[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace” and “love” and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.
But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Park”) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.
If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.
Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.
This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.
Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.”
In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.” Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.
I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.
Slate interviews B.R. Myers, a regional expert, about what North Korea is really trying to accomplish with all the saber-rattling and provocations.
The stars are aligning very nicely for the strategy [Kim Jong-Un] inherited from his father. Just as North Korea is perfecting its nuclear weaponry, China has acquired the economic power to punish South Korea for improving its missile defenses. Opinion polls in the South now strongly favor the left-wing presidential candidate Mun Jae-in, who in 2011 expressed hope for the speedy realization of a North–South confederation. If he or anyone else from the nationalist left takes over, years of South Korean accommodation of the North will ensue, complete with massive unconditional aid.
This went on under George W. Bush, and the alliance survived. Donald Trump, however, is much less likely to allow an ostensible ally to subvert UN sanctions while paying tributary visits to Pyongyang. And Kim Jong-un knows this. He knows that whatever security guarantees Trump gave to Seoul were made to the current conservative administration only. So Kim Jong-un has a better chance than his father did of pressuring the alliance to a breaking point. With China’s support he can pull a left-wing South Korean administration in one way while pushing the Americans in another.
Having lived in South Korea for the past 15 years, I don’t share most Americans’ confidence that it will always choose America over a North-supporting China. My own impression—bolstered by the ongoing controversy surrounding the stationing of the THAAD missile defense system—is that a growing number of South Koreans would rather see their state’s security compromised than risk their own prosperity.
Let’s not overestimate South Koreans’ attachment to their own state, which a sizable but influential minority still considers illegitimate. The most popular movie in Seoul at the moment is a thriller about a joint North–South effort to catch a criminal ring of North Korean defectors. That plot tells you something right there. The main North Korean character is played for cool by a handsome Tom Cruise type, while his South Korean counterpart is a homely, tired-looking figure of fun. There is a tradition of this sort of casting. The subtext: Serving the North is glamorous; serving the South, not so much. Let’s keep in mind that Kim Jong-un is watching these movies too.
…
[W]e must stop focusing on short-term shifts and nuances in North Korean propaganda and instead grasp the fundamental consistency its ideology has maintained since 1945. We have to take that ideology seriously, however absurd the personality cult may seem. To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.
Were Kim Jong-un to share our own leader’s love of slogan caps, his would read: Make Korea Whole Again. Unification is not just central to the North’s ideology, but the only sure and lasting solution to its security problem. That makes the nuclear crisis all that more difficult to solve. But we will never get anywhere if we don’t face up to the true and frightening nature of the North’s goals. For decades our politicians and cartoonists have mocked North Korean leaders as squalling babies who wave missiles around just to get our attention. We’re the ones who need to grow up.
If you were especially observant during your years on campus, you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American (top). When the library decided to reopen the long-disused entrance as the front door of the new Center for Teaching and Learning, says head librarian Susan Gibbons, she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone (bottom) that Gibbons says can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving.
WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.
The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.
“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times.
All over America, ordinary people think that the weather varies dramatically by region, that we’ve all seen warmer summmers years ago than any recently, and that the weather in recent years has been different from year to year but in no way strikingly unusual.
I guess you have to be a Climate Scientist, a New York Times editor, or a community of fashion member of the Establishment to be equipped with the kinds of privileged insights and hyper-sensitive sensory organs that can detect those effects of climate change, along with extraordinary educational training enabling you to predict dramatic weather effects far off in the misty future. The rest of us, even the ordinary people meteorologists, can only imperfectly predict the weather a week or two in advance.
Myself, I guess I must have been not paying attention at Yale, because I find myself completely at a loss when I attempt to sit down and try to define exactly at what point we find ourselves today along the Interglacial Cycle. I must have slept in the morning when they explained what exactly causes Glaciation and the whole cycle of earth’s warming and cooling and how you can tell just where on the cycle we should be and exactly what proper normal climate conditions would be like.
Isn’t it wonderful that there are all these people so much smarter than the rest of us, who know all these things, and who are able to define precisely what the earth’s normal climate would look like and who can measure accurately the negative impact of mankind’s pernicious productive activities and, on top of all that, predict for us all their terrible, terrible consequences?
Me, I’m a bit uncertain at what point later this afternoon a thunderstorm is likely to arrive, and I’m as likely as not to get rained on when I go out to pick up the mail.
At a special press conference held at the technology giant’s sprawling campus Tuesday, Google engineers revealed exciting new technology that autocorrects any errant thoughts its users are having, replacing them with positions approved by the company.
Utilizing advanced retinal scan and proprietary telepathic scanning technology, the new automatic thought correction algorithm is now live for users of Google’s search engine, Android operating system, Chrome OS, and the hundreds of other apps and services the company provides.
“Let’s say you start thinking there may be some kind of inherent biological difference between men and women,” Google employee Ryan Vo said in a live demo of the new tech. “Immediately, the thought suggestion program in any nearby Google device, app, or service will scrub the idea of inherent gender differences and replace them with the sure knowledge that there are at least three hundred different genders in existence, and always has been.”
“Google will begin rebuilding your mind, piece by piece,” he added to the cheers and applause of the tech bloggers and industry professionals gathered.
According to the spokesperson, Google is also utilizing crack teams of ex-military personnel to round up anyone who resists the new technology, taking them to a new portion of Google’s campus known as the “Department of Love” for questioning, reconditioning, and re-introduction into civilized society.
Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.
In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company. …
“One of the great things about Google’s internal communication mechanisms (G+, mailing lists, etc), is that, as a manager, I can easily go find out if I really want to work with you,” wrote another individual described on social media as a Google manager, Collin Winter. “I keep a written blacklist of people whom I will never allow on or near my team, based on how they view and treat their coworkers. That blacklist got a little longer today.”
In the comments, one Google employee can be seen asking, “Are such blacklists allowed at Google?” before another added, “I would talk to legal before assembling a list of people who are possibly creating a hostile workplace.”
“And now I know that if I ever sue Google for harassment I should demand to see all manager’s shit-lists to see if this was something management already knew and thus let happen (my tormentor could be on there and not dealt with). It would probably increase the settlement aware considerably,” he continued. “I would encourage anyone else getting mistreated at Google to do the same.”
This week, a Google employee’s ten-page document went viral, after he called for more ideological diversity at the company. …
The employee’s manifesto quickly prompted extreme responses from left-wing users, including one SJW, Emily Gorcenski, who claimed she would “beat the sh*t out of him.”
Gorcenski frequently retweets and expresses support for It’s Going Down, an extremist far-left Antifa organization, who have previously doxed and harassed college students, and encouraged violence against Trump supporters.
Alon Altman, who according to social media posts is a senior software engineer at Google and who describes himself as an “intersectional feminist” and uses “they/them/their” pronouns, was also seen in leaked screenshots urging Google management to fire employees who agreed with the anti-political correctness manifesto that was revealed this week.
In leaked screenshots, Altman added that should the employee behind the manifesto not be fired by the end of the month, he would hand in his resignation notice.
In another post, alleged Site Reliability Manager Paul Cowan warned to employees that “freedom of speech is the right to freely express an opinion. It is most assuredly not the right to express an opinion with freedom from the consequences.”
Cowan continued to reference a post from Google dissidents, who were discussing the blacklists being created by an “SJW cabal” at the company, before defending the concept of punishing anti-SJW employees.
“To be clear: this is, in my opinion, perfectly acceptable,” he declared. “Quoting this as if it were some egregious abuse of power, or of your rights, is laughable… My life, happiness, and mental health, are worth too much to me to burn my precious happy-fu working with people I find contemptible, unpleasant, or even in some cases merely irritating.”
After being warned that keeping blacklists could result in him being reported to Human Resources, Cowan then bragged on Twitter that they were “threats I ignored, naturally, and which ironically grew the list substantially.”
In older posts, Kim Burchett, a now ex-Google employee and Antifa supporter, also discussed blacklists in a post on Internal Plus.
“I am considering creating a public-inside-google document of ‘people who make diversity difficult’,” claimed Burchett. “I am thinking of something like google doc that accepts comments, and which calls out those googlers who repeatedly made public statements that are unsupportive of diversity, with links to those statements so that readers can decide for themselves.”
A Victorian diary found in a suburb of Liverpool may have established the identity of history’s most infamous serial killer. Telegraph:
[T]he true identity of Jack the Ripper may have finally been confirmed, after researchers said they had proven the authenticity of a much disputed Victorian diary.
Twenty five years ago ‘Ripperologists’ around the world were stunned by the discovery of a previously unknown memoir, claiming to have been written by Liverpool cotton merchant, James Maybrick.
In the 9,000 word volume, Maybrick confessed to the brutal murders of five women in the East End of London, as well as one prostitute in Manchester.
He signed off the diary: “I give my name that all know of me, so history do tell, what love can do to a gentleman born. Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper.”
Well, surprise, surprise! Bloomberg reports that Google has fired the software engineer who wrote the memo criticizing that company’s diversity policies that recently went viral.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting the web company’s diversity policies, creating a firestorm across Silicon Valley.
James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He said he’s “currently exploring all possible legal remedies.”
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Business Insider predicts that Mr. Damore will find no legal remedy.
The problem is that US labor law is well-settled in this area: In the vast majority of US states, employees have almost no rights to free speech at work. …
The First Amendment to the US Constitution prevents the government from restricting your speech. It doesn’t restrict your employer from controlling your speech when you are at work. As the government is not involved in this case, Damore is already on shaky ground if he files a lawsuit arguing a free speech case.
More importantly, Damore’s speech has not been restricted. He can continue to express his opinion. Indeed, his opinion has already been published far more widely than he can have hoped. His speech is on steroids right now! His legal problem is that he does not have a constitutional right to a job at Google. If he is an “at-will” employee — i.e. an ordinary employee not governed by a special contract, like a film star might have — then Google has every right to demand that he leave.
You can read a lengthy legal paper on this issue by Prof. Eugene Volokh, of the UCLA Law School, here. It can be summed up in one paragraph:
“Of course, employee speech can always be restricted by private employers, who are not bound by the First Amendment. This cannot, however, authorize greater restrictions by the government. A householder is entitled to kick out dinner guests who say certain things. A commercial landlord can refuse to rent to tenants who put up certain posters. A newspaper publisher can refuse to publish articles with which he disagrees. A private university may restrict what its faculty say in class, or even what its students say on campus. Speech on private property can generally be controlled by the private property owner.
As Google Site Reliability Manager Paul Cowan warned internally at Google — his posts were screengrabbed by Breitbart — “freedom of speech is the right to freely express an opinion. It is most assuredly not the right to express an opinion with freedom from the consequences.”
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But he does have at least two job offers, Heavy reports:
Damore also has a couple job offers to consider. One offer came from Gab, a company founded in 2016 that says it is “an ad-free social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online.” It has become popular among those in the alt right, including some who have been banned from Twitter.
And Wikileaks’ Julian Assange tweeted Tuesday, “Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore.
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This is a real pain in the ass. I use Chrome all the time, and now I have to switch to Safari or Opera. I guess I’ll also soon find out if Duck Duck Go is any good as a search engine.
