Donald Trump Campaign Adviser George Papadopoulos Flips; Pleads Guilty to False Statements to FBI, by Charles Spiering.

George Papadopoulos, an early national security adviser to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to giving false statements to the FBI about his communications with Russian-connected officials while serving as an adviser to the campaign. …

He previously asserted that communications and meetings with Russian-connected officials took place before he assumed an advisory role with the campaign. …

Papadopoulos admitted that he met with a Russian connected professor while serving as an advisor on the campaign; and sought to set up meetings between campaign officials and Russian officials. The Russian connected professor told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “thousands of emails” from Hillary Clinton and “dirt” on the Democratic candidate for president.

“Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.”: The intellectual arrogance of suppressing campus speech. By Richard Cravatts.

Seeming to give credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts,” a student-written op-ed that ran in the September 25th issue of The Daily Princetonian argued that conservatives should not have the benefit of free speech, and do not even have the right to expect its protection because, given their ideological stance, “they are appealing to a right that does not exist” for them.

“Some ideas will already have been judged wanting,” [student Ryan Born continued in this astounding piece of sophistry], and “Conservatives ought to question why some ideas are so stringently opposed and then adapt their arguments, instead of begging for ‘free speech.’” …

Now, any speech that the left wishes to suppress or avoid it categorizes as being equivalent to violence; conservative ideology is thought of as being weaponized as “hate speech” and potentially harmful to listeners. …

Speakers who question prevailing liberal orthodoxy are said to be committing virtual “violence” against marginalized victim groups on campus who might be exposed to these extremist ideas and be injured by them in some way, and speakers are disinvited or obstructed proactively to ensure that victims are never threatened by ideas they do not wish to hear or tolerate.

These intolerant liberals are not even interesting in engaging with their ideological opponents. At a Rutgers University panel discussion in October, “Identity politics: the new racialism on campus?,” sponsored by Spike, “a British anti-misanthropy current-affairs magazine,” audience members began interrupting the panelists with chants of “black lives matter!” When one of the panelists attempted to explain his position, a woman from the audience shouted out that she did not “need statistics,” further complaining that, at any rate, “the system” controls facts. “It’s the system. It’s the institution,” she raved. “Don’t tell me about facts,” she shouted, most revealingly. “I don’t need no facts.”

Wait until this generation are in charge of society.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific

Paul Manafort under house arrest after pleading not guilty to $75m money-laundering charges – as Trump insists it is NOTHING to do with him. By David Martosko.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, both former campaign aides to Donald Trump, have been confined to their homes in Virginia as they await trials on a laundry list of federal felony charges.

The pair entered not guilty pleas Monday afternoon in a federal courtroom, telling a magistrate judge that they’ll fight the Justice Department in court. …

Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman, is a veteran lobbyist now charged with conspiring against the United States and money-laundering on a gigantic scale, following an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Along with Gates, his longtime business partner and protege, Manafort surrendered to federal authorities early on Monday as the first charges from the probe of possible Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were unsealed.

Manafort is free on $10 million bond and Gates agreed to a $5 million bond. Both will be on ‘home detention’ as a condition of their release, and they have surrendered their passports. They are expected back in court on Thursday. …

The government alleges that at least $75 million was moved by Manafort to offshore accounts without declaring the income to the government. From there Manafort allegedly withdrew $18 million to fund a lavish lifestyle, and Gates is accused of pulling out another $3 million. …

An angry Trump washed his hands of Manafort on Monday morning.

‘Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,’ Trump tweeted after the charges were unsealed. ‘But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????’

‘Also, there is NO COLLUSION!’ he insisted. …

The charges pending against Manafort, 68, and Gates, 45, are related to ‘business activities, not campaign activities,’ he said. …

Trump’s defiant tweet, and his reference to Clinton who faces her own claims of receiving dirty Russian money, sets the stage for a showdown with Mueller which led on Monday morning to Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, calling for legislative moves to prevent the special counsel from being fired.

The indictment is purely focused on alleged financial crimes and does not include any charges related to the broader question that formed the basis of Mueller’s investigation – whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia to swing the 2016 election in his favor.

It describes criminal allegations that predate the Trump campaign; Trump’s name is not mentioned in the 31-page document. …

‘Today, you see an indictment brought by an office of special counsel that is using a very novel theory to prosecute Mr. Manafort, regarding a FARA filing. The United States government has only used that offense six times since 1966, and only resulted in one conviction,’ [Kevin Downing, attorney for Paul Manafort,] declared.

‘The second thing about this indictment that I myself find most ridiculous is a claim that maintaining offshore accounts to bring all your funds into the United States as a scheme to conceal from the United States government is ridiculous,’ he said.

So after a year of media talk about collusion with Russia, Mueller’s indictment is for tax evasion involving the Ukraine in 2013 by one-time Trump campaigners Manafort and Gates. If this is the best Mueller can find, presumably Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia.

Summary: Trump hired a tax cheat, and later fired him.

Are Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies the new Quantitative Easing? By Ivan Lo.

How can [the world’s central banks] stimulate the global economy without adding more to the already ballooned balance sheets?

Simple: With new currencies controlled by no one…cryptocurrencies!

Bitcoin itself has already added over $120 billion in free money without affecting a single balance sheet.

Could that be the reason why governments around the world have allowed cryptocurrencies to exist? …

Cryptocurrencies are created out of thin air, just like paper currencies. But who started it?

No one knows who created Bitcoin. Right now, the creator of Bitcoin has been dubbed Satoshi Nakamoto.

Last year, Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright told the world he’s the inventor of the Bitcoin. Of course, we already know that’s not true.

So who really created Bitcoin?

Remember, money/currency is the most highly regulated industry and the creation of digital currency is technically illegal in most parts of the world – especially the United States.

How does a digital currency created by no one grow to achieve a $126 billion in liquid value? …

Bitcoin is digital gold, sort of:

The biggest difference between Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) and gold is that you can spend Bitcoin using a smartphone instead of having to deliver physical gold.

You can literally send a Bitcoin from the US to Hong Kong in less than a second.

You just couldn’t do that with gold.

Actually you can sort of do that with gold, with a new startup called SendGold.

How Churches Die, by Steven Hayward.

There’s a saying attributed variously to Robert Conquest or John O’Sullivan that “any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time.” A good case in point is the Episcopal Church, which was once known as “the Republican Party at prayer,” but which has for the last several decades fallen in line behind every politically correct enthusiasm of the left.

PC and Christianity do not mix well. It’s hard to be both.

Domestic abuse shelters for men help spotlight male victims, by Jamie Stengle.

A Texas group has opened what’s believed to be only the second shelter in the U.S. exclusively for men who are victims of domestic violence, as advocates say more men are seeking help amid changing views about male victims. …

The number of male victims calling the National Domestic Abuse Hotline and its youth-focused project — loveisrespect — has been growing. Last year, about 12,000 male victims called — about 9 percent of victims who identified their gender. That’s about double the about 5,800 male victim callers from 2010, said hotline spokeswoman Cameka Crawford.

“We believe that there are likely many more men who may not report or seek help for a number of reasons,” she said.

Flink said her organization has sheltered men abused by male partners, female partners or relatives. Some men bring their children. …

Hines said some men don’t even realize they’re being abused until they read pamphlets — mostly geared toward women — listing abuse signs. “If you are the man, that’s a very difficult process to figure out,” she said. …

In the U.S., about 31 percent of men and 37 percent of women have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

See also Rate of Domestic Violence Highest in Lesbian Relationships and Domestic violence: data shows women are not the only victims.

I established a terror movement in Australia, and I quit, by Corrine Barraclough. Shayne Hunter established the far-left and violent Antifa movement in Australia. After four years the Brisbane man quit. Here’s why, in his own words.

ANTIFA is a growing extreme group who believe violence is legitimate.

I got radicalised in Sydney. I was originally concerned about Western intervention in Syria. Radical left wing people dominated rallies and I started to associate with them more. My so-called ‘normal’ friends drifted away. …

I came to believe that war was a symptom of bigger systems at play in society and they were the real enemy, like white supremacy and patriarchy. Antifa believe these systems need to be smashed through a process of ‘de-platforming’ to save the world. People who don’t necessarily agree on everything are united to attack their common enemy — anyone in the right wing of politics.

This micro-society became my life for four years.

They believe historically their roots were fighting Nazi oppression. They run a website which is updated every couple of weeks with a hit list of right wing names. They believe if these people are allowed to speak, society will suffer. So, they must be pushed back.

There is no mission statement, rather, it’s a dangerous rhetoric. There are a lot of very damaged people who are drawn to it. …

I read that Antifa in the US is training people to shoot and punch. It’s the same here. Antifa in Sydney are doing martial arts to, as they would put it, ‘fight the Nazis’. It’s a paramilitary mindset. …

I was ideologically possessed for four years. I would speak louder on public transport so people could hear me speak, hoping they would hear my message. …

The radical left of Antifa presents itself as being about compassion and empathy; it’s a Trojan horse. All conversations are about entitlement and rights, not responsibility. When these people talk about freedom, they really mean freedom from responsibility. …

You don’t know humiliation until you’ve left a cult; I wasted four years of my life.

I cut ties over time. I’m still in contact with some ex-cult members but I don’t see anyone who’s still active.

In my 20-something generation, social media plays the role of a 24/7 preacher — like a pocket preacher. Each day you’re being validated by the echo chamber on your phone.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific

Anti-Togetherness: The Virtues of Disunity, by Fred Reed.

A Truth Not Welcome: People do not like being with those different from themselves. Sometimes, briefly, we find it interesting, as in traveling, but for extended periods, no. This distaste pervades society, often unnoticed, with consequences.

Instances of untogetherness:

People cluster by intelligence. With high consistency, we choose mates of intelligence close to our own. Likewise with friends: If you have an IQ of 100, or 150, you are unlikely to have friends of 150, or 100. Bright people join Mensa not from snobbery but because they want to be around people like themselves. On the internet this takes the form of distributed cognitive stratification in which people from around the globe congregate by intelligence.

A woman I knew while living in the Heart of Darkness once said, “In Washington, you assume that everyone is in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She herself was, and her friends were chemists, high-end journalists, authors, and so on. She meant her remark as shorthand for a common sort of clustering.

People associate by age. We rarely have close friends who differ from us by more than ten years. People of fifty shrink in horror at the thought of being trapped in a bar full of screaming twenty-year-olds–and vice versa. Teenagers suffer their parents because they have to, and escape at every opportunity–to the relief of the parents. It isn’t dislike, just a lack of much in common.

Men and women would rather not be with each other too much. In social and domestic settings, yes. Men would prefer to work with other men had they the choice. Men do not want to go fishing with women, or drink beer and argue politics, and when it comes to talking about their feelings, most men would rather die. Women presumably prefer their own. …

If a group of men are sitting around shooting the breeze and a woman shows up, the conversational dynamics change. The men will speak differently, talk of different things, be wary. Yet heaven help them if they say that sometimes they don’t want female company.

In the military the consequences of forced togetherness are grave, and not just in that women can’t do many of the things required of soldiers. Thirteen men in a squad will work easily together to get a job done. Add a woman and all the men will compete for her sexual favors, even if she isn’t using them, which is possible. …

We prefer to spend time with people of our own level of education. If you have a doctorate, you probably have no friends who are graduates only of high school–and vice versa. The same goes for white-collar and blue-collar people. Few bus drivers socialize with lawyers.

We prefer to be with our own race. Look at what people do, not what they say. Blacks do not find the company of white people compelling, and the most liberal of whites spend ninety-five percent of discretionary time with other whites. If whites do spend time with blacks, those will be of their own age, educational level, accent and, except in couples, sex. They will probably feel self-conscious anyway.

The cultures of blacks and whites differ starkly and any association occurs only to the extent that the blacks simulate the culture of whites. Distance is proportional to difference. Whites and Asians socialize more easily than blacks and whites because they have more in common. …

Ease of association is inversely proportional to difference, and difference is a sort of vector sum of many things: social and economic status, skin color, native fluency in English, sex and sexual orientation, and so on.

Another truth avoided by the PC crew and their PC fantasies. Their fantasies guide them as they make rules for society, and we get to pay the price for their denial.

Our current policy of compulsory amalgamation is fueled both by resentment and ideology. Women and blacks think they endure discrimination by men and whites and so insist on inclusion they really do not much want. The result is lawsuits, and sometimes far worse. Cities burn because we insist on employing white policemen in black regions.

Much of today’s anger would diminish if we allowed people to live in neighborhoods of their own kind, and study in schools of their own kind, and be policed by their own kind, and to establish clubs as they like. We could call this something like, oh, say, “freedom.”

‘Muhammad’ is the Future of Europe, by Guilio Meotti.

During the next thirty years, the population of Africa is expected to increase by one billion.

The French economist Charles Gave recently predicted that France will have a Muslim majority by 2057 — and this estimate did not even take into consideration the number of expected new migrants.

No doubt, Africa’s exploding population will try to reach the shores of a wealthy, senile Europe, which is already undergoing an internal demographic revolution. Europe, to retain its culture, will need to make hard-headed decisions, not just amuse itself to death. The question is: Will Europe protect its borders and civilization before it is submerged? …

The PC crew won’t talk about this issue because they have no ideas about what to do:

In Africa today, there are four times more births than deaths. According to figures for 2017, the total fertility rate is 4.5 children per woman, against 1.6 in Europe.

In 30 years, due to the demographic collapse, Europe will lose 30 million people and, by the end of the century, almost 100 million. “Birth control” has worked most effectively in Europe, which demographically did not need it, and worst in Africa, which did. …

Among countries with population growth, France is expected to grow from 64 to 74 million, and the UK from 66 to 80 million. Sweden is projected to grow from 9 million to 13 million, and Norway from 5 million to 8 million. Belgium’s population of 11 million is expected to increase by 2 million. These five European countries are also among those with the highest proportion of Muslims.

People are sitting there with normalcy bias, just trying to carry on with their lives as ordinary (white) British, French, German people. They’re oblivious to what’s been set in motion. They’re not doing the maths.

Trump’s EPA Chief Charts a New Course: An Interview With Scott Pruitt, by Rob Bluey. During the course of a longish interview Pruitt says:

Now, on this issue with respect to climate change, it’s not a question about whether climate change occurs. It does. It’s not a matter of whether man contributes to it. We do. The question is how much do we contribute to it and how do we measure that with precision? It’s a little bit more difficult questions like when we have individuals telling us in 2017 that they know what the ideal global average surface temperature should be in the year 2100, I think there should be a debate around that. I think there ought to be discussion around that very issue.

There are some, perhaps in this very room that believe that it poses an existential threat. If it poses an existential threat, I want to know. If it’s more important than ISIS and North Korea, I think we better know about it. So let’s have a real, meaningful discussion about it.

The American people deserve, in my view, an objective, transparent, honest discussion about what we know and what we don’t know, with respect to CO2. It’s never taken place. That’s the reason I’ve been proposing a red team, blue team exercise where we bring red team scientists in and blue team scientists in and they would engage in a multi-month process asking of each other these very difficult questions to help inform the American public on these issues to help build consensus toward this very important issue.

Can you imagine Greg Hunt or Malcolm Turnbull saying anything like what Scott Pruitt says below? Just joking.

hat-tip Chris