Who could have foreseen the trouble in France?

Who could have foreseen the trouble in France? By Douglas Murray in The Free Press.

Identifying what is fueling these protests requires nothing more than having eyes.

Yes, there are students involved. But since the early days of the protests, groups of hardened, adult rioters have moved in and stoked the unrest to its current level of conflagration. The result has been apocalyptic scenes, including the burning down of the historic town hall in Limoges and the ransacking of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

Those responsible are not students demanding better math instruction. They are far-left activists, anti-capitalists, green activists, and Palestine fetishists.

Importing generations of people who have no loyalty to or love for the country, many of whom desire to burn it down, has contributed to France’s climate of disorder. …

Ruling class — stupid or evil?

The French public never voted for this. Like their counterparts across Europe, in Britain, and indeed, in America, the public has consistently voted for governments that promised to secure the nation’s borders, maintain order on the streets, and prevent the civil-war scenarios that so many people, inside and outside the country, have warned about. Their leaders simply never heeded them, or failed trying.

And gosh, have there been warnings. In 2021, dozens of retired generals and other high-ranking officers from the French army signed a joint letter warning that, unless the French government got control of the immigration and integration failures that had roiled their country, civil war was a real possibility. The government and media might have considered that these men had a point. But the French authorities took the other option, the same one chosen by governments across Europe: They shot the messengers. Not literally, in this case. They merely hounded the signatories, stripped many of them of their pensions, slandered them, and more. …

Each time someone has tried to warn that France’s model is no model at all — except for disaster — the same response has followed. Whether the warnings have come from writers such as Renaud Camus and Michel Houellebecq or politicians ranging from Manuel Valls to Marine Le Pen, they have been met with silence, ostracism, or persecution from the ruling class.

And yet it is so obvious.

More than any other country in Europe, France has suffered decades of attacks and riots linked to lax border and immigration policies and an atrociously failed integration policy. It has one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations relative to its size, yet rather than integrating these newcomers (if integration is possible), the country has become a breeding ground for resentment and extremism. …

What the politicians are doing now:

Generations of French politicians, commentators, activists, and others have helped bring about this moment. But, like children who start a fire, they have no idea how to put it out. For now, almost all are running away — unequal to the moment and inadequate to the challenge.  …

President Emmanuel Macron has once again used his silky words to talk at the nation, but he seems incapable of listening, changing course, or doing anything about the catastrophe. …

The socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon fans the flames because many of the rioters are his left-wing supporters, who believe that violence always brings something beautiful and constructive in its wake…. The socialist left is aligning politically with discontented immigrants, forming a movement large enough to vie for real power.

Meanwhile, right populist Marine Le Pen tries to pander to what she imagines to be the political middle ahead of the next presidential election, refusing to seize the moment to call for the remigration even of those caught burning France’s cities.

Stephen Kruiser:

Trouble sure does seem to follow large concentrations of Muslim migrants, doesn’t it? Or — just spitballing here — they bring the trouble with them and simply don’t unpack it all right away. Kind of a “sleeper” approach to chaos, if you will.

I know, I know, Islamophobia and stuff.

Italy deploys troops to ‘defend Milan’ from looting

Italy deploys troops to ‘defend Milan’ from looting. By RT.

The Italian government is sending 500 soldiers to Milan to protect the city from looting and violence after two days of riots left shops ransacked, police officers injured, and hundreds of people detained. …

Initially peaceful rallies descended into clashes as hundreds of hooded youths attacked police, set barricades on fire, and looted stores around Milan’s central Piazza del Duomo. …

The unrest comes amid a broader wave of violent protests across Europe, particularly in neighboring France, where demonstrations over rising prices, deteriorating services, and government spending cuts have spiraled into widespread rioting.

Europe-wide civil war is certainly imaginable.

Suicidal France: Wokeness has amplified empathy and suppressed male protection

Suicidal France: Wokeness has amplified empathy and suppressed male protection. By Brivael Le Pogam.

 

You’ve probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. “Why are you doing this? That’s not what we stand for.”

Some accounts are mocking her. “She voted for it.”

I won’t. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It’s a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.

The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.

Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.

Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.

Why has empathy become suicidal?

  1. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. …
  2. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. …
  3. An ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.
  4. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting “refugees welcome” costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.

The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad’s conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. …

Young women:

On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It’s one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It’s a strength.

But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.

Men:

This is where men have a responsibility.

Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say “she deserved it.” Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.

Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.

That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It’s surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. …

Restore balance:

A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.

Look at that young woman again. She isn’t the enemy. She’s what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.

Our job is to make sure she’s the last generation that has to learn it this way.

The choices that made American cities so ugly

The choices that made American cities so ugly. By John Carter.

There is absolutely no good reason that North Americans can’t enjoy the same level of beauty and pleasant street life that Europeans take for granted.

Oh, there are reasons.

  1. In the early 50s single use zoning laws proliferated across the continent, resulting in the automobile-centric suburban model we know and loathe today.
  2. At the same time modernism conquered architecture and made it impossible to design beautiful buildings.
  3. And at the same time, civil rights made it illegal to enforce order in the cities, leading to them decaying into chaotic, crime-ridden hell-holes.

But these are not good reasons. All of these were choices. Americans chose to allow blacks to destroy their cities. They chose to build soulless, charmless concrete boxes. They chose to herd the middle class into the suburbs.

Australia is in-between.

What’s its like to lead a modern political party

What’s its like to lead a modern political party. By Sussan Ley in the SMH.

The rules of being a leader haven’t changed much in 80 years. Look like a leader. Sound like a leader. Know the answer to every question. If you don’t, answer a different one, convincingly. Be distinctive but not unsettling. …

In politics, authenticity matters enormously. But reveal too much, and it can quickly become evidence against you. …

I stood at countless press conferences, hair and make-up done, microphones banked up in front of me. Deep breath, drop the shoulders, march to the podium. I have confidence, I am across the detail, I have answers to every question, real or imagined. The cameras are not about to find an alarming new angle.

How did I actually feel?

Like hell after less than four hours’ sleep. Hoping the adrenaline would carry me through. Hoping, too, that I wouldn’t stumble because in every presser you are one stupid sentence away from bringing the whole thing crashing down. …

The public expects leaders to have all the answers, not to lie awake in the small hours running through every disaster. You could never admit to waking at 3am, heart racing, body braced for attack. No missile is coming through the sealed hotel window. It only feels that way.

Sussan Ley was too honest and thoughtful to make a good political leader.

We want our leaders to be Gods, or at least put on a good show. They should be stupid enough to confidently put forward the party line without being plagued by doubts or complications, yet talented enough to follow the script and be articulate. George Bush 2, Barack Obama, and Anthony Albanese leap to mind.

Much more at the link.

It’s a lot tougher for non-left politicians of course, because they are inevitably standing against the narrative. The media push the narrative, and don’t play fair. So, every slip is reported endlessly on repeat if you are non-left, while the politicians on the left can and do make lots of mistakes that the public never finds out about.

Migration jihad

Migration jihad. By Wall Street Apes.

Former Muslim who grew up in an Islamic country says they are all taught in school from a very young age about “migration jihad”

He says that’s the plan being implemented right now in the UK and all over the West. To send Muslims into our countries as “migration jihad” to take us over, this is a plan that’s been in the motion since they were all little kids

“They are allowing migration jihad. I’m saying it blatantly because that’s what I grew up learning with other kids in school. Migration jihad is exactly what they’re allowing”

“Migration jihad is the essential doctrine of Islam. It’s what Islam was built on”

“It’s when Muhammad migrated from Mecca to, Medina ... hom and his early followers, moved into Medina, acted as refugees, poor refugees who were harmless, and made allies with some people in the area, some tribes in that area. And shortly after, within the first 5 years, they took over. They took over and they killed many of the tribes and they deceived people. They deceived them on a civilizational level”

He says this is what they were taught in school was the path to a global takeover. He says the plan was to create this new “Islamphobic” term that’s never existed before to avoid criticism and push implement the global takeover

If anyone would know it’s this guy, this man’s name is AJ

  • Born and raised in a Muslim majority Arabic speaking country
  • Left Islam at the end of his teens
  • He then faced severe persecution including a militia raid on his apartment, kidnapping, imprisonment, torture and accusations of working for foreign intelligence
  • He described being treated as a “Christian slave” after leaving Islam

Islam is a warrior religion, via Benonwine.

A Muslim preacher in Britain just said the quiet part out loud.

“Islam is a warrior religion, it’s about expansion and conquest.” He openly admits it’s at war with white Christian men, women and children here, and vows to strip non-Muslims of basic rights.

This isn’t about living side by side. It’s about taking over. Islam is Britain’s biggest threat and most people are still pretending it isn’t.

Muslims didn’t came to Australia to live among the infidels, via Eyal Yakoby.

Sheikh Abu Hamzah, speaking in Australia:

“Muslims didn’t came to Australia to live among the infidels, they came to establish Sharia Law on the government.”

 

Isn’t demographic security a human right?

Isn’t demographic security a human right?

John Carter:

We want demographic security. Thanks to decades of mass immigration, that is now in grave peril. Remigration is necessary. Until remigration happens, we do not care what justifications you come up with for immigration. If you want to call us xenophobes, fine, that changes nothing.

The Anglosphere is essentially committing suicide:

While the Islamic world grows and grows:

Weak horse, strong horse.

Is France in a state of “war” yet?

Is France in a state of “war” yet? By Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost.

To be demoralized is to have your sense of reality so inverted that you fail to recognize you are in a state of war, mistake those attacking you for victims, and willingly assist them in undermining your own society while believing you are doing something good.

 

 

Could the people who burned it down have built it?

 

The Arab way of making war is to always play the victim and appear peaceful, but then to launch a surprise attack. Or if the enemy is too strong, to initiate countless attritional attacks on persons and culture, calibrated to stop just short of provoking a war in response — a low-level war. Or if that is too hard, conquest by the womb — no war, just smiles, but you better conform to what Allah wants.

How many in France are still lulled into thinking it’s all normal? Quite a few, actually:

Many Israelis clearly recognize that France is in a state of “war,” and are mock-sancitmoniously “urging” a two state solution. (“There, see how you like it!”)

The mood is turning against every immigrant group

The mood is turning against every immigrant group. By Fool on the Hill at Elizabeth Nickson’s.

They want the benefits of our culture without joining our culture.

They want to be treated with respect without any requirement to respect us.

They want the freedom to live according to their religious laws and demand that, in order not to insult them, we do as well.

They demand citizenship protections here without any allegiance or fealty to our country.

They scofflaw our society with 3rd world behavior then hide behind our 1st world protections of ‘human rights’.

We cannot, and should not allow this to continue.

Not every immigrant group, but some.

Scientists demands answers as audit uncovers widespread errors in Bureau of Meteorology raw climate records

Scientists demands answers as audit uncovers widespread errors in Bureau of Meteorology raw climate records. By Marcus de Blonk Smith and Elizabeth Pike in The Australian.

The Australian newspaper, perhaps sensing blood, is campaigning. I am being quoted.

Scientists have called for “secret climate business” at the Bureau of Meterology to end , as Labor dismisses calls to act on the widespread errors and false readings revealed in a forensic audit of the agency’s raw data.

Led by investigator Tom Berger and retired scientist Geoff Sherrington, the audit — using sophisticated technology — uncovered false readings and widespread errors in the BOM’s raw climate data, including blocks of temperature readings copied and pasted across different years and seasons. …

A fact check by The Australian at the National Archives confirmed the double-up did not exist in the handwritten records and the 1867 data was wrong online.

“Scientists say”:

Scientists on Sunday were calling for more independent rigour over the BOM’s raw climate data.

David Evans, who built Australia’s carbon accounting software in the land-use sector, said the agency’s current “trust me” approach was not good enough.

He called for the bureau’s climate data to be regularly audited, like any other public company.

“I would have little confidence in a public company whose accounts are not audited. I would not invest in such a company,” Dr Evans said, adding that publicly traded companies on the Australian Stock Exchange were required to have their accounts audited every six months.

Drawing the comparison between the BOM’s climate data and the “bad old days” of drug trials, when researchers and companies were under “tremendous” pressure to exaggerate the benefits of a drug, he said the solution were audits that replicate the final climate datasets from raw data.

“Secret climate business is no longer adequate on a matter as important as temperature trends, yet this has been the norm,” Dr Evans said.

“The examples in the financial and medical arenas should be followed, and a regime of full disclosure implemented. Without full disclosure, confidence in climate matters will remain low, and dissatisfaction – disbelief, even – will remain widespread.”

He said the move to audit the bureau’s climate data should be welcomed by climate scientists, in the same way a responsible public company welcomes regular auditing of its finances, or a medical researcher “making his processing methods and software public”.

“If the climate scientists’ methods and conclusions are basically sound, this will be revealed by the audits. This is not a reflection on either the character or expertise of climate scientists, but I am not going to just take their work for it.”

Scientist Jennifer Marohasy, who has had a decades-long interest in BOM’s temperature adjustments, echoed Dr Evans’ calls for an audit of the agency’s weather stations. With the exception of Adelaide, she said there had been no proper audit of any weather station in Australia.

“If there had been, (weather stations such as) Sydney Observatory would have been audited, and it wouldn’t have been left to Tom Berger to uncover the copied months, the August 1867 overwritten by August 1907,” she said, referring to the forensic audit. …

Laughing stock:

Opposition environment spokesman Andrew Bragg called on Environment Minister Murray Watt to explain what was “going on inside his agencies”.

“The BOM is becoming a laughing stock under this government,” Senator Bragg said on Sunday, referring to the agency’s costly website upgrade debacle.

‘Trust me’ approach must end: climate scientists should release raw data to restore public trust

‘Trust me’ approach must end: climate scientists should release raw data to restore public trust. By Dr David Evans in The Australian.

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. — Lord Acton

 

Sydney Observatory. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

 

Let’s apply the lessons of other fields to climate science.

I would have little confidence in a public company whose accounts are not audited. I would not invest in such a company. Of course, I could not invest in such a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, because it is a condition of listing that a company has its accounts audited by an outside auditor every six months.

Thirty years ago, I would have had little confidence in the benefits claimed for a drug in a medical journal. The pressure on researchers and companies to exaggerate was tremendous. Auditing of the processing of results from drug trials was not possible because that information was not disclosed. Since then, the medical industry has reformed. It is now standard practice to make publicly available the raw data from the drug trials, the methods used to process that data, and the software used to process that data. Interested parties can now replicate the results from the raw data. Government approval for a drug now requires this. Confidence was mostly restored.

I have little confidence in some climate datasets because:

  1. There are many after-the-fact adjustments, often multiple times, often decades later.
  2. The reasons for the adjustments are effectively secret, described only in vague terms.
  3. The datasets are not audited.
  4. The raw data and the pathways to the final datasets are not made public with complete documentation and software.
  5. There is a consistent tendency for revised datasets to better fit the carbon dioxide theory of global warming.

By sheer coincidence, the previous version of the data was nearly always wrong, and after each revision it agrees more with the theory. What are the odds? Genuine technical errors would move the data away from the theory as often as they moved towards it.

Replicability is at the heart of science. The final dataset must be replicable from the raw data. This means someone else can start with a copy of the raw data, run the processing software (from source code), and produce the same final dataset. If human judgment enters the process, then it too needs to be documented sufficiently so that it can be replicated.

To further improve credibility, the raw data should be posted on a publicly accessible website immediately it is collected from the field.

Climate data is like drug-trial data back in the bad old days. The current “trust me” approach is not good enough. Too often the trend in the final version of a dataset differs substantially from the trend in the raw data. There might be good reasons for this, or there might not, but no one, apart from a few insiders, knows because the data processing is kept secret.

The process of science is simple: do not trust anything unless it can be replicated. The motto of the Royal Society is relevant: “nullius in verba” or “take nobody’s word for it”.

Reputations, motives, money, popularity, political status — they are all irrelevant. What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge acquisition is that observations and replication are the ultimate authorities on what is accepted as true.

Secret climate business is no longer adequate on a matter as important as temperature trends, yet this has been the norm. Examples in the financial and medical arenas should be followed, and a regime of full disclosure implemented. Without full disclosure, confidence in climate matters will remain low and dissatisfaction — disbelief even — will remain widespread.

The solution is audits that can replicate the final climate datasets from the raw data. This is a narrow technical exercise. Climate scientists should welcome it, just as a responsible public company welcomes an audit of its finances, or an honest medical researcher welcomes making his processing methods and software public.

If the climate scientists’ methods and conclusions are basically sound, this will be revealed by the audits.

This is not a reflection on either the character or expertise of climate scientists, but I am not going to just take their word for it.

This follows up on revelations in The Australian that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) admits errors after an audit revealed duplicated historical temperature data. Joanne has been pointing out glaring errors and inconsistencies in the BOM data as far back as 2014: see her post two days ago BOM’s Scientific Scandal: the Raw Data is Not Raw.

Nice to get an article into the newspapers again; it’s been a while. Maybe the zeitgeist is changing.

Flying cars reveal a cultural divide

Flying cars reveal a cultural divide. By Glenn Reynolds.

 

“A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.”

Well said. As Elon Musk has noted, our society is divided into Makers and Takers. Elon is our preeminent Maker. The Takers don’t like it when he does things. There’s more to that than trying to steal his money, though God knows stealing is a major part of being a Taker. But there’s also jealousy.

Elon’s flying car — the Tesla Roadster Rocket — is amazing. … The upside down driving, and that ultra-precise flip, are in some ways more impressive than the rockets. (This demonstration was fully autonomous, with no human on board. Quoth Elon: “Well, it is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don’t kill anyone!”). …

With rocket assistance, it can do zero to sixty in .81 seconds, a truly absurd acceleration. With the suction fans holding it down it can corner in ways that appear to defy the laws of physics.

But it’s the flying that catches everyone’s attention. Musk said he decided to build it when Peter Thiel complained that here we were, well into the 21st Century, without flying cars. It can only fly for a few seconds (Grok tells me a max of 7-11 seconds in level flight, best-case.) It’s roughly as capable, flying-wise, as the Wright Brothers’ first plane. It’s not a Jetsons flying car that will take a family on a vacation to the Moon. But hey, The Jetsons was set in 2062. …

I stand by this take. I also like this response:

 

 

A problem with our left:

The thing about the left is, it’s made up largely of people who aren’t great at doing things. They don’t get rich by building things or doing things. They get rich, when they do, by declaring problems, getting the government to throw money at them, and then stealing some (sometimes pretty much all) of that money for themselves and their NGOs. There’s nothing for them in flying cars.

But there’s more than that going on here. Because getting rich to them is secondary to self-importance. When Elon does something cool, they’re offended because they feel diminished by that.

As Norman Mailer wrote about why the hippies turned against the space program, the hippies spent years going around talking about how they were going to change the world, then a bunch of guys with flattop haircuts and pocket protectors and slide rules went and actually did it. Unforgivable.

Interestingly, people on the right — and most Americans generally — don’t feel diminished by other people doing cool stuff. They feel spiritually and culturally enriched by it. …

If it was up to the left, Elon would be in jail and his money would be fed to corrupt NGOs.

Larry Correia:

All the comments from terminally online liberals are crying about Elon’s politics. All they can do is focus on one dude disagreeing with them. They can’t get past it. All they can do is minimize. They have no imagination. No excitement. It’s just so sad. They’re so SMALL.

So the conversations are like —
“Wow, they just did some Matchbox stuff with an actual car.”
“That’s nothing. You’re stupid. Elon supports Germany’s AfD party. I am offended. You should have more critical thinking like me.”

And sadly that’s a paraphrase not an exaggeration.

Democrats today are all like “So what Elon made car that does flying kick flips? That’s lame and dumb! When it goes upside down my drink will fall out of the cup holder! Did you even think of that stupid MAGA idiots!?!”

What did AOC ever build?


Two ways of life:

 

Finally, imagine:

Ok, the laws of physics take a beating in some parts of that video, but it’s fun.

UPDATE: Coming soon:

 

 

A confession from Japan and a call to arms

A confession from Japan and a call to arms. By Nobunaga.

Americans — a confession from Japan you were never meant to hear.

We are terrified of fascism. Not the version in your textbooks. The version that lives inside us.

In 1941, no dictator dragged the Japanese people into the dark. We dragged each other. Neighbor watched neighbor. Mothers reported their own sons. One doubtful word at the fish market and the police came in the night. The village went silent. That silence lasted four years and killed millions.

That is how a free nation dies. Not with jackboots. With whispers.

And right now — the same silence is being built again in Japan. Not by the right. By the Left.

They throw our gates open. Strangers pour in by the millions — Muslims, Africans, people who will never bow to our dead. And when a Japanese grandmother dares to say, “wait — slow down — let us think,” she is dragged into the public square and branded a fascist. A racist. A monster.

Hear me clearly: in our country, “racist” is no longer a moral word. It is a muzzle. A weapon. A silencer pressed to the mouth of every citizen who still loves Japan.

If we fall, Beijing feasts. Moscow carves the atlas. The lights of the free world blink out — Tokyo first. Seoul next. Washington within a generation.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

So I come to you — Americans. The one nation on earth that still salutes its own flag without flinching. …

From one wandering samurai in Tokyo, to every patriot across your fifty states —
You are not alone.
You are the wall.
Stand.