The Conservative Case for Taxpayer-Funded Penis Removal in the Military

Donald Trump has abandoned his supposed conservative principles to make a pointless and offensive attack on a segment of American citizens. He has decided to use his executive power to tell people how they should live, how they should feel, and how they should identify themselves. The most cherished conservative value is freedom from government tyranny, yet not the government is telling the transgendered that they can no longer engage in their right to military service.

The decision violates Christian norms as well. Did Jesus say that trannies shouldn't serve in the military? No. Well really the early Christian doctrine was that no one should serve in the military, one of the major reasons they were so despised by the Romans, but they didn't single out any of the 72 genders in their opposition to martial practices. So Trump's ejection of the gender-atypical is not just anti-libertarian, it is anti-Christian as well.

Finally, Trump's decision violates free-market economic principles. Because the transgendered are oppressed in the marketplace, they are more willing to accept difficult, lower-paying jobs, like enlisted military service. By rejecting these applicants, the President is effectively instilling a minimum wage on military service, thus he is distorting the free market and causing a higher burden on taxpayers.

This decisions stinks. It fails the American ideals of personal liberty and limited government, it fails the Christian ethos of universal equality, and it fails free-market economic principles.

[Except to see some drivel like this being pushed out by the National Review and other pseudo-conservative outlets. McCain, who is only ever in the news for bashing Republicans, is in the news for opposing the tranny ban. Some things are just too predictable to even be amusing.]

But What About His Tax Returns?

The recent post There Will Be No Obituary for the Left stated

This is all they have left. You don't throw those kinds of hail mary's unless you're completely desperate and the clock is running out. Today my google news feed said nothing about what was the biggest and virtually only story in the news just two days ago. Instead, I saw something about Sessions Russia connections (lol) and a story about how the CBO says Trump's budget won't balance. They're either going back to old news that already went no where (seriously waiting to start hearing about tax returns again soon) or giving, gasp, valid and deserved criticism of Trump's policies.

This was done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but recall, the left can no longer be satirized. From my Google news feed today.

Satire and prediction have become one and the same. They've circled back around. It's back to Taxes Taxes Taxes. Will Rachel Maddow be vindicated after all? I wonder how far they'll regress. Do you think they'll go all the way back to Trump has no mathematical chance to win the Republican primary? Actually, that's probably a fair prediction. At some point, we'll hear up and down about Trump's stiff primary competition from some National Review favored neocon. Expect that soon after the 2018 Congressional elections are wrapped up.

The Dumbest Headline Possible X 3

Yesterday CNN decided not to cover the Wikileaks dump of CIA Vault 7 documents. But they did run this.

Let me explain 3 different ways it's the dumbest headline possible, in light of not covering the CIA leaks.

1. On the day that we learned the CIA has a massive cyber arsenal that can eavesdrop on nearly any device, CNN reminds us (indirectly through the mouth of the Ukranian PM, of course) that we face a dire cyber threat from Russia. That is something like walking in the woods and being mauled by a mountain lion and having a CNN reporter stroll up and say, "Hey man be on the lookout for bears. They're really dangerous."
2. The CIA lost control of the tools. The reason this happened is because the CIA isn't authorized to use them the way they want. They aren't supposed to be spying domestically. So they hire contractors who then hire sub-contractors who sign contracts containing no illegal requirements, but which are passed over with a wink and a nudge. The CIA can't give those unvetted civilians classified cyber weapons, so they were simply declassified. Because they lost control of the tools, anyone could have them. Now you're walking in the woods but every squirrel, bluebird, and chipmunk is potentially as dangerous as a mountain lion.
3. The leaks also showed that the CIA keep a library of foreign malware for the purposes of disguising their operations as those of foreign actors, including Russian tools. The fact that Wikileaks just cast serious doubt that any evidence of Russian hacking was valid didn't deter CNN from going with the narrative of Russian cyber terror.

To be fair CNN did finally pick up the story. Here is their headline today.

They're toeing the establishment party line of "it doesn't matter what was leaked, only who leaked and how they should be punished." But at least it's an improvement over running the headline that was the dumbest possible headline for three different reasons.

Mainstream Media Unsure How to Best Discredit Itself Over Wiretapping Situation

As you've likely heard, Trump has accused the Obama administration of wiretapping his campaign during the general election. The response of the media has been something like this:

The media, which has run for months on hysteria of collusion between Trump and Russia during the election despite not one iota of evidence, is rapping Trump's knuckles for tweeting without evidence. Don't you love when the double standard is in open display? Apparently news organizations are permitted to run stories without evidence, but a 140-character tweet must be properly cited. I don't think anyone really expects tweets to be held to some high level of journalistic rigor, so the implication being made is that there is no evidence to support Trump's claims. Other headlines spread the same implication. Politico tells us that lawmakers are "stunned, baffled" by the comments. Allegedly many are left scratching their heads over the statements.

Let's look at this case from the point of view of a criminal investigator.

Motive

Obama has said the following about Trump's presidential bid.

I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president.

He is woefully unprepared to do this job.  

 Everything that we've done over the last eight years will be reversed with a Trump presidency.

I would fear for the future of our country.

If somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes. 

It smells like motive to me. Obama commented openly and frequently his grave concerns about the dangers a Trump presidency posed to the nation.

Behavioral patterns

This is not the first wire-tapping scandal under the Obama administration.

1. Edward Snowden revealed massive warrantless wiretapping against American citizens. (source)
2. Angela Merkel's personal devices were wiretapped, causing a huge diplomatic roe. (source)
3.  Mexico summoned the US Ambassador over revelations he was wiretapped by the US. (source)
4. The Brazilian president was so enraged at being wiretapped by the US that she canceled a state visit with Obama. (source)
5. Fox News reporter James Cohen was wiretapped. (source)
6. They wiretapped more than 20 AP journalists. (source)
7. The Obama administration was sued by former CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson for wiretapping her computer and cell phone. (source)
8. The Obama administration twice sought FISA warrants against Trump. In June 2016 they were denied. It was the first FISA refusal in six years! In October they again applied for a warrant with a reduced scope and it was granted. (source, not sure if verified. The Washington Post refutes it.)

Update: this was laid out more thoroughly at TheGatewayPundit.

Evidence

There actually is evidence to support Trump's claim.

1. The FISA warrant was pursued and obtained by the Trump administration.
2. Michael Flynn was almost certainly wiretapped. (source)
3. The NY Times reported on the leaks two months ago. (source)

A screen grab from that article shows they specifically use the term wiretapping.

And that brings us to the point I really want to make: media absurdity. Mark Levin made the case this morning on Fox News using the media's own previous reporting on the subject.

The MSM is insinuating that Trump is running reckless with accusations that have no supporting evidence. Yet the MSM also previously reported on it. Only one of the following conclusions can be made.

• The current reporters are unaware of the previous reporting
• The media is being intentionally deceitful in insinuating there is no supporting evidence
• The media is confessing that it runs stories with no supporting evidence

Any case leads to the same result: the MSM does not engage in real journalism. It is fake news.


Update: here is a good piece from Breitbart along the same lines

3968

The New York Times is now quietly editing articles to better promote the Narrative.

They reported it — and then, when they figured out it was wrong, they simply vanished it. Whoosh. Presto-change-o! It was never there. Did you hear me? It was never there.

You've heard the phrase so funny it hurts. As of the current year the phrase should be superseded by so ironic it hurts. Or maybe it's so hypocritical it hurts. I vowed to cut back on obsessing over hypocrisy in Hypocrisy and the 4 Stages of Anti-Progressivism, so let's just call it irony.

The irony is that the book 1984 has had a surge of sales in response to Trump's election. And here we have the paper of fucking record doing just exactly what Winston spent his days doing: quietly modifying the public record to legitimize the party. People are buying the book, but they don't seem to be reading it. Perhaps they just think it looks impressive on their bookshelves. [Confession: I bought A Tale of Two Cities for just that reason.] In this case edits were made to further the narrative that Attorney General Sessions lied under oath about meeting with the Russian ambassador (he didn't) when in fact Senator McCaskill actually did lie about meeting with the Russian ambassador. Oh look, that's even more hypocrisy irony.

I contend that the propaganda today is even worse than that portrayed in 1984, for reasons proposed by Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, which outlined how a voluntary and independent media can promote propaganda more effectively than state propaganda. In the Soviet Union, and in Oceania, everyone knows the media is controlled. At some level they understand it is propaganda. In the Soviet Union the saying went, "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." The people weren't excessively naive. But in our system the media is independent. There is plausible legitimacy. Even though people often state their opinion that the media is rubbish, they tend to believe what they hear anyway. That is the Gell-Man amnesia effect in action. What has surprised me in recent months more than anything is the number of people I know who are smart, who are independent and relatively non-conformist, who nevertheless swallow down the media narrative no matter how ridiculous. I see a lot of smart people falling for this Sessions-Russia thing. Intelligence is no immunity from propaganda, and I wonder if it isn't a net vulnerability.

At any rate, I reckon today's propaganda is at least twice as effective as that found in a blatant autocracy, like seen in 1984, which puts us at 3968. How progressive.



Update: they're at it again! This time modifying a headline that was being used to ridicule the media for ridiculing Trump's wiretapping claims.

Fake Fukushima Radiation Map

This Zerohedge article is going around facebook, and is previewed with this image.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the article is predominately a lie. Is that the distribution you'd expect of contaminated ocean water? For reference, here are the currents in the Pacific.

In comparison, in their map the radiation seems to be moving linearly from the source. What in the ocean moves linearly from the source? Maybe waves? And indeed a 2-second Google search for "noaa fukushima tsunami map" reveals the answer.

Despite attributing the source to NOAA based on the image logo, ZeroHedge clearly didn't confirm the validity of the source, or they'd see the image had been altered by cropping off the text that explains what the image is. Amusingly enough, the mastermind who concocted the ruse left in the scale which shows the data is measured in centimeters, a very odd unit for radiation, wouldn't you think?