Owen takes a week off

Courtesy of YouTube. Apparently a Boomer was threatened by criticism of his g-g-generation and complained, leading to a strike and a one-week timeout.

Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our hate speech policy.

We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:

Video: The Boomer – Owen Benjamin

How dare you, Big Bear? How double-dog dare you? This is the banned video, which you can still watch on Unauthorized. Making fun of Boomers is now officially considered “hate speech” by YouTube.

Called it

Once men who should never have been pastors fall to temptation, they fall hard:

So let’s get this straight. Josh Harris poses with his wife to announce a divorce. Several days later, he announces on Instagram that he has renounced his faith with a “heartfelt” apology to the LGBTQ community. Now, he’s seen marching in a gay pride parade wearing rainbow gear and eating rainbow food. Is there another announcement he will be making soon?

One certainly assumes so.

China fires its biggest gun

Economically speaking, you understand, by lowering the value of the Yuan against the USD:

“The wait is over for those wondering how Beijing would respond to Trump’s recent tariff announcement,” BMO said. “The result: the yuan was allowed to depreciate well beyond 7.0.”

Krueger called China’s retaliation “massive,” adding that “on a scale of 1-10, it’s an 11.” He cited the Chinese government calling on state buyers to halt U.S. agricultural purchases, while there’s “increased anecdotal evidence that the Chinese government is tightening its overview of foreign firms.”

“While there were measures that could have been chosen with larger direct effects on supply chains, the announcements from Beijing represent a direct shot at the White House and seem designed for maximum political impact,” Krueger said. “ We expect a quick (and possibly intemperate) response from the White House, and consequently expect a more rapid escalation of trade tensions.”

This doesn’t matter to the real economy. The US economy will only benefit from a reduction of trade with China. But it does matter quite a bit to the financial economy, hence all of the sturm und drang and falling stock markets.

It’s interesting that they resorted to this so quickly. It appears things are a little shakier over there than everyone except Nate suspected.

Credit where credit is due

Black Science Man actually makes a modicum of sense for a change:

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical Errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

We’d better hope no one tells Ivanka about these statistics or President Trump will be announcing a VERY GOOD, NO, GREAT proposal to ban doctors, the flu, and automobiles before the end of the week.

What part of “shall not be infringed” is so hard to understand?

Cloudflare cucks again

This is why you shouldn’t have cucked in the first place, Matthew Prince. Once you have demonstrated your willingness to do so, you have not signaled virtue, but weakness, and thereby guaranteed that pressure will be placed on you to do so again, and again, and again:

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan. Based on evidence we’ve seen, it appears that he posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled “open letter” on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.

8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare’s service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

This may explain the real purpose behind the shootings: interfering with Q’s communications. But regardless, Cloudflare is about to learn that there is no rest for the weak, as this comment from the Verge posted on Instapundit demonstrates.

excellent. now can Cloudfare remove DDOS protection from the GOP website until the Republicans stop being the party of white supremacist, bigots, xenophobes and racists?

Another atheist shooter

Interesting that the low-status atheist angle doesn’t seem to come up often amidst all the theatrics and diagnostics that have been performed over the years concerning mass shooters. Notice the patch on the right side of the Dayton shooter’s chest.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that says Against all Gods. The primary pattern to be recognized here is low-status white male atheist. Perhaps they make the best wind-up toys.

A series of highly improbable coincidences

One strong indicator of a Narrative at work is the presence of people connected to similar previous events:

The parents of one of the Stonewall Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida happened to be in El Paso on Saturday.

I said the over/under was three, although I was anticipating a connection to Las Vegas rather than Parkland. But regardless, we’re already at two. Let’s just say this isn’t the first time there has been an “amazing coincidence” of this type.

  • Gilroy Garlic Festival: 3 also survived Las Vegas shooting 2 years ago
  • Telemachus Orfanos, 27, died alongside 11 others when a man opened fire at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, north-west of Los Angeles. He escaped death last year when a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
  • A woman from California who survived the Las Vegas attack had been driving to her job in San Bernardino, California, when the mass shooting at that city’s Inland Regional Center began in December 2015.
  • Parkland survivor’s dad escaped harm in Las Vegas shooting.
  • One of the victims of the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, had been at the site of a mass shooting in Toronto only a month before.

The odds against one person in a country of 320 million being in the vicinity of two such events are astronomical. The odds of this happening at least six times are astronomical squared. What the explanation is, I don’t know, but the probability math indicates extreme skepticism is required.

She’s not wrong

Too many commentators are still caught up in the irrelevant Republican-Democrat shell game:

Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its citizens to remember that. She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign. She talks about the horror.

She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed its original atrocity.

“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.

Ms. Gabbard, 38, was a soldier in Iraq and currently serves as a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, which she cites to temper her message: Get out of foreign wars. Leave other countries alone. Not everyone wants democracy.

Her position is hardly new. It’s essentially what George Washington recommended and what Donald Trump promised.

The US government has arguably committed more atrocities and broken more promises and treaties than any other extant government in the world, with the sole exception of Great Britain. That is an easily verifiable fact. The list of Indian treaties alone that it signed, then violated, are in excess of 100. In fact, it’s incredible that any foreign governments even bother to go through the charade anymore.

I’m not a fan of Tulsi Gabbard. But on this particular matter, she’s absolutely correct.

Shall we pretend to be surprised?

Another mass shooting, this time in El Paso:

KTSM can confirm that 18 people were shot inside the Walmart. The extent of their injuries is unknown at this time. El Paso Police and multiple other law enforcement agencies are responding to a shooting at the Walmart an active shooter situation.

I wonder how many people from Las Vegas and Gilroy will just happen to be there to be interviewed by the media? I’d put the over/under on three.

Update: A fake white nationalist manifesto has already made the rounds and been debunked.

Update: The Associated Press quotes three witnesses who report seeing four gunmen:

A family of three was among a dozen people waiting outside a bus station. They were trying to return to their car that was in a blocked-off Walmart parking lot. “I heard the shots but I thought they were hits, like roof construction,” said Adriana Quezada, 39, who was in the women’s clothing section of Walmart with her two children. Quezada said she saw four men, dressed in black, moving together firing guns indiscriminately. Police confirmed only one gunman.

And yet, the only shooter in custody is a young drug-addled man. Again. I understand that eyewitness reports in stressful situations are intrinsically unreliable, but “four men dressed in black” are considerably more likely to be confused with “three men dressed in dark brown” or “six men dressed in blue” than zero men. 

The problem with US nationalism

As Alan Mendenhall notes, it simply doesn’t exist, because it has never existed:

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.

The Difference Between a Country and a Nation

Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

The United States is not a nation, it is an empire. But the formerly dominant American nation that it contains is, despite its self-disbelief, nevertheless still a nation. And its national self-interest is naturally opposed to the self-styled “nationalist conservatives” who are neither nationalists nor conservatives, but rather, neoclown imperialists in nationalist clothing.

Mendenhall observes: “The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.” And that, of course, is precisely the point.