American Conservative, August 9, 2022: In 1979, President Carter formally abandoned the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan. Carter’s action abruptly ended Washington’s commitment to defend Taiwan against attack from the Chinese mainland. Yet, in an answer to a journalist’s question about whether he would use military force in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, President Biden stated, “Yes, that's what we are committed to.”
When it comes to defense and foreign policy, there are very few stone-cold realists in Washington’s policy-making circles. Since 1945, with a few notable exceptions, most American presidents have tended to put short-term political celebrity or ephemeral liberal causes ahead of tangible, concrete national interests in America’s relations with other nation-states. Biden is no exception to the rule.
Guided more by impulse and emotion than reason or knowledge of the facts, President Biden, like most of Washington’s ruling political class, may be privately pleased with Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taipei. When Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is viewed in the context of Biden's self-evidently thoughtless remark, however, it is clear that the combination is having a negative impact across Asia.
NewSpeak: The Zelensky Narrative is ShiftingMeaning that Zel and cronies, having ripped-off most of the $60 billion in aid provided at the expense of the US public by the most corrupt US administration in living memory, have made it impossible for that administration to publicly embrace the Jew-led Nazis in Kyiv with unrestrained fervor.
Nancy Pelosi makes a private -- which is to say non-official -- visit to Taiwan, and China has gone ape. China has surrounded Taiwan with warships engaged in live-fire exercises, while sending warplanes to invade Taiwan's airspace.
Could any country have a more ridiculous excuse for such outrageous behavior?
Yet Western media and many pundits are wittering on about Nancy Pelosi endangering world peace.
No, it is China that is endangering world peace.
China has offered precisely zero reason to believe that Pelosi's Taiwan trip, in her capacity as a private citizen, constituted a threat to Chinese national security. In the absence of such a threat, China's reaction amounts to a threat of an unprovoked invasion of an independent nation, the ultimate war crime.
But perhaps Pelosi's visit was instigated as a US-devised trap for a paranoid China. If China acts on its threat to invade Taiwan, then NATO will have the justification it may want for war on China.
Which raises the question: why would the West, meaning the United States and its most sycophantic NATO allies such as Britain and Germany, want war with China.
For two reasons.
First, while China is rising in industrial output, scientific and technological capacity, military might, and national self-confidence, the West declines, meaning that war now is better than war later.
Second, war with China could reverse the trends in social development not only in the West but in China too.
How could war with China, hurt China while being the cure for Western decline?
Through an inevitable ban on trade with China, as a result of which:
1. China loses much of its huge export market for manufactured goods, this resulting in widespread unemployment and social unrest in an economy already suffering from an imploding real estate bubble.
2. The US and other post-industrial states experience widespread shortages and huge increases in the cost of manufactured goods. The unavailability of cheap Chinese products reverses many detrimental social changes of recent decades. The resulting boom in domestic manufacturing will create millions of decently paid jobs, which together with a huge increase in the cost of living, while raising the incentive for working people to acquire useful job skills as a prerequisite to decently paid employment.
Whether these changes would sufficiently tip the balance in war to the advantage of the West, is impossible to know. However, without a restoration of its industrial base, the West is surely doomed to both economic and military eclipse by China.
There is, obviously, no logical reason why reform in the West should be contingent on war with China. But there are powerful social forces that, short of some catalyzing event such as a major war, will continue to resist rational economic and social development in the West. These malevolent influences include:
1. Great Western corporations that have profited massively by offshoring labor services from the West to China and other developing nations. These include a remarkably large proportion of the best known Western manufacturing names. For example, Ford, GM, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, and many, many more. Even famous craft industries have been off-shored, Ireland's Waterford Glass to Indonesia being among them, along with England's Wedgewood pottery.
2. Expansion of so-called higher education to accommodate a substantial fraction of the population including, inevitably, many of below average academic potential. Along with this reduction in the average intellectual competence of the academy's student intake has occurred a massive dilution in the competence of the teaching staff. Today, instead of a small group of low paid and dedicated professionals, universities are largely staffed by second-, third-, and fourth-rate, overpaid, alleged scholars whose research pursuits amount in a vast number of cases to little more than piffle, often degenerating into anti-intellectual politically correct or woke rubbish with which to poison the minds of youth.
3. The growth of public services, such as Britain's grotesque National Health Service with over a million employees, which serve less the public than its employees and administrators at the expense of the public.
4. The adaptation of political party platforms in Western democracies to attract the public service vote, with the consequence that employees of Western governments have a political stranglehold that prevents any reform is of what are mostly bloated, unproductive and often socially harmful bureaucratic establishments.
So what do you want? More Bido-, Trudo-, or BoJo-led pseudo-democracy or, Heaven forbid, some monster like Trump who might shake up and pare down our great parasitic bureaucracies and corrupt educational establishments, while punishing unpatriotic industrial corporations once synonymous with Western industrial greatness.
U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre $45.2 million in punitive damages - on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages already awarded - for falsely claiming the shooting was a hoax, a Texas jury decided on Friday.
So there you are, the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 14, 2012 really happened.
But then what is one to make of the report of an interview with Sandy Hook School Principal, Dawn Hochsprung, which was published on the Web site of the local newspaper, The NewTown Bee, and in which it was stated that:
"Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung told The Bee thata masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shows [sic] – more than she could count – that went "on and on."
China claims Taiwan to be a part of its sovereign territory. But that's bunk. A sovereign nation has a defined territory with a single government. But Taiwan and China are distinct territories each with its own government. Therefore Taiwan cannot be part of the sovereign state of China.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the majority of the people of the sovereign nation of Taiwan wish to merge with China and become subordinate to the government in Beijing. That being the case, Taiwan is absolutely entitled to host anyone it wants on its territory, even including Nancy Pelosi, and even if she was wearing that hideous pink pajama suit. For China to threaten the sovereignty of Taiwan because an American politician has visited the island is preposterous.
It is equally preposterous for China to challenge the legitimacy of the Government of Taiwan. Rather it is the Government of Taiwan that has grounds to challenge the legitimacy of the Government of China. China's Communist government was established by insurrectionists in receipt of military aid from Joe Stalin's Soviet Union. The Communist insurgents led by the brutal dictator-to-be, Mao Tse Tung, expelled Chiang Kai -Shek's Nationalist Government from the Chinese mainland. The Nationalists were, however, able to retain a foothold on the formerly Chinese island of Taiwan. So if a question is to be raised about the legitimacy of government, it is clearly the Communist government of China that is illegitimate, and the Government of Taiwan that is the embodiment of a legitimate government of mainland China.
The American Government is right: China should keep its greedy hands off Taiwan. At the same time, China should also get its hands off both Tibet and Xinjiang, where it now pursues a vicious policy of ethnic cleansing. The former independent sovereign state of Tibet is the homeland of the Tibetan people, and Xinjiang is the homeland of the Uyghur people, a Turkic race, many of them blue-eyed and fair-haired, quite unrelated to the Han people of China.
Ukrainian Troops Quit the FightNear certain death in the service of Zelensky's Nazi program to genocide Ukraine's ethnic Russians is apparently unappealing to some people.
Harvard University professor, Steven Pinker, has been named by Timemagazine, a publication with a history of CIA collaboration, as among "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today."Foreign Policy, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank founded to promote the Rhodes-Milner project for global empire, has named Professor Pinker a"100 Global Thinker."Pinker's new book, Rationality, which will be available in Canada next month, could be expected, therefore, to pack some punch. And pack a punch it does: to the gut of any who would claim that the US Government has ever committed crimes to subvert democracy.
Notwithstanding its clear political objective, much of Rationality is taken up with puzzles and mind-benders. The Monty Hall prize-behind-one-of-three-doors problem.* for example, which distracted so many, even a famous mathematician, when first presented. And the Linda problem**, which, so it is implied, shows that most people are irrational, whereas, in fact, it merely shows that, in common speech, language is not used as those who devise SAT tests to identify candidates suitable for admission to Harvard University think it should be used.
All of this is perfectly harmless and pretty much useless except as a distraction for those with time to kill. But then, in Chapter 10, "What's Wrong With People," the author announces the real point of his book.
"This is the chapter most of you have been waiting for. I know this from conversations and correspondence. As soon as I mention the topic of rationality, people ask me why humanity appears to be losing its mind.
At the time of this writing, a glorious milestone in the history of rationality is coming into view: vaccines likely to end a deadly plague are being administered less than a year after the plague emerged. Shortly before the announcement of the vaccines, a third of Americans said they would reject them."
Which raises a question about the author's own rationality. The infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2, aka Covid19, the "deadly plague" of which Pinker speaks, has been known since 2020 to be around 0.25%, making it little if any more "deadly" than the seasonal flu. Moreover, the development of Covid vaccines, this "glorious milestone in the history of rationality" did not, as it turns out, end a pandemic of what has proved to be much closer in severity to the common cold than to the Black Death. Rather it appears, Covid19 will be forever with us in ever more attenuated forms, its spread little impeded by vaccines, which as now emerges, have many severe side effects not excluding death***. And while the vaccines may be somewhat effective in reducing death from Covid19 (or not?), they have proved virtually useless in preventing Covid spread, as highlighted in the news this week that the twice vaccinated and double boosted President of the United States had just tested positive for Covid.
But let us not enter the quagmire of Covid debate, but proceed to Professor Pinker's more general task, which is to shred the credibility of any person impugning the integrity of government by, for example, questioning the official narrative about 9/11, or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Thus, Professor Pinker writes of:
"the popularity of a miscellany of canards that the historian of science Michael Shermer calls "weird beliefs." Many people endorse conspiracy theories like Holocaust denial, Kennedy assassination plots, and the 911 "Truther" theory that the Twin Towers were felled by a controlled demolition to justify the American invasion of Iraq. ...
How can we explain this pandemic of poppycock?"
So did you ever question the official "pancake theory" that is supposed to explain the collapse of the Twin Towers into their own footprint at a speed close to the acceleration of gravity?
Did you ever wonder why New York Trade Center Building 7 collapsed into it's own footprint on 9-11 although it was not hit by an airplane?
Did you ever wonder how it was that a couple of guys looking remarkably like E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis (both members of Richard Nixon's infamous "Plumbers," who botched the Watergate burglary), happened to be photographed in Dealey Plaza immediately following the shooting of President John F. Kennedy?
If so, then according to Pinker, you are a person who readily accepts as true what are merely unfounded rumours, which is to say "canards."
Furthermore, according to some Historian of Science that Pinker names, but of whom you have probably never heard, you are possessed of "weird beliefs" which is to say you are more or less a nut.
Even worse, you likely endorse Holocaust denial, in which case you are almost certainly an anti-Semite, which is to say the kind of person with no rightful place in decent society.
Indeed you are a carrier of an infectious mental disease in a "pandemic of poppycock," and should probably be put into isolation for life. Indeed, you are fit only for the loony bin. Unless, that is, you have been singled out for derision simply for declining to accept official narratives without question. For example, George W Bush's claim that:
"Nobody, certainly not in this administration, thought about people flying airplanes into buildings,"
although that is precisely what one FBI supervisor in Minneapolis feared, reporting to FBI Headquarters concerning the 9/11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center."
And as to Pinker's derision of those who adhere to the 911 "Truther" theory that the Twin Towers were felled by a controlled demolition, one would do well to consider the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which collapsed into its own footprint on 9/11 without being hit by a plane. And, in fact, we know for certain that World Trade Center Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition because the World Trade Center leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, publicly stated as much.
"I remember getting a call from the Fire Department Commander telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said you know we have had such terrible loss of life maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it. And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."
Thing is, you don't just "pull" a building on the spur of the moment. Explosive charges have to be placed at many critical points throughout the building and wired for simultaneous detonation so that all supporting structures are disrupted simultaneously and the building goes into free fall, the entire structure fragmenting on impact with the ground. Such an operation requires more than a few minutes to prepare: it requires days to plan and execute.
The implication is clear: Building 7 was wired for a controlled demolition prior to 9/11.
And if Building 7 was wired for a controlled demolition prior to 9/11, why not the Twin Towers also?
There are also questions that a reasonable person may ask about the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy, i.e., that there was no assassination "plot," an assumption that Professor Pinker treats as a self-evident truth.
Oswald, so the Commission concluded, was located in a "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, as the President's party was driven by in an open car. At a range of more than 240 feet, Oswald, so the Commission inferred, fired multiple shots with his World War I vintage, Italian army-surplus rifle, hitting the president first in the back of the neck, then fatally, in the head.
Many questions have been raised about this conclusion, but its validity rests on the assumption that all shots fired that day were fired from behind the Presidential limousine, which is to say from the where, according to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal bullet.
But the surgeons who operated on the President in an attempt to save his life, Dr. Malcolm Perry, assisted by Dr. Robert McClelland, believed, based on their observation of the President's wounds, that the President had been hit, not from the back, but from the front.
"... he was wrapped in a sheet and we placed him in a coffin, but before we did, I looked at the wound again. I wanted to know and remember this the rest of my life, and the rest of my life I will always know he was shot from the front.
I never talked to the Warren Commission ... the bullet struck here (pointing to his forehead) taking out a piece of the occipital bone (which is at the back of the skull) the size of the palm of your hand."
Asked his reaction to seeing sketches taken from the Kennedy autopsy conducted at the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, MD, along with an official explanation that the wounds were from bullets fired only from behind the Presidential limousine, Dr. Crenshaw said:
"It was beyond disbelief. I could not believe that a real pathologist would put out something this poorly."
Asked if the autopsy report was fraudulent, Dr. Crenshaw responded:
"I say that it was wrongly done ... maybe they were directed to do it that way."
And beside the judgement of the surgeons attending on the stricken president, there is acoustic evidence that negates the Warren Commission's lone gunman hypothesis:
"In 1978, at the request of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., studied recordings of police radio and traffic during the assassination, and Mark R. Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, Queens College, City University of New York, conducted an independent analysis of the alleged third gunshot recorded on the Dallas Police Department radio system. Based primarily on the acoustical analyses performed by BBN and Weiss and Aschkenasy indicating that there were gunshots in Dealey Plaza from both the Texas School Book Depository building (where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three gunshots) and the grassy knoll area (one gunshot) during Kennedy's assassination, the HSCA found, in part, that 'scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F Kennedy."
But according to Professor Pinker, members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were merely holders of "weird beliefs," victims of a pandemic mental disease whose opinion should be disregarded.
But such a contention, far from being rational, is obviously absurd. So what underlies such irrationality and what are its implications?
One possible explanation of Pinker's attempt to paint rational scepticism as irrational, is that education at a top American private university is expensive. Including the prior cost of 12 years at a private prep school, a Harvard degree must cost one or several million dollars. For that, parents expect their progeny to gain a firm footing on ladders of social and career success. But those who control the upper rungs of social and career ladders have no inclination to give a leg up to those who question the intentions of the ruling elite. That being so, there is a certain logic to Professor Pinker's view that learning to accept the official narrative, however, improbably or inconsistent with the evidence, is essential to a "good" education.
There is, however, a massive downside to this concept of education. The readiness to question authority is essential to the scientific spirit. The acceptance, and even enforcement, of conformism at the modern Western university thus heralds a new dark age in the world of learning.
Notes
* The Monty Hall challenge
The challenge for the contestant is to win a prize by guessing behind which of three doors the prize, a new car or some such thing, lies. After the contestant picks a door, the show host opens one of the two remaining doors to reveal no prize there concealed. Then the host asks the contestant whether they would like to abandon their initial choice and go for the other unopened door.
To decide how the contestant should respond so as to maximize their chance of winning the prize, one must note that initially, the chance of the prize being behind any door is exactly one third. That means that, having chosen one of three doors, there is a two-thirds probability that the prize is behind one of the unchosen doors. But then the show host opens one of the unchosen doors, taking care not to open the door behind which the prize is hidden if it is not hidden by the contestant's initial door of choice.
But the show host's opening of one of the unchosen doors does not alter the two-thirds probability of the prize being behind one of the unchosen doors. Therefore, since the prize is not behind the door opened by the show host, the odds of it being behind the other unchosen door must be two-thirds, which is twice the odds of it being behind the door initially chosen by the contestant. That means the contestant can double their chance of winning the prize by accepting the show host's invitation to change their choice to the other unopened door, an option show contestants were generally reluctant to accept.
** The Linda Problem
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
(1) Linda is a bank teller. (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Most people, more than 80 percent, choose Option (2), which means, so Professor Pinker informs us, that they have fallen for the "disjunction fallacy." The reality, however, is simply that most people, even qualified statisticians, do not see the Linda Problem as a problem in combining probabilities. Rather, they see it as a question about Linda. And if they think that Linda is a feminist, the only way they can indicate that is by checking Option (2). But according to Pinker, that commits them to the belief that "Linda is a bank teller." But they almost certainly don't believe that, which is why they didn't check Option (1). So now, according to Pinker, they have contradicted themselves. But in reality, they've just done the best they can in response to a dumb question, a view Ludwig Wittgenstein would surely have endorsed.
Other, more elaborate and less probable justifications for the most common response to the Linda problem are provided by Berit Brogaard D.M.Sci., Ph.D.: Linda the Bank Teller' Case Revisited, and W. S. Messer and R. A. Griggs: Another look at Linda.
Edinburgh University is learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going woke
Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials thought it would be easy to spit on the memory of David Hume. They were wrong
Douglas Murray has written in the Telegraph about the University of Edinburgh’s excruciatingly woke decision to cancel one of Scotland’s greatest Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, and the anti-woke backlash that led to a drop in donations to the university of £2 million.
David Hume’s work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.
I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Hume’s works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Hume’s collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.
But the Wokesters of the University of Edinburgh will surely themselves make up the shortfall in cash through an impost on the salary of each and every one of them.
Meantime, the donors who have ceased donating should consider building a multi-million pound monument in recognition of David Hume's monumental contribution to the advancement of human understanding.
As to Hume's great offence? He said that white people are smarter and more creative than people of any other race. Moreover, he had no qualms about the slave trade. In today's multiracial Western world, such views naturally cause outrage.
But this is now and that was then. Hume lived in a world totally dominated by European technology, capital and military might. Even today, almost every important feature of the modern world that makes it rich and modern was invented by white people: cars, planes, wireless, television, missiles, atom bombs.
Moreover, Hume was an empiricist. Certain truth about the world was, he believed, unknowable. On that view, our only means of anticipating the future is to assume that the future will resemble the past, which it often does -- but not always.
On the relative creativity of the races of mankind, much evidence during the 18th Century, supported Hume's assumption of white superiority. The British nation, the people of a small island, had begun the settlement of North America and the conquest of India, on the way to creating the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Other European nations were creating other vast overseas empires. Meantime, at home, the European nations were instigating a scientific, technological and industrial revolution, whereas China, the World's most populous nation existed in a condition of cultural and economic stagnation, and Africa, the World's largest continent was lightly populated by a multitude of tribal groups of very limited cultural and technological advancement.
So was David Hume wrong in his belief in the superiority of white people? At the time he committed his view to paper in a footnote to a paper on national characteristics, few white people would have judged him so. Among others, well the Chinese for sure, would have laughed at the absurdity of his presumption.
But today, when formerly white nations have turned multi-racial, and their university and corporate research laboratories ire staffed by creative people of every race, colour and creed, and when China's industrial output far exceeds that of any other nation, Hume's judgement seems mistaken.
So what? Hume believed certain truth to be unattainable. If it had been demonstrated to him that his belief about human racial differences in intellect and imagination was false, he would have simply shrugged.
But there's no end to the PC crowd's hatred of white people or their endless search for justification of their anti-white racism and their ignorance of the history of the advancement of human understanding.
The American Conservative, July 18, 2022:Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, ruled as the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. For those who are unaware, Caligula, the great grandson of Rome’s first emperor, the brilliant Augustus Caesar, squandered the enormous wealth of the Roman State, declared himself to be a god, appointed his favorite racehorse to serve in the Roman Senate, and according to some sources, considered deifying the animal.
After a little less than four years in office, Caligula was removed. Rome’s citizens, as well as its legions, were spared the indignity of having to worship a dead horse. Americans and Europeans are not so lucky.
Determined to fight his proxy war with Russia to the finish, Biden is losing the fight in Ukraine and his favorite, deified horse, NATO, is on life support. The only things sinking faster than Biden’s approval ratings are the American and European economies.
Readers will recall that President Trump wanted to reduce European dependence on American military power—to make Europeans their own “first responders.” Biden reversed Trump’s policy and promised to reinvigorate NATO, in the words of French President Macron, the “the brain dead alliance.”
The problem for NATO is the economic hardship wrought by Biden’s sanctions against Moscow are threatening Europe with economic Armageddon. It’s bad enough when European bond and stock futures plunge and the euro dips below parity with the U.S. dollar, but when Paris, the city of light, shuts off its famous night lights to save energy, things are truly horrific.
If they do, Russia will hit back hard against Kyiv, then the Nazi-backing NATO countries, like Liberal Canada, will urge Zel to hit back harder, then before you know it, we have WW3. Yeah, the mission of the handlers of a senile US President accomplished -- whether Biden will understand that or not.
As one has come to expect of Peterson, the presentation is (a) immensely popular, with well over a million views on U-Tube in just four days, and the number still climbing rapidly, and (b) a mix of unreasonable judgements and imaginative ideas amounting to nonsense.
Thus, Peterson begins by describing "what Putin has done" in Ukraine as "unconscionable." But in fact, what Putin has done is simply what any Russian leader was bound to do if they were to avoid being removed from office and replaced by someone with a stronger stomach.
To understand why Putin had no choice, one must understand the circumstances leading to his "special military operation" in Ukraine. It was a direct response to the decision of the Kyiv government to dispatch a hundred thousand troops to Eastern Ukraine, an army including multiple overtly Nazi formations. This action by the, according to Western media, heroic Zelensky -- who now rules Ukraine as a dictator without parliamentary opposition -- had only one conceivable objective; namely, the conquest of the breakaway Donbas Republics that have been under constant Ukrainian shelling for eight years resulting in 13,000 civilian deaths.
Without Russian intervention, Putin was faced with the near certainty of a massacre of ethnic Russians who are characterized by Ukrainian Nazis as Orcs and cockroaches. And there is nothing fake about these Nazis. They are adherents of the ideology of Stepan Bandera, Ukraine's World War II nationalist leader whose followers aided Hitler's Nazis slaughter 30,000 Kyiv Jews, and who traversed the country burning villages and slaughtering hundreds of thousand of Ukrainian Poles. These massacres, Canadians might note, were promoted by Michail Chomiac, a Ukrainian newspaper editor and the grandfather of Justin Trudeau's deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland.
And if anyone doubts that the anti-Russian genocidal impulse lives on in Ukraine, they should not forget the tapped phone conversation in which former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Julia Tymoshenko not only said it was time to "grab guns and kill damn Russians" but urged that eight million Donbas Russians be nuked*.
In a further bizarre judgement, Peterson condemns the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, for supporting Putin's military operation in Ukraine. But the Russian Orthodox Church is effectively a part of the Russian state apparatus. Patriarch Kirill can no more survive as a critic of Russia at war than the Archbishop of Canterbury could have survived had he condemned Britain's fire bombing of German cities during World War II.
In addition, though it is but a minor point, Peterson confuses the Black Sea, or possibly the Sea of Azov, with the Caspian Sea when speaking of Ukraine's offshore oil reserves, notwithstanding that Ukraine more than five hundred kilometers from the the Caspian Sea.
What may seem interesting, at first sight, is Peterson's notion that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a culturally determined European civil war between a re-Christianized Russia and a woke West, the latter having, as it must seem to the Russians, gone insane.
But if momentarily diverting, the idea is obviously wrong. While the woke West is undoubtedly insane, the conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with culture. For Russia it is a purely defensive war against US imperialism, forced upon Russia by the genocidal actions of the Nazified Kyiv regime toward Ukraine's ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population. As Putin stated recently: "we have no interest in what Zelensky wants. The decisions are made in Washington."
The American objective upon which the US has invested more than $53 billion thus far, and on which other NATO states have invested billions more, is to weaken and then break Russia into a collection of corrupt stans ruled by the likes Poroshenko and Zelensky: states that can be readily looted by Western oligarchs, and occupied by NATO, which could then advance to the border of China, the real threat to American global hegemony.
But to grant him his due, Peterson has one thing right. Russia's attitude to foreign military bases in Ukraine is the exact counterpart to America's Monro Doctrine, which gives warning to the world that the United States will tolerate no foreign military bases in Latin America.
________
* And those hated Donbas Russians, the target of Zelensky's US-backed genocidal war, are not newcomers. Some are surely descendants of Russians who settled on the East bank of the Dnieper River in the seventeenth Century, a hundred and more years before the United States even existed.
“There is no official definition [but that] the “Living In Love and Faith” project ... has begun to explore the complexities associated with gender identity and points to the need for additional care and thought to be given in understanding our commonalities and differences as people made in the image of God.”
Which is absurd.
A woman was, is and always will a human able to produce an ovum, and to host a fertilized ovum until the moment of parturition.
Accordingly, a woman possesses ovaries, a womb, and a vagina permitting both impregnation and child delivery.
Yes, in both women and in men, there can be anatomical or physiological abnormalities that may prevent an individual expressing the reproductive potential of their sex. Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, sex is clearly defined in the genome: a woman has two X chromosomes but no Y chromosome, whereas a man has a Y chromosome, but only one X chromosome.
Again, there can be abnormalities. Some women have three X chromosomes, and some men have an X and two Y chromosomes. But still the presence or absence of the Y chromosome dictates whether the anatomy is functionally male or female.
It should be added that there are genetic abnormalities affecting sexual characteristics more subtle than the presence of extra chromosomes. For example, a gene coding for the hormone testosterone, the masculinizing hormone, may be transposed from the Y chromosome to the X chromosome, with the result that a person without a Y chromosome, though functionally female, may be more or less masculinized in such features as muscularity and the production of the feminizing hormone estrogen.
But whatever the physical determinants of gender, it may be claimed that a person without a Y chromosome may have a male mentality and thus a wish to dress, live and behave like a man, while conversely, a person with a Y chromosome may have a female mentality and wish to dress, live and behave like a woman. Who, then, is to say that the presence or absence of particular features of the reproductive anatomy are more important than the presence or absence of particular features of the personality?
The answer to that question should surely be this: if a person who is functionally male wishes to live as a female, or a person who is functionally female wishes to live as a male, why should anyone object, provided only that, in the impersonation of the opposite sex, the transsexual individual does not hurt others who might be misled by the impersonation.
And yes, we know, that by transplantation of organs and glands and surgical removal or reconstruction of various parts of the anatomy, a man may give birth to a child. So is such a man actually a woman? Well, who but the individual concerned and those near and dear to them actually cares. Obviously, as a matter kindness and civility, why would one dispute the adopted sexual role and identity of such a person. But because a person has undergone an extreme surgical makeover, does not alter their original biology, or the facts that distinguish male from female. Or as the great Scotch poet Robbie Burns said, "A man's a man for a' that".
What is evil, immensely so, is propaganda directed at children by transgender advocates with the aim of persuading confused and inexperienced young people that they should undergo surgical and hormonal treatment to change their gender. Such advocacy should be criminalized and severely punished. Jordan Peterson explains why:
Jordan Peterson -- Doctors, Psychotherapists, Liars and Butchers:
Was UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a US-Deep-State plant, courtesy of MI6? Johnson's father, Stanley Johnson worked for MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service, and it is doubtful whether an agent of the secret intelligence service is ever released from the obligation to serve.
That Boris Johnson's father owes allegiance to the British security services does not make Boris Johnson a secret agent, but it certainly adds plausibility to that possibility. And whether linked directly or indirectly with MI6, one could expect of Johnson great deference to the American security state.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Boris Johnson has been the most aggressive among European leaders in following the American line in providing support, both financial and political, to Ukraine's Nazi-directed and genocidally Russophobic government in the ongoing war with Russia.
Meantime, Johnson did essentially nothing for the working class voters whose support he won at the general election. The millions of working class voters in poor North Eastern constituencies who most likely for the one and only time in their lives cast a vote for the Conservatives, have gained nothing from the Johnson government other than a 2.5% increase in their National Insurance contributions and the promise of a high speed rail connection to London -- if it isn't cancelled due to cost overruns.
Which raises the question, which other Western leaders displays this Johnsonian pattern of subordination to US policy with near total indifference to the interests of their own people. The name that springs to mind is Justin Trudeau. Like Johnson, a buffoonish character (fourth from right) with minimal interest in the concerns of ordinary Canadians, but fully committed to the cause of the Ukraine's Russian-hating Nazis. Not surprisingly, therefore, that, at 59%, Trudeau's public disapproval rating exactly matches that of senile Joe Biden, the worst US President in living memory.
I enter the above heading in the contest for the world's most obscure blog post title, a title that I will now attempt to explain.
The Georgia Guide Stones, as any conspiracy theorist knows, were 19-foot-tall slabs of granite erected in a farm field in the US State of Georgia, inscribed with globalist directives including the injunction to eliminate nine tenths of the world's population, while selectively breeding the posterity of the remainder. These stones have now been taken down, the first with an explosive laid by an unknown hand, the rest with a backhoe presumably on orders from Georgia State authorities.
In what way could Covid be related to the Georgia Guide Stones? Simply on the presumption that the virus is the intended mechanism for global depopulation.
But how can that be, since the Covid mortality rate is so low? The answer could be what is known in the technical literature as original antigenic sin (OAS).
Original antigenic sin is the whimsical name for a particular feature of the action of the human immune system. What is it? The answer is fairly straight forward, but, as set forth below, the explanation has a number moving parts.
On first infection by a pathogenic organism, the immune system develops proteins, known as antibodies, that bind to one or more constituents of the alien organism thereby inactivating it. The constituents of the pathogen in response to which antibodies are formed are known as antigens. Thus, for example, infection by the SARSCoV-2 virus, aka Covid-19, elicits the production of antibodies to various protein constituents of that particular virus. Best known among Covid-19 antigens is the infamous spike protein, which enables the virus to enter human cells, while damaging the affected tissues in the process.
The antibodies that the immune system evolves in response to the presence of an antigen, bind to the antigen, thereby preventing it from serving its function, whether that be, in the case of a viral antigen, the invasion of the cells of the host organism or in the replication of the virus once cell entry has been achieved.
Having created an antibody, a process that may take several weeks during which viral infection can proceed, the immune system retains cells, known as memory B-cells, that are capable of producing the same antibody on short notice in the event of a future infection. That is the essence of disease immunity, and is the phenomenon upon which the effectiveness of vaccination against infection depends. In vaccination, a pathogen-derived antigen, or a non-infectious form of the pathogenic organism, is injected to induce the production of pathogen-specific antibodies resulting in long-lived disease immunity.
Original antigenic sin results when infection by a particular pathogen is succeeded by infection by a evolved version of the same pathogen in which the antibody-inducing antigen, for example the spike protein in the case of Covid-19, differs due to mutation from the immunity inducing antigen of the earlier infection or vaccination. What happens then is that the mutated antigen evokes rapid production of antibodies effective against the original antigen. This reaction is a sin if the mutation in the antigen of the newly infecting pathogen prevents effective binding by the antibodies to the original antigen, which are what the host organism is producing. In that case, the immune system kicks into high gear producing antibodies that don't work.
Here then is how OAS could be exploited to cut a huge swathe through the human population.
First, let loose a virus such as Covid-19 that is both highly infectious and sufficiently scary to compel universal vaccination.
Next, release a novel strain of the virus with mutations that massively increase virulence while modifying the antigen against which the vaccine-induced antibodies are effective (the spike protein in the case of Covid-19 mRNA vaccines) in such a way that it resists binding by the vaccine induced antibodies.
The result? The immune system goes into overdrive producing ineffective antibodies, and people die by the billion.
The above conspiracy theory is just that, a theory, without any supporting evidence that I am aware of. But it does demonstrate that we live in interesting, and dangerous, times.
Virtue is widely attributed to those driving an electric car rather than a carbon-emitting gas-guzzler. It is questionable, however, whether propulsion dependent on half a ton or more of lithium ion batteries is any easier on the environment than use of an internal combustion engine. For one thing, battery electric cars come with a substantial up-front carbon-emission cost relating to the mining of lithium for the battery. For another thing, much of the electricity that powers battery electric cars, whether in the US, China, or Europe, is generated by carbon-dioxide-emitting, coal-fired generating stations.
But batteries are not the only way to power electric cars. This is evident from the recent development of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (and here) that offer the power and performance of a Tesla S without the massive weight, cost and negative environmental impact of a battery. These are one off vehicles, but they demonstrate an electric vehicle technology with which Tesla and other battery electric car makers may soon find themselves having to compete.
Another way to make automobile use carbon neutral would be to remove from the atmosphere carbon dioxide equivalent to that emitted by gas-powered automobiles. The cost of so doing could be very much less than the cost of switching to electric propulsion. For example, combustion of a litre of gasoline produces 2.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The cost of extracting 2.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with technology now at an advanced stage of development would be around 15 cents. Thus a moderate charge added to the price gasoline (about 50 cents per US gallon), if applied to the creation and operation of carbon capture plants, would make gas-powered automobiles carbon neutral. For the motorist driving 10,000 kilometers per year, that would add $580.00 to their yearly motoring cost, which is less than the cost of trading a standard automobile for a Tesla.
But whatever may be the outcome of technology competition at the high end of the electric vehicle market, it will be at the bottom end of the market that electric vehicles with small batteries and short range are most likely to win out, as they already have in China. There, the clunky looking, short-range Hongguang Mini is selling a million copies a year at a cost competitive with the cheapest gas powered automobiles. Such vehicles, if made available with better styling will likely prove hugely popular as city runabout/commuter cars in Western markets. Introduction of such vehicles to Western markets will be delayed however, as established automakers strive to avoid undercutting sales of more expensive family-sized sedans and SUVs, whether gas or electric.
Another type of low emission vehicle is the plug-in hybrid for which there is a considerable present demand. There is no doubt such vehicles can save much gas. But the plug-in hybrid is, like the big battery electric, a clunky solution, having two full drive trains, one electric, the other dependent on an internal combustion engine. This makes for high cost, high vehicle weight, and hence a vehicle with a high embodied carbon content. so although the plug-in hybrid will play an interim role in the transition to low carbon transportation, it does not constitute an likely end product of automobile evolution.
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.[3,6,57] We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.
For the first time in American history a president, governors, mayors, hospital administrators and federal bureaucrats are determining medical treatments based not on accurate scientifically based or even experience based information, but rather to force the acceptance of special forms of care and “prevention”—including remdesivir, use of respirators and ultimately a series of essentially untested messenger RNA vaccines. For the first time in history medical treatment, protocols are not being formulated based on the experience of the physicians treating the largest number of patients successfully, but rather individuals and bureaucracies that have never treated a single patient—including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, EcoHealth Alliance, the CDC, WHO, state public health officers and hospital administrators.[23,38]
In the meanwhile, our civilization was ripped apart, our citizens were gaslit and impoverished, and in countries across the Western world, innocent people were removed from polite society, branded as lepers, and fired from their jobs.
Why? Because there is one story that just won’t die and for which no corrections have been issued—the shibboleth that vaccination can prevent infection, transmission, and help “end” COVID.
While there is never an excuse for hateful rhetoric towards, and intervention in, the personal medical choices of law-abiding Americans, perhaps one could have, kinda sorta, understood the campaign if the new vaccines had provided long-lasting immunity and prevented community transmission. They do not.
Early on we were told: “Nine out of ten [vaccinated] people won’t get sick” (Columbia University feat. Run-DMC, February 12th, 2021, no this is not a joke); “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick” (Dr. Rochelle Walensky, March 29th, 2021); “When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, May 17th, 2021). ...
