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Hey, ya want ya some Medicare for All? Well, a self-described "left wing liberal" physician who worked for several years in one of the federally-funded test locations says to do this:

OK, actually, she wrote this in I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here's Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.:

So, I put my head down. I shut my mouth. I stopped suggesting improvements or changes that might make the system more efficient and improve patient care. I humbled myself before my managers and administrators, saying “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am.”

This technique worked like a charm. No one screamed at me anymore. I even got a large raise.

But inside I seethed. My blood pressure spiked. My neck ached. I was anxious and depressed.

The day that my government contract expired was one of the happiest days of my life. I was free. Never again would I sell myself into indentured servitude—not to the government or any other agency.

Because doctors bail when they become serfs of the state. Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage -- If only someone had warned them.

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

But in the last six years, 585 surgical practices have closed down, affecting 1.9 million patients. Last year alone, 138 surgery facilities closed their doors, up from 18 in 2013.

But it's okay, comrades, because fairness!

Speaking of socialism, what this country needs is to make pencil manufacturing great again! Elizabeth Warren's Pitch for 'Economic Patriotism' Is Full of Intellectual Dishonesty and Economic Fallacies

"There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves 'American,' but face it: they have no loyalty or allegiance to America," she says in the video.

As proof, Warren points to the "famous no. 2 pencil," which is mostly manufactured in Mexico and China. Her video doesn't make clear why pencils should have to be made in America—or why that lack of good, pencil-making jobs in America is a problem.

That Warren chose to use pencils to illustrate the supposed need for "economic patriotism" is darkly hilarious to anyone familiar with "I, Pencil," Leonard Read's 1958 parable about the merits of free markets and comparative advantage. Reed's lesson is that no one on the planet has the means or knowledge to make an item as mundane and ubiquitous as a simple pencil. A pencil requires wood, graphite, brass, and rubber, but each component part is the result of supply chains that might stretch around the world—from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the mines of Mexico to the factories of Indonesia.

But what does that have to do with election sound biting? We need a pencil factory here, dang it! And Warren is going to build that!

First thing we do is keep all the poor people poor. If you were a national leader and decided to make sure that poor people stayed that way, what would you do? Well, this, of course: 7 Things I'd Do if I Wanted to Keep Poor People Poor

First on the list? Socialism, baby! Because remember:

Speaking of destruction of the nuclear American family, The tragic — and overlooked — fallout from the ’60s sexual revolution.

The fracturing of the post-1960s family and the flight to collective identities have not only been occurring at the same time. As the timeline and other evidence show, they cannot be understood apart from one another.

Identity politics is also a product of the revolution in another way. Whether one looks left or right, to politics or culture, the question, “Who am I?” has become the most frantic of our time. Traditionally, that question has been answered at least in part via primordial relations: I am a sister, a daughter, a cousin, a mother, a grandmother.

When answers that revert to family identity are more attenuated than ever before, “Who am I?” gets answered in a different way. 

White privilege check!

But s'okay because the Obamas Strike Blow for Economic Justice, Donate Millions in Exchange for Massive Beachfront Estate: Former president conquers ‘wealth anxiety.’ 

What a relief, because for awhile there I was afraid that America was too racist for the Obamas to move to Martha's Vineyard. But I was wrong!

What are the seven deadly sins of progressivism? PEWSLAG, of course.

Long ago, there was a mnemonic for the seven deadly sins, PEWSLAG. In order, it meant Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony.  So common have the elements of PEWSLAG become in our time that they can no longer be considered as ‘The 7 Deadly Sins,” but rather as the PPAF, The Progressive Platform for America’s Future.

Let’s review the PPAF in greater detail:

Explained in detailed by the inimitable Gerard Vanderleun, who was a founding member of the SDS at UC-Berkeley back on the 60s and so knows what he is talking about.

Finally, some Truth here by the late Nabeel Qureshi.

The darkness revealed

"Medicare for All" - as goes the UK, so will go USA

Want to know what medical care will be like if we get so-called Medicare for All (MFA) that Democrats are proposing? Well, here ya go: "Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage."

Why? Because MFA's costs are so incredibly high that massive tax raises will be enacted in the vain hope they will pay for it. They won't, but the taxes will still be levied. And as goes the UK will go the USA:

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

The respected Financial Times explains:

An investigation [in March] by the Financial Times found widespread evidence of consultants refusing to take on extra work to clear patient backlogs fearing extra pay would bust tax allowances on their pensions contributions, triggering five-figure tax bills. …

[T]he Department of Health conceded that around 3,500 consultants and GPs had retired early over the past three years due to pension tax charges.

The tax system is so labyrinthine that some doctors discover they actually have negative income flows - it costs them more out of pocket to stay in  practice than to leave it.

Doctors respond to these perverse incentives the same way many rational actors would: by closing up shop. All parties agree the UK’s progressive tax policy triggered this cascading medical shortage.

But fairness, comrades! Onward to the future!

Why Islam is winning in the West

Briton Jacob Williams explains why he wanted to become a Christian while a student at Oxford but rejected it and converted to Islam instead.

I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.

But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t ­bargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.

Read the whole thing. And weep.

New Zealand decides to raise its murder rate

Time mag: New Zealand Has Passed Sweeping Gun Laws Banning Most Semi-Automatic Weapons

(WELLINGTON, New Zealand) — New Zealand’s Parliament on Wednesday passed sweeping gun laws that outlaw military style weapons, less than a month after mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch left 50 people dead and dozens wounded.

A bill outlawing most automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banning components that modify existing weapons was passed by a vote of 119 to 1 in the House of Representatives after an accelerated process of debate and public submission.

The bill needs only the approval of New Zealand’s governor general, a formality, before becoming law on Friday.

Britain has probably the strongest anti-gun laws in the world. The result? A year ago, London's murder rate climbed higher than New York City's.

LONDON — When British police launched a murder investigation Tuesday into the shooting death of a 17-year-old girl it pushed the homicide rate in Britain's capital to a new, troubling milestone: London's murder rate surpassed New York City's for the first time.

London tallied 15 murders in February and 22 in March, slightly more than New York City for the same two months, which logged 14 in February and 21 in March, according to murder rate statistics provided to USA TODAY by London's Metropolitan Police and the New York Police Department.

As for 2019, The Sun reports,

There were 132 murders in the capital in 2018.

The total number of London murders, excluding victims of terrorism, has shot up by 38 per cent since 2014.

It has been well documented in Britain that knife assaults and murders have risen rapidly, 20 knife murders in London alone this year through April 3. In fact, London police set up an amnesty box where anyone could drop a knife. Criminals, being, well, criminals, emptied the box, taking the knives because, hey, free knives!

I stoutly maintain that disarming the general public, who are peaceful and law abiding to a super-super-majority, thinking it will reduce weapons crimes, makes no more sense than making me give up my car because a criminal crashed a stolen car.

Royal Wedding Classics

One supposes that these are musical selections used in one or another royal weddings in Britain or the other surviving European monarchies. Still, some really great selections here.

Fake News: London gun crime way up

I call Fake News on this BBC report:

Gun crime in London increases by 42%

That is not possible because in England it is illegal for anyone but government to possess a firearm, except for extremely limited exclusions. And everyone who understands how criminals think knows that if it is illegal for them to possess a firearm, they won't possess one, because it's the law.

Here is the Fake News report:

Gun crime offences in London surged by 42% in the last year, according to official statistics. 

The Met Police's figures showed there were 2,544 gun crime offences from April 2016 to April 2017 compared to 1,793 offences from 2015 until 2016. 

Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017.The Met said although crime rates were rising they remained at a much lower level than five years ago. 

Scotland Yard registered annual rises across a number of serious offence categories in the past 12 months, following several years of falls. 

The total number of offences during the 2016 to 2017 financial year was 774,737, an increase of 4% from the previous year when total offences stood at 740,933.

Knife crime offences that resulted in an injury also increased, by 21% to 4,415 from 2016 to 2017, compared to 3,663 offences the year before.

See, that's ridiculous! If evil-doers can't get a gun - and they can't, because guns are illegal in England - it is foolish to think they will use some other weapon, such as a knife, to commit crimes. What kind of fools does BBC think we are to fall for false reporting like that?

Unless we consider, of course, "complex social reasons." Of course.

Seven-year-old to take English throne as absolute monarch

It seems a seven-year-old English girl named Matilda has recovered King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, from the bottom of Dozmary Pool, where Arthur had it thrown into the waiting hands of the Lady of the Lake after he was mortally wounded at the battle of Camlann.

According to Britain's Daily Mail,

Matilda Jones was wading through water waist-deep at Dozmary Pool when she stumbled across the blade underwater.

According to local folklore, Dozmary Pool is the spot where King Arthur returned Excalibur after being fatally wounded in the Battle of Camlann.

It is said to have been accepted by the Lady of the Lake, whose arm mysteriously rose from the water to received the fabled blade. 

Of course, the discovery means that Matilda can lay immediate claim to the British crown since the Arthur legend has always held that the sword would someday be restored to the possession of Arthur's only rightful successor.

Other sources reported that when Matilda was asked what the first thing was she would do after taking the crown, she answered, "Give free ice cream to everyone!" Then, after a long pause, she continued, "And behead William and Harry as an inspiration to the others of Elizabeth's family not to get any bright ideas."

Witness of Diana's fatal crash speaks after 20 years

The UK's Mirror: Lawyer who saw Diana's death crash breaks 20-year silence to claim "other forces" were behind accident

Stanlee Culbreath is speaking out for the first time in two decades to question whether the Princess of Wales could have lived if French emergency services had acted faster

The car in which Princess Diana suffered fatal injuries in is removed from the tunnel where it wrecked
in 1997. Crash witness Stanlee Culbreath says that the car was mainly intact after it crashed. 

A lot of what he says was talked about at the time - namely why it took so long for rescue crews to get there, why they waited so long to evacuate Diana once they arrived, why they later said they had to "stabilize" her before taking her to hospital, when in the US, every ambulance crew knows that there is no better treatment for a crash victim than immediate evacuation to an ER.

Mr Culbreath said he was also sceptical about the delay in getting Diana out of the wreckage and claimed the door on her side could have been opened. He said: “I thought the car was in a condition where you could open the door.

“I didn’t feel there was enough damage to the car that you couldn’t open the back door – and the front door was already open.

“So why couldn’t you go through that door?

“When the car eventually came out of the tunnel on a lorry it was as big as a pancake, but when I saw it, one side wasn’t. It was the side the Princess was on. I later learned the ‘jaws of life’ were used. Why didn’t they just open the door.

“She wasn’t dead, she was talking.”

 Even stipulating that Culbreath's account is accurate, there will never be another inquiry. Mysteries of Diana's death will always remain so.

Single Payer Death Panels are Real

This child has been sentenced to die by
single-payer healthcare bureaucrats.
Because fairness, comrades!

In Britain, Connie Yates and Chris Gard have a 10-month old baby who was born with brain damage and a rare genetic condition called mitochondrial depletion condition. The condition damages muscles and organs so greatly that the child can breathe only with a ventilator.

Britain's National Health Service - aka the country's single-payer healthcare system - have pronounced all treatments prospectively futile and fruitless, so the NHS will not authorize any treatment. The infant's condition, absent the ventilator, is terminal.

So the parents decided to take the child to America for a therapy trial treatment. Needless to say, the bureaucrats running the NHS could not let their judgment be questioned, so they denied the request, dismissing the American treatment as merely "experimental."

(You and I will wonder why on earth a family need the government's permission to leave the country, no matter the child's medical condition, but remember, Britain is not a country of liberty but of statist domination.)

As the Daily Mail reported:

Chris Gard, 32, and Connie Yates, 31, wanted to take their 10-month-old son - who suffers from a rare genetic condition and has brain damage - to the US to undergo a therapy trial.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, where Charlie is being cared for, said they wanted him to be able to 'die with dignity'.  

But the couple, from Bedfont, west London, raised almost £1.4million so they could take their son to America but a series of courts ruled in favour of the British doctors. ...

It comes after specialists at Great Ormond Street said therapy in the US is experimental and will not help and added that life support should stop.

And after losing legal battles in the UK, Charlie's parents were hoping judges in Strasbourg, France, would come to their aid.

But on Tuesday afternoon, the ECHR rejected a last-ditch plea and their 'final' decision means the baby's life support machine will be switched off.

The ECHR announced the application to the court by the parents was 'inadmissible' and added that their decision was 'final'.

So the parents got tied up in legalistic red tape and then were told, basically, that they had no standing to appeal to the European Commission on Human Rights.

But wait! as they say on TV. There's more! Having lost every avenue of appeal, Chris and Connie asked simply that they be allowed to take Charlie home to die there. And the Daily Mail covered that, too:

Devastated parents of Charlie Gard spend their last night with their baby and blast 'heartless' doctors for refusing to let them take him home to die before they turn off his life support later today

Charlie Gard's bereft parents have blasted his 'heartless' doctors who have refused to let him come home to die, MailOnline can reveal today.

Connie Yates and Chris Gard have been told by Great Ormond Street their son's life support will be switched off later today but he cannot leave the ward.

The couple's 'final wish' for Charlie has been blocked and his mother Connie said yesterday in a video for MailOnline: 'We promised our little boy every single day that we would take him home'. 

Mr Gard added: 'We want to give him a bath at home, put him in a cot which he has never slept in but we are now being denied that. We know what day our son is going to die but don't get a say in how that will happen.' ...

His father Chris, 32, said: 'Our parental rights have been stripped away. We can't even take our own son home to die. We've been denied that. Our final wish if it all went against us can we take our little boy home to die and we are not allowed.

'They even said no to a hospice.'

This is nothing but outright cruelty, which makes the NHS' comment all the more nauseating:

A spokesperson for Great Ormond Street Hospital said: 'As with all of our patients, we are not able to and nor will we discuss these specific details of care. This is a very distressing situation for Charlie's parents and all the staff involved and our focus remains with them.'

This is simply a baldfaced lie and nothing else. Compassion for the Gards does not exist in the NHS, which has treated them (well, not treated Charlie) with officious contempt and disregard for their interests or well being.



What is really going on? Stephen Green explains,

Robert Bidinotto posted on Facebook yesterday:

They have already declared him, explicitly or tacitly, “brain dead” or vegetative. If they are correct — and I have no reason to doubt their medical judgment — then no issue of protecting the child’s rights or “interests” exists any longer — by their own premises.

What the parents are proposing is thus no threat to the child, his rights, or his interests. It is simply to exercise THEIR right to conduct an experiment of sheer desperation, in order to see whether they can salvage their child. If that child is already medically irretrievable, then please define for me whose “interest” would be threatened by allowing the parents to exercise that right.

There is no rational or moral reason to deny them this right. The only conceivable “interests” involved are those of the denizens of the socialized-medicine regime, who do perceive a threat — not to a child they have already written off, but to their power to make and enforce life-or-death decisions over the disposition of healthcare. No, sorry: This case is not about science; it is not about the child’s rights or interests; it is about exerting state power against a perceived popular menace to the socialized medicine system, which would come from allowing individuals the freedom to exercise their rights to make their own personal medical choices.

What is happening to the Gards is just “necessary” reminder of the individual’s place in the socialized scheme of things.

Now, remember that, according to President Obama himself and Harry Reid. single-payer (nationalized) health (non)care was real objective of Obamacare all along. And remember too that "death panels" were just fevered imaginations of its critics.

Update: "The Vatican’s Statement On UK Baby Condemned To Die Is Frightening" -- If this is where the Vatican now makes its stand, then the most vulnerable members of society—which is to say all of us, at some point—are in trouble.

Methodist terrorists

The Spectator blog sums up British media coverage of the massacre of children in Manchester at the end of an Ariana Grande performance in We must come together – and repeat the mantra ‘hope not hate’

We must all come together. Hope, not hate. Nothing to do with Islam. Nothing to do with Muslims. Just a rogue individual, possibly in the employ of some mysterious foreign agency. Just terrorism, bad people. Unaligned wickedness. Nothing to do with religion. We must all come together. And show love. And solidarity. Hope not hate.

Je Suis Ariana Grande. Already viciousness is being expressed on social media sites. People jumping to all sorts of conclusions. Horrible, horrible, people – no better than the murderer. Who might just as easily have been a Methodist. Remember Jo Cox? That wasn’t them, was it? There, you see.

So we should come together. Hope not hate. Nothing to do with immigration. Nothing to do with Islam. Nothing to do with Muslims. Just horridness of no discernible provenance. Hope not hate. [boldface added]

Let it be noted that the media in Britain are state controlled. Not state organs, mind, but Her Majesty's government has the authority under law to prohibit British media from covering stories or using angles of coverage that the government doesn't approve of. And so you get pablum like above. As British singer Morrisey tweeted,

The Queen receives absurd praise for her 'strong words' against the attack, yet she does not cancel today's garden party at Buckingham Palace - for which no criticism is allowed in the Britain of free press.

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an "extremist". An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?

At least US media are actually acknowledging that the Manchester bombing was carried out by person(s) who at least thought of themselves as Muslims (even though, you know, they weren't, not really). ABC News went straight to the point and expressed deep concern About Potential ‘Anti-Islamic Backlash’ After Manchester Terror Attack.

But why would there be a backlash against Muslims if the attack objectively had nothing to do with Islam? You may as well be worried about a backlash against Seventh Day Adventists or, well, Methodists.

Well, at least Methodists can be held partly responsible for the destruction of Rock Ridge:



And that is about the level of coverage of most media.

Enemies who shouldn't be, enemies who must be

This is a photo of Soviet army and US Army officers shortly after World War II. They seem to be at least halfway to getting drunk, and the Soviet in the middle is probably winning the race.

In my military career I was fortunate enough to have served with officers of many foreign nations, not all actually allied nations. German officers of course were my most common foreign companions; I well remember the Prussian haughtiness of Hauptmann Schneider - but it was an act and he was a great guy.

I wrote before about Egyptian Lt. Col. Solomon, with whom I served at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was representing the Egyptian army along with Lt. Col. Osman, both wonderful companions and great friends who were also outstanding military men.

There were many others, such as Brits and some Aussies and a handful of Indian army officers and Saudis, and many Honduran officers, who were simply superb. My personal acquaintance with Soviet officers was quite limited. The first time I met one in person was when I stepped into the corridor outside my office at the Pentagon and almost ran into two Soviet officers walking down the hall! Quickly I reached for a pistol that I wasn't wearing and then watched dumbfounded as they ambled on down the hall.

That day was not long after the failed coup attempt against Soviet general Secretary Gorbachev, which marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Shortly the USSR ended and was succeeded by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia would become Russia again, and it was officers of this post-Soviet military whom I encountered in the Pentagon. But their uniforms were the same.

The Russians were here to learn how to be an army of a democratic, free-market state, and I think that  at the time both they and we believed that this would come about. Of course, it did not. Putin came to permanent power and former die-hard communists morphed into die-hard capitalist oligarchs. (You think we have pay gaps here? Ha, we're pikers compared to the former commies of both the USSR and China.)

That being said, the Russian officers I did work with (though briefly) were great guys, too, and serious about their craft.

And herein is the issue. In 2013 wrote a review of a book by the late Lt. Col. Phillip Corso, who served in Army Intelligence at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. He wrote of the relationship between the CIA, the British MI-6 and the Soviet KGB:

They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information is power to be used. You don't simply give it away to your government's political leadership, whether it's the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you to. You can't trust the politicians, but you can trust other spies. At least that's what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last.

This kind of informal integration was not the case among the countries' armed forces, but I am confident that regular officers of the US Army, the British Army, the Soviet army, the Egyptian army, the German army, you name it, all felt a fundamental distrust of their nation's government at a very basic level, even if on the choice, responsibilities and intricacies of employing military forces. And every one of us, distrusting though we probably were, would have gone (and we did go) when told.

Even so, if you ever could have locked a group of American, Soviet, Egyptian, British, Saudi, and (even) French officers of equal rank in the same room, gave them a few cases of Coors to pass the time, and locked the door on your way out, when you came back in a couple of hours you would find a group of best friends telling each other war stories and nodding their heads at each others' tales, exclaiming, "Us, too!"

Did you ever notice that when two nations on the brink of war hold a last-gasp peace conference, the confreres are always wearing business suits? Funny that they never let the generals and colonels and captains get together and sort the thing out - maybe the suits are afraid we would. After all, of all men or women, military veterans know the futility and stupidity of war. And every one of them who might take the place of suits at a peace conference don't really trust their own governments, anyway.

For almost all of American history, we have fought enemies who shouldn't be enemies. The exceptions can be easily listed in one breath: The Nazis, the bushido Japanese and the North Koreans. The Nazis and the bushido Japanese are gone and North Korea is more dangerous than ever. But that's about it.

And now ISIS. They are enemies who must be. I cannot imagine any fellowship, any negotiation, with ISIS' officers or commanders that could come to a peaceful accommodation. ISIS seeks only to kill.

And so we must fight. After Manchester the task seems clear and unavoidable. To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, we may not want to fight ISIS, but ISIS definitely wants to fight us. Our choice is not whether to go to war. We are already at war. Our only choice is how the war will end.

How North Korea cured obesity

Well of course they did: Olympian Declares That North Korea Is One of the Few Countries That Has Tackled Obesity

James Cracknell is a British athlete and two-time gold medal Olympian. But now he has his sights set on politics. His pet issue? Tackling obesity.

Yes, you heard that right. Cracknell told Sky News this morning that he believes Cuba and North Korea are shining examples of countries that have tackled the obesity problem.

“If you think of the two countries in the world who’ve got a handle on obesity, what do you think they are, which two countries?” Cracknell asked a Sky News presenter.

“I’m stumped there, I don’t know,” the presenter said.

“North Korea and Cuba,” Cracknell said proudly.

The presenters all take a moment to wait for the punchline or something and then kind of politely agree before realizing that he’s serious. Cracknell insists that these dictatorial regimes influence “behavioral change.”

“Yeah, but people are starving in North Korea, aren’t they. They’re not obese because they haven’t got any food,” another presenter chimes in, trying to inject some sanity into the conversation.

"Behavioral change?" You know, like this: How Kim Jong Il Starved North Korea.

When North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died of a coronary this weekend [in 2011- DS] after 17 years in power, the homuncular tyrant left his country much as he found it -- poor and desperately hungry.

For the last two decades, North Korea has grappled with food crisis upon food crisis, the result of a dysfunctional government and its erratic leader. In 1994, the year Kim inherited North Korea's reins from his late father, the country was in the midst of a severe agricultural decline. The newly minted despot transformed it into a famine that would claim as many as three million lives. Food shortages have plagued the country ever since.

It begs the question: How did one man starve a nation of roughly 23 million people? The answer: By clinging to a broken economic system designed to do little but ensure his own survival.

Old news, one might say? Here is the LA Times from just March of last year:  North Korea tells its people a new famine may come, they again may need to 'eat the roots of grass'

This week, an official mouthpiece of the North Korean state made what appears to be the country’s first acknowledgment that it is preparing for worsening economic conditions.

“We may have to go on an arduous march, a time when we will again have to eat the roots of grass,” said an editorial in the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. ...

For decades, North Koreans have lived in poor conditions while their government has poured huge sums into weapons development, and the state has used the language of collective sacrifice when selling tough times to the populace.

Here are some examples of North Koreans who have undergone behavior change to cure their obesity (link); the photos were taken by a British photographer who broke so many rules that he has been banned for life from re-entering the country.

Only the nation's elites are allowed to live in the capital of Pyongyang. There are two supermarkets in the city, open only to the politically favored and westerners.

But Olympian Cracknell is right. The North Korean people have certainly been "behavior changed" out of obesity. And out of cancer, heart disease, the infirmities of old age. And liberty, freedom of conscience and of religion, and of hope for their future. Because when you're dead, your behavior has been changed pretty effectively.

Related:

Communism didn't fail the people, the people failed it

More photos from North Korea

Facebook, ISIS beheadings and child porn

Yet another reason I don't regret deactivating my FB account. The Times (UK) reports, "Facebook publishing child pornography."

Facebook is at risk of a criminal prosecution in Britain for refusing to remove potentially illegal terrorist and child pornography content despite being told it was on the site, The Times can reveal.

The social media company failed to take down dozens of images and videos that were “flagged” to its moderators, including one showing an Islamic State beheading, several violent paedophilic cartoons, a video of an apparent sexual assault on a child and propaganda posters glorifying recent terrorist attacks in London and Egypt. Instead of removing the content, moderators said that the posts did not breach the site’s “community standards”.

Facebook’s algorithms even promoted some of the offensive material by suggesting that users join groups and profiles that had published it.

A leading QC who reviewed the content said that, in his view, much of it was illegal under British law. Facebook was at risk of committing a criminal offence because it had been made aware of the illegal images and had failed to take them down, he said.

If you have a tough stomach, read the rest.

Academic freedom is terminal

The report is from Britain but it is quite as valid here: Academic freedom is dying because profs are too scared of the repercussions to use it.

The book, edited by commentator and academic Joanna Williams, says that a culture of self-censorship in the academic community is so far advanced that there is no need for formal curbs on freed speech, since they exist in practice anyway.

Williams said: “The tendency for academics to police themselves and each other means that formal restrictions on academic freedom, although problematic, are actually rarely needed. One danger is that self-censorship becomes a routine part of academic life.

“New lecturers quickly learn how to avoid upsetting the student-customers who pay their wages and how to please the peer-reviewers who will green-light their work for publication and them for promotion. They learn how to comply with all manner of speech codes, safe-space and anti-harassment policies.

“Routine self-censorship not only does away with the need for too many overt restrictions on academic freedom it also reinforces an intolerance of dissent.”

The primary power tactic of the Left in America today is first, to define the terms of public debate and second, to dictate what may not be uttered without invoking furious retribution. That both of these tenets are pure power plays and nothing more seems hardly worth explaining. Speech control is joined at the hip to the Marxist categories of Oppressor-Oppressed, and these are defined by the speech controllers according to sex, class, race, disability, gender-identity and numerous other ways that are impossible to track because the speech controllers keep changing them. Witness the fury unleashed by the Left on Matt Lauer for his moderation of Sept. 7's "Commander in Chief Forum."

Lauer is getting raked over the coals by the Left, who contend that he wasn’t as tough on Trump as he should have been. The Washington Post said Lauer “was tougher on Ryan Lochte than on Donald Trump” ...

The New York Times had two separate articles on Lauer’s performance, one titled “Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism over Clinton-Trump Forum.” The other headline called his performance “pathetic.” The Times’ Nicholas Kristof called Lauer “an embarrassment to journalism.” 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Professors who wander off the narrow, approved path become class enemies. who are anyone who does not toe the line of "revolutionary truth." This is the result of postmodern deconstructionism, which I explained here:

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak. 

The appetite of tyrannical ideology is never sated. When the commissars run out of one group of class enemies they always invent another.

American college campuses are starting to resemble George Orwell’s Oceania with its Thought Police, or East Germany under the Stasi. College newspapers have been muzzled and trashed, and students are disciplined or suspended for “hate speech,” while exponentially more are being shamed and silenced on social media by their peers. Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics. A Brandeis professor endured a secret administrative investigation for racial harassment after using the word wetback in class while explaining its use as a pejorative. [boldface added]

Inevitably, Leftists always devour their own.

Sarah Hoyt:

LISTEN CAREFULLY FOR THOSE YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO MOCK.  THOSE ARE THE ONES WHO OWN YOU: North Korean Citizens Warned Against ‘Hostile’ Speech.

As Glenn Reynolds has described it, "you can’t speak here, this is a university!"

The problem is that it can be weaponized

DNA confirms cause of 1665 London's Great Plague - BBC News

The Great Plague of London killed one-quarter of its population from 1665-1666, the last major plague outbreak in Britain.

Historians and researchers have long thought it was bubonic plague, but proof was never found. Until now.

It's taken a year to confirm initial findings from a suspected Great Plague burial pit during excavation work on the Crossrail site at Liverpool Street.

About 3,500 burials have been uncovered during excavation of the site.

Testing in Germany confirmed the presence of DNA from the Yersinia pestis bacterium - the agent that causes bubonic plague - rather than another pathogen.

It was a gruesome way to die.

Daniel Defoe wrote that plague victims "died by heaps and were buried by heaps"

Back in 1988-89 I wrote a 105,000-word novel about an Iranian plot to infiltrate a weaponized, extremely lethal form of Y. pestis into the United States, aiming to kill millions of Americans. The plotters were not the Khomeinist government, but the dwindling number of Iranian communists who were supported from Moscow by a small, rogue element of the Soviet general staff. It is set in the late 1980s, during Gorbachev's tenure as General Secretary.

After the jump is the first section of the third chapter. Click here and page down a little (Blogger's page-jump coding is pathetic, sorry).

EU to UK: Get out!

THE European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has given Britain its marching orders after the British people voted to leave the European Union.

Talking from Brussels after an emergency meeting with EU leaders, Mr Juncker told Britain the other 27 member states wanted to negotiate its exit plan “as soon as possible, however painful this process will be”.

Sort of like this:

The EU Titanic, flaming falling ruin

Brexit

Within 24 hours of the Brexit victory its disruptive effects made many argue it was a mistake; that it would not be long before a repentant Britain was pushing its face against the cold glass doors of the Euro cafe, wistfully eyeing the delicacies now out of its foolish reach.  Yet others have argued in the same breath it would be Europe with its face pressed against the glass, longing the other way round. For example Jamie Kirchick writes in the NY Daily News that an EU without Britain would be easy meat for Russia.

An E.U. without Britain is also more prone to appease Russia, which today poses a greater threat to European security than at any point since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Soon to be a body dominated by France and Germany, where voices demanding accommodation with a revanchist Moscow grow louder every day, the E.U. is increasingly likely to lift sanctions on Russia regardless of its behavior in Ukraine. Indeed, if there is one world leader of whose reaction to Brexit we can be confident, it is Vladimir Putin, unquestionably delighted that the largest military power in Europe, and its strongest proponent of democratic freedom in Europe’s east, has decided to call it quits.

Come back, Lord Shane!  Come back!

Kirchick is right about the EU's vulnerability as far as it goes.  It's a fair bet that there'll always be an England.  Less certain is whether there will always be an EU, a fact of which the public will be reminded when Putin's adventures, rising bond rates and refugee flows creep back into the news.   As soon as the focus returns to why the UK bailed in the first place the proper sympathy will shift from the poor Britons in a flimsy rowboat to Europeans still trapped on the Titanic.

Read the whole thing.

Get ready for Frexit (or Franxit, maybe)

The ripples from yesterday's Brexit vote are only now starting. The UK may break up itself, now.

The success of the Brexit vote has already caused Scotland's independence party to start talking again about that country's secession from the United Kingdom. A Scotland referendum two years ago to declare separation garnered 45 percent of the vote, so failed. (I remember reading then that a higher percentage of Englanders supported Scottish secession than Scots did!)

But why stop with Scotland? Today, some Londoners themselves are calling for breaking away from England and re-entering the EU as a small city-state. More than 46,000 Londoners have already signed a petition for a referendum to that effect.

What is unclear from reports is which London they refer to. London has never been a single political entity. What we think of a London actually consists of the City of London and Greater London, aka the London Metropolis.

The city of London dates to early in the region's Roman era and is also a county in itself. By ancient law and tradition, the British monarch may not enter the City of London without advance permission from the Lord Mayor of the City of London, an office separate from (and much older than) the Mayor of London. (BTW, the adjacent City of Westminster also holds equal city status with the City of London.)

"The City," as the City of London is called, is small, only 1.1 square miles, which is to say, a little more than 700 acres. Its population is about 7,000.

Despite its small size, it is the financial center of Metro London.

I am guessing that separatists are referring, though, to Metro London for two reasons:

1. Seven times more people have petitioned for a referendum than live in The City,

2. Metro London's Mayor Sadiq Khan has already been publicly asked whether he'd like to be President Khan.

The ripples go on from there throughout not just the UK, but the Commonwealth. The Brexit is likely to reignite the long-simmering dispute between Spain and Britain over Gibraltar. There is already a "Frexit" movement building across the channel in France. (And yes, I just made that word up and will take credit for it henceforth! Also "Franxit.")

As Bachman-Turner Overdrive once sang, "You ain't seen nothing yet."

This is almost certainly correct, too: "Brexit is an English nationalist revolution"

Make no mistake: this is an English nationalist revolution.

At its heart are all of the things the English used to see as the province of other, less rational, nations: identity, difference, the deep passions of belonging and resentment. It did not, in the end, matter that no one on the Brexit side could articulate a coherent economic case for leaving the EU. It did not even matter that those who will take over from David Cameron will be right-wing market fundamentalists whose policies will deepen the very inequalities and alienation that have driven working class voters towards Leave. It did not even matter that the very entity in whose name independence is being claimed — the United Kingdom — is surely doomed by Brexit.

Hardly covered by American media, a nationalist movement in England has been growing for many years.

See also: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/london-wants-independence-spain-wants-gibraltar-back-the-world-reacts-to-brexit

Update, humor break:

Britain is now a pagan nation

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/british-christianity-death-watch/

This is grim:

A landmark in national life has just been passed. For the first time in recorded history, those declaring themselves to have no religion have exceeded the number of Christians in Britain. Some 44 per cent of us regard ourselves as Christian, 8 per cent follow another religion and 48 per cent follow none. The decline of Christianity is perhaps the biggest single change in Britain over the past century. For some time, it has been a stretch to describe Britain as a Christian country. We can more accurately be described now as a secular nation with fading Christian institutions.

There is nothing new in the decline of the church, but until recently it had been a slow decline. For many decades it was possible to argue that while Christians were eschewing organised religion, they at least still regarded themselves as having some sort of spirit-ual life which related to the teachings of Jesus. Children were asked for their Christian name; conversations ended with ‘God bless’. Such phrases are now slipping out of our vocabulary — to wear a cross as jewellery [sic] is seen as making a semi-political statement. Christians are finding out what it’s like to live as a minority.

Just 15 years ago, almost three quarters of Britons still regarded themselves as Christians. If this silent majority of private, non-churchgoing believers really did exist, it has undergone a precipitous decline. Five years ago, the number of people professing no religion was only 25 per cent.

Read the whole thing.