Archive for the 'Dystopia Watch' Category
The world is rapidly going downhill. Unfortunately, we can’t get off.
3rd October 2015
Theodore Dalrymple turns over a rock.
But what most interested me about the VW episode was the speed with which VW owners in Britain made inquiries of litigation lawyers as to whether they had grounds to sue. It used to be said that the definition of an instant is the time it takes for the first horn to sound after the traffic lights in Mexico City turn from red to green; but in Britain, and no doubt elsewhere, the definition might now be the time it takes for the first inquiry to be made of a litigation lawyer after some wrongdoing is publicly revealed—wrongdoing, that is, by people or corporations with deep pockets, for defendants are selected as much by capacity to pay as by anything they have done.
It goes without saying that corporations, being run by people, are capable of the deepest-dyed villainy, but that does not mean that the rest of the population is honest. What harm has VW so far done to the owners of its vehicles that they have grounds for legal action? I am sure that they, the owners, are already telling themselves lots of convenient lies, for example that they have been deeply traumatized by the revelation that their cars emit more pollution than they thought when they bought them.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Emission of Guilt
3rd October 2015
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Many of the posters kept mentioning the phrase “Beta Uprising”, with some users asking whether they could join in, while others said they were happy to stay at home and watch it on the news.
According to a thread on Reddit, the term Beta Uprising refers to people who see themselves as being socially awkward, unattractive, shy, not popular with mainstream society or deviant in some way (the “Betas”) rising up and “rebelling against the society that they believe makes their lives difficult because they’re ostracised or don’t have success with women by shooting random people, usually people more attractive and popular than them”.
The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 may have started the trend off, but it is common for 4chan users to joke about shooting up public places:
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on What Is the Beta Uprising?
3rd October 2015
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Last night I wrote that the most effective measure to reduce the number of mass shootings would be to stop publicizing the names and purported grievances of perpetrators. The principal motivation of these deranged criminals is to become famous–as they see it, to go down in history. The Umpqua Community College murderer confirmed this once again when he wrote, prior to his rampage, “The more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on It’s Time to Stop Feeding the Delusions of Mass Murderers
3rd October 2015
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Sure, open the borders! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Jobs Up Only for Immigrants, +14,000, Down 262,000 for ‘Native-Borns’
1st October 2015
Mark Steyn turns over a rock.
This tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons is a glum day for free speech. But that’s no reason for some “social media” billionaire not to make it worse. During her visit to New York for the grand UN dictators’ ball, Angela Merkel was overheard rebuking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for permitting people to post “anti-immigrant” sentiments on social media:
On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported.
The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?” Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.
The very small cartel that run “social media” worldwide are increasingly hostile to free speech outside of a limited and largely trivial number of subjects. Ours will be the first civilization to slide off the cliff while watching cat videos.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Two Faces of Facebook
30th September 2015
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If you haven’t read Camp of the Saints, don’t bother — the newspapers are telling the story.
– Have you thought about a sequel to The Camp of the Saints?
– It is certain that there will be one, but not from me. Will it come out before the great collapse? I’m not sure.
– In your book you speak of the “ferocious” nature of the migrants. But we see today that those arriving from Syria or elsewhere don’t have a knife between their teeth…
– What’s happening today isn’t important, it’s anecdotal, for we are only at the beginning. Right now, the whole world is talking about this, there are thousands of specialists on the issue of migrants, it’s a chaos of commentary. Not one looks at the thirty-five years that lie ahead. The situation we are living through today is nothing compared to what awaits us in 2050. There will be nine billion people on the earth. Africa has gone from one hundred million to one billion inhabitants in a century, and perhaps twice that in 2050.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on 90-year-old Jean Raspail Says: I Told You So
30th September 2015
Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.
Europe’s self-inflicted “migrant crisis” ought to serve as a warning to Americans citizens that there’s no time like the present for planning ahead to stymie similar mass assaults on America’s borders.
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The influx of 2015 was more or less predicted by Jean Raspail in his 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, but few in authority in Europe appear to have ever devoted any attention to the Continent’s obvious vulnerability to foreign flash mobs taking advantage of the good nature of contemporary Europeans.
In contrast, the Australian government has laboriously worked out an effective system to block boat people, which has succeeded in discouraging most from even attempting the voyage.
And the government of Israel has so impressively anticipated the threat of Muslim and African population surges that it only briefly suffered from sub-Saharans pouring into Israel when Egypt’s Mubarak government, which had long blocked economic border-crossers as a favor to Israel, was overthrown.
It’s time for Americans to start thinking like Israelis rather than like Germans when it comes to defending their country.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Gradually and Then Suddenly
29th September 2015
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People might think him a Republican, you see, and the University would be shamed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on New Mexico Student Told to Remove American Flag From Dorm Window
29th September 2015
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Here’s a quick and easy guide to the 10 videos that have been released thus far and what they show.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Quick and Easy Guide to the Planned Parenthood Videos
29th September 2015
Ross Douthat blows the whistle.
If the scene in question literally did not exist, which is what the language of her critics consistently suggests — if Fiorina had conjured up a vision of an intact fetus with a working heart and twitching limbs having its brains harvested out of her hyperactive pro-life imagination — well, that would merit liberal shock and outrage. But she didn’t conjure or invent it: It’s very easy to figure out what scene she’s talking about, and the discrepancies between what’s in the documentary and her description aren’t wild or incredible or weird. There’s no outright fabrication here, in other words, and what Lithwick calls “the big lie about the kicking fetus and the brain harvesting” is a roughly-accurate summary of what the film actually shows. (A twitching, dying fetus? Check. A firsthand description of harvesting a brain from an intact fetus? Check again.)
So for Fiorina to actually be proven as wildly misleading and fundamentally dishonest as her critics keep suggesting, they would need to marshal evidence beyond just a parsing of her words, and demonstrate that the thing she’s describing is an inaccurate depiction of what happens inside abortion clinics that double as tissue procurement centers. They would need to prove that, for instance, the technician in the video is lying about what she saw and did, or that the footage of the twitching fetus in the bowl is fake, or that abortionists never approach the procedure with an eye toward making sure the fetal body comes out intact, or that the idea that this leads to “born alive” cases is just a myth and all testimony (including, implicitly, Planned Parenthood’s own) to the contrary is false or misleading.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Lies, Carly Fiorina and Abortion
28th September 2015
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One of the first pre-requisites for being a socialist is having no sense of humor. I’d really love to see a reporter ask Bernie Sanders to name his favorite standup comic, and watch him default to “Who has time to laugh when the middle class is being decimated by Wall Street! Socialist lives matter!”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Follow Up: Peeling the Onion of Socialism
28th September 2015
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Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, attended a fundraiser in New York hosted by John Zaccaro, convicted on felony drug charges after he sold cocaine to an undercover cop.
The 1988 conviction of the son of unsuccessful Democratic vice presidential candidate Gerraldine Ferraro was reported in numerous publications at the time. But the arrest was unearthed Friday by the Republican National Committee.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Clinton Fundraiser Was Hosted by Convicted Drug Dealer
27th September 2015
Richard Fernandez discovers that his Bullshit Detector has sounded.
It was as if John Boehner had a confession to make after all these years of troubled conscience. His recent resignation had the effect of suggesting the pro wrestling in Congress is fake. The Washington Republicans, dear fans are supposed to lose – after making some effort to heighten the drama — to the Capital Democrats. All those heart stopping moments toward the end lost due to some error or a sudden reversal of fortune — well that was in the script.
Republican Eric Cantor, writing in the New York Times, argues that there was no dishonor to being on the losing team so long as the game drew the crowds in. It kept the masses entertained, filled the stadium, paid the bills and prevented the Capital Democrats from winning too easily. There was an art to arranging things so that the Capital Democrats could imperceptibly gain a hundred points and let the Washingtons win back ten of them without becoming too obvious.
The reference here is of course to the Washington Generals, professional patsies to the Harlem Globetrotters.
Now all stability is at risk from people, hicks who not knowing the noble history of the game, actually want to wrassle for real.
The nerve of some people.
The fans, once enraptured by the wrestling, have noticed large fires starting outside the stadium. They hear shouting a few blocks over in Chinese. In the far distance there’s appears to be a rumble of Russian. And right next door, where the smoke (is it smoke?) seems to be coming from thickest, are loud yells in Arabic, French and German.
They notice that the price of tickets gets higher and higher; and the food service quality lower and lower. The space under the seats looks like they haven’t been swept in weeks. And there are disturbing movements of cash boxes from the ticket gate they’ve never noticed before. They sense, even if they can’t articulate it, that something is different.
Yet to their astonishment no one in the wrestling ring, not even the announcer, appears to take the slightest notice of events and carry on making the same choreographed moves, the same scripted sounds. At that point, they crowd may start to boo.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Speaker Flubs His Lines
26th September 2015
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The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
Nevertheless the challenging power ultimately lost, however damaged the winner wound up. Let’s hope the Chinese take that to heart.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
25th September 2015
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In a small town, the impulse to assist the poor and disorganized was direct, and the people being helped were known to everyone. Big cities with their concentrated slums of poor immigrants led to social service agencies, funded at first by churches and cities, and then by state and federal governments. As the source of the assistance became impersonal, so did the aid — and the direct contact between those assisting and those assisted declined. Instead of the local church matrons with their bourgeois ideas of proper behavior and work, harassed social workers with enormous caseloads processed cases quickly, and the ideology of government assistance changed so that any behavioral expectation of the client population was viewed as an affront to their dignity.
In time, the government assistance ethos spread to every corner of the country and crowded out the local community services. Meanwhile, locally-controlled schools were gradually taken over by higher levels of government and distant union bureaucracies so that the influence of local parents was minimized. This was viewed as “progressive,” since distant elites thought local school boards and parents were too parochial and backward to be entrusted with decisions, and would get in the way of teaching the correct materials.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Real-life “Hunger Games”
25th September 2015
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Illustrations of how innumerate with respect to statistics various professions are.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Statistically Valid
24th September 2015
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Look no further for why black incarceration rates are as high as they are. Those who don’t respect property rights often wind up behind bars. Funny how that works.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Black Lives Matter Activists Will Keep Stealing Newspapers Until They Get Their Way at Wesleyan
22nd September 2015
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Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter anti-racism movement have promised to remove Wesleyan University’s student newspaper, The Argus, from its stands and pressure the student government to deny funding to the paper unless certain conditions are met.
In response to a recent Argus op-ed that was mildly critical of BLM’s tactics, the protest group launched a petition calling for newspaper staff members to undergo diversity training and set up a space on the front page specifically for “marginalized groups/voices.” If no one submits content for this space, Argus staff members are instructed to instead print an advertisement “for your voice.” More than 100 students and faculty members have signed the petition.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Wesleyan Black Lives Matter Group Vows to Punish Student Newspaper for Thoughtcrime
21st September 2015
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Distracted, inexperienced, and reckless, it’s no secret that teens make terrible drivers: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death of 16- to 20-year-olds.
Think of it as evolution in action. Cull them from the gene pool before they breed (although these days that’s a close-run thing….).
For generations, training teens to be safer drivers has been based on scare tactics: gory screenings of Red Asphalt and clunky drunk glasses to emulate the challenges of inebriated driving. But recently, automakers have begun taking a different approach: letting parents and onboard systems have greater control over how their teens drive.
Good training for Loving Big Brother in a future Democrite-controlled world.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The 2016 Chevy Malibu Is Every Teen’s Worst Nightmare
16th September 2015
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Let that be a lesson to us all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Man Suffers Fractured Neck, Third Degree Burns and Has Hole Blown Through the Roof of His Mouth After E-Cigarette Explodes
15th September 2015
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Of course not. He’s a Muslim. ‘Forgiveness’ is not a Muslim virtue, as both history and current events bear witness.
Let’s see: He’s in her country illegally, and he thinks that she needs forgiveness from him. That explains the situation in a nutshell.
I’m told that the Russians have a proverb: ‘If you meet a Bulgar on the road, beat him. He will know why.’ I suspect that the Hungarians are even now creating a similar proverb concerning Syrians.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Syrian Refugee Says He Cannot Forgive Hungarian Camerawoman Who Tripped Him Up
15th September 2015
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I can see how that would be a concern in the Labour Party.
‘He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.’
— Declaration of Independence
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on UK: Jeremy Corbyn Creates New Dedicated ‘Minister ror Mental Health’ in His Shadow Cabinet
15th September 2015
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And he’s not spending his money. Oh, no. He’s spending your money. Because, hey, he knows better than you do what your money ought to be spent on.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion
15th September 2015
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Bernie Sanders’ appearance at Liberty University today made clear that he’s no independent socialist, but in fact a true-blue Democrat of the Stephen Douglas variety. John took note of these remarks already, but they deserves a bit more gilding:
And I will also say, that as a nation — the truth is a nation that in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.
Good to see that Sanders is keeping faith with Stephen Douglas (and also Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott) and is opposed to Abraham Lincoln’s view of America’s “title deeds.” (Also Martin Luther King Jr. for that matter.) Douglas, remember, said that the Declaration of Independence—and its great principle that “all men are create equal”—only applied to white people, and he repeatedly scorned the “black” Republican Party.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Sanders Proves He’s a Democrat After All
15th September 2015
Richard Fernandez explores the fantasy world of ‘virtue signalling’.
In the world of anything goes “virtue signalling” can be substituted for the needless art of competence. That term, invented by British writer Libby Purves, describes an exhibition of moral superiority which wins the day. Moral superiority is now all it takes to fix things. Engineering — especially social engineering — has been radically simplified. Will it, and it is. In place of “true or false”, “correct or incorrect” the contemporary thinker can merely substitute the term “good or bad” or better yet “progressive or reactionary” to characterize any approach to a problem and make a judgment on that basis.
The two interesting things about relativistic world based on “virtue signalling” is that 1) there are an infinite number of solutions to any problem; 2) all these solutions are equally valid. This absurdity holds because answers in a progressive world are always compared to intentions. It becomes equivalent to solving a dependent system of equations, like the intersection of a line and a line equal to itself. High school algebra shows this yields an infinite solution set. To the question: what is the right policy in the Middle East comes the certain answer: anything Obama does.
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Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Tolstoy and Watertight Bulkheads
15th September 2015
John Hinderaker fisks Bernie Sanders’ ideas about religion, economics, medicine, and race.
Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Bullshit From Bernie
14th September 2015
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My son, Cory, will leave our Northern California home to start college back East in the fall, prompting other mothers to offer condolences about my soon-to-be-empty nest. Though they expect me to break into tears, my overriding emotion when my youngest departs will be relief. I will finally be freed from the constant scrutiny of the ever-vigilant eco-warrior I raised.
I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance traveled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry, and fish I serve. He questions my every move—from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?)—an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.
In my parents’ house, that would have happened once, and I would have spent the next month lisping through my split lip.
It would not have happened a second time.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance
13th September 2015
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Fredrik deBoer, the socialist lecturer at Purdue University who is quickly becoming one of the most interesting commentators on American higher education, has a provocative piece in the New York Times Magazine that attempts to offer a unified theory of what is ailing campus political culture. It’s not, as the right typically argues, left-wing ideological intolerance (though he concedes that this is a problem), nor is it, as the campus left would have it, widespread racism and sexism (though there is progress to be made on this front, too). Rather, deBoer suggests that the real source of the campus insanity that has been circulating in the popular press for the last few years—the trigger warnings, the speech codes, the “Yes Means Yes” rules, the coddling and political correctness—is what he calls corporatization, or “the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations.”
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DeBoer is clearly on to something here. Campus bureaucrats, like all bureaucrats, are often more concerned with protecting their institution and advancing their own interests than creating the best outcomes for the people that they serve. Some of what the right sees as left-wing ideological militancy on the part of college administrators—for example, the recent adoption of guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual assault policies at some schools—is actually driven more by a corporate desire to protect the college from bad press than any particular political commitment. (The reverse is also true: some of what campus activists see as right-wing oppression by campus administrators—such as letting athletes off the hook for well-substantiated sexual assaults—has just as much to do with the university’s self-interest as it has to do with the patriarchy). Moreover, the proliferation of administrators who advertise the campus, manage publicity, and cater to their students’ every need is related the decades-long transformation of higher education from a type of public service designed to invigorate American democracy into a private service to be sold in at exorbitant prices.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Is Corporatization the Problem?
13th September 2015
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All children are psychopaths. Some grow out of it; some run for elective office.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Is Your Child a Psychopath? Study Reveals the Warning Signs and How Early You Can Spot Them
12th September 2015
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A hungry truck driver stopped at a roadside diner for lunch. He ordered a cheeseburger, french fries, and a chocolate milkshake.
No sooner had the waitress brought the trucker his lunch than three motorcycles pulled up, and three burly bikers came inside. The first grabbed the trucker’s cheeseburger, the second took his fries, and the third took his milkshake.
Saying nothing, the trucker got up, paid the cashier, and left.
When the trucker was gone, one of the bikers said, “He sure ain’t much of a man.”
“He’s not much of a driver, either,” said the waitress. “He just backed his truck over three motorcycles.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
11th September 2015
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A liberal arts college in North Carolina is pledging to identify and potentially punish students who heckled a play about sexual assault the college forced them to attend.
“It Stops Here,” an original play produced by students at Greensboro College, was first performed last Wednesday before a crowd of students, but the performance didn’t go as planned. According to people at the play, members of the audience frequently heckled the cast and shouted sexually explicit remarks.
Well, who let those jerks in, anyway?
Notably, though, the hecklers do not appear to have been invading the performance to disrupt it. Rather, attendance at the play was mandatory for all incoming freshmen at Greensboro, as well as for some older student-athletes who were required to attend by coaches.
Well, there it is. Had I been forced to attend that play, I would have been even more obnoxious than that. I have, after all, many decades of experience on those puny college boy amateurs.
I guess they take ‘liberal arts’ pretty seriously in North Carolina.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on College Promises to Punish Students Who Heckled Mandatory Play
11th September 2015
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Very few would have predicted on September 11, 2001 that the headlines 14 years later would feature an American president arming Iran; that there would be millions of Middle Eastern Arabs flooding into the heart of Europe. Or Saudi Arabia, while refusing to accept any refugees from an Islamic civil war in Syria, would instead offer to build 200 mosques in Germany, one for every hundred who has arrived to spare the Germans the trouble and expense of building the mosques themselves.
Few could have imagined that rail and road transport from Hungary to Germany would be interrupted to hold back floods of people in numbers unseen since World War 2. Not many would have guessed that the Palestinian flag would fly over the UN in New York, despite the objection of the United States.
Hardly anyone would have foretold the return of the Russia to the Middle East, spearheaded by a legion of forces who had honed their skill at “hybrid warfare” — then and unknown term — in Ukraine. Not just anyone mind you, but as Michael Weiss in the Daily Beast notes, “the Kremlin isn’t sending just any troops to prop up the Assad regime. It’s dispatching units that spearheaded Russia’s slow-rolling invasion of Ukraine.”
Except one man: Osama bin Laden. Unlike the American public, which still expected its leaders to defend them against aggression on that fatal day, Bin Laden had come to the conclusion the American elite would run at the slightest difficulty. What convinced him was the precipitate withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in 1996 following the incident popularly known as Blackhawk Down.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Prediction From the Grave
11th September 2015
Steve Sailer points out an inconvenient truth.
With the Obama Administration Justice Department announcing, after many embarrassments trying to persecute white non-criminals such as Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson, that they are finally going to focus upon white collar crime, it’s worth taking a look at the FBI’s Most Wanted List for white collar criminals.
White collar crime, it appears, is today a vibrantly diverse field, with native born American whites having been relegated to a small minority of the most wanted offenders.
Reading from left to right, the Most Wanted were born in Israel, Unknown (Asian), Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea, Syria, Laos, America (Asian), America (white), Russia. The one American-born white guy is named Hamed Ahmed Elbarki.
Now that’s diversity!
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Where is the ‘White’ in White Collar Crime?
11th September 2015
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“Feminist humor” is one of those terms describing a hypothetical category, like “honest Democrat.”
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Her comedic repertoire consists mainly of repeatedly mentioning that, in case you didn’t get it the first time, she’s a lesbian. It’s as if Jerry Seinfeld had made a career of standing onstage pointing out that he is Jew from New York, rather than actually, y’know, telling jokes.
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No, really. Dead babies are hilarious. Ask any feminist.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Lesbian ‘Comedian’ Wants You Guys to Know Women Are ‘Not Incubators’
10th September 2015
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None of which, of course, ought to be degree programs at all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
10th September 2015
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Further proof that Harvard is a force for evil in the world. Paging James Bond….
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Harvard Students Edit Wikipedia in Effort to ‘Dismantle the Patriarchy’
10th September 2015
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Turns out the only people more stupid than the TSA work for the Washington Post.
Anybody who subjects himself to the TSA deserves what he gets.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys From Leaked Photos
9th September 2015
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Barack Obama was elected to be our First Black President. That was, really, his only claim to fame; he was unqualified for the office by experience, ability and work ethic. Electing Obama was supposed to put a capstone on two generations of racial progress. That was the main reason millions of people voted for him.
Somehow, though, it hasn’t worked out that way. Rasmussen Reports recaps its recent findings: only 17% of Americans rate race relations as good or excellent, a drastic drop from numbers in prior years. Only 8% think race relations have gotten better since Obama was elected, and those 8% are trying to fool the pollster.
Why are race relations so bad? Obama’s actions are an important culprit in the eyes of a strong plurality of Americans. Forty-seven percent say that Obama’s actions have driven the races apart, while only 20% say he has brought them together. It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of Obama’s six and one-half years in office. And I can’t imagine that many of those who think Obama has driven the races apart could nevertheless approve, overall, of his administration.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on On Race, Obama Gets An “F”
8th September 2015
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Young Jewish entrepreneurs face forbidding obstacles in France: economic regulations that are hostile to start ups and flexible business models; anti-Semitism on the street and in the suites; a slow growth climate that is bad for all companies, new ones especially.
And so many have moved to Israel—and the French government is now trying to woo them back. We give points to the French government for realizing the cost of the brain drain and trying to lure people back, but it won’t be easy; France is a hard country to leave and people don’t make that decision lightly. It would be much smarter for the government to work harder to correct the conditions that made emigration so attractive in the first place.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on France Reaps the Rewards of Anti-Semitism
8th September 2015
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Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.
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These drivers are willing to kill not only because it is cheaper, but also because they expect to escape murder charges. In the days before video cameras became widespread, it was rare to have evidence that a driver hit the victim twice. Even in today’s age of cellphone cameras, drivers seem confident that they can either bribe local officials or hire a lawyer to evade murder charges.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Why Drivers in China Intentionally Kill the Pedestrians They Hit
8th September 2015
Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.
For many years, the Third World has functioned as the sump of toxic Western ideas. Ideas too dangerous for any sane person to actually try were boldly exported there. Years ago, a Bavarian friend remarked that the most destructive German export of all time was Karl Marx; far more catastrophic in effect than that perennial rival for ideological malpractice, Adolf Hitler.
There’s something to this. Marx’s disciples like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and the Kim family have between them killed many more people than perished at the hands of Adolf. Yet after each catastrophe, the intellectuals would go back to the drawing board and try again with the highest hopes, since the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and South America seemed perpetually ready to be sacrificed on the altar of “scientific” socialism.
One of the characteristics of Leftism is that it always works best for the “masses.” The Vanguard are somehow always exempted from its strictures, as they have important work to do. Individuals who sincerely decry “carbon footprints” see nothing wrong in flying by private jet to denounce the use of fossil fuels. The bigger the private jet, the more credible the environmentalist.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Marx Materializes at the Border
8th September 2015
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I have no evidence that Hillary Clinton ever met a tax she didn’t like.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Hillary on New 25% National Gun Tax: “I am all for that.”
8th September 2015
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An art teacher from Austin, Texas who traveled to Nepal to help with earthquake recovery has been beaten to death.
Dahlia Yehia, 25, went missing in the city of Pokhara for more than a month after arriving in Nepal on 20 July.
Hari Bahadur Pal, the Kaski District Police superintendent, told CNN that fellow teacher Narayan Prasad Paudel, 30, has admit to killing the woman on 4 August, whom he met through a Couchsurfing website.
Let that be a lesson to us all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on American Teacher Murdered in Nepal While Volunteering for Earthquake Relief
7th September 2015
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An up-and-coming Detroit rapper has reportedly shot and killed outside a strip club.
Reports said rapper Dex Osama was killed outside the Crazy Horse strip club on Detroit’s south-west side. WXYZ-TV said the shooting followed an argument inside the club.
Prediction: By another black male, not by a white policeman.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Rapper Dex Osama ‘Shot and Killed’ in Detroit
7th September 2015
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
6th September 2015
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The way to keep black people from being shot is to get guns out of the hands of young black males. But, of course, nobody dares say it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Racial Reality of Policing
6th September 2015
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Qualifications? We don’t need no steenkin’ qualifications.
First, dropping the SAT while handwaving about “diversity” is often simply a politically convenient way for colleges to serve their own narrow interests, without doing anything to actually admit more low-income or minority students. Stephen Burd has reported on two ways test-optional policies can boost a college’s selectivity profile: (1) by increasing the number of applications (and, incidentally, the number of hefty application fees) it receives each year, and (2) by increasing a the average SAT score for admitted students, because applicants with higher scores are more likely to send them in. It’s ironic, but not surprising, that colleges are still self-conscious about their students’ average scores on a test they claim is useless and discriminatory. It’s also not particularly surprising that, as Burd notes, a 2014 University of Georgia study “did not find any evidence that test-optional colleges had made ‘any progress in narrowing these diversity-related gaps after they adopted test-optional policies.’”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The End of the SAT?
6th September 2015
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Hillary ought to be highly embarrassed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
6th September 2015
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Entirely ignored: How this is any of the British P.M.’s job, or indeed any of Britain’s business at all.
The let’s-butt-into-everybody-else’s-business fetish of the Left is one of its least attractive personality flaws.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on UK: Jeremy Corbyn Blasts David Cameron for ‘Wholly Inadequate’ Response to Refugee Crisis After Images of Drowned Syrian Child Emerge
6th September 2015
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The mob as Thought Police. Now that’s comedy.
Anyone who would want to smell like Rihanna has more serious problems to worry about than fur.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Rihanna’s Perfume Launch Taken Over by Anti-Fur Activists Who Condemn Singer for Her Controversial Fashion Choices