Space Invaders And Palestinian Rights

Are humans too stupid to avoid an alien invasion? Pexels Images

By Amir Azarvan: Philosophers sometimes adopt an alien perspective as a useful way to try to take an objective view of human affairs. It is a thought experiment that I sometimes like to apply to the Palestinian question.
Imagine an alien collecting intelligence on planet Earth in order to determine whether humans are intelligent enough to successfully defend their world from an invasion. Among other barometers, the alien would take into consideration the manner in which humans handle their disagreements. Do the earthlings argue according to universal, inviolable laws of logic?
Now, when I hear people object to Palestinian rights by expressing the common refrain that the Palestinians don’t really exist as a nation, I imagine the alien instinct would reach a quick conclusion: “Oh, we can totally invade.”
For readers who aren’t very familiar with the Palestine issue, this is actually a thing. Several American commentators have adopted this idea, once expressed by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who remarked that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” (Those Americans who adopt this inane argument tend to be the same faux patriots who chant “America first!” and yet are the first to subordinate national interests to those of foreign countries. But this particular bit of irony is not my focus here.)

Wall Street Destroys Another Retailer

Max and Stacy discuss the ‘dead meat’ walking that is Sears ‘restructuring’ during bankruptcy. After being asset-stripped to within an inch of its life, is there any hope for the walking corpse to turn it around? In the second half, Max continues his interview with Alasdair Macleod of GoldMoney.com about the credit cycle turning. They also discuss if gold will finally shine, despite interest rates rising, and whether or not China is really planning on ‘de-dollarization.’

White Males Are Still Treated As Cannon Fodder In The Campus Identity Wars

Mike Buchanan, J4MB: A piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times by their columnist Jenny McCartney:

Jenny McCartney: I’m already feeling a little sorry for Emily Dawes, the 21-year-old president of Southampton University’s students’ union, who sparked widespread fury with her tweet: “Mark my words — we’re taking down the mural of white men in the uni Senate room, even if I have to paint over it myself.” Her choice of target was woefully misplaced: the mural was painted in 1916 by Sir William Rothenstein to commemorate members of British universities who fought in the First World War. Many of them died in water-logged trenches having barely attained adulthood.
It was a silly tweet — and not the only silly one in Dawes’s Twitter timeline. She has already apologised for “the offence and upset” and said that “upon reflection I have realised how inappropriate it was”. The tabloids have had a field day with her wealthy US family home and background, but the press shouldn’t be too hard on her: its own ranks are stuffed with journalists who spent their university years striking similar attention-seeking poses, which they now recall fondly as the political foibles of youth.

Discussing The Last Synagogue Shooting

Ex-Jew Gilad Atzmon: I was interviewed yesterday by Patrick Henningsen/Sunday Wire about the recent synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I offered my view of this tragic event and also allowed myself to offer an alternative view of the current dystopia. Unlike most liberals and so called ‘progressives,’ I see the constant rise in mass shooting events around the globe as a symptom of a radical shift in our human landscape. We are rapidly drifting away from empathy and tolerance. In the discussion I suggested that we better look at the root of that shift and identify the disease instead of focusing on the symptoms. ...The interview starts at around 22:30 and is about one hour long.

Listen to "Episode #254 – ‘American Gothic’ with guests Gilad Atzmon and more" on Spreaker.

Thurman Blevins, Justine Damond And The Automatic Outgroup Derogation Of Men

By Jewel Eldora: Last summer in North Minneapolis, Thurman Blevins buried a sister he loved. Within days, his family was mourning him as well. He was dead. Shot in an alley after failing to outrun the police.
In a 911 call, Blevins was described as shooting a gun into the ground, with a specifically branded bottle of gin. Men often express their grief through public displays of aggression, such as shouting, or shooting, and/or drinking heavily.
Within 2.5 minutes of the police arrival, Thurman Blevins was dead, at the hands of police, in essence, for expressing his feelings.

National Secular Society: Barrister James Chegwidden And Ethicist Brian D Earp Talk About MGM Male Genital Mutilation

By Mike Buchanan, J4MB: The National Secular Society’s Healthcare & Secularism conference in Birmingham today was well worth attending, primarily (for myself and J4MB supporters) for two presentations on MGM, both of which were excellent. We’ll post the videos as soon as they’re made available.

The first presentation was given by James Chegwidden, a human right barrister, “One green bottle – male circumcision and the law”. More on James in a moment.
The second was given by Brian D Earp, “Gender or genital autonomy? Why framing non-therapeutic genital cutting as a children’s rights issue is both ethically and pragmatically necessary.” Brian is an American ethicist, based for some years at The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He flew from the US just for the conference, and is flying back this evening. We’ve linked to some excellent papers by Brian on the ethics of MGM and FGM in the past.
The video recording today was carried out by Richard Duncker, and I assume he’ll be doing the editing. For some time he’s run the website Men Do Complain. Last year he posted on the website a video of James Chegwidden giving a talk in 2016, “Not drowning, paddling: The English Court’s slow row to genital autonomy”. This is Richard’s introduction to the video:

Barrister James Chegwidden takes us through the English Court’s current views on genital autonomy.

Title IX And Men's Issues

Paul and Tom talk with Chris Pekgoz about title IX and men's issues. The plan is to do a series on how to file a Title IX complaint. Paul and I will be learning how to do this and showing videos of our learning. It's time to get more people out there filing complaints!

Global Warming Real - Threat Real - Ecocide On Horizon

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The tobacco companies’ response to the US Surgeon General’s report in 1964 linking smoking to lung cancer was countered by the tobacco companies setting up propaganda organizations to create a controversy by generating doubt over the link. This strategy staved off the inevitable for more than two decades.

The same tactic is being used by the carbon energy companies against the independent climate scientists who have established that the climate is warming as a result of CO2 emissions. After a certain amount of warming, feedback mechanisms come into play that accelerate the warming. For example, as CO2 emissions raise temperatures, permafrost begins melting releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that speeds the warming.
Another example of feedback is the loss of sea ice and snow cover on land. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s heat, but the dark surface of the ocean and land absorb the heat, resulting in a further rise in temperature.

The greenhouse gases around the planet trap heat radiation. The oceans, which cover about 75% of the planet, have enormous heat capacity and can soak up a lot of energy. Being very deep, they take a long time to heat up. As the oceans absorb the heat, it takes decades for the atmosphere to heat up. This “climate lag” delays the full impact of global warming.

Born In A Man

DoctorRandomercam

Losing The War On Cash - Swedish Central Bank U-Turns On 'Cashless Society' Agenda

Authored by Don Quijones: Cash is less of a threat to central banksters policies when interest rates rise above zero...
Sweden’s Riksbank has become the first central bank in the 21st century to take concrete measures to ensure that cash does not disappear as a means of payment from the financial system. To that end, the Riksbank proposes, in a document published on its website, to make it mandatory for all banks and financial institutions to offer cash services.
The pronouncement comes in response to a recent policy suggestion by the Riksbank Committee that only the country’s six major banks should be obligated to continue offering cash services.
That prompted a backlash from Sweden’s competition watchdog, which argued that the plan would distort competition as it would affect only a few of the nation’s banks. In response, the Riksbank has opted to apply the rule to “all banks and other credit institutions that offer payment accounts.”

Noam Chomsky, Christine Blasey-Ford And The Automatic Outgroup Derogation Of Men

'#Metoo and #Kavanaugh, are merely foreshocks
for a main event that will make the Satanic Ritual Child Abuse Moral Panic and the Day Care Sex Abuse Scandals look like family picnics.'

By Jewel Eldora: Our opinions are shaped, in some part, by our media and social media experiences. My writing deals with a quirk in the brains of human males that I believe is creating a slow moving disaster as we move toward a state of perpetual moral panic. Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony may be something we look back on for reference.
The quirk my writings deal with is the inability of human males to demonstrate automatic in-group bias for one another.  Unfortunately, it has created problems that men can’t fix and the government can’t fix. Neither men nor government have the tools, because, men, are an automatic outgroup and the biases that creates, in both men, and women, are, well, quirky.
This series deals with how this lack of bias plays out, at scale, in traditional media and social media environments.
Outgroup bias is hardwired in the species and has entered a into feedback loop, because of social media.

USA Transfixed In Horror By Toy Bombs While Destroying Lives With Real Ones

By Caitlin: Media headlines have been dominated for the last two days by the news that pipe bombs are being sent to Democratic Party elites and their allies, a list of whom as of this writing consists of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, George Soros, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, Robert De Niro, and the CNN office (addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan who actually works for NBC). As of this writing nobody has been killed or injured in any way by any of these many explosive devices, and there is as of this writing no publicly available evidence that they were designed to. As of this writing there is no evidence that the devices were intended to do anything other than what they have done: stir up fear and grab headlines.

And of course it is a good thing that nobody has been hurt by these devices. Obviously targeting anyone with packages containing explosive materials is terrible, even if those devices were not rigged with the intention of detonating and harming anyone, and it is a good thing that not a single one of them has done so. It is a good thing that none of America’s political elites were targeted by the sort of explosive device that America drops on people in other countries every single day. You know, the kind that actually explode.