we totally meant to do that” line of the announced ground invasion that wasn’t, and exulted in the “brilliance” of total destruction of Hamas’s elite forces though a press release, I was more than a little skeptical of US media Jews reporting on the astonishing cleverness of Israeli military Jews in outwitting a group of unsuspecting gentiles, who were totally defeated by little more than deceitful words.

Let’s just say the narrative struck me as a little bit… familiar. Also, the idea that enemy troops on the ground – indeed, underground – were completely destroyed by artillery and air strikes tends to be one that lasts right up until the moment that the ground troops actually go in. Let’s just say “no one could have survived that” is a concept that has been repeatedly disproven everywhere from Normandy to the South Pacific.

The Israeli military apparently used a brilliant deceptive maneuver to take out Hamas’s terrorist fighting force and underground tunnels — in a single blow.

In what could only be described as killing two birds with one stone, the Israel Defense Forces on Thursday night told news reporters that the Israeli ground forces were on their way to Hamas-held Gaza.

The news spread quickly through the mainstream media and affiliated social media accounts. Believing an Israeli ground invasion to be imminent, Hamas ordered its terrorist fighters to seek shelter in the tunnel network dug up under the Gaza city.

What followed the Hamas mobilization was a massive wave of Israeli airstrikes — comprising of 160 aircraft — on the Gaza tunnel network with the jihadi group’s top terror brass sitting underground, right where the IDF wanted them.

The fact that the failure of this “brilliant deceptive maneuver” was going to be apparent as soon as the next round of rockets were launched doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the idiots who didn’t hesitate to celebrate Israel’s total victory through extreme cleverness by applied average 115 IQ. And indeed, while more sober and experienced Israeli sources dutifully stuck by the official “ruse” report, they were considerably less convinced about its results.

An IDF ruse was behind the “embarrassing leak” to world media on Thursday night, May 13, reporting the start of an IDF ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, It was denied early Friday morning and explained by an “internal communication problem.” DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that this false story was in fact planted deliberately to bring Hamas elite forces out of their bunkers to confront the “invaders” – whereupon they were to be clobbered by Israeli warplanes. How far this trick worked has not been disclosed. A similar subterfuge was tried 13 years ago – in reverse. On Dec. 27, 2008, IDF sources leaked to world media that the military had been ordered to refrain from responding with ground action to a past Hamas rocket barrage, Its commanders were taken in and staged a police school graduation parade in Gaza in the open. They were bombed by Israeli jets.

For now, the IDF has not given up on a ground operation inside Gaza. Whenever it goes forward, it is planned to be a fast in-and-out raid for well-defined targets before pulling back. Up until Friday, May 14, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had exhausted no more than a quarter of their rocket stocks, dozens dropping short inside the enclave. The bulk, however, remained out of reach of Israeli air strikes, tucked away deep inside underground stores. Destroying this stockpile would be the main target of any Israeli ground operation.

Hamas has also kept its elite Izz e-din Al Qassam battalion safe and whole by dispersing its members among well-fortified bunkers, designed to withstand both aerial and ground assaults. In contrast, around half of the 15 ordinary units, split into four regional brigades, have been knocked out of action.

So, neither the leadership nor the elite were knocked out by the stunning ruse after all? What’s the real story? We don’t know yet, but we do know that the pace of the rocket launches by Hamas doesn’t appear to have slowed considerably, which tends to indicate that the Jerusalem Joe narrative was a false one.

For the fifth night running, Hamas and Islamic Jihad spread a barrage of some 190 rockets over large parts of Israel. 

Personally, I think it’s much more likely that someone in the IDF media department screwed up in the erroneous belief that the planned ground invasion had begun, but rather than simply admit the embarrassing mistake to the world press, they decided to sell it as intentional in order to support the increasingly creaky narrative of the invincible IDF, which took a serious hit in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

In any event, remember that the only thing we can be absolutely sure did NOT happen is whatever the mainstream media is reporting.

UPDATE: Ahem….

Israel Defense Forces say false Gaza invasion report to foreign media was ‘mistake’ and not manipulation to lure Hamas into trap.

Convergence Complete: BSA

 It’s official. The Boy Scouts of America are dead.

The Boy Scouts Of America released a statement in support of Black Lives Matter and now say they’ll require Eagle Scouts to earn a diversity and inclusion badge. According to the rest of their statement, they “haven’t been as brave as they should have been” following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.

This organization turned into a joke when they made it sexist to keep women out of the Boy Scouts, but now they’re a laughing stock.

This is why it is utterly and absolutely futile to continue participating in any organization that refuses to police itself. There were many people right here on this blog who continued to make excuses for their continued involvement with the Boy Scouts, and any number of various rationalizations and justifications for it.

But once an SJW-infested organization begins to converge, it’s over. Because if you didn’t have the sense to keep them out in the first place, you’re not going to be able to do a damn thing once they’ve established their strongholds and feel secure enough to begin actively tranforming the organization.

Keep this in mind the next time you’re warned about an organization with which you’re involved. Because if you don’t care enough to protect it, you will not keep it.

Weekly BIC Roundup

 Bounding Into Comics publishes its weekly Arktoons roundup:

Arkhaven Comics offers a wide variety of the very best in new comics from superheroes to YA to urban fantasy. It publishes gritty, adult adventure, and humor.  But this company goes a step further, Arkhaven also honors the rich history of the American comic book.

Harlen Ellison once said, “…there are five native American art forms that we’ve given to the world: Jazz, of course. Musical comedy as we know it today. The detective story as crafted by Poe. The banjo. And comic books.”  

In today’s Arktoons roundup we’ll look at just a few of the Arktoons celebrating the rich history of that American-created artform, the comic book.

They had some interesting things to say about ATOB, among other things. Anyhow, read the whole thing there. Also, we only have one Saturday PM Arktoon today due to some technical difficulties with Chuck Dixon Presents: Comedy.

CLOCKWORK DANCER Episode 3: Attacking Automata

 

The CDC isn’t getting vaxxed

 Let’s face it, if they’re publicly admitting that half the employees at the CDC and the FDA aren’t getting vaccinated, the actual number is almost certainly north of two-thirds:

When pressed by Sen. Richard Burr about the percentage of CDC and FDA employees who have elected to receive the COVID vaccine, Biden medical adviser Anthony Fauci and the FDA’s Peter Marks admitted that the number who have chosen not take the vaccine is close to half. CDC director Rochelle Walensky dodged the question.

“Okay, this question I’m gonna go to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Marks, and Dr. Walensky,” Burr said. “What percentage of employees in [Fauci’s] institute, [Walensky’s] Center, or [Mars’] agency, of your employees, has been vaccinated.”

“You know, I’m not a hundred percent sure, senator, but I think it’s probably a little bit more than half, probably around sixty percent,” Fauci said.

“I can’t tell you the exact number, but it’s probably in the same range, some people vaccinated at our facility, and others at, uh, outside of the facility,” Marks said.

When the same question was posed to Walensky, she replied, “We’re encouraging, um, our employees to get vaccinated, we’ve been doing town halls and education seminars, um, we have, our staff have the option to report their vaccination status but it’s you, un-understand [sic] the federal government is not requiring it so we do not know.”

In my opinion, only a complete and confirmed idiot would permit himself to be injected with an untested substance that is intended to interfere with the human immune system in order to protect himself against a disease with a very low mortality rate, especially when those who are selling it and urging people to get injected are a) immune to legal liability, and, b) are not being injected themselves.

And if you did, well, what can I say? There is no nice way to put this. You failed the stupid test. Congratulations? If you’re fortunate, there won’t be any significant long-term repercussions and you won’t fail the Darwin test too. We shall follow your future endeavors with interest.

I am genuinely curious, though. What sort of individual reads here regularly and still somehow manages to take ANYTHING the US government or the mainstream media asserts at face value?

The unmitigated retardery of modernism

The more one learns about the foundations of modern post-Christian postcivilization, the more intellectually flimsy one sees them to be. And the more one learns about the formulators of those foundations, the more retarded one learns they were. From the incest fantasies of Freudian psychology to free trade economics, free speech, free movement of peoples, and free love, every pillar of modernism is not only a complete fraud, it is an obvious fraud dreamed up by a lunatic failure.

Consider, for example, the pathetic background of the novelist D.H. Lawrence, whose work is the basis for both sexual freedom and pretty much all modern pornography. 

Lawrence had first set eyes on Frieda in 1912. Already a published novelist, he’d decided on a whim to find work as a teacher in Germany and approached his former university professor for a recommendation.

Professor Weekley, who lived near Nottingham with his 31-year-old wife and their three children, invited him for Sunday lunch. But Weekley was finishing something in his study when Lawrence arrived, which meant Mrs Weekley had to entertain him alone for half an hour.

In those crucial 30 minutes, the novelist decided that the professor’s wife — with her blonde hair, green eyes and large bosom — was his destiny.

What did they talk about? Lawrence told Frieda that after a few sexual misadventures, he was finished with women; she laughed, and was soon chatting merrily about her favourite subject.

As she later encapsulated the philosophy that drove her: ‘Fanatically, I believed that if only sex were “free”, the world would straightaway turn into a paradise.’

Whether Frieda’s husband shared that view is unlikely. He’d met her on a walking holiday in Germany and married her in 1899. On their return from honeymoon, he told her parents: ‘I am married to an earthquake.’

Within a few years, Frieda had her first affair — with a lace-maker who’d drive her to Sherwood Forest so she could run naked through the trees. Another lover was a cocaine-addicted schizophrenic. A third was an anarchist railway worker.

And now she’d landed an intense 27-year-old novelist who appeared to worship her. They met again — just twice — before agreeing to travel together to Germany.

It hardly mattered that Lawrence had no money, no job and no home. As far as Frieda was concerned, she was having just another affair while she paid a visit to her parents.

But Lawrence was in earnest: he wrote to Professor Weekley to tell him they loved each other.

‘Mrs Weekley,’ he declared, ‘is afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow and so she must live her own life.’

From Germany, they travelled on to Italy, where he worked on a novel Frieda named The Rainbow — because rainbows, composed from fire and water, symbolised their union: she was a full-flowing stream and he was a burning flame.

All very elemental and romantic, but Frieda was all too often drawn to other flames. One chance came on their honeymoon when they were walking in the mountains with bisexual novelist David Garnett and his good-looking pal Harold Hobson, a drama critic. Later, Frieda told Lawrence that Hobson had ‘taken’ her in a hay hut one day. It was the second time she’d strayed that summer; back in Germany, she’d slept with an officer in Metz. Lawrence shrugged — who was he to stunt her growth?

Yet even her sexual antics couldn’t mitigate Frieda’s genuine distress at being separated from her children, then aged 12, ten and eight. Lawrence, she recalled, ‘hated me for being miserable… In revenge I did not care about his writing.’

In fact, he was jealous of her children, wanting all of Frieda’s attention for himself. Mothers, he told her in all seriousness, must relinquish their spawn, and the sooner the better.

She couldn’t agree, but the decision was taken out of her hands: when her marriage ended, Professor Weekley was granted full custody.

The Rainbow was published a year after the Lawrences married, by which time they were living in London. Now widely viewed as a masterpiece, it charted the sexual awakening of three generations of women.

Any society that bases its sexual mores on the cuckish fantasies of a sickly, sterile gamma male obsessed with a fat, stupid adulteress deserves its inevitable demise. It’s not an accident that Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals is such a repetitive recounting of one disastrous human failure after another.

Welcome to Sportswriting 2021

A female advocate of the WNBA lectures people on why their reasons for not watching a terrible parody of a men’s sport are not acceptable:

This friend played sports at a high level, and he asked me, tentatively, whether he could explain why he doesn’t watch women’s sports. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” I wanted nothing more than to understand why someone like him—an athlete, a millennial, a feminist—had never turned on a women’s basketball game. Or, more precisely, I wanted to hear why he believes he hasn’t.

“I’ve actually thought about this a lot over the years,” he said. “Because I often feel some level of guilt about it, but when it comes down to it, I just think that if I’m going to take the time to watch sports, I want to be watching them at the peak of how they can be played—speed, strength, all of it. And to me, that pinnacle is happening on the men’s side.”

I nodded as my friend spoke. He hit all the expected notes. I don’t watch because they can’t dunk; I don’t watch because they’re like a good boy’s high school team; I don’t watch because, you know, I could probably beat them one-on-one.

Perhaps you even saw your own reasoning reflected in his. At its heart, this reasoning insists that people don’t watch the WNBA because men run faster and jump higher. That is, in fact, true. Most men do run faster and jump higher. And, yes, it’s incredibly exciting when one of those men runs fast and jumps high and we watch, in awe.

It’s a soothing rationale, this little story we tell ourselves about our insatiable appetite for windmill jams. It’s foolproof, too, because this reasoning doesn’t just absolve sports fans of any further introspection, but more important it absolves the marketers, the TV networks and the sports apparel companies. Hell, it even seems to pardon the women themselves: It’s not your fault; sports fans crave something you just can’t give them. This reasoning presents itself as more than logical; it’s biological.

Actually, it’s pathological. It’s chronic, and irrational, and it’s been stalking the WNBA since its founding. In the U.S., this lie is the serial killer of women’s professional leagues. To name a few: the American Basketball League (1996–98), the Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–03), the Women’s Professional Softball League (’97–01) and Women’s Professional Soccer (’07–12).

The WNBA, though, is resilient. When launched in 1996, the league was ahead of its time—in almost every way. Long before Big Business saw the value, the players of the W stood against racial injustice, and for equality, and took the hits—“Every direction we turned, we were walking into a wall,” says WNBA legend Sue Bird—for representing the folks at society’s margins. “People think you’re supposed to look and talk and be a certain way, but the WNBA blasts all of those things out of the water,” says A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces. “And you should want that. We are standing on the shoulders of women who didn’t back down just because casual sports fans didn’t think they were worthy. That’s what makes our league better, because we have faced those hurdles. I can’t think of another league that gets hit with every single last knock, and I don’t see that going away, but we’re not going to let that stop us.”

Understanding why we watch sports isn’t just a thought experiment. It has practical implications. Rather than passively believing the WNBA is biologically inferior, we can actively recognize that no athletes in modern history have faced more cultural obstacles than the players of the W. Not only are comparisons to the men ubiquitous—and the differences rendered clearer because of the unique intimacy of the sport—but also, more important, no women’s league has a higher percentage of Black athletes, meaning that for nearly a quarter century the WNBA has been rowing against the headwinds of racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

What a deeply stupid article! The amusing thing is that this idiot woman is trying to sell the WNBA on the very same basis that has most – not many, but most – former NBA fans turning off the men’s game, thereby offering additional support for my hypothesis that SJWs are both evil and stupid.

Most women’s sports are not an alternative or a variant of the similar men’s sport. They are parodies. And they harbor absolutely no appeal for any actual fan of the sport itself, unless one happens to find entertainment in the comedic aspect of watching sustained incompetence.

There are some women’s sports that are superior to the men’s versions. For example, women’s tennis is better in the rare circumstances that it is competitive for the same reason that men’s tennis was better when the players used smaller wooden rackets. It’s boring to watch two 6’6″ men using oversized titanium weaponry to launch rocket serves at each other that neither of them can return. And women’s soccer actually makes for relatively interesting viewing now that no top-level male player not named Ronaldo or Messi is capable of beating a defender one-on-one anymore.

(I think the men’s game could use bigger fields or two less players per side to open up more space, but that’s a tangent for another day.)

In general, women’s sports are tedious, parodistic, and parasitical on the male versions. Which is why the WNBA will collapse, sooner rather than later, as a consequence of the NBA’s vanishing audience.