Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Whether you like it or not, Trump actually has a strategy for dealing with Islamic terrorism and Obama didn't.
...Unlike his predecessor, Trump is not afraid to call this problem by its real name. Departing from his script, he called for “honestly confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds.” Tut-tut, grumbled The New York Times, he wasn’t supposed to say “Islamic” but “Islamist.” Oh yes he was.
“A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists,” Trump told his audience of leaders from Muslim-majority countries. “Drive. Them. Out.” For all his flaws, he has this right. For decades, Saudi Arabia has been the principal source of funding for the export of Sunni fundamentalism. Leaning on the Saudis is therefore an essential first step. Obviously, there has to be some quid pro quo if the House of Saud really is going to turn off the cash. But that, as Trump’s speech made clear, is going to be US-led action to check Iran’s regional and nuclear ambitions. For hostility to Iran is the one thing that unites the Sunni states represented in Riyadh with Trump’s Jewish hosts in Jerusalem.
This strategy will not be easy to execute. It will not bring back the 22 people Salman Abedi killed last Monday. But at least it is a strategy. And the fact that the president of the United States no longer spouts politically correct newspeak about “countering violent extremism” gives me a glimmer of hope...
Pissed-off artist adds statue of urinating dog next to ‘Fearless Girl’
...City sculptor Alex Gardega — seething over the “Fearless Girl” statue being placed across from Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” — has decided to retaliate with a work of his own.
Gardega created a statue of a small dog, titled “Pissing Pug,” and his sloppily crafted pooch takes direct aim at “Fearless Girl” — or, at least, at her left leg.
“This is corporate nonsense,” Gardega told The Post of “Fearless Girl,” saying it was put opposite artist Arturo Di Modica’s famed bull as a publicity stunt by a Boston-based financial firm.
“It has nothing to do with feminism, and it is disrespect to the artist that made the bull,” he said. “That bull had integrity.”
The Upper West Side artist sniffed that he even made his dog particularly poorly just to stick it to “Fearless Girl” even more.
“I decided to build this dog and make it crappy to downgrade the statue, exactly how the girl is a downgrade on the bull,” said Gardega...
Update HERE
With any luck, this'll just keep getting more absurd, ending like this...
Monday, May 29, 2017
What will Ontario's government do about the overt anti-Semitism at Ryerson University?
Programs in Ontario universities, outside of those withing the pure sciences, have become immersed in a depraved, neo-Marxist ideology that is infused with overt antisemitism. Social Work, which is supposed to be a field that supports people in need is one of the worst examples.
At The University of Toronto, a professor named Rupaleem Bhuyan, who espoused antisemitism and facilitated a reprehensible "Jew count" in her class, was rewarded with career advancement while her critics were driven out of the Social Work Department.
Now at Ryerson University, a Social Work Placement Coordinator has determined that denying the Jewish people a right to national self-determination is one of the "values" of Social Work. Ryerson has decided that denying rights to Jews that they would accord to people of other religions is the new "Social Justice."
The vacuous depravity of Social Sciences in Ontario's schools needs to come to an end now.
More HERE
All Ryerson social work grad Rebecca Katzman wanted was to do her third-year placement at one of two respected Toronto Jewish organizations with a track record of addressing social justice issues.
The 22-year-old, who will graduate with her Bachelor of Social Work degree on June 8, said her desire to be placed at either the Prosserman Jewish Community Centre (JCC) or the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was “sparked” by a combination of actions at Ryerson — among them the anti-Semitism she experienced on campus.
However, she wasn’t prepared in the slightest for what happened with her third-year placement coordinator in the faculty of social work, Heather Bain.
After making it clear to Bain about her preferred placement, Katzman said the field coordinator advised her in an e-mail in late August of 2015 she did not follow up with the JCC or UJA because their values appeared to be “in opposition” to the values of the School of Social Work.
Bain listed those values as the advancement of anti-oppression; anti-racism; anti-colonialism and decolonization; feminism; anti-capitalism; Queer and trans liberation struggles; issues in disability and madness (cct); among others (many of which are not listed on the school’s own website.)
“My understanding is both agencies have a strong anti-Palestinian lean,” Bain continued, suggesting that if Katzman agreed to bring a “critical awareness” (of Palestinian solidarity movements) to either agency she might reconsider.
While the two agencies where Katzman wanted to be placed are known to be pro-Israel, she said their websites do not indicate any anti-Palestinian policies in the slightest.
Katzman, who waited until she was ready to graduate to tell her story for fear of retaliation from the faculty, said she was devastated by Bain’s e-mail.
“I felt targeted as a Jewish student,” she said, noting she’s coming forward because she wants the university to investigate as well as a public apology.
When she challenged Bain about her contentions, the field placement officer responded on Aug. 25, 2015 that she consulted with Jewish colleagues who are part of “Jews Against Israeli Apartheid movements” before making her decision not to pursue those placements...
Sunday, May 28, 2017
Undoing Insularity: A Small Study of Gender Sociology’s Big Problem
The following is the abstract of an academic paper by Professor Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University in which she identifies Gender Studies as a system which is oblivious to facts and instead relies on its own religious-like "Sacred Beliefs" which have no basis in science or reality:
Abstract
In my experience as a sociologist, I see many ways in which gender sociology tends to insulate itself from challenges to its own sacred beliefs and sacred causes. The sacred beliefs are to the effect that the biological differences between the sexes are minor and that the cultural differences between the genders have little basis in biological differences. The scholarly findings that challenge the sacred beliefs come from anthropology, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences, genetics, biology, and many other fields. For many decades now researchers have amassed findings of differences in competitiveness, aggression, sexual interest, risk behavior, and many other traits, and differences in brain physiology and neuroimaging, by many different methods and approaches. I investigated a sample of top cited gender sociology papers to test my impression, and indeed the findings illustrate extreme insularity. It saddens me to see students and scholars fall into insular communities of highly dubious sacred beliefs and causes. I propose that gender sociologists strive to undo insularity.You can read the whole paper HERE
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Robert Lantos: Calling Out The Jew-Hatred Of The So-Called "Progressive" Left
...Since its inception, the UN Human Rights Council has adopted 135 country-specific resolutions. Of those, 68 condemn Israel. The following is a list of some of the enlightened democracies that are current or past members of the UN Human Rights Commission: Sudan, Congo, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, Russia. It is with these champions of human rights that today’s left aligns itself: authoritarian regimes, which persecute the LGBTQ community, are intolerant of women’s rights, of freedom of the press and of freedom of expression.
The so-called progressives who denounce Israel are unfazed by the jailing of dissenters in Iran, oblivious to the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, blind to the incarceration and torture of gay men in Qatar, accepting of widespread female genital mutilation and unperturbed by the persecution of Christians in several Islamic countries. Their single fixation is on the Jewish state, a country whose laws treat all citizens equally, regardless of gender or religion and guarantee them education, healthcare and civil liberties. A country where freedom of expression is sacred.
It is time to stop kidding ourselves and to call all those with such selective social conscience the anti-Semites we all know they are. Hitler and the Nazis were vanquished but Jew hatred was not. It has found renewed vigour in an unholy partnership between the jihadists and the proverbial useful idiots, who hide under the progressive mantle...
Friday, May 26, 2017
Thursday, May 25, 2017
A Century and a Half Before There Were Mods and Rockers, There Were Dandies and Fops
Beau Brummell: This Charming Man
Starring James Purefoy
Starring James Purefoy
WHY SALMAN ABEDI GREW TO HATE US - A British Libyan on the poison of Islamism
Salman Abedi was a British Libyan. So am I. His parents were given refuge in the UK, and so were mine. His grandparents and great grandparents were saved from German and Italian fascists by the sacrifice of British soldiers, as were mine. Details are now emerging that suggest Abedi fought in the Libyan revolution alongside his father. If true, then he will have depended for his life upon the actions of British, French and American airforces.
Abedi was not disenfranchised. He was not rejected by British society. He was taught to reject and hate it, despite everything it gave him and his family. His older sister has reportedly said that Abedi was looking for ‘revenge’ for the ‘ill-treatment’ of Muslims in the UK and Syria. This is the circular logic of the Islamist victimhood narrative that almost every Muslim growing up in the UK will have been exposed to at one time or another. Western governments, and therefore Western societies, are to blame for all instances of intervention in Muslim majority countries, and are equally culpable should they fail to intervene.
Manchester and Birmingham are home to some of the most militant Islamists in the UK. They mingle and operate throughout local Muslim communities with relative impunity, and maintain networks up and down the M1 motorway to London. They also have a significant presence online with which they extend their influence globally. At the level of propaganda, at least, they’re not an underground movement. They are out in the open.
While living safely under Britain’s rule of law, they nonetheless view British society as beneath contempt. They don’t want to be part of it, and they teach people like Salman Abedi that it’s a mortal sin for them to want to be part of it. Anything that happens to a Muslim anywhere in the world, once passed through the Islamist victimhood filter, becomes an anti-Muslim act for which the guilty must be punished. And so it seems that Abedi’s actions were the result of this solipsistic staple of Islamist indoctrination...
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
The Gender Obsessed West Sets Itself Up for the Rise of Islam
Welcome to the progressive "next frontier of 'liberation'", where the most urgent question in Western democracies is "genderism".
North Carolina was subjected to a year of being boycotted, until it withdrew its transgender bathroom law. Last month, the National Union of Teachers in Great Britain asked the government to teach children as young as two new transgender theories. New York recently presented the first "trans-doll". American universities are wracked with hysteria over the correct use of neutral pronouns. Even National Geographic, instead of writing about lions and elephants, started covering the "Gender Revolution". One of the first announcements of Emmanuel Macron, as the French President-elect, was that he would appoint officials from a "gender equal" list.
What does it mean that this gender mania is permeating every corner of Western societies and culture? According to Camille Paglia, the contrarian feminist, it is a sign of the decline of Western civilization. In her new book, Free Women, Free Men, she writes:"Civilizations have gone through recurrent cycles. Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force".She then asks:"How has it happened that so many of today's most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. Transgender phenomena multiply and spread in 'late' phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline"....
Mark Steyn: "Dangerous Woman" Meets Dangerous Man
...Douglas Murray's fine book, The Strange Death of Europe, which lays out, unsparingly, the central illusion of the last half-century - that you could demographically transform the composition of hitherto more or less homogeneous nation states on a scale no stable society has ever attempted, and that there would be no consequences except a more vibrant range of local restaurants. Mrs May declared this morning on the steps of Downing Street that she had held a top-level security meeting, or what they call in Britain a "COBRA", which sounds like something scary enough to do battle with SPECTRE; in that sense, it's a very butch acronym for a bit of bureaucratic furniture labeling (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A). But I'll bet the mood around the table was one of fatalism and resignation, outside a few micro-adjustments to the budget of counter-terrorism agencies and the number of CCTV cameras and the amount of security checks at "sensitive" "high-value" targets like department stores, and theatres, and restaurants and football grounds and pubs and chip shops and...
But the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It's just a fact of life - like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.
All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks...
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Stupid, white western leftists, China laughs at you...
If you look at any thread about Trump, Islam or immigration on a Chinese social media platform these days, it’s impossible to avoid encountering the term baizuo (白左), or literally, the ‘white left’. It first emerged about two years ago, and yet has quickly become one of the most popular derogatory descriptions for Chinese netizens to discredit their opponents in online debates.
So what does ‘white left’ mean in the Chinese context, and what’s behind the rise of its (negative) popularity? It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.
The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”...
Foreign money funnelled through Tides Foundation alleged to have improperly influenced Canada's 2015 election
...The 36-page report entitled: Elections Canada Complaint Regarding Foreign Influence in the 2015 Canadian Election, alleges third parties worked with each other, which may have bypassed election spending limits — all of which appears to be in contravention of the Canada Elections Act.
The Canada Elections Act states that “a third party shall not circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, a limit set out . . . in any manner, including by splitting itself into two or more third parties for the purpose of circumventing the limit or acting in collusion with another third party so that their combined election advertising expenses exceed the limit.”
“Electoral outcomes were influenced,” alleges the report.
The Canada Elections Act also states: “No person who does not reside in Canada shall, during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting or vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate” unless the person is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident...
Farewell Roger Moore. We won't see your like again anytime soon.
The suave, wry, wonderful Roger Moore has passed away.
He was the epitome of the suave English gent, quipping sweatlessly in a bespoke three-piece suit, who enjoyed an acting career spanning eight decades. On Tuesday, Roger Moore’s children announced his death at the age of 89 in Switzerland, saying: “he passed away today ... after a short but brave battle with cancer”.
Moore was best known for playing the third incarnation of James Bond as well as his roles in hit shows The Saint and The Persuaders. He also devoted a lot of his time to humanitarian work, becoming a Unicef goodwill ambassador in 1991.
The actor was born in London in 1927 and, after working as a model in the early 50s, he signed a seven-year contract with MGM. His early movies weren’t particularly memorable, from Interrupted Melody to The King’s Thief, and it was a move to the small screen that brought Moore his first taste of success.
“During my early acting years I was told that to succeed you needed personality, talent and luck in equal measure,” Moore said to the Guardian in 2014. “I contest that. For me it’s been 99% luck. It’s no good being talented and not being in the right place at the right time.”...
From Scott Adams' Blog: Goodbye ISIS, Hello Losers
...Quickly, name one other way you could label/insult the Losers that would be as powerful as the word Loser. You can’t do it with any other name or insult that is also repeatable in polite company.
What kinds of people join the Losers? Mostly young males. And you know what brand young males do not want on them? Right: Losers.
If you call them monsters, they like it. If you call them ISIS or ISIL they put it on a flag and wave it around. If you call them non-Muslim, it just rolls off their backs because they have Korans and stuff. Almost any other “brand” you can imagine is either inert or beneficial to Loser recruitment.
Loser is different. No one joins the Loser movement. Try at home, with your family or friends, to concoct a more effective brand poisoning than Loser. You probably can’t. Remember, your brand has to fit with future confirmation evidence. The Losers on the battlefield will continue to be losing, so the brand is engineered to get stickier over time. Your alternative idea for a brand solution has to have that quality of future confirmation too. Good luck finding a better persuasion brand.
This is not accidental. President Trump does (laugh if you will) have the best words, at least for this sort of thing. He’s proven it over and over. Just ask Jeb, Ted, and HIllary...
Monday, May 22, 2017
New York City's Pride Parade To Welcome Uniformed Toronto Police Banned From Toronto's Disgraceful, Hateful Pride
Toronto police have received an invitation to participate in uniform at New York City’s Pride March amid a controversy over the exclusion of uniformed officers from Toronto’s Pride Parade.
In a letter sent to Toronto police on Friday, the Gay Officers Action League requested permission for uniformed TPS officers to join uniformed members of the NYPD Marching band and color guard in the June 25 Pride March in New York City.
The New York City event is the same day as Toronto’s own Pride Parade.
“If Toronto officers would like to march proudly as open LGBTQ criminal justice professionals in a march and they feel it’s important to identify both as an officer and a member of the community – we welcome them with open arms,” Gay Officers Action League President Det. Brian Downey told CP24 in an interview Monday.
The controversy over police participation in the Pride Parade began at last year’s parade, when Black Lives Matter –Toronto halted the parade and refused to budge until a list of demands was signed – one of them being the exclusion of uniformed officers from the parade...
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Today in Cultural Appropriation - Gay porn studio under fire for using a didgeridoo as a dildo
Quote: 'I'm gonna didgeridoo you in the ass'
A gay porn studio is being called disrespectful after using a didgeridoo as a dildo in a new scene.
Entitled ‘Didgeridoo Me’ (because of course it is), the Men.com scene sees two roommates with one having recently gotten back from Australia.
While they do not go into detail of the frustrations of getting it through customs, his playing wakes his roommate up.
Frustrated, his roommate decides to take out his frustration by penetrating his roommate with the instrument.
The porn company is now being accused or racism, disrespect to the Australian Aboriginal community, and for being culturally offensive...
Venezuela’s collapse and the ‘useful idiots’ of the Canadian left
One political curse from the twentieth century that continues in this one is the praise from self-described progressives for demagogues whose policies can, in advance, be predicted to hurt the poor and destroy their freedoms.
Such “useful idiots,” as Lenin described them, were thick on the ground in the last century. Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter, covered the Soviet Union in the 1930s and parroted the official line about Stalin’s agricultural “reforms”. Duranty wrote his dispatches just as millions were dying from Stalin’s forced collectivization in Ukraine.
In Canada, the best example of left-wing praise for poverty-creating regimes was Pierre Trudeau. He lauded multiple communist governments—the Soviet Union, Mao’s China’s and Castro’s Cuba—before, during, and after his time as prime minister.
The curse continues. Recall radical praise for the late Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan autocrat who died in 2013 and whose anti-entrepreneur policies and attacks on civil society were obvious from the start. His destructive policies are again relevant given current Venezuelan protests against his successor, Nicola Maduro, and the government-induced poverty and repression which stem from Chavez-era policies aped by Maduro.
To wit: In 2004, Linda McQuaig glowed in her picture with and praise for Chavez. Arguing he redirected “vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela’s poor” McQuaig mourned his passing in 2013. She called it a “sad milestone.” Likewise, Naomi Klein wrote of how Chavez left behind “the most democratic country in the Western hemisphere.” One current Alberta NDP MLA, Rod Loyola, pre-politics, praised Chavez. And in 2013, Loyola was listed by the Marxist Leninist Daily as the media contact for an Edmonton “tribute to Chavez”...
Friday, May 19, 2017
The Penis Is A Social Construct - Peter Boghossian pulls a Sokal Hoax on the Academic Farce That Is Gender Studies
It’s been 21 years since physicist Alan Sokal submitted a bogus paper to a special “Science Wars” issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text. His paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“, maintained that quantum gravity was a social construct, using many bizarre quotes from postmodern scholars to make its case. Almost immediately after the paper was published, Sokal revealed it was a hoax in an article in Lingua Franca.
The “Sokal Affair” inspired a lot of debate, as well as accusations that Sokal himself was unethical in submitting the paper, but I thought it made its point superbly: much of the social sciences and “culture studies” in academia is intellectually vacuous—a repository for dumb ideas couched in bad prose.
Now we have another hoax: a piece on the “conceptual penis” published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, self described as “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences: from law to sociology, politics to geography, and sport to communication studies. Connect your research with a global audience for maximum readership and impact.”
Here’s the article;(though it will probably be removed very quickly!). The paper has, however, been archived, and you can find it here.
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