24 hours, 300 percent

The Junior Classics campaign is going extremely well, having hit 300 percent of goal in less than 24 hours. You can acquire a digital set, a hardcover set, or a deluxe leatherbound set by backing the campaign.

The 2020 edition is about 85 percent 1918 and 15 percent 1958. This is because the 1918 volumes are generally better, but a) one of the original volumes was half-comprised of Alice in Wonderland whereas the later volume had a better and broader selection of stories, and b) the stories contained in the 1918 Volume 9 Stories of Today are seriously outdated and mediocre in comparison with the relatively timeless stories contained in the 1958 Volume 9, Sport and Adventure.

If you want multiple sets, just run through the buying process as many times as you require. You will receive multiple backer numbers.

The digital editions are both EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) format.

The Democrats back down

Remember that impeachment thing? You know, because the fate of the republic was at stake due to the high crimes of the president? Yeah, well, forget about that:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday she will not stage a vote on the House floor to officially launch an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The decision came after Democratic leaders, returning to Washington following a two-week recess, had reached out to members of their diverse caucus to gauge the party’s support for such a vote.

After back-to-back meetings with party leaders and then the full caucus, Pelosi announced that no such vote would take place. Democratic aides emphasized, however, that the process remains fluid and that Pelosi may reverse course and stage such a vote at any point in the future.

“There’s no requirement that we have a vote, and so at this time we will not be having a vote,” Pelosi told reporters during a last-minute press briefing in the Capitol.

President Trump is using their emotional projection as bait. It’s one of the more brilliant political tactics I’ve ever observed; it’s worthy of an entire chapter by Machiavelli. What he’s doing is accusing himself of things that he knows they are doing. So they demand the very investigations that he wants, thereby forcing the media to extensively cover the very topics it wants to bury.

The Dark Ages, new and improved!

The Z-man doesn’t get the etymological origin of the term “Dark Ages” quite right, but he raises a good question about whether the West has already entered another one:

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

As I explained in TIA, Petrarch’s term was the reversal of an earlier Christian perspective of the time before the coming of the Light of the World by an embittered Italian patriot looking at the ruins of the Roman Empire and despairing of the relatively barbaric German domination of his time.

Which is hauntingly similar to the situation which the people of the West may soon be facing. That is why it is so important to preserve knowledge now. Barbarians have never cared about building or minded living amidst filth, which is why we are already at the point where the fate of our indoor plumbing is in doubt.

It’s not enough to know about things. It’s not even enough to know how to maintain them. It is vital to learn how to design, develop, and build things if civilized society is to be preserved. We’re already bringing back the Junior Classics, but perhaps we also need to create a new series, Core Civilization, comprised of books that teach the core basics of everything from architecture to gardening and water engineering. Because it’s clearly time to begin thinking about these things.

I started to think about those people living in the Roman Empire wondering why the water no longer comes from the big stone thingy anymore. Some may have remembered their ancestors working on them for some reason, but they no longer recall why. The people who knew how and why those aqueducts worked were long gone. No one was around who could figure out how to make them work again, because they lacked the capacity to do it.

Fake News is very, very fake

In fact, it’s considerably more fake than even the average skeptic imagines:

I didn’t have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: «oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel’. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.

We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.

It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.

While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.

So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: ‘I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ‘

‘Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.’

That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:’Young man, you didn’t see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?’

It’s entirely obvious that the world is very different than we were taught to believe, and is actually very different than even the cynical and the skeptical observe it to be.

Jordan Peterson is a mirror

He reflects back to the insufficiently aware precisely what they want to see:

You can pretty safely judge someone’s politics from his attitude toward Jordan Peterson.  We on the right listen to see if he makes sense.  That’s because our attitudes are shaped by reality.  Leftists, unimpressed by reality and anticipating something they don’t like, shout him down.  Media interviewers stumble over their own assumptions, struggle with their biases, and leap to conclusions rather than grasp that the world is complex and simplistic answers just don’t cut it.  As a result, they regularly end up looking shallow, uninformed and foolish.

Clearly this gentleman of the Right has not listened closely enough to Jordan Peterson or he would realize that Mr. 12 Rules for Meth does not make anything that even remotely approximates sense. Not that his Christian fans have noticed that he’s not on their side.

In a joyful ceremony, Christian leaders gathered to grant Jordan Peterson the status of honorary Christian. Though the Canadian professor has never identified as a Christian and does not attend any church, a vote was taken and the decision was made unanimously that Peterson had earned his salvation and could be drafted into heaven by popular vote.

The Junior Classics, 2020 edition

The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education of every child.

This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference to individual tastes and needs, will help many children enjoy good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child’s enjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual’s enjoyment of his mental occupations.

CHARLES ELIOT
PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
1918

This is an essential action to help preserve the hard-worn knowledge of Western civilization. To back the campaign to revive the Junior Classics by REDACTED PRESS, please visit the crowdfunding campaign page.

All print editions will ship to the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The shipping cost is included. The digital editions – EPUB and MOBI formats – are included with all of the print edition sets.

The neoclown narrative

The neoclowns are desperately trying to spin the situation in Syria to their advantage:

President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four American adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State.

Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team.

The fact of the matter is that there wasn’t a damn thing the president could do about Turkey’s decision to send troops into Syria. As it stands, given that Turkey is a NATO ally attacking an “American adversary”, the United States would appear to have a military obligation to aid the Turks in their incursion into Syrian territory regardless of who happens to be their target.

The idea that the 50 nukes at Incirlik Air Base are being “held hostage” by Turkey is nothing more than shamelessly manipulative rhetoric. They are at no risk and can be utilized or withdrawn at will; the Turks have no ability to interfere with them in any way. But it’s just another way of trying to make the God-Emperor look inept and foolish, and scare the uninformed into supporting the neoclown program for sending American troops to the the Middle East.

President Trump is just doing what he does best, breaking the unwritten rules and gentleman’s agreements in order to lay the foundation for a substantive change of an untenable situation.

Sony converges Cinderella

No tale is too classic for the Devil Mouse Sony to resist its urge to destroy:

Actor and LGBTQ activist Billy Porter has confirmed that he will play the role of the Fairy Godmother in James Corden’s forthcoming live-action movie musical Cinderella.
“I have a couple of movies that I’m working on,” Porter announced on the New Yorker‘s Instagram Stories. “I’m gonna be playing the fairy godmother in the new Cinderella movie with Camila Cabello.”

E! News reports that the 22-year-old Cabello will play the role of Cinderella while also helping to write the film’s music. Porter and Cabello are currently the only two actors announced for the remake, which is described as a “modern re-imagining of the classic fairytale.”

See, he’s a FAIRY godmother. Get it! So clever. So brave. Thank you for this.

Inside CNN

The upcoming Project Veritas release promises to be very interesting indeed, as the investigators are being investigated:

This week, a CNN insider will blow the whistle and through Project Veritas will release dozens of recordings made of officials at the highest levels of CNN, revealing a political agenda, bias and misconduct hidden from public view.

This series of tapes — which we think will be the biggest story of the year for Project Veritas — blends two extraordinary series of events; a brave insider secretly recording at work and a hard-hitting piece of hidden camera muckraking into one of the supposed “most trusted names in news.”

As the revelations about the disgraced Matt Lauer have demonstrated, the media tends to be considerably worse behaved and more degenerate than the people at whom they point and cluck.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.