Category Archives: Politics

Institutional Capture

I’ve mentioned before that the left has, in the long-term, won almost every political battle of the last century. The one big area where the US (and just the US) has not been moving overly left is gun freedom. The main reason for this is the NRA, but the NRA wasn’t always as powerful or hardline as it is now.

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? Or flee to the Mountain West? The latter was appealing, and the NRA leadership decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and also spend $30 million to build a recreational facility in New Mexico called the National Outdoor Center.

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Carter, a longtime NRA board member, had arrived in Washington in 1975 as founding director of a new NRA lobbying unit, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). His pugnacious approach, which rankled the Old Guard, was captured in a letter he wrote to the entire NRA membership to discuss the fight in Congress over gun control: “We can win it on a simple concept —No compromise. No gun legislation.”

The right is holding its own in this particular battle because hardliners captured the NRA (and then later recaptured it after a moderate pushback). This is how the left has always won, by capturing institutions: the academy, NGO’s, the media, the bureaucracy, etc.

If the right wants to win, it needs to figure out a way to take over pre-existing institutions. Making institutions is also good, but it takes a lot more effort. Conquering pre-existing institutions and their resource base is better.

Drafting Women

It seems that drafting women has come up among the GOP candidates for some reason. So, I’ll give my take on it.

First, women are far too valuable to waste on military activity, with the possible exception of a truly existential threat (such as both the Russians and Germans each faced from the other in WW2). Doug Wilson gets the right of it:

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

In a civilized society, anybody proposing sending women to war would be sent to a penal battalion himself to die honourably for the motherland.

On the other hand though, Wilson is right. Our society is no longer civilized and no longer worth defending or supporting. There is nothing to conserve and we should stop acting like there’s anything left.

Most “military age” women voluntarily render themselves infertile, so it’s not like we’re taking them away child creation and rearing. They’ve willingly and enthusiastically removed their own civilizational value and made themselves as expendable as men. There’s no civilizational reason to protect expendable self-sterilized young women.

Rationally we should be drafting women. Women claim to be men’s equals, and equals don’t get defended. Equals have to carry their own weight, and in this case carrying their own weight means being drafted and sent to die in case of war. If we’re going to do this liberalism, we should do it right. Allowing women into the military but not drafting them is one of those unprincipled exceptions that Zippy likes to talk about. If women are allowed in the military like men, then they should drafted like men.

(And no, to unseeing tradcons, this is not men cowering behind women, women enthusiastically pursue equality).

On Wilson’s biblical argument, the case Wilson makes does not support the idea that women at war is objectively sinful, just imprudent. So, I will talk in practical terms, not moral ones.

As for the combat effectiveness, it is obvious to anybody who’s not ideologically blinded that women will lower the military’s combat effectiveness and that’s a positive thing (I hesitate to use the word good). America’s hard military effectiveness doesn’t matter. America has had few just wars, hasn’t had a truly defensive war in a long time, possibly ever (the Pacific front of WW2 and the confederate defence in the War of the States may have been defensive, although, the US did provoke Japan and the CSA was not the USA) and has never fought a necessary war at all as far as I can recall at the moment. There’s certainly not going to be a defensive foreign war any time soon, and definitely not an existential one.

As for foreign conquests, America also has the gear and numbers to utterly destroy any possible foreign enemy that it gets serious on. The only reason America loses wars is because America (purposely?) tries to fail. A loss of combat effectiveness simply doesn’t matter against foreign enemies.

On the other hand, the happening could occur in the next couple of decades, and where the military falls during this times will matter a lot. The red tribe (ie. the tribe I support and the one not wholly given to degeneracy) has the absolute advantage when it comes to capacity for violence, but if the military falls on the side of the blue tribe, things could get rough. So, a less effective military helps neutralize a potential threat to the red tribe.

As for the purpose of women in the military being to destroy masculine virtue and manly pride, that’s also a positive. The military is the enemy. It is a part of USG and is controlled at the top by the same people destroying the rest of our civilization. Even worse, it is an enemy filled with good people who should be the allies of us and civilization. Because of its association with masculine virtue and red tribe values, the red tribe disproportionately volunteers to support the institution controlled by those who hate them. As well, it is the most trusted institution in the US, acting as a bulwark of trust for the otherwise (rightfully) mistrusted fedgov.

We need to disillusion young white men of their allegiance to the military. White men shouldn’t be fighting the wars of those who hate them. The more we can destroy  the (undeserved) trust the military has among young white men and the less we white men think they can get manly pride from joining up, the fewer white men will volunteer to die in a on the other side of the world while forcing liberalism, sodomy, corporate rape, and democracy upon foreigners.

The same argument holds for lowering military standards. It is a foregone conclusion that military standards will be lowered so that women look equal on paper. This is not something to fear, it is a positive as it will further lower combat effectiveness and eat at trust in the military.

Finally, and more morbidly, having CNN and the NYT showing hundreds of body bags from whatever foreign sandpit we’ll lodge ourselves in next beside the pictures of formerly cute (now dead) young women may end up being a wake-up call for the country (or not, it’s hard to tell where our depravity ends). A little bit of accelerationism in this area could lead to awakening.

So, it’s horrific (but not objectively sinful) that we’re wasting valuable women in the military, but those women were wasting their value themselves, so corporately and civilizationally we’re not really losing anything. If we’re going to let them into the military, we should follow through on the base principles and draft them. The practical effects of this will be positive for those concerned with eventual restoration.

Why Trump?

The GOP establishment has been asking why Trump? They don’t understand why so many are supporting Trump. Why are a bunch of “childless single men who masturbate to anime” supporting “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones”?

This article shows why:

The two officials described having conversations and asking which candidate a voter supports, whereupon the voter quickly glanced left and right, to see if it was OK to talk, and then said, “Trump.” That happens a lot, they told me.

Normal people in the US are having to look suspiciously around before voicing their public opinion.

The article barely mentions it, but I will repeat it:

Average Americans have to glance over their shoulders and make sure there are no hostile commissars around before they declare support for a mainstream political candidate. This is happening not in the USSR, but in the USA.

This is why we support Trump.

We fucking fear you and we fucking hate you.

Before we can speak candidly we working-to-middle-class white men have to quickly make sure no informants are around to rat us out. We have to be careful, because we know that one wrong word or action at work, in public, online, or even in the privacy of our own homes means losing our jobs and being publicly pilloried. It may even mean being persecuted by kangaroo courts, being bankrupted, or having your home raided by police.

We used to think the conservative machine had our back, that you would protect us from political correctness and left-wing pogroms. We working-to-middle class white men are your base, we thought you’d fight for us us. Maybe you’d let a nazi or two twist in the wind, but you’d at least have our backs. But now we’re the nazis for simply advocating what the people who beat the nazis did.

You don’t have our backs. Instead, you sneer at working-class whites. You call us, your fucking base, illiterate, crazy, and stupid. You attack us, the people you supposedly represent, as racist, the same slur leftists use against us to destroy our lives (and against you to score political points, but your heads are too far up your own asses to see the irony of that). You deride us and sneer at us at every turn.

But you aren’t even content to sneer at us. Instead, you traitorous bastards attack and mock us as cowards for writing anonymously because we don’t want to lose our jobs and be the subject of a national two minute hate. Not once did any of you even wonder why your base, the people you supposedly represent, have to hide behind pseudonyms and proxies simply to talk openly about politics. Instead, you insulted us for not wanting to lose our jobs.

We support Trump because we now know that you’re just like the leftists. You have shown repeatedly you do not have our backs, you hate us just as much as the progressives. You will run us out of jobs, you will engage in the public shaming, and when the time comes, you will happily march us to reeducation camps.

We fear you and we hate you and the media complex you represent and support. And Trump, it appears he’s standing up for us against you. He has the will and the money to speak where we can’t without becoming impovershed and publicly shamed. He can frog-march newsmen (ie: the leftist witch-hunters) out of rooms and insult them to their face, we’re we’d just be burned at the figurative stake. He’s willing to attack leftists, instead of fawning all over them to get invited to swanky DC parties. He’s opening the conversation so that we have slight bit more room to breathe without being purged from society. Through him normal folks have an outlet to speak. He’s standing against those who are trying to destroy us.

We don’t fucking care about your “conservative principles” of hating Russia (the only major power fighting degeneracy and supporting the church), amnesty for invading illegals, corporate subsidies, homosexual marriage, slightly lower taxes, increased debt, and minor hedges of Obamacare. We don’t care if Trump hasn’t been ideologically pure; you didn’t when you forced Romney(care) and amnesty McCain on us. We don’t care if he doesn’t fit in the ever-more-left overton window. We don’t care if his Christian convictions are superficial (it’s been 40 years and you’ve done shit all about Roe, not to mention you’ve done nothing to prevent Christians from having their businesses destroyed by kangaroo courts). We don’t care if he gave money to Democrats a decade ago  (y’all keep importing new voters for them).

We don’t care and why should we when we are living in a country barely above a crowd-sourced communist police state, we are being culturally genocided, our jobs and our future are disappearing, and we are killing ourselves in despair at record numbers?

We don’t care. Trump is fighting for us (or at least acting like he is, but nobody since Ron Paul has even pretended to care about the white middle). We don’t trust your party, we don’t trust your democracy, we don’t trust you, because you have done nothing but betray us.

Trump is rich beyond anything we can comprehend. He could spend the rest of his life drinking champagne from crystal glasses and snorting coke off high-class call-girls’ breasts at his own personal beach-side mansion if he wanted. Instead, he’s spending mounds of his own money and taking the hatred of the entire political-media-bureaucrat class upon himself to fight. Meanwhile, you guys are paid to fight and all you do is fold and compromise.

Trump is absolutely right that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose voters.” In fact, it could win him voters. This is how much we hate and we fear you: if he took the media class, lined you all up on your knees along 5th Ave and personally put a 9mm in the back of each of your heads, he’d get cheers. Almost nobody would sympathize with you because we know you’d sit by contentedly watching while the left dragged us into the street, if you didn’t join in yourselves to prove you’re not racists (and fail, again, like always).

You are the ones engaging in witch hunts against us. You are the ones driving us from our jobs. You are the ones selling our country out. You are the reason we have to look over our shoulders before we speak. You are the ones destroying our culture. You are the ones bringing in hordes of foreigners to murder us and replace us.

Maybe he won’t follow through. In fact, I doubt Trump will make a difference. Maybe the wall gets built, maybe it won’t. Maybe Muslim immigration won’t be stopped, maybe he won’t change the stifling political culture, maybe he’ll work with leftists. But with you it is not a maybe, we know that you will cave as soon as the leftists call you names and we know you will betray us. You had the chance to pull the trigger on the government machine and you pussied out like the pathetic mewling quislings you are. Trump may change his mind, he may betray us, but he won’t pussy out.

And if he does change his mind, so be it. Better a chance at success than the surety of failure you represent. At the very least, we will get to see Trump beat you, mock you, and humiliate you. At the very least he will tear apart the corrupt, weak GOP machine and show the “convservative” media machine for the quislings they are. Your tears alone are making supporting him worth it. He probably won’t accomplish anything beyond destroying you, but destroying you is worth it in itself.

The country is disappearing, freedom is dying, and our trust is gone. Trump is our hail mary, because we know if nothing is done, we will, at best, be forced to check around for commissars for the rest of our lives.

If you don’t want Trump, then do your jobs. Stand up for us, defend us. If the GOP establishment showed half as much hatred and derision for the leftists attacking us as you do for us, your base, if you spent half as much effort stopping leftists as you are stopping Trump, there would be no Trump. If somebody would actually stand up for us, common people wouldn’t have to flock to the only man who is willing.

The day of reckoning draws near. Repent your betrayal now before its too late, so it can be avoided.

Until then, viva la Trump!

Conservatives are Losers

Conservatives are losers.

Literally.

This is not an insult, this is a statement of empirical fact.

Here’s one (((Noah Rothman))) who proves it beyond a reasonable doubt. He attempts to outline conservative wins to convince the base that the GOP leadership is awesome. His list of the epic accomplishments consists of 3 points:

  • Rolling back some of the worst of the Bush/GOP implemented No Child Left Behind national curriculum standards (and the resulting Common Core).
  • Preventing a $2.5-billion bailout of Obamacare, while failing to actually change the part of the Obamacare law he set out to eliminate.
  • Planning to give all illegals legalization, but not citizenship.

The conservative base should trust their GOP leaders because they undid part of what a previous GOP leader did, will legalize criminal immigrants, and temporarily, not permanently, halted some small portion of the funding of Obamacare.

What heroic leaders giving their all for the cause.

I’ve noted before how conservatism is always doomed, but never has anything I have written been so pathetically proven right. What kind of losers trumpet a record like that? If that was my record I’d commit seppuku in shame. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have enough honour left to be worthy of seppuku.

It will be a mercy to these people when the Sweet Meteor of Death puts them out of their perpetual misery.

Conservatism can not die fast or hard enough.

Culture Loss

Why not bring in immigrants and refugees? These people just want a better life, why not open the doors and let them in?

Spandrell found a thread of a Belgian couple sharing their journey through the Congo in 2008, and it is interesting, and answers why we shouldn’t.

Big mistake. We were stuck. The water came to the bottom of the door. This particular mudpit had a bit of a funny smell. It was the favourite place of the pigs so it probably contained a fair amount of sh*t. It sure smelled like it. The entire village gathered round us while we got out, knee deep in sh*t.

They did not offer help.

We started clearing the wheels. Josephine hurt her foot on a stick, the pain could be seen on her face. The people thought this was extremely funny and burst out laughing. This was very humiliating for Josephine and I could see the anger on her face. We looked at eachother and understood that this was not the time to get angry or start discussions with 50 or so people. We continued to work. As I bend over to clear the mud from underneath the car my pants get wet up until my ehrm.. ‘privates’.. . Once again this is the funniest thing these people have ever seen. Hilarity ensues. This was very humiliating to us.

Eventually they offered to help us if we pay them. I tell them that I do not have money. They did not move an inch.

The same thing happens a little bit later:

No surprisingly nobody they offered their assistance, they even had some shovels. But they wanted money first. By now you probably think we are just stupidly stubborn and naive. We probably are, but we refused to give in to corruption. I once again told them they were free to help, but we would not give them money. So I continued to dig on my own with an entire village as an audience.

Here man meets tribal culture. He calls it corruption, but it isn’t, it’s culture. Why would people help others outside their tribe without a reason? Why would someone honestly expect unrelated others to help them?

I live in Canada. Everybody gets stuck in the snow on occasion. When you do, you’ll always have someone stop to help push your car out and get you on the way. One time I slid up the curb and got stuck in a small snowbank at 2 am on New Years (it was a patch of ice, not alcohol). The family in the house came out and helped me push and dig it out for 15 minutes, until someone in a 4×4 showed up and gave me a quick tow. I’ve stopped to help others push as well. Helping to jump-start someone else’s car is barely worth remarking on. It’s just something you do because you trust people will help you out when you need, and so we all get to avoid freezing to death trying to get our cars going.

This is a cultural practice built up by an uncountable number of positive interactions over a unnumbered years. The Canadian experience is the unnatural outlier, the Congolese experience is the natural norm. Helping strangers get their car unstuck is an unnatural cultural practice held by a limited number. It is just one of many western Europeans have built up. These practices have not built up in many (most?) other countries.

If you import foreigners from Congo who do not have this cultural practice, fewer positive interactions and more negative interactions build up, and eventually a some tipping point, you no longer have the cultural practice.

This is the harm immigration causes, it wears away at built-up cultural practices. The insidious danger of it is that this regression is barely noticeable until one day you get stuck, look around, and wonder, ‘why is nobody helping me?’

Of course, cultural practices go far beyond simply pushing someone’s car.

****

I asked them if they would want us to help them if they had a problem. The acknowledged this. I said what they would think if we asked for money before we would help them. They called us racists and immediately demanded money from us.

Welcome to your future.

Also, the demands for money or free stuff is omnipresent throughout the trip. Everywhere they go, someone is demanding money, drinks, phones, or the like from them. Is this the cultural practice you want imported to your country, where ‘le Blanc’ is seen primarily as a source of free stuff?

We opened a can of Coke (still from Zambia) and a jar of pickled onions to eat with our bread.

Those ‘horrible’ people did not have a Coke, even if they had the money to buy it, it was not avaialble. They did not have pickled onions either. And between the two of us we ate as much bread as an entire family would eat for an entire day.

We tried putting things into perspective. Maybe we shouldn’t be here after all?

This is what immediately follows their ‘stuck in a mudpit’ story. The answer to the question is ‘correct, they don’t belong there’.

But more interesting is how they do not seem to make a connection. Maybe there’s an underlying reason why people who won’t help others stuck in mud don’t have Coke and pickled onions available. Coke and pickled onions require cooperation in the marketplace, but how can there be cooperation when you can’t even trust your neighbour to help pull you out of the mud?

****

If you want to know why there’s no social trust, here’s an illustrative example:

We came across a small motorcycle. You’d see them from time to time, it is the most luxurious transportation people have here. They are litte chinese 50cc (or 125cc) bikes. We stopped to let him pass and he stopped to greet and ask us if we had some oil for his engine.

All over the world there is an unwritten rule that in remote or difficult to travel areas people help eachother. That is why in the sahara everybody says hi to eachother. That is why in the Mongolian steppe people drive for kilometers just to check up on you. People help when needed as they know they will be helped when they are in need. We very much honour this unwritten rule and will always assist when we can.

So when this guy asks for oil, I do not hesitate and take out a my spare can of oil. I warn him that this is oil for diesel engines, but that does not matter to him. It is probably the best oil he would ever find to put in his little bike. As I am pouring oil from my can in his can the passenger of the bike starts begging with Josephine. I am not impressed when Josephine tells me. And when the bike owner too start to ask for money, it really pisses me off. We are helping this guy and still he begs for more? So I pour the oil out of his can back into mine and tell them to sod off. In our car and off we go.

For almost a month now we were in a serious fight with Congo. We were fighting against corruption. We were fighting against the roads. A constant battle. Congo was giving us a serious beating, but we stood strong and did not give in. Slowly but steadily we were winning this battle against the Congo.
But while we were so busy battling the roads and the corruption, Congo sneaked in from behind. It had transformed us into loud and angry people. With no remorse, no compassion, and a total lack of rules.

What happened to the unwritte rule of the road less travelled? The rule we nohour so much? All out of the door..

Congo had beaten us a long time ago already. Just like it had beaten most of its own citizens.. And we didn’t have a clue

The defections finally got to our generous tourist and finally defected himself. I wonder if this will cause him to further defect in the future?

Foreign cultural practices are acidic and burn away your cultural practices.

****

Here’s the price for not having a culture of trust and cooperation which would allow for road-building:

As said, traffic is always local. They somehow manage to get cars into larger towns and then drive it around town, but no trough traffic. So cities/towns/village that are not on a river or on the limited railroad network have very limited supplies.

Up to 600kg of goods are transported on these bicycles. They do not ‘ride’ them, but push them instead. You can see there is a stick connected to the bikes handlebars.

This is the major transport method in Congo. It is probably one of the most ‘popular’ (this does not seem like a good wordchoice) jobs. There are fixed routes and people often travel in groups. For security reasons but also to help eachother on the hills.

At regular intervals on the main “bicycle” tracks there are “service stations”. This is usualy a small hut where one can eat a meal of fufu. They would also have a pump and some basic tools to fix flats.

We saw many of these overloaded bicycles before, but on this stretch of the road it seems to be the only means of transportation.

It must be very hard work to get these loads over the sometimes very rough roads. The ‘drivers’ are away from home for weeks on end and probably barely make any money out of it.

And here’s another cost:

We came across a truck that was parked in the middle of the track. Luckily the surrounding area was pretty open, so we could pass it.

Us: “Bonjour, ca va?” – “Hi, how are you?”
– Them: “Ca va un peu bien ” – “I am doing a little bit ok” -> typical Congelese answer this!

Us: “Votre vehicle est en panne?” – “Did you truck broke down?”
– Them: “Oui, mais ils vient avec des nouveaux pièces” – “Yes, but they are coming with spare parts”

So we chat a bit and we ask what their problem exactly was. They left Ilebo for Kananga with a load of building materials for a rich guy in Kananga. Their engine had completely seized. Their cargo was transferred onto another truck and they had taken the engine out and transported the engine to Kinshasa to get it rebuild. In the meantime the truck ‘crew’ stayed onsite to safeguard the truck. But they were very happy as they just received news that the necessary parts for the engine were now ordered in Germany, so the parts would come arrive in Kinshasa in a few weeks time!

A fascinating story, and they told it as if the was the most normal thing in the world. Fair enough. We said our goodbyes and asked them one more final question. How long had they been here?

“Un peu plus qu’un an maintenant” – “Just over a year”

“The most normal thing in the world“. Is this the culture you want to import?

****

After the preceding stories, someone did help them:

It took three more attempts to drive out before the village priest (7th day Adventist by the way) encouraged a few strong men to help.

***

Some other people in the Congo were more proactive:

When we continued on the same road we would pass other smaller mudpits. These bogholes always had a “crew”. When a truck arrived, they would throw in rocks so the truck could pass… for a fee ofcourse. After the truck passed they removed the rocks again. A lucrative occupation!

In our books this is just plain wrong and we refuse to support such behaviour. So we always charged trough in 4×4, hoping we would not get ourself stuck.

The corruption is omnipresent and not just limited to roads. The tourists can hardly go anywhere without some official or another demanding a road toll, a non-existent “tax”, or a “fine” for some made-up infraction. As the tourists note, despite all the road tolls:

Nothing ever returns to the maintenance of these roads, or anything remotely related to the province it is in. It shows:

All the roads are like that or worse, My favourite is the one with the tree in the middle of it:

Here’s there first two days of travel. Remember, day one was the fast part of their trip with the best roads.

Less than 200 miles in day one, barely 50 in day two, while driving a sturdy 4×4. That’s how bad the roads are.

But between the corruption and and distrust, why would anyone build a decent road? Who would build a decent road?

There was one group who tried, the Belgians, which brings me to the next point.

****

At some points the trip reminds me of Skyrim. The Congo resembles a pre-civilized society but there’s the (sometimes functioning) ruins of an ancient civilization scattered about.

Fallout 4 or a Belgian Ruin in the Congo

They’re driving down unkempt, potholed dirt roads, then suddenly:

The bridges were something we were very concerned about upfront. Congo has a lot streams and rivers and we knew the roads had not seen maintenance in many many years. If a bridge broke down, that could be a major problems. Up until now however we did not have any problems with the bridges. Some of the smaller bridges might have been dodgy, but all of them were passable. Most of the large bridges were fortunately made out of steel and in reasonably good nick.

Take the bridge we just crossed for example. I find it amazing that is still there. Numerous armies have crossed the Congo in the last 20 years, chasing their enemies down to the capital. Now, I am not a military expert, but if my army was losing terrain to the enemy army and I have to retreat. The one thing I would certainly do was blow up all bridges after me. Had it happened but was the damage so small that it could easily be repaired? Or did they just not bother? Or did they lack the explosives and time to actually blow it up? Who knows…. but at least the outcome is good for us now!

A bridge made by the evil Belgian colonialists over a half-a-century ago still functions, but the Congolese can’t keep basic roads functional. Here’s the ruins of “what once must have been a grand building… marked with logos from a Belgian University… [that] must have once been some scientific study centre of sorts.”

Everybody talks shit about imperialism and colonialism, but when the Belgians were there the people of the Congo had peace, order, bridges, working roads, a functional bureaucracy, non-corrupt police, and scientific study centres. Are the Congolese better off being ‘free’?

Here’s the tourist on the dark Belgian history:

I presume you are referring to the “not so nice” role Belgium has had in the history of Congo. For a while I thought that would be a problem as well, but it isn’t. Just about anything that still exists in Congo is made by the Belgians. The older generation who had their education from the Belgians really have fond memories of that era. And at the moment Belgium is still one of the main funders of the country (via aid). The dark pages of history during the Leopold 2 era is not what the Congolese people think about. All in all I think being Belgian was actually a plus. As a matter of fact, a lot of people asked how things were going with the “war” in Belgium :-o

****

Speaking of functional bureaucracy, mismanagement is not limited to infrastructure. Here’s the tourists on getting a permit to be tourists:

Nobody really know what kind of permit one needs, let alone where to apply for it. But everybody agrees that a permit is required. Officially it has got something to do with the many mining areas to be crossed. We contacted the few people who have attempted travelling trough congo but they too never managed to get hold of the permit. One of these guys did get arrested and deported because he could not provide a permit.
Our Belgian Consulate really tried hard to get this stupid little piece of paper for us, but to no avail. They even managed to get us invited with the governer of Katanga, but he too could not give it to us. After many days of trying we asked the consulate to give us some sort of official looking letter with an official looking stamp. We would chance it without the permit!

****

There are some actual functional paved roads around, made by foreigners:

So, why is there an asphalt road in the middle of Congo? Not connected to the rest of the road system (due to lack of road system).

There reason is simple: Diamonds. This is the main diamond center of Congo. This has attracted many people ofcourse, but the local people barely benefit of the natural wealth of the region. Officially it is the third largest city of Congo, after Kinshasa & Lubumbashi. Although by now it is probably the second largest city with over 2 million inhabitants. It also a politically important region. Most of the recent political problems start here. When Mbuji-Mayi “explodes” the rest of the country usually follows shortly after.

The diamong mining companies ofcourse need transport. Most is done via air, but the heavy supplies (fuel) are brought in by train. The nearest train station is in Mwene-Ditu. Hence the tar road between Mwene-Ditu and Mbuji-Mayi.

It’s hard to say “the local people barely benefit” when the mine is the only reason there’s a decent road in the area.

Here’s an interesting tidbit on who they talked to while prepping for their trip:

2) Coca-cola company: If there is ony thing you can find anywhere in the world it is Coca-Cola. They should know how to get their goods in the country. We had no response on mails, so we called them up. Their answer was pretty short: They do not have a distribution network outside the major cities in Congo 8O And it proved to be true, Congo is the first country we have visited were Coca-cola is hard to get once you leave the major cities.

****

An interesting thing about the trip, is the number of Catholic missions in the Congo, how often that’s where the tourists stay at them, how much the tourists appreciate them and their kindness, and how much a relief the priests are. From the way the tourists talk about them, Catholic monks seem to be what keeps the country even somewhat functional. I’m not going to quote all of the references, but here’s a few.

Here’s some priests picking up the white man’s burden. It speaks for itself:

The priests (Brothers actually) are nice guys. There are 4 of them, young and smart. All of them have studied in Lubumbashi or Kinshasa. After they finished the seminary they were sent to a mission. They cannot choose which one. We could hear the sadness in their voices when they told their stories.

They sampled the “world” when studying, they have a degree (one of them had a masters in engineering) and then they are sent to a mission. They know they will probably never have the chance again to live in a city. At the mission they take care of the kids, teach, etc.. A noble and rewarding job. But they carry all this knowledge that they cannot put in practice here. They have no computers, no tools, no electricity, no budget, …

Their living quarters were very comfy and clean for Congolese standards. They had a radio and a TV set. Because of their proximity to Lubumbashi they had a regular supply of newspapers.

The priest-engineer was setting up a project to generate clean energy from a river. He had a recycling project. A radio project. An irrigation project, … He had to run all these projects without any funds, without material. So many ideas, so little chances.

They remained positive but you could see it in their eyes that they were sad. Without a doubt they would take the first opportunity to get out of there. It would be a great loss for the mission and the village but I couldn’t blame them. In the way our talks went we thought we could hear them crying for help. To take them to Europe, to give them funds, to supply them with material. They did not speak these words, but to us it was clear that they really longed for those things. We were not able to provide this. It made us sad and we felt guilty.

Here’s another set of priests carrying the burden and the thanks they get for it:

We rolled into Kamina and had a warm welcome by several “frères” (Brothers), among them Frère Louis, the belgian brother that hosted us in Luena. The other frères were Croatian. They all have their missions deep in the brousse, but this week they had their annual gettogether.

The missions was big and well organized. They had all the facilities, even a workshop. They were responsible for almost everything functional in Kamina. Churches, school, farms, factories, …
…
That night we talked for hours with Frère Louis. Our little adventures here dissapear in the nothing compared to everything he went trough. He had been in DRC for over 40 years, he stayed during all the wars. He had to abandon everything and run for his live three times as teams were sent out to kill him. But he always returned. Many books could be filled with his adventures.

He is also responsible for most of the bridges Katanga. He build hundreds of bridges himself. He has a small working budget from Franciscans, but he funds most of it all by himself. He has put every last penny in the Congolese people. That is why his house in Luena was so rundown.

He also told us about the Mayi-Mayi rebels that still roam the jungle. We were not prepared for the horror stories we would hear. I still have problems giving these stories a place. They are not just stories though, he gave us a 100 page document with his interviews of victims. If you thought, like us, that cannibalism was something that belonged in comic books and dusty museums about Africa. You are wrong. :cry:

But not everybody is called to the self-sacrifice of the mission field:

Unfortunately the father of this mission was not there, but his apprentice was. A very young guy, fresh out of school. He was not happy to be here, that much was clear. He did nothing else but complain and he would whine on endlessly. He was not a bad guy, but was wan’t very good company either.. oh well.

And not every priest remains uncorrupted:

We discussed our plans with Abbé Omer in the garden of the mission (it must have been a wonderfull garden back in the days.. now it looked a bit rundown). The good news was that there was good ferry here that could take us across the mighty Kasai river. The bad news was that nobody every uses that ferry and it does not see any regular action.

Omer knew the guy who was responsible for the Ferry, a chap called Barthélémy. He even has his phone number, but he does not have credit on his phone. No problem, he can use ours. A conversation in Lingala starts, it takes about ten minutes until we run out of credit on our phone. I actually think they talked 1 minute about the ferry and the other 9 minutes about other things, but anyway. Here was the deal:

– Price for a two-way trip is 50$US
But,
– we have to supply our own diesel the engine of the boat. 150 liters is required (!). that’s about 200$US (Diesel here is cheaper because they have a regular supply via boats from Kinshasa).
– we have to supply two batteries to start the engines of the boat
– the ferry is on the other side of the river and they would only be able to get it across somewhere next week

That’s just great!

We immediatelly uttered to Omer that that was a ridiculously high price, one we would never pay. And that we wanted to cross as soon as possible. preferably tomorrow.

What followed was a very difficult negotiation. Abbé Omer insisted that he acted as an intermediate person. According to him to protect us from getting ripped off (because we were white). I was actually convinced that he was playing a game with his mate Barthélémy to make some money out of us. It took us many hours on the phone to finally convince this Barthélémy to come to see us to discuss the price. He would come at 8 the next morning.

Later that evening Omer suggested that we he would have to inform the police of our presence (c’est normal!), it took us a lot of persuading for him not to ‘give us in’.

Interesting that Omer is a local.

****

Of course, some secular non-profits are there to, but they are not as effective as the evil Catholics, MNC’s, and imperialists:

They told us about the mysterious roads. Apparently some NGO (they did not know the details… or they told the details and we forgot) has funded the construction. Several teams started working at several locations. The different bits were supposed to connect at one point. As of recent, work had nearly stopped… no more budget. It was unclear if more budget would become available or not. In any case the idea of the construction was to invest all the money in labour instead of buying an expensive CAT. Great idea ofcourse, that way all the money stayed in DRC, instead of filling the pocket of some bigwig at CAT. If you look at the road it was quite a feat. They thought about drainage and everything. Unfortunately they could not compress the earth enough with the tools they had. We already started a few ruts, it would only take 1 heavy truck to completely destroy these roads again. These roads would not last a rainy season.

Here’s Barthélémy’s ferry:

We couldn’t believe our eyes when we finally saw the ferry.

It looked brand new!
It wasn’t..

A German (?) NGO had funded the restoration of the ferry recently. It had received a nice fresh coat of paint, but the money to rebuild the engines had gone missing.

****

Here’s some more local cultural practices excerpted from a 131-page document by a priest:

“Y”‘s brother went fishing in Missa and saw mischief like cutting of ears. They fry the ears in a pan eat them. They make the victims look at how their own ears are being fried and eaten. They are being accused of cooperation with the Congolese FAC army. The May May continue to eat humans. Y’s brother managed to escape to Bukama, this is where I met him.
…
They kill those four soldiers and eat them. They then carry one of the heads of the murdered soldiers to Kintobongo and put the head on the table in our mission. They do this as warning not to attack hem, if not this is what happens.
…
..The hunters (May-May) asked food at the woman of Chef Kitumba. The women told they did not have food. The hunters then demanded that they roast their children for them to eat.
…
The commander Bati dared to display a naked woman. With a pen he pointed at every part of the “intimate organs” and told the onlookers the names in dialect. What a humiliation.
…
We are living in a situation of pure and simple cannibalism. The may-may plunder, rape and kill the civilian population. They then eath their meat, raw or smoked. This is true for the May-MAy chief Kabale, who was killed recently (15/05/2006) by the population of Kayumba.

Do we really want to bring these kinds of cultural practices here?

****

Of course, it’s not all bad:

We stopped in the first village. A car in the village.. with white people in it. Now that is an attraction ofcourse. And if they are covered in mud from head to toe it is even more interesting.

I do not have to explain we drew a bit of a crowd?

But people were actually quite nice. They offered us to use their shower (a tree with a mud wall before it and a bucket) and after an hour or so they actually left us alone.

Later that evening some kind of custom officer came to see us. He wanted to see our permits and whatnot. We kindly told him to bugger off and come back tomorrow. Surprisingly, it worked. Next day we were gone before he came back ;-)

As soon as it got dark we got into our tent and looked outside. We could see several fires in the village were people would gather around and sing and dance (mostly women). Small groups of men were having discussions. Peaceful village.

But small villages aren’t all good either:

The first village we encountered seemed deserted at first, but as soon as we entered the village we saw people coming at us from all sides. They had machetes and sticks and were shouting. “Des Blancs. Argent!” – “White people. Money!”. They were all over the place. This was not good! I floored it and sped out of the village. A rock hit the back of our car.

What in gods name was that all about?

Very few Congolese had made us feel welcome, but this was plain agression! It scared the hell out of us.

We passed another village, and once again a mob formed as soon as they heard us coming. Machetes flying round, racist slogans shanted. Once again we did not give them the chance to get near us and blasted out of the village. They tried following us. This was turning ugly, if we would get stuck here we would be in big trouble, these people did not want a chat!

****

Anyway, I’m about twenty pages into the thread and it goes on for almost 100 pages. I’m done reading and commenting on this (for now?), but I hope you found this illuminating, or perhaps endarkening?

Serge and Frederick Kovaleski

Trump’s getting heat for mocking a disabled NYT reporter, Serge Kovaleski. I have no sympathy for NYT reporters, so I support Trump attacking them.

Anyway, Serge is the son of Frederick Kovaleski. Frederick Kovaleski was a tennis player who worked as a CIA spy for a decade, recruiting other spies. Serge wrote of Fred’s work as a spy in the Washington Post in 2006. Oddly, Fred doesn’t have an English wiki, although, he does a French one, which, run through Google Translate, states this:

He grew up in a small town Hamtramck Michigan near Detroit and mainly populated by Eastern European immigrants where most people converse in Polish. Poland is the country of his parents, he speaks Polish and Russian. At school he first played handball and his gym teacher sees him as a tennis player potential. There is no court in the city then it draws a line on the gym wall and asked if his parents can buy her a racket. After asking 10 dollars to his father who does not see what sport it is, it advises instead to play baseball or something like that. His teacher, Jean Hoxie who became a local legend of tennis, provides him a racquet and tennis teaches him, he is 11 years old. It will be selected for the US Junior Davis Cup Team and spotted by several universities of Michigan, where he will visit but for a short time since October 1942 he had to make war from the Philippines.

On his return his tennis success earned him invitations to tournaments, USTA and then left to tour Europe with the financial support of Jean Hoxie in 1950, after a 1/8 finals at Roland Garros is classified in the top 15 worldwide for Wimbledon where he also reached the 1 / 8th. His many successes throughout the world earned him a further invitations chaining in France, Italy, Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, Philippines etc. He met many US diplomats in various embassies. At Monte Carlo in 1951 the question arose to turn pro after an offer from Calcutta tournament, but he refused because only a handful of players at that time could make a living as a pro.

His contacts then offered her to work for the CIA. His first mission was to support defectors from the Soviet army because of his knowledge of the language. He continued in parallel its business coverage, tennis player. He meets in Cairo Manya Jabes, of Russian origin. The CIA considered too high risk and asked him to choose. He chose to marry her, in Lebanon or it will just find a position for Pepsi. They then go to Sudan and the CIA back in touch with him and asked him to make recordings of translations after reconsidering her marital situation.

He works after Yemen and South Africa in Cape Town, still for Pepsi. In 1961 Serge and his son was born, and he decided to leave the CIA. He left for Australia and Pepsi situation at Revlon, not before had an MBA at Columbia University. The family moved to New York and then go to Washington to follow their son Serge who works for the Washington Post. It is for this newspaper that Serge will tell the story of his father in 2006. Following the article the family returned back to Manhattan the son to follow in his new post at the New York Times where he will pick the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. That year Fred Kovaleski won the USTA National Men’s Grass Court Championships for over 85 years, and in 2010 and 2011. n June 2014, nearly 90 years he decided to speak for the first time in his past secret agent

According to Serge’s article linked above, Serge knew his father by 1973 and Fred worked in the upper echolons of Pepsi, Revlon, and Nabisco. There’s also this little tidbit:

Soon after my father arrived in Cairo, a socialite friend introduced him to an exotically fetching Egyptian woman of White Russian parents. He started to court Manya Jabes, even though she was married to a wealthy Egyptian banker, Rene, and devoted to her young son and daughter, who were at school in Europe.
…
To be inconspicuous, she and my father would meet at his apartment, take drives outside of Cairo or have drinks at a bar on a Nile house boat. After knowing her for two years, my father asked my mother to marry him. She said yes and divorced Rene several months later. She has seen her other children — my half siblings — often over the years.

My father was exalted about marrying my mother, but apprehensive. He knew how the CIA felt about agents wedding foreigners, especially a foreigner whose father had returned to the Soviet Union. His fears were justified. In March, 1957, his boss received a cable from Washington: If my father married Manya Jabes, he would have to resign.
…
Now out of the CIA, my father found civilian work with Pepsi, which sent him to Khartoum, Sudan, for training at a local bottling plant. Ironically, it wasn’t long before he got a call from the CIA chief of station there who offered him a job translating tapes from taps on Khartoum’s Soviet Embassy. My father declined, but said he knew someone for the job: his new wife, who spoke six languages, including Russian.

This article elucidites a bit more:

While Kovaleski’s cover story eventually changed from tennis pro to travel agent, he continued his work in Cairo with the CIA. There he fell in love with a woman named Manya Jabes of Russian descent. Marriage, however, required approval by his boss at the agency. “I supplied her name, birthdate, family members, et cetera, all of which was cabled back to D.C. for security processing,” says Kovaleski. “They discovered that Manya’s father had divorced Manya’s mother, married another Russian woman who was a poet and returned to the Soviet Union.”

She was considered a security risk. The CIA told Kovaleski he had to choose his career or Manya. He chose Manya and resigned as an officer of the CIA.

Manya ended up working for the CIA a few years later. Serge was born in Cape Town in 1961, which, as near as I can tell, would have been around the time Manya was working as a spy. Serge graduated from William & Mary, one of the original Public Ivies and has worked the rounds of newspapers: The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Money Magazine, and The Miami News.

Interestingly, he won a Pulitzer in 2009 for his work in writing on Spitzer’s prostitution scandal. 28 Sherman has connected Spitzer’s scandal to Maurice Greenberg, who himself has numerous known CIA connections and has been accused of even deeper connections.

Also, Greenberg and Trump have been feuding for a while now, starting around the time Greenberg was forced out of AIG by Spitzer and is backing Bush in this election.

I don’t see a direct link between Greenberg and Kovaleski,* but it would be doubtful that someone who wrote for Money Magazine didn’t know someone as involved in the financial world as Greenberg. It seems at the very edge of coincidence that the man who was awarded for destroying Spitzer, which just happened to benefit the big hedge funds and got revenge for Greenberg, is also the man who is at the centre of a manufactured controversy against Trump, who is also warring against hedge funds and is feuding with Greenberg.

Don’t forget, Serge’s entrance into the controversy was when he backtracked on his article in 2001 which stated:

In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.

Which directly supports Trumps assertions on this issue and which the usual suspects are attacking him on.

If you look around, Kovaleski has been involved in pushing numerous other left-wing causes in his “reporting”. Here he is sympathizing with Tsarnaev, painting Zimmerman as creepy and crazy, and pushing the poor, victimized Michael Brown narrative.

None of this amounts to proof of anything, but the coincidences of a left-wing NYT reporter being involved in two scandals to destroy the enemies of AIG and Greenberg, are rather interesting. In fact, it’s almost amazing how little there is on the internet about the Kovalski family despite (because of?) the two parents being known CIA spies, the father being an executive at multiple MNC’s and a world-class tennis player, and the son being a NYT reporter at the heart of two different national headline political controversies. I suspect there’s probably more to this than the superficial outrage generation.

What NRx and the alt-right really need is a wiki/encyclopedia/editable web so we can track the web of connections between all these people. It would be a huge project, but if we mapped the web of connections within the Cathedral over the last century, I’m sure it would provide reams of interesting information.

****

* There’s a Dan Kovaleski who works as an Assistant VP at AIG, but I don’t see any linkages but the name (Dan Kovaleski is almost non-existent on the internet), and Kovaleski isn’t rare enough to assume a family connection on last name alone.

A Democratic Thanksgiving

A couple years back, I posted on the emptiness of leftists who think of the holidays as an opportunity for indoctrinating their family. It looks like the campaign has started again this year. (H/T: SDA).

If you want my thoughts this, you can read it there. Right now, I’m going to forgo any substantial insights and indulge in a little bit of lulz, by focusing on the content of the official Democratic site for turning Thanksgiving into an opportunity to spew political propaganda: Your Republican Uncle. The site states:

The holiday season is filled with food, traveling, and lively discussions with Republican relatives about politics sometimes laced with statements that are just not true. Here are the most common myths spouted by your family members who spend too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh and the perfect response to each of them.

Look at these “perfect responses” on Trump:

Trump1Trump2Trump3

These responses are retarded. Maybe, I might be able to understand looking up and memorizing talking points full of hard statistics, sophisticated political philosophy, and strongly reasoned ideology, if you are broken enough that that what’s Thanksgiving and Christmas mean to you. But this? Who can not think up the stunningly intellectual arguments of “Trump is an evil xenophobe who went bankrupt a couple times” and “deportation is mean, you meanie-head” without the gentle guiding hand of a DNC shill.

Oh, and just in case you were thinking those links may expand on the arguments, they do not go to supporting documentation with anything more substantial, they merely allow you to tweet your ignorance and asininity to the people you know. Although, why Democratic operatives anybody would think anybody would want to publicly advertise their own vacuousness is beyond me? They must think even more condescendingly of their base than I do.

The rest are more of the same asininity. Read them if you thinks your IQ is too high and you want to lop off a few points.

Now, note the faces: The Republican Uncle is a grumpy meanie-face, while the Liberal, who has prepared and memorized partisan political talking points in advance so he can “win” a debate family dinner, is happy (because that’s what happy people do right?). But look at the happy face:

Smug

The smug just radiates from it. Even leftist PR flacks can’t imagine a liberal at a family dinner not being an insufferable, smug, condescending asshole.

Finally, look at this. The site was designed so that only the first talking point is shown when you open a category and you have to click to see more. This is what you click on to see more:

StillTalking

Note how condescending it is (that fool is still yapping). Then consider this, the site is implying that parroting the first of your inane Democratic talking points will so bedazzle ‘your Republican uncle’ that he will fall silent in awe of your superior genius and insight. Heh.

I found something even better. Here’s a DNC flack:

“This time of year, the only thing more annoying than holiday traffic is an awkward conversation with family about politics,” DNC Digital Director Matt Compton wrote in an email announcing the site. “We designed YourRepublicanUncle.com so that it look greats and loads quickly on your phone — no getting ambushed when you go back for seconds on stuffing.”

Political conversations suck, so make sure to prepare for and start them, and we know our base is completely ignorant about everything, so you can pull up rebuttals on your phone and let us do your thinking for you.

****

Now, I doubt (hope?) that there is (not) any statistically significant number of people who actually use these talking points, however many guides the media will put out.

Rather, the most interesting part of this is just how little the Democratic Party thinks of their base. The GOP cuckservatives will attack their base and ignore their base’s wishes, but at least they assume we’re evil. The DNC just assumes their base are a bunch of dysfunctional retards who are ignorant of the world around them and need to be handheld through basic human interaction.

Le Petite Mort

I was asked if I was going to write something on the French Attacks. I wasn’t planning to, but I will now.

Anyone could have told France these attacks were inevitable, and in fact many have. The French invited diversity in and were culturally enriched. Following 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Rotherham, 7/7, Burgas, Madrid, numerous riots, and the untold other incedences, this is not unexpected.

However, unlike in Charlie Hebdo, these were not leftists, these were just normal people going about their lives, so I do have sympathy and wish their families the best; may God have mercy on the victims in the next life.

And yet, while the individual victims deserve sympathy, France as a corporate body doesn’t. France is a democracy. Theoretically, the people rule and, in actuality, the people are able to vote for their government in relatively fair elections. The people even have a party dedicated to preventing foreign invasion and mass murder. Yet, the people refuse to vote for that party. France has willfully chosen pro-immigration policies and has once again received the natural consequences of their actions. If the French don’t want to be mass-murdered by savages, they should stop inviting savages in.

France chose to suffer these attacks. Not just once, but repeatedly, the French have overwhelmingly voted to aid savages in attacking France. If the French wish to play status games rather than defend themselves, no amount of sympathy in the world will help them. They have chosen their fate.

Now, I doubt the French are going to lay prostrate forever. They probably won’t do anything real now, the status games are too entrenched, but at some point something will happen.

The rational, compassionate thing to do, would be to find and execute everyone somewhat involved in these attacks, then end (Muslim) immigration and (humanely) mass deport Muslims from France. This would be a calm, measured respone and could be done with minimal bloodshed and suffering.

But equal and opposite reactions are the thing of physics. Humans work differently, especially when aggregated. They tend not to take measured and appropriate responses. Instead, they tend to keep doing what they are doing, ignoring or downplaying tensions as they build. Political inertia is a powerful force. Things will keep chugging along as they are right now.

Then suddenly, they won’t.

Humanity does not work like a spherical cow in a vacuum, it works more like man’s most base act. The act begins, tension mounts over time, then the pent-up pressure is released in a singular explosive moment.

In the case of Muslim immigration, the act has already begun. We are in the tensions mounting phase. Attacks, assaults, and riots and the occasional counter-attack (a la Breivik) will create continual friction between the French and their invaders, but nothing will be solved by these thrusts and counter-thrusts. Instead, at some point, the French tensions will reach their breaking point, and the French will release themselves in an orgasm of violence.

This will be an explosive release, not a calm, measured response. Cracked had a recent article about the Bosnian genocide, and an earlier one about the Rwandan genocide, the first point of each is how sudden it was. So it will be in France.

Contrary to these articles, these types of violence are never sudden or shocking, however quickly they may occur. They are the final result of long-standing tensions. They can be prevented if action is taken before the release, but once the release occurs it can not be stopped until it is fully spent.

The French will play their status games, ignoring the low-level guerrilla war and avoiding taking necessary measures, then, at some unknowable point for some unforeseeable reason, the dam will burst and genocidal violence will release all over the country. Rather than enacting a preventative policy now, while it will be comparatively clean and merciful, the French will bloody their hands in brutality when the situation has gone beyond reason.

After the violent release, they will look back and realize a little part of them died in that brutality. Their sons and daughters will look back and wonder how neighbour could turn against neighbour so suddenly.  People will be shocked at how violence like that could happen so suddenly.

Now, as I said before, I want to prevent this violence. I don’t want the white man to be broken and forced into this brutality simply to be able to enjoy their own civilization and culture in peace.

So, France, please stop the status games and act now while you can do so with clean hands. Don’t wait until fields of blood are your only recourse. If nothing is done now, the blood will be on your hands, because you valued status more than peace and justice.

Gun Deaths

David Auerbacher has a piece where he argues that stats are on the side of freedom haters. He is right if you think having many studies of rigged studies by lying ideologues using false measures and ignoring confounding variables (ie. race) are ‘the stats’. But rather than addressing the usual idiocy that has been addressed to death elsewhere, I would like to comment on one specific phrase used by him and other freedom haters.

“Gun deaths”.

The use of the phrase ‘gun deaths’ is a sure sign that the person making the argument is arguing in bad faith (if not outright lying with statistics) and has absolutely nothing worthwhile to say on the topic of guns and violence.

What this phrase ignores, and what gun control advocates scramble to hide is that guns have substitute goods.

The large majority of gun deaths are suicides, another thing liberals try to hide with the phrase ‘gun deaths’ by trying to lump suicides in with murders and mass shootings. Substitute goods for guns in relation to suicide include: drugs, poison, rope, plastic bags, carbon monoxide, water, electricity, high places, and knives, to name some of the more common suicide goods. Guns have the advantage of being quick, relatively painless, and mostly effective, but the other suicide goods are all adequate substitutes.

Side note: Isn’t it odd that liberals, who support euthanasia and the right-to-die, suddenly hate the right-to-die if it bolsters the emotional case for gun control.

There are also many substitute goods for guns in relation to murder, including: knives, fists, feet, bats, hammers, carbon monoxide, matches, drugs, water, and explosives, to name of the most common.

By only measuring ‘gun deaths’ the deceptive liberal is ignoring that someone without a gun can easily obtain other methods of killing themselves or other people if they should choose. To say gun deaths rise or fall in relation to gun availability or gun control measures is to say nothing of any value at all. If the gun is not available, the gun death will likely become a knife death or an OD or a drowning, etc.

“Nearly 75% of the cases involving firearms are actually gang related.” Does anyone honestly think that gangs will stop murdering each other if law-abiding citizens are restricted from owning firearms? Leaving aside that what makes criminals criminals is that don’t follow laws, such as gun control laws, is there anyone that could possibly believe a gangbanger would say to himself, “I really wanna ice that bitch nigga, but I ain’t got no gat. It therefore behooves me to refrain from committing violence upon his person, however much  distress his continued existence upon this mortal plane causes me.”

No, if a gangbanger wants to ice a bitch nigga, and he ain’t got a gat, he gonna get himself a knife and stab that bitch nigga.

Guns deaths is used specifically to hide the substitution effect for murder (and to conflate murder and suicide) so that deceitful freedom-haters can paint gun freedoms in a negative light.

There is nothing special about a gun death that separates it from a knife death, a hanging, a drowning, or an OD. A person is no less dead if they are killed with a knife than with a gun. There is no reason to make this distinction other than rhetorical or statistical manipulation.

If anybody uses the phrase ‘gun deaths’ you can ignore their arguments because they are, at best, full of shit and not worth listening to.

The Bible on Refugees

Recently, the migrant crisis has caused a lot of Christians to display their holiness by calling other people to let migrants in to rape their daughters. Generally, as with this example, these are rather vague allusions to the exodus or Christian charity. I’ve written about Christian ethno-nationalism before, but what does the Bible actually say about allowing hundreds of thousands of invading immigrants into your country?

First, in Levitical law it is repeated often and is very clear that the sojourner is to be fairly treated; he is not to be oppressed, he is to receive fair justice, and he is to given charity and love.

You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
(Exodus 23:9 ESV)

For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you.”
(Numbers 15:15-16 ESV)

And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
(Leviticus 23:22 ESV)

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
(Deuteronomy 10:18-19 ESV)

On the other hand, the sojourner is to be forced to assimilate. There are repeated commandments that the sojourner must follow the laws and customs of his hosts.

Whoever blasphemes the name of the LORD shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the LORD your God.
(Leviticus 24:16-22 ESV)

For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwelling places you shall eat unleavened bread.
(Exodus 12:19-20 ESV)

but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.
(Exodus 20:10 ESV)

This assimilation is not absolute though. He is not to be forced to engage in religious sacrifice/ritual, although he is free to join.

Thus it shall be done for each bull or ram, or for each lamb or young goat. As many as you offer, so shall you do with each one, as many as there are. Every native Israelite shall do these things in this way, in offering a food offering, with a pleasing aroma to the LORD. And if a stranger is sojourning with you, or anyone is living permanently among you, and he wishes to offer a food offering, with a pleasing aroma to the LORD, he shall do as you do. (Numbers 15:11-14 ESV)

The foreigner is different from the citizen, though. The sojourner could not own land.

And Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the LORD, saying, “The tribe of the people of Joseph is right. This is what the LORD commands concerning the daughters of Zelophehad: ‘Let them marry whom they think best, only they shall marry within the clan of the tribe of their father. The inheritance of the people of Israel shall not be transferred from one tribe to another, for every one of the people of Israel shall hold on to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers. And every daughter who possesses an inheritance in any tribe of the people of Israel shall be wife to one of the clan of the tribe of her father, so that every one of the people of Israel may possess the inheritance of his fathers. So no inheritance shall be transferred from one tribe to another, for each of the tribes of the people of Israel shall hold on to its own inheritance.’”
(Numbers 36:5-9 ESV)

Here’s an interesting passage though:

And the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it, but every slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him. No foreigner or hired worker may eat of it. It shall be eaten in one house; you shall not take any of the flesh outside the house, and you shall not break any of its bones. All the congregation of Israel shall keep it. If a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised. Then he may come near and keep it; he shall be as a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it. There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.”
(Exodus 12:43-49 ESV)

This suggest a difference between foreigners and sojourners. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but this Hebrew scholar deals with that verse and states that the sojourner is someone who who is essentially a naturalized citizen. I looked up the words Brian Webster mentioned. Ger (often sojourner) is the one to whom all these protections apply. On the other hand, nekar (often foreigner) is used almost entirely negatively. The protections above are only for the ger and are not given to the nekar.

Foreigners (nekar) are to be barred from Israel’s religious practices and there is a constant stream of warnings to Israel against adopting the religious and cultural practices of foreigners:

“Thus says the Lord GOD: No foreigner, uncircumcised in heart and flesh, of all the foreigners who are among the people of Israel, shall enter my sanctuary.
(Ezekiel 44:9 ESV)

And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, “If you are returning to the LORD with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your heart to the LORD and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the LORD only.
(1 Samuel 7:3-4 ESV)

There are warnings against intermarriage with foreigners:

In those days also I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people. And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. And I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, “You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not Solomon king of Israel sin on account of such women? Among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel. Nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin. Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?”

And one of the sons of Jehoiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was the son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite. Therefore I chased him from me. Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.

Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign, and I established the duties of the priests and Levites, each in his work; and I provided for the wood offering at appointed times, and for the firstfruits.
(Nehemiah 13:23-31 ESV)

As well, God explicitly discriminates between different foreigners.

“No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever, because they did not meet you with bread and with water on the way, when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you. But the LORD your God would not listen to Balaam; instead the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the LORD your God loved you. You shall not seek their peace or their prosperity all your days forever.

“You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land. Children born to them in the third generation may enter the assembly of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 23:3-8 ESV)

Aliens with whom have dealt kindly with Israel should be treated well, but Israel was actively commanded not to pursue the prosperity or peace of aliens that dealt poorly with them.

He also repeatedlt orders the extermination of foreigners and refers to those not exterminated as barb and thorns:

And the Lord spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it. You shall inherit the land by lot according to your clans. To a large tribe you shall give a large inheritance, and to a small tribe you shall give a small inheritance. Wherever the lot falls for anyone, that shall be his. According to the tribes of your fathers you shall inherit. But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.”
(Numbers 33:51-56 ESV)

Although, these were specific to genocidal conquests, not to immigrants, the thorns and barbs remarks would likely still apply to hostile migrants.

Also interesting is that among the mountain of curses listed for violating the covenant is this:

The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail.
(Deuteronomy 28:43-44 ESV)

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I might be mistaken, but as far as I recall, there are no specific commandments to the treatment of foreigners or immigrants, beyond the basic love your neighbours and help those in need commands which apply to everyone.

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So, from all this, what’s the biblical Christian position on refugees:

Migrants you allow into your country as naturalized citizens and permanent residents are to be treated justly and charitably, but treating them justly also means applying the law against them (ie. the death penalty) when they commit crimes. All foreigners are to be assimilated into the dominant cultural and legal practices, although they can be exempted from strictly religious practices. They are not allowed to spread their religious practices to citizens. Although you can do so, there is no command to allow migrants into your country but there is a command to keep those migrants that would be harmful to your religion and traditions away from the assembly. You are to treat foreigners of friendly nations well in your country and can let them in, but you have no obligation to foreigners of hostile nations and should not let them in. Being ruled by naturalized foreigners is a curse and having hostile minorities is a thorn and a barb.

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So, here is the biblical positions as applied to the current migrant crisis:

The foreigners migrating are generally from countries hostile to us, so we have no obligation to them, but, while we are inviting them to stay here, we should be treating them justly. Should they commit crimes (such as Rotherham) against our people and we should execute them. The current migrants have generally been thorns and barbs in our nations’ sides, so extermination is not out of the question. They are bringing foreign gods to our nations and should not be allowed to do so. Any we decide to keep should be forced to assimilate.

So, in sum, the biblical position is to feed the migrant horde, then send them back home, except for those who have committed crimes who should be executed. We should consider taking in Christian refugees and maybe Kurds and other allies who are friendly to us, but are not obligated to. Those foreigners who we’ve already allowed in should be treated justly, which includes expelling those groups who are committing crimes against our people and leading them to worship foreign gods.

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Now, having said all this, it is debatable whether these laws cited are to apply only to the specific state of Israel or are more broad guidelines for all nations. I’m not sure myself, and probably, not being a theonomist, lean towards the former, but whatever the case, it is clear that the ‘let them all in’ doctrine is definitely not commanded by any honest reading of scripture and is in fact contradicted by many passages. In fact, scriptural remedies for the migrant crisis might be quite the opposite of what many Christians are now preaching.