Making America smarter

There are some real rocket scientists arriving from Africa:

Roughly 300 Congolese and Angolan citizens who arrived in San Antonio the first week of June after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border days earlier have all briskly departed the city for destinations across the country, some with fuzzy plans based partly on hope. While many Central American families who arrive have final destinations and family members in mind who could pay for their tickets and put them up, the African families did not always have quite as clearly defined plans.

“They come with a place in mind. ‘My friend told me to go to Portland, Maine, because there’s a lot of Congolese families that already live there and it’s welcoming,” said Nemeth. “And they have that plan in mind, right? But they don’t understand the geography — like where it is, how much it costs to get there. There’s a lot of misconceptions. They may think, ‘I have a friend there,’ but they don’t have a friend’s phone number … [We can look into] what is their last name, phone book, call shelter and ask about them, connect the dots. I wouldn’t say that we’re just putting them randomly. They have an idea.”

The African migrants are spending six to seven months traveling to Brazil then up to the U.S. Those entering the U.S. through this route did so because they “were scared the [refugee] process was not gonna work, or that it’s last a standstill,” said Christina Higgs, Catholic Charities spokeswoman for the San Antonio region. Some worried traveling to or through Europe was “getting really dangerous.”

Europe is getting dangerous because the Europeans are actively embracing nationalism and aggressively opposing all immigration. Meanwhile, in the USA, more than half the so-called nationalists are still civic nationalists who don’t understand or accept that a nation is not an abstraction or an idea. Remember, it’s just the illegal immigration they oppose. Legality makes it all good, apparently because the Magic Dirt only works on legal immigrants. Also, huddled masses, melting pot, and judeo-christian ethics.

It doesn’t help that most Americans don’t know that African-Americans are nearly 20 percent European on average. The difference between an 85 IQ and a 70 IQ is very hard to imagine for the average 100 IQ individual, and the latter almost has to be witnessed to be believed.

As for those “welcoming” cities, send all the New Americans there, by all means. It will be informative to see how long it takes those welcoming people so happy to help poor refugees to flee their hometowns. There are only 81 million more hopeful Congolese who would love to make a better life for themselves and their families in the USA, after all.

Framing Infowars

It looks like someone is really desperate to take down Alex Jones:

The FBI has informed Alex Jones someone planted child pornography on the servers for his Infowars website and on Friday the controversial radio host offered a $1 million reward for any information leading to an arrest.

Federal authorities have been conducting a child pornography investigation for several weeks after they reviewed emailed threats made against Jones that contained links to child pornography websites, according to his attorney Norm Pattis.

Pattis appeared on Jones’ show late Friday afternoon to discuss the incident. But before he did Jones went on a five-minute, profanity-laced rant announcing the reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of whoever infiltrated the his company’s servers.

Forget deep fakes. The real legal issue going forward will be criminal material that is planted in order to frame innocent people.

One thing that many readers here might not know is that one blog troll I’ve mentioned as having had investigated by police in the past was guilty of doing this, not to this blog, but to a forum he had been frequenting, which was one reason the police didn’t hesitate to act.

In this case, it looks as if it is likely someone who was aware of, if not actively involved in, the Sandy Hook lawsuit against Infowars.

What’s good for Google

Is most definitely NOT good for America. It’s more than a bit ironic that Pichai Sundararajan is appealing to the very sort of white Christian male innovation that Google observably hates in trying to prevent Google from being broken up:

Google’s CEO has made an appeal that the company should not be broken up, as federal regulators and Congress are directing increasing scrutiny at the tech goliath.

Google’s massive size allows it to invest in future technologies without worrying about ‘short-term profits,’ CEO Sundar Pichai insisted in an interview with CNN Business on Thursday.

‘Scale does offer many benefits, it’s important to understand that,’ argued Pichai. ‘Big companies are what are investing in technologies like AI the most.’

Pichai even hinted that if Google were subject to antitrust regulation, it would spell doom for American innovation, allowing competitors like China to seize the advantage.

The amount of contempt that Pichai has for Americans can be seen in this appeal to the benefits of Google’s monopoly position. If only AT&T and Standard Oil had been clever enough to argue that their monopolies were actually beneficial…..

I have considerably more confidence in Chinese communists than in US-citizen corporatists. Say what you will about communists, but at least they are atheists that don’t actively worship the devil.

The continuing decline of empire

Whatever happened to the imperial policy of free trade uber alles?

The US-India defense ties will be put at risk should New Delhi purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, a senior American diplomat warned, noting that India should think very carefully about making such strategic choices.

“At a certain point, a strategic choice has to be made about partnerships and a strategic choice about what weapons systems and platforms a country is going to adopt,” Alice Wells, US principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, said this week at the hearings on US interests in South Asia and the budget for the fiscal year 2020. India’s procurement of the S-400s “effectively could limit India’s ability to increase our own interoperability,” she said, explaining that Washington has “serious concerns” about the implications of the $5 billion deal signed with Russia in October on India-US defense ties.

If it’s not my business that my neighbor hires a Nicaraguan gardiner, how is it a senior American diplomat’s business if India buys Russian air defense systems? If I were an Indian official, I would simply throw Washington’s idiotic free trade rhetoric right back in its face. As well as, of course, this amusingly ironic news concerning the manufacture of F-35s.

Exception PCB, a Chinese-owned company based in Gloucestershire, England, manufactures the circuit boards that control the engines, lighting, fuel and navigation systems of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter…. Exception PCB was bought by Shenzhen Fastprint in 2013, has never concealed its Chinese ownership and has also worked on the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet and the Apache attack helicopter, among other sensitive programs. A director from the company told SkyNews there are “clear firewalls in place” between the Exception and its Chinese owners, that the company only produces bare circuit boards, and that no additional electronic information is supplied. But Lockheed Martin didn’t seem so sure, informing Sky that “like all components of the F-35,” the circuit boards “are inspected repeatedly at each stage of manufacture.”

What’s to worry about? Countries that trade don’t fight, right? Anyhow, the continuing decline of US influence is becoming more apparent every day. No wonder the neocons are desperate to trigger a war between the US and Iran while the US is still capable of fighting one.

A statistical observation

Item: Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: “second generation”; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (“third generation”; the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (“first generation”) immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.

Item: According to the 2000 US Census, there were 385,488 Americans of Iranian ancestry at that time.In the 2011 ACS, the number of Americans of full or partial Iranian ancestry amounted c. 470,341… most experts believe that the underrepresented number of Iranian Americans in the ACS is a problem due to the fact that “many community members have been reluctant in identifying themselves as such because of the problems between Iran and the United States in the past two decades.” Higher estimations of 1,000,000 and higher are given by many Iranian and non-Iranian organisations, media and scholars. The Atlantic stated that there are an estimated 1,500,000 Iranians in the United States in 2012. The Iranian interest section in Washington D.C. claimed to hold passport information for approximately 900,000 Iranians in the US in 2003.

Translation: there are at least 10x more Iranians in the USA now than there were Japanese in the USA during WWII. This is only one of the many reasons that the war with Iran sought by the neocons would be extraordinarily foolish. Not quite “invade Russia in winter” suicidal, but almost certainly “Sicilian Expedition” stupid.

The comics meltdown continues

IDW, the #4 publisher in the industry, is in trouble:

IDW Media Holdings has reported its second-quarter financials for 2019, and it doesn’t look like good news. Overall, the company had a net loss of $3.7 million, with $1.6 million of those losses coming from IDW Publishing, the branch of the company that publishes comic books.

A loss of $1.6 million on publishing revenues of 3.7 million (not a mistake, IDW’s publishing revenues were $3.74 million, nearly identical to the amount of its total net loss) is pretty impressive. Even worse, that’s a decline of nearly 30 percent of sales from Q1.

But this is an industry-wide issue. Total unit sales were down another 6 percent year-on-year in May, while dollar sales were down 11 percent.

Snicker-snack….

The irrelevance of conservatism

James Guiran explains why nationalism is necessary at Jacobite:

Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible  —  it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony.

If, at this juncture, you are still describing yourself as a “conservative” instead of a “nationalist”, you are completely failing to grasp the nature of the cultural conflict. Conservatism can no more save America than Churchianity can save your soul.

Corporate cancer metastasizes

Fewer customers are good for business, according to the executive NPCs of more than 180 converged companies:

The top executives of more than 180 companies have signed a letter that says abortion is essential in order for people to be successful in their businesses.

“When everyone is empowered to succeed, our companies, our communities and our economy are better for it,” the executives say in the letter posted on a newly launched website titled Don’t Ban Equality. “Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers,” they said, adding:

Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business. It impairs our ability to build diverse and inclusive workforce pipelines, recruit top talent across the states, and protect the well-being of all the people who keep our businesses thriving day in and out.

A rational observer can only conclude that fewer executive NPCs and less corporate convergence would be of considerably more benefit to the economy. It tends to remind me of a story from the third volume of the 1918 Junior Classics entitled “The Bravery of Regulus”.

The Carthaginians were driven to extremity, and made horrible offerings to Moloch, giving the little children of the noblest families to be dropped into the fire between the brazen hands of his statue, and grown-up people of the noblest families rushed in of their own accord, hoping thus to propitiate their gods and obtain safety for their country.

Some things never change. Evil loves to promise that sacrificing little children to Moloch empowers everyone to succeed.

Get the story straight, guys

Newsflash: “THE US said tonight that Iran was behind the “torpedo attack” on an American-linked oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Both the Front Altair and the Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous – which was reportedly bombed – burst into flames and were forced to evacuate in the troubled region this morning.”

Newsflash: ” An unexploded device, believed to be a limpet mine, was spotted on the side of one of two oil tankers attacked on Thursday in the Gulf of Oman, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

It’s going to be a little awkward if that limpet mine turns out to be of US or Israeli manufacture.

UPDATE: Even the Pentagon and the US Navy don’t buy it.

“We have no interest in engaging in a new conflict in the Middle East,” CENTCOM added. “We will defend our interests, but a war with Iran is not in our strategic interest, nor in the best interest of the international community.”

The literature we have lost

I was comparing the 1918 and 1958 editions of the first volume of the Collier Junior Classics, and one of the first things I noted was that the Introduction by Harvard University President Charles Eliot had been replaced with one by William Neilson, the former President of Smith College. I strongly suspect the following two paragraphs will suffice to explain why it was replaced:

The right selection of reading matter for children is obviously of high importance.  Some of the mythologies, Old Testament stories, fairy tales, and historical romances, on which earlier generations were accustomed to feed the childish mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous, perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children’s minds, generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race.  The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who gave her children dirty milk or porridge, on the theory that the children would not assimilate the dirt?  Should we be less careful about mental and moral food materials?  The Junior Classics have been selected with this principle in mind, without losing sight of the fact that every developing human being needs to have a vision of the rough and thorny road over which the human race has been slowly advancing during thousands of years.

Whoever has committed to memory in childhood such Bible extracts as Genesis i, the Ten Commandments, Psalm xxiii, Matthew v, 8-12, The Lord’s Prayer, and I Corinthians xiii, such English prose as Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, Bacon’s “Essay on Truth,” and such poems as Bryant’s “Waterfowl,” Addison’s “Divine Ode,” Milton’s Sonnet on his Blindness, Wotton’s “How happy is he born or taught,” Emerson’s “Rhodora,” Holmes’s “Chambered Nautilus,” and Gray’s Elegy, and has stamped them on his brain by frequent repetition, will have set up in his mind high standards of noble thought and feeling, true patriotism, and pure religion.  He will also have laid in an invaluable store of good English.

What has happened to the former “Junior Classics” in the last 100 years is both a prelude and a microcosm of what has happened to the West as a whole. It’s something that can be seen in everything from the transition of blasphemy laws to hate speech laws and the musical descent from “The Hallelujah Chorus” to “Christmas in Hollis”. First, the Christian influence was pushed to the side, then it was removed and replaced with a focus on secular aesthetics, then the aesthetics were abandoned and the original purpose of the institution was entirely lost.