Showing posts from May, 2019

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Deathwatch

Deathwatch This is not an article. But once upon a time this was a blog where I would post my unformed personal thoughts. The thoughts eventually became articles. The articles were picked up and reprinted. But this one time, Sultan Knish will return to what it once was in a simpler time. This is self-indulgent and personal. Feel free to skip it. Our lives are defined by numbers. Our deaths are defined by them too. Somewhere out of sight, in the world or in our bodies, a clock ticks insistently away. Most of the time we are fortunate enough to be deaf to the relentless clockwork march of time. Until we begin to hear. And are unable to stop. There are many clocks in the hospital room where she lies dying beneath a plastic blanket inflated and deflated by one of a dozen machines in the room. There is an old fashioned clock ticking inaudibly on the wall, there are digital clocks and timers embedded in everything. And there is the insistent count of heart rate, blood pre

A Government Environmentalist Experiment in Brainwashing Parents Through Children in North Carolina

#C02Kult. That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”. The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes. “I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.” Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old

What's Really Behind the Impeachment Con?

The Democrats have become a cult of anti-personality. The ‘anti’ phenomenon is not unique. Past Democrat generations had built their identity around hating Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. But the internet monetized the cult of anti-personality in a big way. And Democrats are paying the price. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Dem House leadership have tried everything possible to stop the talk of impeachment. But nothing that she and her deputies can do has made a dent in the madness. In a sign of pure desperation, Pelosi has begun insisting that impeachment is a Trump conspiracy. “Trump is goading us to impeach him," she actually claimed. The Dem House leader is hoping to dissuade her faction from its self-destructive orgy of Trump hatred by tapping into that hatred to convince them that impeaching Trump is exactly what he wants. And it won’t work. Impeaching Trump is the obsession of a narrow slice of the Dem base. But it’s the one that provides much of the money and t

America Doesn't Have an Anti-Semitism Problem. American Politics Does

If anti-Semitism is thriving among Americans, there’s no sign of it in any of the latest polls. Americans are the least anti-Semitic people in the world. A 2017 poll, taken at the height of a spike in anti-Semitism, showed that 14% of Americans held anti-Semitic attitudes. That was up from 10% in 2015 and 12% in 2013. That’s not a great trend, but it also shows just how narrow the scope of the problem is. It’s also dramatically different than the numbers from similar polls conducted in Europe. How then can we explain the rise in anti-Semitic violence? What about the increased harassment of Jews on campuses and in major cities? And why is there a rise in anti-Semitic discourse? There’s no climate of hatred in America. The rising anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence are the work of small but highly active political groups who have become disproportionately influential in public life. The rise in anti-Semitism isn’t happening among ordinary Americans, but among a narrow group of inf

Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It

“But, it’s a private company.” It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business. In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue." “The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine." The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate a

A Dozen People Were Shot in Buttigieg's City While He Ran for President

In early April, South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski had two concerns. His boss, Mayor Peter Buttigieg, was preparing to formally announce his presidential run. The blighted Rust Belt city, riddled with gangs and bodies, was Buttigieg's platform. The bodies were Chief Ruszkowski's other concern. Another fatal shooting had happened a day earlier. A reporter asked him how many shootings had taken place in South Bend. The top cop's response was both bitter and evasive. “After one shooting, I stop counting because all of these shootings are frustrating and make me sick to my stomach." There’s little doubt that Chief Ruszkowski knew the number. South Bend’s plan for fighting crime has run heavy on statistics and light on results. But he knew that the number would be inconvenient. Instead he touted the “special event” where his boss, after running the city into the ground, would announce, not a plan for dealing with the shootings, but a run for President of the U

Latin America is Collapsing and Taking America With It

Long before the current scenes of thousands of migrants showing up in New Mexico or Arizona, the northward migration was fueled by a combination of Latin American instability and American greed for cheap labor going back over a century to the Mexican Revolution. Venezuela’s spectacular collapse may be dominating the news cycle now, but a Latin American country usually implodes in a spectacular fashion every few years. Even now, there is political chaos in Nicaragua, with major protests demanding the ouster of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, and brewing scandals in Argentina, Brazil and Peru that could expand and tear any or all of the three countries apart. Political instability, sharp swings from the far left to the far right, from Marxist terrorists to military warlords, are not a temporary aberration that can be fixed with our foreign aid or military intervention. They’re an enduring feature of political life that are as much a part of Latin America as the Declaration, the Cons

The Brainwashing of a Nation

Brainwashing isn’t a secretive event that takes place in hidden rooms. No hypnotists or vials full of chemicals are required. It takes place every day on a massive scale across the United States. Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead, it transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons. The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and violence. Brainwashing isn’t magic, but it can look like magic. The sleight of hand that causes us to think so is our firm belief in our reason and free will. It’s easier to believe in changing minds through hypnotism and drugs, than to understand, what the successful practitioners of brainwashing do, that the human mind is more malleable than we like to think, and that the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious

Who Can Count the Dust of Jacob?

" Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel ." Numbers 23:10 The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills,  the traffic stops ,  the people stop , and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day. What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year's dead and wounded to the scales of history? A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To s

8 Years of Media Lies About the Syrian Civil War Exposed

The end of the big lie about the origins of the Syrian Civil War began on the Arizona border. Claas Relotius, a German reporter for Der Spiegel, had written a piece about being embedded with a militia patrolling the Arizona border for illegal migrants. Gullible German leftist readers were regaled with tales of the militia, whose leader called Mexicans "bean eaters" and, at the end of the article, opened fire into the night. It was one of a series of Relotius articles delving into Trump country with novelistic accounts of pro-Trump Americans that confirmed all the stereotypes of Der Spiegel’s readers. But the residents depicted in the Minnesota town in which ‘Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays’ is set quickly pointed out that much of the article was factually wrong and that Relotius had never even bothered talking to the people he claimed to have been writing about. And a woman doing media relations for the militia contacted Der Spiegel and informed the magazine that he