“Administrative incompetence” and “computer failures” “beyond belief”: the miracle of state-controlled health care in the UK led to the deaths of up to 270 patients

Hundreds of thousands of women face an “agonising wait” of up to six months to be checked for breast cancer

writes Chris Smyth in the Times of London,

after an IT blunder which meant they were not called for screening led to the deaths of as many as 270 patients.

NHS bosses were trying last night to contact 309,000 women who were not invited to breast cancer checks because of computer failures dating back almost a decade.

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, apologised for women’s lives being cut short by “administrative incompetence”, but said that some women affected would have to wait until the end of October for catch-up checks to avoid disrupting routine screening for those aged between 50 and 70.

Campaigners demanded that the NHS hire hundreds of extra staff or send women abroad to get the checks done. Labour said that the NHS should be given extra resources to carry out the checks, but the party’s response was tempered by the knowledge that it had been in power when the troubles began.

Public Health England, which runs the screening programme, is also facing questions. Mr Hunt told the Commons: “For many years oversight of [the] programme has not been good enough.”

 … Mr Hunt promised to write by the end of the month to all women affected, saying: “There may be some who receive a letter having had a recent terminal diagnosis. For them and others it is incredibly upsetting to know that you did not receive an invitation for screening at the correct time and totally devastating to hear you may have lost or be about to lose a loved one because of administrative incompetence.”

The NHS is promising to pay for staff overtime and to use the private sector to offer all women who missed out an appointment by the end of October.

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, chief executive of the charity Breast Cancer Now, said it was “beyond belief” that the problem was undetected for so long.

“Beyond belief” is another way of saying Unexpected.

Peter O'Keefe: Misleading MSM Headlines Deliberately Obscure Both the Intent and the Merit in Trump's Policies

Guest editorial from Peter O'Keefe, an expatriate American in Paris and one of the earliest readers of No Pasarán (now in its 14th year):

Shortly after World War II, there was rarely a week that passed without someone in my social circle saying, ”You know … the Germans are perfectly nice people, just like you and me.

“It’s just that they were duped by the Nazi propaganda machine.”

Years passed before it occurred to me that if there was such a machine, every government on the planet, not to mention every business and every ambitious politician, would commit murder to get their hands on it.

A recent American headline was broadcast across the international wire services:

“ Feds Won’t Restore Grizzly Bear Protections Near Yellowstone National Park”

Most European readers immediately conclude that American President Donald Trump loves guns and hunters, hates forests and wildlife, and is abandoning the grizzly to the bloodlust of NRA zealots.

This interpretation was, of course, encouraged by the headline’s author, and endorsed by the editor(s).

This interpretation is, of course, entirely wrong.

Closer inspection of the article reveals that the Federal government is returning the responsibility for the management of wildlife to the various States. This is a deliberate Trump Policy, consistent with the stratification of authority outlined in the U.S. Constitution, and supported by two centuries of positive results.

The grizzly will again be cared for by people who know something about them.

Duh.

Unfortunately, few readers will delve beyond a headline unless the subject is of particular interest to them.

They will, however, recognize the implied message, and place it upon the balance scale of their judgement.

Regrettably, there is no equivalent to Rush Limbaugh in France.

Joy Reid wholeheartedly regrets writing that stuff she didn’t actually write; Also, she’s deeply remorseful for the pain she didn’t really cause

Joy Reid’s televised non-pology was perhaps the most awkward thing Benny Huang has seen all year.

The host of MSNBC’s AM Joy began her April 28^th segment by delivering a mea culpa for “homophobic” blog posts she wrote years ago while simultaneously maintaining that

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me.”

Reid had earlier asserted that somehow her blog had been hacked, though that claim was demonstrated to be a preposterous lie. So she apologized—while still clinging to the hacking story.

Joy Reid wholeheartedly regrets writing that stuff she didn’t actually write. Also, she’s deeply remorseful for the pain she didn’t really cause.

Let’s take a moment to recap the situation. Before Reid had her own program she was a mainstay on The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow is of course a homosexual. And before that, Joy Reid was an obscure blogger who liked to call prominent Republicans “closet cases.”

Chalk these comments up to mindless mimicry. Years ago, when conservatives used to stand against the homosexual agenda, “gays” used to taunt them by claiming that their foes were “on the down low”—secretly homosexual. The whole culture war was apparently an internecine battle between two groups of homosexuals—one closeted and the other out in the open. The taunt worked well because the homosexuals didn’t consider it insulting but it left their targets red-faced and fuming. 

Homosexuals knew that nothing bothered their opponents more than to say, “You’re one of us, you just won’t admit it.”

The taunt doesn’t work quite the same way when Joy uses it. It doesn’t even make sense because none of her targets have ever given any indication that they are homosexuals. Also, the “gay” activists who made similar taunts didn’t really consider them degrading because they obviously saw nothing wrong with butt sex. But she does. And that’s why she’s in trouble.

It’s clear from Reid’s posts that she thinks homosexuality is disgusting. Good for her. Most people, if they were honest, would admit that they agree with her. But that means that her jabs at Republicans were actually delivered as insults not merely intended to be received as insults.

And for that Reid must pay. Not a high price, mind you—she isn’t being banned from the planet earth as we’ve done to people like Brendan Eich. She’ll survive but first she must grovel a little.

I’m not offended, of course, and I won’t pretend that to be. Some of the things she said were clearly incorrect—Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove are not closeted homosexuals, for example—but that’s not the same as being offensive.

Other statements she made were spot on. Wrote Reid:

“Most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Broke Back Mountain.’ (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.) Does that make me homophobic? Probably.”

I didn’t go see that flick either. Liberals loved it because they love anything that promotes homosexuality, especially in conservative milieus such as the macho cowboy culture. But most normal people didn’t want to pay eight bucks to see two dudes ramming each others’ sphincters.

In another post Reid writes about “gay” culture’s weird obsession with teens.

“And then there are concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, ‘bringing them into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral. (Ditto with gay rights groups that seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination they are gay…)”

She’s right about that. Why do you think your kid’s school has a Gay-Straight Alliance? It’s a recruitment center.

 … After reading some of her posts I can say that I liked the old Joy Reid. She was someone I could have had a beer with. …

Reid’s blog posts reveal an urban black woman grappling with the new reality of progressive politics. She is, after all, the daughter of two very religious black immigrants and a cradle Democrat who grew up at a time when there seemed to be no conflict between the two. (Except for the baby-killing, of course.) But as “gay rights” started to rise to prominence within the party the space for people who wouldn’t celebrate homosexuality began to shrink. Religion was no excuse.

Blacks were often the slowest to adapt primarily because they are America’s most religious ethnic group. They are also less likely to consider sexuality to be comparable to race. This gap between black liberals and other liberals has narrowed quite a bit over the last ten years but it’s still there.

Joy Reid isn’t the first black person I’ve encountered who’s exhibited symptoms of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the new “LGBT”-obsessed progressive movement. These often religious blacks come up with a thousand rationalizations to explain why they vote for candidates whom they know in their heart of hearts don’t represent their values. If they were honest with themselves they would admit that their values aren’t nearly as important to them as their self-determined interests. The Democrats are still handing out free money, aren’t they?

There’s something very hypocritical about a person who used to write “homophobic” blog posts going on to join America’s most “woke” news network, MSNBC, and lecturing the rest of us about our supposed intolerance. And if I know anything about liberals it’s that they despise hypocrisy. Or at least they hypocritically pretend that they do.

 … Anyone who thinks she’s changed should first ask what the media would say about a conservative family values champion who was revealed to have done “gay” porn ten years ago. Would anyone say that he’s not hypocritical because he’s obviously turned over a new leaf?

Personally, I don’t believe that Reid ever had any genuine conversion experience. If she did, I’d like to know how and when it happened.

When did you stop being revolted by the idea of two men having sex, Joy? Do you still think they recruit kids or did you just stop caring if they do?

In all likelihood, she just learned to shut up. Toeing the party line was imperative to keeping her friends and advancing her career in journalism so she did what a lot of people have done and joined the mob.

She must have seen the objects of the mob’s hatred—Dan Cathy, David and Jesse Benham, Jack Phillips—and understood that they were only being savaged for saying aloud what she believes too. The moral and courageous thing to do would have been to defend these people. But of course she didn’t do that.

In that regard, Joy Reid is something like the Larry Craig of the Left. For those of you who don’t remember, Craig was a Republican senator from Idaho whose career ended in 2007 after he was caught soliciting sex from strangers in a Minneapolis airport men’s room.

The Left ate it up. The common refrain was that Craig’s moral turpitude lay in his hypocrisy not his actual offense. Why? Because Craig had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act—just like supermajorities of both parties.

The real scandal was that he opposed the Left’s legislative agenda. And when you think about it, that’s always the scandal.

Much like Larry Craig, Joy Reid’s real failing is her hypocrisy. There’s really nothing scandalous about her ten year old blog posts but there is something contemptible about the way she’s acted since joining MSNBC. She’s wagged her finger at us, virtue-signaled her butt off, and held her nose aloft because of her supposed tolerance and open-mindedness.

Then we found out the truth: Joy Reid is one of us, she just won’t admit it. …

Homofascism: The closet hasn’t disappeared and gays don’t want it to; They just want someone else to live in it

Over at the Constitution website, Benny Huang has quite a provocative article:

Army chaplain Major Scott Squires brought the wrath of homosexuals and anti-theists upon himself when he recently opted himself out of a marriage retreat he was supposed to lead because a lesbian couple signed up. Squires, an ordained Southern Baptist minister stationed at Fort Bragg, believed that he was doing right by his faith and Army regulations when he rescheduled the event and asked another chaplain to lead it.

But the Army still slammed him for discrimination.

It was plainly obvious that scenarios like this would arise after the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and the demise of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT). Neither of those “gay rights” milestones had anything to do with the privacy of anyone’s bedroom or even with the relationship of two people to each other. Both were about ruthlessly suppressing dissent.

Mikey Weinstein of the militantly anti-religious “Military Religious Freedom Foundation” summed up the attitude pretty well when he commented on the Squires affair:

“If you’re going to view same-sex couples as a sin against god, you can either hold your tongue, change your attitude, or get out of the military.”

Weinstein believes that any denomination that won’t accommodate same-sex couples on marriage retreats should not be allowed to endorse chaplains for military service. I glean from some of his other comments that he believes the same should also apply to denominations that don’t perform same-sex weddings. Weinstein’s exclusionary ban would impact most major denominations including Catholics and nearly all Evangelicals, leaving the military with a huge deficit of qualified chaplains—which also happens to be Mikey’s lifelong dream. That’s not a coincidence.

Make no mistake—Weinstein’s point-of-view is gaining momentum. Chaplains will very soon be forced to conduct same-sex nuptials or be kicked out. This was blatantly obvious eight years ago when the Defense Department was carefully “studying” the effects of DADT repeal and yet these concerns were pooh-poohed.

To be clear, Chaplain Squires did not exclude this couple from the retreat though he would have been within his rights to do that. He excluded himself so as not to run afoul of his conscience, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Army regulations which require him to remain in good standing with his sponsoring denomination.

But these two chicks still weren’t happy because attending a marriage retreat was never their intent.

Do they expect me to believe that they really wanted to attend a marriage retreat conducted by a Southern Baptist preacher? This seems incredible. For starters, the marriage retreat was presumably Bible-based. Secondly, most marriage retreats focus on the complementary nature of men and women—their similarities and differences, their synergy, etc. It’s yin and yang stuff that doesn’t apply to yin and yin.

I can say with a high degree of certainty that this couple didn’t really want to attend this retreat. What they wanted was to provoke this exact conundrum. More than that they wanted Squires to face disciplinary action and perhaps lose his commission.

So they ambushed him.

These kinds of ambushes are increasingly common.

[The equivalent in civilian life would be the bakers and the photographers ostracized, demonized, and sued for tens of thousands of dollars…]

Something similar happened to Navy chaplain Wes Modder. His ordeal began when a homosexual junior officer began to engage him in regular private conversations about sexual sin in which the junior officer asked direct questions about the morality of certain sexual practices including homosexuality. Modder confirmed the teaching of two thousand years of Christianity and told him that yes, God hasn’t crossed anal sodomy off the sin list as much as our fallen world would like Him to.

Little did Modder know that the junior officer was taking notes of their conversations. The backbiting snitch then proceeded to file an Equal Opportunity complaint against the chaplain. According to the five-page complaint the chaplain not only thought that homosexuality was wrong but masturbation and pre-marital sex too! Apparently believing these things makes a person unfit to be a chaplain in today’s military.

Note to Mikey Weinstein: This is why “holding your tongue” is not good enough. Not content with merely shaming religious people into silence, homofascists will literally interrogate others’ religious beliefs just to ruin them.

The military, like society as a whole, is becoming an increasingly hostile place for people of faith. Millions of people are living in fear that their constitutionally-protected religious beliefs (and the free exercise thereof!) will make them the homofascists’ next victims. So they keep mum. They wait until they think they are in like-minded company—at church perhaps—before feeling out the group to see if it’s safe to speak. Then they say what they really believe in hushed tones and with lots of apologetic caveats.

There’s a term for this. It’s called living “in the closet.”

Homosexuals won’t like me using this term of course, because they claim it for themselves. Central to homosexuals’ identity is their purported victimhood which they attribute to being a hated minority forced to pretend to be something they are not.

It’s hard to see how the closet that homosexuals claim to have emerged from is any different than the one that they force dissidents liked Chaplains Squires and Modder to live in. The closet hasn’t disappeared and they don’t want it to. They just want someone else to live in it.

I know there are some people who honestly wish for a world in which no one lives in the closet but I’m not sure that such a world can exist. Nothing I’ve witnessed in the last twenty years of intolerant homosexual activism has convinced me that homofascists can live side by side with people who express even the mildest disapproval. The search for a fleeting “third way” that leaves everyone feeling liberated is fruitless.

If someone has to be in the closet, which I believe to be the case, let it be the homosexuals.

I must give some credit for this idea to former congressman Ron Paul, the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president. For nearly two decades Paul published newsletters that contained some off-the-wall stuff mixed in with a few hard truths that many people just aren’t mature enough to handle. “Bring back the closet!” he bellowed in the August 1990 issue. In June of that same year he wrote:

“I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”

Amen to that, brother!

When homosexuals still lived in the closet they couldn’t harm us. During my time in the Army, for example, chaplains weren’t ambushed for their religious beliefs. No one was. But that’s because I served under DADT. Homosexuals in the ranks, of which I’m sure there were a few, couldn’t have been agitators and activists, much less bullies and tattletales, without calling attention to themselves.

Each day I wake up and read a news item about the homofascist assault on our freedoms and think to myself, ‘This wouldn’t be happening if they were all still hiding.’ Take for example the recent re-nomination of Chai Feldblum to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feldblum is a militant lesbian who was originally appointed by President Obama and recently renominated by President Trump. Shame on him.

Feldblum does not respect the first amendment rights of anyone to disagree with or resist her movement’s agenda. Said Feldblum: “There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.”

She’s right that there can be a conflict between these two things but wrong to think that sexual liberty (if we can call it that) should supersede the unambiguous words of the Constitution.

But that’s really beside the point. What matters is that Chai Feldblum wouldn’t be a threat to our freedom if she had been born fifty years earlier. She might still have been a lesbian but she would have been a closeted one and her homofascist impulse would have been locked away in the depths of her heart where it couldn’t hurt a fly.

The “closet” that homosexuals whine so much about was a defensive apparatus for the rest of us. It ensured that the Chai Feldblums of this world couldn’t bind together and enact the kind of tyranny that they have succeeded in foisting upon us over the last two decades.

Under no circumstance should we apologize for using shame to defend ourselves. Society uses shame to disincentivize all sorts of behaviors including smoking, watching FOX News, telling racist jokes, and questioning global warming. We certainly shame people who won’t get in line with the homosexual agenda.

So what right do the shamers have to tell us we can’t shame them back?

Homosexuality was once the “love” that dare not speak its name—and if we try hard enough, it could be again. Ron Paul was right when he said society was better off when social pressure made these sexual deviants keep quiet.

Twitter NSFW? While Conservatives (Alone) Are Banned From Twitter, Porn Stars' XXX-Rated Photos Make Quite a Splash ("Anyone want to see me get blasted?")

Happy 4th All! Hope everyone is enjoying friends&family on this terrific holiday!! cum check out the fun we've been having..bit.ly/1GwbAom pic.twitter.com/sBG2ukWwty

— Wifey's World (@wifeysworld) July 4, 2017

You are being forewarned: most of the links — and some of the quoted captions — in the second half of this post are Not Safe For Work (NSFW) as, indeed, they take you to some pretty steamy images, and by that we mean less X-rated than XXX-rated or, if you prefer, more Penthouse caliber than Playboy grade (if you catch our drift).

Okay, I'll be honest with you, I was not, I am not, scandalized by the torrid pictures linked below.

Indeed, I'll be quite frank — doing research for a blog post can be fun at times!

So, listen, I promise, I am not too much of a puritan, far from it, and offhand, I don't have an aversion to eye candy, as I think that there are fights more important to engage in. (Update: Thanks for the Instapundit link.)

In other words, this post is not — repeat, not — a call for Stormy, Brandy, Wifey, and their ilk to have their their posts deleted and/or to be banned from Twitter, permanently or otherwise.

In case you're wondering, I spent more time laughing while "researching" this post than hand-wringing (fun double entendre here) like an old schoolmarm, foaming at the mouth (another fun double entendre), and collapsing on the fainting couch (yet more fun double entendring).

Oh hell, I'll confess: I'm pretty much against censorship. 
Plus: I did like the eye candy.

At the same time I have to admit to feeling admiration for the strength in the bloke at CPAC who told me that if he arrived home and found the latest issue of his wife's women's beauty and fashion magazine subscription in the mailbox sporting a scantily-clad model on the cover (was it Elle? it was one of those), he would tear it off, just like that, and throw it in the garbage.

Yeah, I don't disagree, offhand that sounds kind of extremist but when you think about it (or when his wife thinks about it), that might turn out to be a pretty good man to be married to (at least in one aspect of life).

Good morning all ! Have a wonderful day ! #milf #milfporn pic.twitter.com/2T1oR0IBxJ

— Rachel Steele (@RedMILFRachel) April 24, 2018

For me, what poses a problem — indeed, what does scandalize me — is the double standards of the left and of social networks like Twitter. Double standards like the fact that the groups of anti- or non-conservatives which neither Twitter nor the Twitter mobs (nor, for that matter, the members of the #metoo movement) show the least interest in keep growing. (In the case of porn stars, maybe the leftists think that they are not showing "hate" and "disrespect" but — ahem — "love" and — cough — "compassion"? Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it…)

So, we get conservatives such as Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, Sheriff Clarke, Mark Dice, and Breitbart reporters who see their accounts temporarily suspended, or conservatives like Stacy McCain and Milo Yiannopoulos, who see their accounts permanently banned, or conservatives like Kevin Williamson, who lose their job due to the Twitter mob. Stacy was told that his

account was suspended [by the “Trust and Safety Council”?] because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules), specifically our rules around participating in targeted abuse.

Meanwhile — and as the calls for censorship of haters of conservatives (on Twitter, on FaceBook, on Youtube, etc, etc, etc) keeps growing, with no end in sight — there are rumors that a Senator of the United States and presidential candidate, no less, was shadow-banned (appreciate the openness and the transparency that the left is always boasting about), while a conservative artist like Sabo has been Banished from Twitter Permanently. (Aren't artists supposed to be transgressive, and isn't their art supposed to challenge our boundaries? — or is it only the boundaries of conservatives and their dirty capitalist pig cousins of the decadent bourgeoisie?) Twitter itself says that

Examples of what we do not tolerate includes, but is not limited to behavior that harasses individuals or groups of people with:

• violent threats;

• wishes for the physical harm, death, or disease of individuals or groups;

All of this, we (and they) are told — Wikipedia has the full list of the accursed — because their attitudes, their ideas, and their posts are hateful and offensive to people — quite unlike BLM members, leftist comedians, Democrat politicians, Nation of Islam leaders, et al who, with foul language galore, call for the death of Republicans, make threats against or pose with fake severed heads of a president (only when he is a Republican), vilify their deceased wives, vilify and demonize America, or demand totalitarian one-party rule in the United States — oh, wasn't that last one approved of by Jack Dorsey, none other than, uh, Twitter's CEO?!.

Indeed, as Powerline's John Hinderaker writes, Facebook and Twitter have acquired a dangerous ability to suppress conservative speech:

I never actually go on Twitter, in part because Twitter is a cesspool. Profane language is common, I often read about calls by liberals for conservatives to be murdered, and outrageous hate speech like the tweets I wrote about here is common. If you are on the Left, anything goes.

 … I can’t think of any reason why a Twitter employee would question the appropriateness of the tweet by Clear Energy Alliance other than the fact that it promotes a video that criticizes “green” energy cronyism, a sacred cow of the Left.

Whereas the aforementioned Kevin Williamson goes on to say that, even in the mass media with (far) more than 140 (or 280) characters, a liberal news outlet like

New York magazine, in the words of its own editor, prefers a truncated, incomplete account, which is of course easier to distort and to misrepresent. Whatever that is, it isn’t journalism.

A subject to which I expect to be returning in the near future is the way in which social media functions as a tool for the prevention of discourse rather than an instrument enabling it. One of the lessons of the 20^th century is that authoritarian movements are happy to use the instruments of liberal democracy as weapons against liberal democracy …

 … social media is purportedly an instrument for the enabling of discourse that is in fact used to prevent actual exchange—and, unhappily, the same desire to preempt genuine dialogue can be found throughout the ordinary news media.

Let us end this first part with the take of The Declination's Thales on "a massive problem":

 … boilerplate Leftism … is seen, even by most Rightists, as the default position. It’s the ‘no thinking required’ setting. If you want to spout some kind of philosophical nonsense to make yourself look smart and cultured while your boob is falling out, you do Leftism. It’s easy rhetoric. Hey look, there’s a man with no fish. Saying “somebody should give him a fish, look he’s starving” is the easy rhetorical answer. Defeating this argument is simple with dialectic, but few people care about dialectic. It’s boring. Nerdy. Too many words. Better to just call somebody a bigot and move on.

Defeating Leftism with rhetoric is much more difficult. For not only must you use a convincing argument, that argument must be truthful and honest. The Leftist may use deceit without remorse, because to him the end justifies the means. You may not. Furthermore, Leftism itself is tailored toward sounding good. Rightism is full of unpleasant truths about human nature and the how things work in the real world. People don’t like to hear these things. …

 … It is the ease of this rhetoric, the reward for it, that really pushes people into Leftism.

 … It is the ease of this rhetoric that must be defeated more than the rhetoric itself.

Read the whole thing ™ (especially since Thales brings up the subject of "bikini girl[s]" and "superficial Instagram would-be porn stars"…)

Okay, enough of that.

Admit it:

you want to get to the naughty parts.

Let's do it!

If you're like me, you would imagine (insofar as you think about the subject at all) that, sure, a porn star on a public website like Twitter would have some titillating images, but some that aren't much worse (or much better, if you prefer) than the risqué bikini photos that supermodels (or teenagers!) regularly post on Instagram ("posing provocatively, generally with the juicy bits only barely covered enough to avoid attracting the attention of the censors," writes Thales), or, at worst (at best?), stronger images (full frontal nudity, sex acts, etc?) with perhaps the naughty parts blurred or concealed by a smiley or something…

How naïve you are!

What a riot you are!

No, not every (ex?)porn star is like Brenda James‏ whose page, at first glance, seems pretty tame and who even retweets Jordan B Peterson!

To be fair, the main purpose of most of the posts is to redirect visitors to links to porn websites (often for pay) — ain't it a business, after all? — but it turns out the actresses have Twitter images, GIFs, and trailers that show the worst of the worst (or the best of the best).

How does Twitter approach this?

We consider adult content to be any media that is pornographic and/or may be intended to cause sexual arousal. … Twitter allows some forms of graphic violence and/or adult content in Tweets marked as containing sensitive media.

The social media adds that 

Some examples include, but are not limited to, depictions of: full or partial nudity (including close-ups of genitals, buttocks, or breasts) … exceptions may be made for artistic, medical, health, or educational content.

Well, that's good to know. Be forewarned: I cannot embed what they consider "some forms of … adult content" here or this blog is likely to get banned

. They are eye-opening (yes, in every sense of the word) :) they leave little, if anything, to the imagination, and they include such things as money shots (if you don't know what that expression means, just click on one of the links below). In the list below, they go from relatively tame to progressively worse (or, depending on your take, progressively better).

Just remember not to worry: the good news is that neither you nor anyone else, as per Twitter's rules, will feel any kind of sexual arousal while peeking at the following NSFW photos. (Yeah, right…)

Warning: Did I mention that the best description for all the links below is "pornographic" and that they are NSFW?!

1. Wifey's World‏ @wifeysworld 
I've been a baaaaad girl this week..

First, we have Wifey's World, in which we learn that, uh, "Wifey" (or Kate) is Having a little fun on a Friday night or has been (Uh-oh) a NAUGHTY girl (or a a NAUGHTY NAUGHTY girl) or has taken on one of the biggest [I believe this word needs to be redacted] I've sever seen or meets up with the MasterBlaster (what a MESS) or has been blasted with one of the biggest [perhaps it would be better to redact this word as well] ever seen on film (I was floored by his 12 shot output!!). Of course, Wifey did something REALLY naughty in the latest update (I hope my Hubby understands…).

3. Rachel Steele‏ @RedMILFRachel
   

Warning: Did I remember to tell you to watch out before clicking on the links that follow, since they are NSFW?!

Then there are "artists" like Nicolette Shea and like Red MILF Rachel Steele‏ @RedMILFRachel (My Hot Taboo Clips, For Your Stroking Pleasure), whose posts go from least raunchy — via one X-rated post after another after another after another after another (with GIFs) after another (with really hot GIFs) — to outright XXX-rated, with X-rated GIFs that leave little to the imagination, including one in which the GIF "cuts" appear so close to one another in time that they look like a colorized Charlie Chaplin movie (okay, not really) from the silent era.

Oh, wait, I finally did manage to find a film — not GIFs, real film, and with sound! — or, rather, the trailer (NSFW!!!) for a film ("The most brilliant casting job ever," thanks to PornMegaGold) that as far as I can tell does show just about everything, but that's OK, y'know, because it comes with a warning, one which says "If you are not of legal age you must close this now."

So, listen, to be frank, I live in Europe and these images don't bother me per se. (Hey! Admit it! Wifey and Rachel and Brenda are hot!)

Plus, I am not in favor of censorship.

Again: I'm NOT asking that anybody get outraged, I am NOT asking that anybody complain to Twitter, I do NOT demand to have anyone's twitter handle cancelled, or any of their posts censored (that, after all, is what leftists — see (cough) Twitter — are wont to do)… 

What I AM asking is for Twitter to admit to their double standards — the website's record in the matter is egregious enough without the addition of the porn examples, which for the record I consider little more than a distraction — or to at least stop (ab)using them. Once and for all…

Update: The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Excerpt: • Stormy Daniels may be a porn star while Sarah Huckabee is a government spokesperson, but Stormy is a dreamer, or on the side of the dreamers (or certainly not actively against the dreamers), while Sarah is one of the deplorables. (Indeed, even adult actors are not in the same class as deplorables, as can be evidenced on Twitter …)

Boilerplate Leftism is the default position, the ‘no thinking required’ setting; It is the ease of this rhetoric that must be defeated more than the rhetoric itself

Excellent article by The Declination's Thales (obrigado para Sarah Hoyt) on "a massive problem":

 … boilerplate Leftism … is seen, even by most Rightists, as the default position. It’s the ‘no thinking required’ setting. If you want to spout some kind of philosophical nonsense to make yourself look smart and cultured while your boob is falling out, you do Leftism. It’s easy rhetoric. Hey look, there’s a man with no fish. Saying “somebody should give him a fish, look he’s starving” is the easy rhetorical answer. Defeating this argument is simple with dialectic, but few people care about dialectic. It’s boring. Nerdy. Too many words. Better to just call somebody a bigot and move on.

Defeating Leftism with rhetoric is much more difficult. For not only must you use a convincing argument, that argument must be truthful and honest. The Leftist may use deceit without remorse, because to him the end justifies the means. You may not. Furthermore, Leftism itself is tailored toward sounding good. Rightism is full of unpleasant truths about human nature and the how things work in the real world. People don’t like to hear these things. …

 … This means superficial Instagram would-be porn stars are going to spout Leftism. It requires minimal intellectual investment. And in order to please these attention-seekers, hordes of thirsty men will likewise spout Leftism.

… Delusional rhetoric is the centerpiece of Leftist thought. These people believe – or at least act like they believe – that we live in the most oppressive, terrible society ever, when it is far closer to the exact opposite. If a more tolerant society has existed, it certainly wasn’t for very long. … the point is, the oppression they crave, the oppression they rant about (not the contradiction it first seems) does not exist.

 … Just notice how much society rewards people who claim oppression. It’s actually a benefit. People compete and jockey for oppression points, because the more you have, the more attention you get.

 … It’s all mass delusion, but it’s a strange sort of self-reinforcing mass delusion. It’s like a brain virus, and once you have it, obtaining a cure is exceedingly difficult – because you have to realize that you are sick in the first place, something Leftism explicitly tries to avoid. Don’t question the narrative heretic… er… I mean racist. If there is any sort of religious dictatorship threatening to micromanage every facet of our lives, it’s coming from the Left, not the Christian Right. Of course, their dictatorship doesn’t make women wear strange red bonnets, but it does make you sign a consent form to have sex, so there’s that. The boob on Instagram is free, though.

 … It is the ease of this rhetoric, the reward for it, that really pushes people into Leftism. Oh, sure, there will always be welfare queens and hardcore Marxists who spout this crap, but the regular Joe is responding to a need to be accepted. The middle manager trying to angle for promotion to the upper tier is saying what he thinks people want him to say. And yes, even the flaky Instagram girl is just responding to what will get her the most likes and comments.

 … It is the ease of this rhetoric that must be defeated more than the rhetoric itself. Even if a Milo or Ben Shapiro gets in a slick comeback; even if Thomas Sowell comes to the party armed with every economic statistic known to man and has them on immediate tap, it won’t be enough. Such victories are short-lived, and the culture at large goes back to ‘if you want upvotes, talk about Islamophobia!’ Rightists are fighting an enormous cultural current, and are doing so admirably. But it is the current itself that must be changed.

The bikini girl on Instagram should be at least as likely to talk about taxation as theft as she is to take rhetorical dumps on Donald Trump. Only then will the rhetorical battle be on level ground.

Hammers & Nails? If all you have is discourse, every party to any round of talks looks like Socrates

A Herblock cartoon in the International Herald Tribune from November 11, 1998, has Iraq and Serbia's bloodthirsty leaders laughing at the Western countries' propensity for talks. Of course, both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević would eventually be taken out, albeit after many years (in Milosevic's case, only after half a dozen years of war in Kosovo, and in Saddam's case, it could easily be argued, only because of the 9-11 attacks), so the Herbert Block cartoon cannot be said to be far from wrong.

In any case, doesn't it seem that the attitude is something that the Kims of North Korea have been doing for decades, right up until the arrival in the White House of a fellow by the name of Donald Trump?

Based on an Abraham Maslow thought, an old phrase regularly brandished by the left's pacifists against the Pentagon and its conservative backers goes like this:

"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." 

 Well, if all you have is discourse and debate, every party to any round of talks looks like Socrates.

What Matter Human Rights When Faced with Chinese Contracts with the West?

As Emmanuel Macron visited China a few months ago, Le Monde's Plantu let it be known that he did not seem too impressed with the French government's legendary devotion to human rights in the face of French-Chinese contracts…

George Bush of Iraq, Meet Little Trump of Syria…

Imitation may indeed be the highest form of flattery, 

reports Hollie McKay from the Syrian town of Kobane,

but one Syrian-Kurdish father here has taken that concept to a whole new level.

“My son is 'Trump,'” Rezgar Ramadan, 40, a pharmacy drug representative, proudly told Fox News this week. “He likes his name so much, everywhere we go people always ask us, ‘How is little Trump?’”

Ramadan said he thought of renaming the boy, originally named Mustafa, back in 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidential election.

 … The boy has become a celebrity of sorts in the village of Kobane, in the nation's north, his dad said. "Everyone knows him now. I am teaching him about America. He is already so smart, and wants to lead his brother and sister.”
 
 … The couple are also parents to 8-year-old twins  Muhammed and Rula, and are planning to expand their family in the very near future. The names are already picked out.

“If it's a boy, it will be 'Rex Tillerson,'” Ramadan declared. “And if it a girl, she will be 'Nikki Haley.'”

“I like Rex Tillerson because I like his character,” Ramadan said, unfazed by the fact that Tillerson had recently lost his job as U.S. secretary of state. “And Nikki Haley fights a lot for the human rights, and speaking out against Russia, who have been committing a lot of crimes here in Syria.”

Naming children after foreign leaders is no longer so unusual in parts of the Middle East. Some supporters of the Syrian regime have named their babies “Putin,” in honor of the Russian president. And "Bush" became a popular name after the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq under the administration of George W. Bush.

Ramadan insisted he hasn’t received any backlash over his decision to name his son after the U.S. president. …

Related: On July 11, George Bush turns 15 years old…
Related: There's a new George Bush in Baghdad,
six weeks old and screaming in a crib
• Nadia Jergis Mohammed, 34, … told Associated Press Television News:

"I tell you all Iraqis hated Saddam's regime. It was only George Bush who liberated us, without him it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't done it the sons of Saddam would have ruled us for years. He saved us from Saddam and that's why we named our son after him"

During the CPAC Convention, a Conservative in Europe Is Interviewed by Lars Larson from Radio Row

On the Lars Larson show during the CPAC get-together, write Carl Sundberg and Donovan Sargent,

Lars talks with ex-pat Erik Svane who emigrated to France, Erik tells us what conservativism is like in Europe and how some things are the same but some are very, very different.

Among other places, the Lars Larson interview appeared on FM News KXL and on iHeart Radio.
 

It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just ain’t so

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong 

write Peter Wood and David Randall in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled How Bad Is the Government’s Science? (thanks to Instapundit).

John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles.

 … It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so.

 … The chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy data. If a researcher looks long enough, he can turn any fluke correlation into a seemingly positive result. But other factors compound the problem: Scientists can make arbitrary decisions about research techniques, even changing procedures partway through an experiment. They are susceptible to groupthink and aren’t as skeptical of results that fit their biases. Negative results typically go into the file drawer. Exciting new findings are a route to tenure and fame, and there’s little reward for replication studies.

 … A deeper issue is that the irreproducibility crisis has remained largely invisible to the general public and policy makers. That’s a problem given how often the government relies on supposed scientific findings to inform its decisions. Every year the U.S. adds more laws and regulations that could be based on nothing more than statistical manipulations.

All government agencies should review the scientific justifications for their policies and regulations to ensure they meet strict reproducibility standards. The economics research that steers decisions at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department needs to be rechecked. The social psychology that informs education policy could be entirely irreproducible. The whole discipline of climate science is a farrago of unreliable statistics, arbitrary research techniques and politicized groupthink.

Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. Mr. Randall is the NAS’s director of research and a co-author of its new report, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.”

"Do you realize I have not done a movie in 5 to 6 years? Why? Because I was totally blackballed by the … liberals in Hollywood," R Lee Ermey alleged; "They can destroy you. They're hateful people"

Samuel Chamberlain of Fox News has written the obituary of R. Lee Ermey, the former Marine Corps drill instructor known to millions of moviegoers as the sadistic Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket". Among other things we learn of the man who was 74:

An outspoken conservative, Ermey spoke to Fox News in 2016 about being "blackballed" from Hollywood over his political views.

"I've had a very fruitful career. I've done over 70 feature films," he said. "I've done over 200 episodes of [Outdoor Channel series 'GunnyTime']... and then [Hollywood] found out that I'm a conservative."

Actually, he corrected, "I'm an Independent, but I said something bad about the president. I had something unsavory to say about the president's administration, and even though I did vote for him the first time around, I was blackballed."

Ermey, who was an NRA board member, said at the time that his association with the organization and his disapproval of President Obama cost him acting jobs.

"Do you realize I have not done a movie in five to six years? Why? Because I was totally blackballed by the ... liberals in Hollywood," he alleged. "They can destroy you. They're hateful people [who] don't just not like you, they want to take away your livelihood ... that's why I live up in the desert on a dirt road ... I don't have to put up with their crap."

New Paris Tour Company Offers Guided Tours Fitted to Your Wishes and Desires

 … sharing my knowledge and love of Paris is second-nature to me

writes an expatriate American corporate trainer who, after a decade in the City of Light, has taken the leap from trainer to tour guide through her Paris Personally company, which personalizes tours to your wishes and desires (see a sample of Tour Ideas). Gina Hunt continues:

 … if you've decided to hire someone to help you get the most out of your trip, then you're not just looking for a cookie-cutter tour. You're looking to see Paris in a personal way. You're looking to make your experience of Paris unique and memorable. That's why you're looking for Paris Personally.

 … because I know how to personalize your experience, you'll enjoy Paris in a unique and memorable way. I'm always professional, always focused on helping you have a great time, and I speak fluent French, bien sûr!

FAQ 

Contact Ms. Hunt at gina@paris-personally.com or through her contact page to see a sample itinerary and learn more details of how Paris Personally's small group trips work.

Racism in Canada: Swahili Cultural Appropriation with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra

This is your chance to sing in Swahili!

Horrible! A despicable racist named Roger Whittaker engages in Swahili cultural appropriation with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. And the appallingly un-woke members of the audience at the Jubilee Auditorium seem to be enjoying it…

While Calling Assad a "Gas Killing Animal", Was Trump Also Referring, Obliquely, to Putin the Poisoner?

Instapundit's Stephen Green links to Mark Hodge and James Beal's Sun story, which starts out thus:

DONALD Trump has told Russia to "get ready" for American "smart" missiles heading to Syria while blasting Putin for partnering with "Gas Killing Animal" Bashar Assad.

I can't help associating Gas with Poison — two largely invisible killers — and wondering whether, in the same breath, the "Republican firebrand" isn't referring to, and condemning, Putin's poisoning of a Russian spy and his daughter in the UK.

A foreigner who knew John Bolton during the Bush administration writes to the FT: he is a rational agent who is perfectly capable of engaging in constructive dialogue

So many people, both inside and outside the United States, have reacted with horror at the nomination of John Bolton to the upper echelons of U.S. power that the Armenian who served as his country's permanent representative to the UN during the time of the Bush administration, Armen Martirosyan, felt the need to write to the Financial Times to set things straight.

Since U.S. president Donald Trump announced John Bolton as his next national security adviser, the prospect of “possibly Washington’s most aggressive hawk”, as he was described by [the Financial Times’s] Simon Kuper (“Don’t get distracted. John Bolton is a huge threat,” April 7), having a central role in the formulation of American foreign policy has become a cause for foreboding apprehension for many.

In 2005, as the then permanent representative of Armenia to the UN, I was a first-hand witness to then U.S. ambassador Bolton’s aggressive campaign for an anti-Iranian resolution at the UN General Assembly. Armenia’s position on the Iran vote did not meet American expectations, so the U.S. mission contacted us with an urgent request for an appointment with Mr. Bolton.

It was abundantly clear that Mr. Bolton was not ready to take no for an answer, and this peculiar situation called for unorthodox solutions. After a brief welcome, to my guest’s utter surprise I unveiled a map of Armenia and rolled it out over my desk.

With this visual aid, I impressed on him the relevant regional complexities facing my country and thus justified our position on the resolution. Before his departure, Mr. Bolton accepted a sip of Winston Churchill’s favourite Armenian brandy, Ararat, as a seal of our new understanding.

My advice to all potential interlocutors is to treat Mr. Bolton as a rational agent who is perfectly capable of engaging in constructive dialogue and adjusting positions based on new-found insights.

Armen Martirosyan

Ambassador of Armenia to India

New Delhi

Be sure to subscribe to the Financial Times. It is worth it, for the daily is full of treasures like this one…

Voir aussi l'article de Philippe Gélie dans Le Figaro…

Peu d'hommes sont précédés d'une réputation aussi sulfureuse que lui - patiemment bâtie et totalement assumée.

Did the CIA and the FBI become opposition research shops for the Obama White House and the Hillary campaign?

The left used to get very worked up about the CIA’s interference in foreign elections.

The American Spectator's George Neumayr has penned what is possibly the best single article on the 2016 election scandal (thanks to Instapundit), the alleged Trump Russia collusion and the real wrongdoing that has been (deliberately) hidden by the noise covering that alleged scandal.

Liberals [used to] quote solemnly the work of Philip Agee, a CIA turncoat who wrote articles and books about the agency’s manipulation of this or that foreign election. But these days ACLU-style liberals shrug at the meddling of John Brennan’s CIA in the 2016 American election, mischief that the FBI is still trying to conceal.

It was reported recently that the FBI refuses to show Congressman Devin Nunes an unredacted copy of the origination document that triggered the probe into the Trump campaign. What is the FBI hiding? Paradoxically, nothing — that is, no classified information showing collusion between Trump and Russia. The FBI is simply trying to hide the embarrassingly partisan origins of its spying on the Trump campaign.

Were the redactions covering material harmful to Trump, that material would have been leaked by now. So the redactions can only be concealing the fingerprints of Hillary’s partisans in the Obama administration. The FBI will eventually have to fess up to the politicization to which it succumbed — that the most virulent Hillary partisan imaginable, John Brennan, had put pressure on FBI officials to start the probe, that a Trump hater, Peter Strzok, formally opened up the probe, that the smears of a paid opposition researcher for Hillary, Christopher Steele, contributed to the probe, that scandalous “intelligence-sharing” between Brennan and foreign intelligence agencies shaped the probe, and that FBI officials suspected the probe was unfounded but pursued it anyways at the insistence of Obama officials.

The FBI says it is redacting “sensitive information.” That’s true in an ironic sense: the FBI is very sensitive about the information, in that it illuminates the agency’s transformation into an opposition research shop for the Hillary campaign. Take her partisans out of the picture and the probe would never have started.

In an attempt to sanitize the probe, the media has attributed its origin to a drunken conversation between an Aussie diplomat and a minor Trump campaign volunteer. But that’s a joke. Maybe the FBI threw that into the pot at the last minute, but John Brennan had been stirring it for months before then. As Brennan told Congress, “we were uncovering information intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.” Notice his use of “we” in that statement. By “we,” Brennan meant his retinue of Hillary partisans at the CIA who had been shaking foreign intelligence agencies down for any dirt on Trump.

The British intelligence, in cahoots with Brennan and Christopher Steele (who was on Hillary’s payroll), figured largely into this mischief. In all likelihood it will come out that the “information” British intelligence shared with Brennan was just recycled Steele material. The “allies tipped us off to Trump-Russian collusion” storyline is a sham, designed to distract attention from a chain of Hillary partisans who in the thick of a campaign were circulating smears among themselves and calling it “intelligence sharing.”

It was the blinding, viscerally personal hatred of Brennan for Trump, perhaps more than anything else, that turned all those phony “tips” into a counterintelligence probe. In the grip of that kind of feverish antipathy, combined with his desire to continue as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan could convince himself of any Trump monstrosity and made it his mission to prod the FBI into harassing him.

 … But it wasn’t enough for Brennan to push the FBI investigation. He also had to publicize it, which he achieved through another person in Christopher Steele’s orbit, Senator Harry Reid, whose Super PAC, as the Daily Caller reports, was run by the very Hillary lawyer who hired Steele’s services. Brennan briefed Reid on the beginnings of the FBI investigation he instigated, knowing that Reid would leak the contents of the briefing to the press.

About this astounding meddling in an election by a CIA director, the Philip Agees of the left have fallen completely silent. But that makes sense. After all, how can old radicals inveigh against the CIA as a “wilderness of mirrors” when it is John Brennan’s reflection in it?

A fantasy philosophy 2,000 years old: the belief one can discern how things really are by means of that inner light allowing one to deny actuality and proceed according to fantasy

A Hebrew prophet once asked the rhetorical question: “Can a leopard change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin?” Much later, another prophet asked, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”

Fay Voshell goes back a couple of thousand of years (thanks to Instapundit) to explain the modern left.

The idea [of the prophets] was that there are certain realities that humans cannot change by a mere exercise of will.

Even the beasts instinctively accept how they are made. But the prophets’ common-sense observations about the unchanging nature of material realities has in our day been thrown aside in exchange for a fantasy philosophy that is akin to alchemists’ dream that if we only had secret means to do so, we could change lead into gold.

The fantasy philosophy that insists human will combined with spiritual power can defy and change material reality is called Gnosticism. Gnosticism is basically a pessimistic belief, as it tries to repudiate the existence of the whole universe, which is seen as irretrievably corrupt. Devotees of Gnosticism crave being free from the curse of all things material and believe they may be released from the curse of this wretched world by a secret, inner spiritual knowledge accessible only by themselves. 

Even Christianity, which celebrates the material world as still good, though fallen, has through syncretic thinking been afflicted with the idea that the human spirit can by a sheer act of will overcome material reality, including the built in limitations of the human body and its sensual desires.

 … Eating only the Host [the daily Eucharistic wafer] was seen as an exercise in achieving a pure spirituality that eliminated or at least utterly transcended the fleshly appetites, including sensuality. Spirit over matter was to prevail. By an act of will, one could overcome the reality of the sinful body.

The ancient Gnostic idea that one can by an act of will repudiate material realities has been resurrected time and again, resurfacing to be part of the current liberal political ethos.

Such is the state of affairs in Gnostic leftist political thought that it is believed quite possible to declare one’s self by fiat to be sex opposite to the one you were born as. If you are a man who feels like a woman, all you have to do is to declare yourself to be a woman.

This denial of a reality that is foundational to all civilizations is being made into law in Europe and in America, with the deleterious consequences still to be completely realized.

As George Weigel notes in his recent National Affairs article entitled “Reality and Public Policy,” in 2007, Spain's Zapatero government enacted legislation allowing men to change themselves into women and women into men by simply declaring one’s newly recognized sex, with or without surgical alterations. The new man or woman could then be issued new national identity card reflecting the gender of choice. Weigel concludes, “It is hard to imagine a more explicit expression of personal willfulness overpowering natural givenness.”

In other words, reality be damned. The purely good will and spirit within the individual is to prevail over common sense and human tradition since time immemorial. I may look like a woman and actually be a biological woman, but if I decide I’m a man, who are you to question my inner light? Who are you to resist my truth about myself? As millions of American children are taught every day, “You can be anything you choose to be.”

As Weigel notes:

“[…]within a very short span of time, less than two generations, two aspects of the human condition that had been understood for millennia to be the very quintessence of givenness -- maleness and femaleness -- were no longer taken to be given at all. "Male" and "female" were not The Way Things Are. "Male" and "female" were "cultural constructs," usually manipulated by those in power for purposes of domination (Gnosticism thus adding a soupçon of Marxism to its ideology of plasticity).

“Gnostic anthropology -- the Gnostic view of the human person and the human condition -- is the antithesis of the Biblical view of men and women and their possibilities, which has long been one of the foundation stones of the Western civilizational project.” 

Weigel points out that the new Gnosticism engendered by the sexual revolution not only ignores and warps the differences between men and women, but it also warps the rest of politics:

“[…]if people are prepared to insist as a matter of fundamental civil rights) the unreal claim that marriage can encompass two men or two women, why should those same people not believe that America can continue to run trillion-dollar deficits with impunity? Or that the centralization and vast regulatory apparatus to be created by Obamacare will not inevitably lead to the rationing of end-of-life care? Or that the federal budget deficit has primarily to do with the wealthy not paying ‘their fair share’ ”? 

Seeing matters through the lens of Gnosticism’s sure inner light gives infinite plasticity to foreign affairs, as the belief one can discern how things really are by means of that inner light means one can deny actuality and proceed according to fantasy. For instance, liberal Gnostics can see behind the spittle-inducing statements of jihadists and know the Islamists are actually protesting poverty rather than really meaning to kill Jews and eliminate the nation of Israel. Because of their secret knowledge about the true conditions of humanity and the remedies for ill, Gnostics can see behind Iranians’ leaders desire to get rid of the “Great Satan” in order to issue in the reign of the 12th imam and see that at heart, radical Muslims truly believe in peace for all mankind.

Liberal Gnostics also can see clearly that the mass murders of American citizens by lone gunmen are really the fault of the NRA’s advocacy of gun ownership. They discern with inner clarity that the solution to violence is not only to disarm the American populace but to ensure none of our kids even so much as point a finger at anyone and say, “Bang; bang. You’re dead.” In brief, if your child doesn’t even think violent thoughts, evil will never happen.

Leftist Gnostics can also discern that anything bad that happens in the Obama administration is not really his fault. The bad seeds now producing bitter fruit were planted during the administration of G.W. Bush. The illogical conclusion: Nothing is ever Obama’s responsibility, much less his fault.

The fact some guy just murdered his wife and should be punished is trumped by Gnostic prophetic musings about the criminal’s past and pleasant dreams about rehabilitating him and his society in the future. The victim whose blood cries out for justice in the here and now is not as important as political augury extending back into the past to discern how things got this way as well as looking forward into the future to determine how things will change for the better. The present moment, the present reality is entirely insignificant. The murder is significant only for what it represents. It is symbolic, not real.

In sum, for the Gnostic Left, the reality of bad or even criminal behavior is trumped by the idea of how things were and how they ought to be, not how they are in the here and now.

But the greatest Gnostic denial of all is the denial of the almost limitless capacity for evil that lies within the human heart. In laying the blame on material reality as being inherently corrupt and in dreaming of fantastical utopias of the future, Gnostics fail to see that their mystical inner word of discernment can be as corrupted as anything actually occurring within the material world. That clear, spiritual inner voice is not necessarily pure as driven snow. It, too, has unpleasant realities and odious capacities. A soul can smell worse than the body.

As Weigel writes,

“Reality may be, and often is, unpleasant. But policies rooted in a failure to grasp reality are dangerous, and too often deadly. […] A culture convinced that everything is malleable and that there are no givens in personal or public life is not a culture likely to sustain serious debates about serious public-policy options.”

 … Ultimately, Gnosticism in all its forms, including current liberal political thought, owes its basis to the Devil’s lie to all humans: “You shall be as gods.” The lure of having infallible inner knowledge of how things really are combined with the mystical misconception that the will to power is all that matters, ignores not only material reality, but the reality of the fact that both good and evil speak to the human heart.

In the end, Gnostics’ belief that the still, small voice within can trump reality puts politics, national and international, on the road to perdition.