December 4, 2015 THE BAD-FAITH ANALOGY BETWEEN SYRIAN REFUGEES AND JEWS FLEEING NAZI GERMANY Luke Ford No sacred cows.

THE BAD-FAITH ANALOGY BETWEEN SYRIAN REFUGEES AND JEWS FLEEING NAZI GERMANY

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

James Kirchick writes: The flood of refugees fleeing war in Syria, and the heated opposition to their resettlement in Europe and America, have inspired comparisons to the plight of European Jews who attempted to escape Nazi clutches over seven decades ago. “The people who want to close the door on Syrian Refugees are no different from those who closed doors to me and my family in 1939,” declared Aryeh Neier, president emeritus of the Open Society Institute, who as an infant fled Nazi Germany with his family for the United Kingdom. “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently wrote about the “xenophobic bidding war” instigated by the likes of Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, all of whom have appealed to the basest fears of the American public. It would take a blog post by one of Milbank’s colleagues, however, for the analogy to go viral. Highlighting a 1939 Gallup poll reporting that 61 percent of Americans opposed accepting 10,000 Jewish refugee children—coincidentally, the same exact number of Syrians that the Obama administration has pledged to take in 2016—Ishaan Tharoor, a writer for the Post’s WorldViews blog, concluded, “Today’s three-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” (In September, Tharoor had made the same point about European reactions to the crisis, in a post entitled, “Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930’s anti-Semitism.”

Invoking the Holocaust for contemporary political debates is an inherently tricky business, and as far as such comparisons go, this one is certainly more appropriate than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Holocaust on Your Plate” shock campaign, which implicitly equated the vast majority of human beings who are carnivores to Himmler and Mengele. Tharoor would later boast that his piece likening past American attitudes about Jewish refugees to present day antipathy toward Syrian migrants was “one of the most read articles on our Web site,” garnering some 2.5 million reader views. My own perusal of social media indicates that the piece has become a prime illustration of “virtue-signaling,” the largely Internet-driven phenomenon whereby one demonstrates his moral superiority, (more specifically, in the words of the writer who coined the term, that he is “non-racist, left-wing or open-minded”) by “saying the right things violently on Twitter.”

Indeed, a necessary consequence of broaching the Holocaust in the discussion of contentious, political debates is that one invariably characterizes those who disagree with him as, at best, indifferent to the monstrous crimes of racist genocide, and at worst approving of them. Writing about the criticisms he received for his post, Tharoor cast them all as fundamentally bigoted. “It was repeatedly argued that (with varying degrees of profanity) Muslims can’t assimilate, represent an evil religion and seek to wreak violence on the West.” While it is true that many people’s reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis has been cruel, there are several wholly legitimate, non-racist reasons to be concerned about the influx, not to mention important factual differences between the predicament of European Jewry circa 1939 and Syrians today, that render Holocaust comparisons facile.

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Thousands Of Muslims In Our Midst Want To Slaughter Us

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

How should we respond? Sure, only about 10% of Muslims according to surveys support ISIS, so that means what, about 10,000 of Muslims in Southern California support jihad?

I don’t find that comforting. I’d rather not take the risk.

I wish white Americans had half the concern with their group interest that Muslims, blacks and Jews have.

Librarian of Hate tweets:

* 1 in 9 Arabs has a positive view of ISIS.

* One in eight Muslims in Germany believes that terrorism is justified.

* One of best predictors of crime among migrants to Europe is the prevalence of Islam in their home country.

* 36% of Muslims believe 9/11 was partially or wholly justified.

* ISIS is supported by 11.5% of Arabs, or 42 million people.

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Trump’s Rise Without Traditional Campaign Spending ‘Existential Threat’ to ‘Political Election Industry’

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Breitbart: Donald Trump’s ability to remain the undisputed GOP frontrunner in December even though he has hardly spent any money on traditional television advertising that enriches consultants in the permanent political class is why he represents an “existential threat” to the established political order. In the newest CNN/ORC poll that was released Friday, Trump has a commanding 20-point lead, which reportedly marks “Trump’s highest support and widest lead since he first announced his candidacy.”

Trump may indeed be establishing a blueprint that other candidates could follow in the future to put many in the stale permanent political class—many of whom are career mercenaries who care more about using politics to line their pockets than the interests of the candidates they purportedly support—out of business. He even mocked Jeb Bush this week on the campaign trail in Georgia for wasting millions on television ads that have not helped the former Florida governor’s flailing poll numbers and campaign.

NBC News reported this week that Trump has spent the least amount of money ($227,000) on television commercials during this election cycle. Even more astonishing is the fact that establishment GOP candidates Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have an 18-1 advantage on television ads than the three outsider/non-politician candidates that are leading in nearly every poll—Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Dr. Ben Carson. Bush, who tops the list, registered just 3% in the latest CNN/ORC poll.

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Organized Jewry Vs Donald Trump

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

Organization Jews are just beginning to mobilize against Donald Trump. The battle hasn’t even begun. The ADL hasn’t yet fired the starting shot, they won’t until at least after the first primary.

Trump is the first populist in over a century who could become president. Jews fear populism because Jews have rarely been popular. They’ve survived by cutting deals with the elite.

* “There are a lot of folks who are, to be charitable, into white identity politics, and to be uncharitable are outright racists, who are supporting Trump,” said Nathan Wurtzel, a Republican political consultant and principal at The Catalyst Group, who is Jewish. “It’s very off-putting and disturbing.”

Comments: Oops, there’s another area where Jews aren’t prominent (because Jewish identity politics are anti-white).

Can’t have the goyim contemplating having for themselves what the Jews have for themselves in Israel.

Unspoken Jewish oligarch problem with Trump: he doesn’t need their money. Doesn’t even seem to want it. Big Problem.

* Powerful people want to be respectable.

Those who control respectability controls the elites.

Once homo stuff was made respectable, elites complied cuz status means so much to them.

There are leader-elites and follower-elites.

Leader-elites, largely Jewish, get to decide what is respectable.

* Trump is a very entertaining speaker. In Las Vegas he spoke about his self-financed campaign and the fact that he hadn’t asked any Jews for money. That was a “LOL and SMH” moment.

* The tech industry grew in California because of the political climate and largely stays there because of the political climate.

Civil digital computers were first developed in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Integrated circuits were invented in Texas. All of those states recognized non-compete agreements and various other restrictions on employees leaving, hiring their old cow-orkers, and starting up new firms.

Silicon Valley was the place you could go and start over again. And again. There were no non-competes. The CA Supreme Court declared them all illegal. If you did stay with a big company, corporate HQ on the East coast was far away and couldn’t stop you from innovating.

William Shockley, an iSteve favorite, came to SV for the freedom to work on transistors without AT&T forcing him to share credit and denying him the help he needed. The whole Intel team developed out of his efforts by freely leaving two different employers before finding space to build their own vision. The founders of Intel are known as the “traitorous eight.” Everything they did would have been illegal on the East coast because of trade secret and noncompete law.

Xerox invented laser printers and modern computer interfaces and ethernet in Palo Alto because the Xerox HQ wanted to fire the scientists that were disrupting their business from the inside. Goldman and Pake started PARC to get space to build things 3000 miles away from the suits.

Sand Hill Road was far enough from Wall Street to build its own standards for investment. If the banks knew what venture capitalists in CA were doing, it would be illegal. But in SV, you could make big bets and see a few of them pay off.

Sure, the taxes are 4% higher and lately the locals have driven up real estate prices by refusing to allow any property development, but Silicon Valley has freedom from central corporate control that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the USA. That’s why SV is the center of tech.

Posted in Donald Trump, Jews | Comments Off

George Zimmerman’s Twitter account suspended after he posts naked pics of woman he claims cheated on him with ‘dirty Muslim’

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

From New York Daily News: George Zimmerman’s Twitter account was suspended Thursday after his social media rants turned into what looked like revenge porn.

The Florida man acquitted in the fatal 2012 shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin posted nude pictures and contact information of a woman he called “Heather” who he claimed had stolen from him and cheated on him with “a dirty Muslim.”

Zimmerman, who lists his hometown as Casselberry in the Orlando area, lives in a state that is one of 26 with laws against revenge porn, according to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

The “@TherealGeorgeZ” account showed two different naked photos and an email address for the woman Thursday afternoon.

“This is Heather,” the first of two tweets about her read. “She cheated on me with a dirty Muslim.” He added a phone number and told his 15,500 followers, “She’ll sleep with anyone.”

Minutes later, he continued, “Did I go to far? I won’t even mention that she stole a gun and cash from me.”

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Female shooter in California pledged allegiance to IS leader: reports

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

REPORT: WASHINGTON: Investigators believe the female shooter in California, Tashfeen Malik, posted on Facebook during the deadly attack, pledging allegiance to Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, US media reported Friday.

One US official familiar with the investigation said Malik had posted on Facebook under an account with a different name. The officials did not explain how they knew Malik was responsible for the post, CNN reported.

Malik and her American husband, Syed Farook, burst into a year-end party in San Bernardino, California Wednesday and opened fire on a roomful of Farook’s co-workers, killing 14 and wounding 21.

“At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” an official told the New York Times, which also reported that Malik had pledged allegiance to IS in a Facebook posting but that there was no evidence the group directed the woman.

FBI agents have been combing through cellphones and a computer hard drive left behind by the couple to try to establish a motive for the killings.

CNN, quoting officials, earlier said Farook had been in contact with known terror suspects overseas and had become radicalized after marrying Malik in Saudi Arabia last year, although an imam at a local mosque he attended said Farook showed no signs of that.

The Times reported that the FBI had evidence Farook had communicated with extremists domestically and abroad a few years ago.-AFP

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Interventions may temporarily raise kids’ IQs, but there is fadeout over time

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the University of California at Santa Barbara: The winner of a decades-old debate about what scientists call the fadeout effect — one of the most persistent research mysteries in intelligence and psychological development — may finally have been decided.

Following a meta-analysis of experimental methods to determine whether or not the benefits of early interactions designed to raise intelligence remain over time, UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral researcher John Protzko found that the positive effects on intelligence actually diminish after a particular intervention ends. Protzko’s study marks the first quantitative analysis of the fadeout effect across nearly every known intervention that has attempted to improve early intelligence.

The findings, which appear in the journal Intelligence, have important implications for the long-term benefits of programs such as Head Start, a federal initiative that promotes school readiness of children under 5 from low-income families through education, health, social and other services.

“Many theories of cognitive development and the relationship between the environment and intelligence are not able to account for the fadeout effect,” said Protzko, who is a member of the META (Memory, Emotion, Thought, Awareness) Lab in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB. “Reciprocal interaction models, for example, put forward that no such fading would occur. It turns out that when you raise children’s intelligence, they may not go out and select into new, more cognitively demanding environments. Other traits may be driving what environments children select into.”

The 44 randomized controlled trials that Protzko analyzed for the study included a total of 7,584 young children. He found that those in the experimental groups lost their IQ gains, rather than the control group catching up. According to Protzko, this provides a clear demonstration that intelligence fades over time.

“That actually tells us a lot about the role of the environment in the development of intelligence,” Protzko said. “It shows that intelligence is reactionary. While providing interventions will raise intelligence, once they’re over, intelligence reacts by adapting to the new, lesser demands.

“If you take kids and put them in a Head Start program, for example, then they’ll be smarter and their academic achievement will be better,” Protzko added. “But when you take that away and put them back in with everybody else, they’re going to adapt to that new system. It doesn’t work in any permanent sort of way.”

Protzko is careful to reiterate that his work in no way posits that early interventions are doomed to fail or that they are of no value. “This paper doesn’t argue that intelligence cannot be raised,” he said. “Instead, it urges that a critical assumption long held — that increases to intelligence are permanent — be questioned and rejected. I believe it is still a good thing to intervene and try to change the trajectory for these children.”

All of the studies included in the analysis were done on young children, Protzko noted. “To know if the fadeout effect is applicable to other demographics like adolescents, young adults or the elderly, there would need to be a push toward long-term follow-up — two, three, four, five years, maybe even longer — for these groups as well,” he concluded.

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Steve Sailer: National Immigration Safety and Quality Board vs. the Farook Family

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “An idée fixe of mine is that there should be an independent National Immigration Safety and Quality Board to investigate spectacularly screwed-ups results of the immigration process and issue advisories on how the system can be reformed to let in only better quality people. There are 7 billion foreigners in the world, hundreds of millions of whom would like to move to America, so there’s no good reason why America should have policies that let in so many crummy people like the Farook Family.”

Chaim Amalek: “Why are such people in the West? Because Christendom produced such leaders as Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton (I know, he was never actually a leader, but still, he did hold the title of one), George W. Bush (with Jeb! in the wings), Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel. Christians are their own worst enemy.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* One thing I’ve come to realize is that non-discrimination is a sacred value. It’s not only one value to be balanced against others. It’s the first principle, and can never be questioned.

Want to cut back on Muslim immigration? Extremist! Reasonable people would rather have mass surveillance and never-ending war.

I watched too much Fox News today. There’s this fool named Greg Gutfeld, who is always telling us Islamic extremism is the greatest threat to mankind, something our children will worry about on a daily basis. He fancies himself some sort of brave truth teller, and his mockery of campus leftists is occasionally entertaining. But he never, ever brings up immigration when talking about this supposedly greatest threat in the history of mankind.

It’s truly depressing. We need Trump for the cultural change it’ll bring. When the president is offending every group under the sun, maybe we’ll have our own perestroika. As things stand, the sacred principle can’t be questioned, and if not Trump (and it’s a long shot)I don’t know what will ever wake the country up out of its stupor.

* A day and half since the shooting and no pics of International Missus Martyrdom Mystery Malik. Shouldn’t the federal government have her picture on file as part of the greencard process? Wouldn’t it be a good idea for them to release it, so if someone had seen her doing something sketchy they could report it?

* It’s interesting that the notion of not receiving immigrants from certain nations at all is unthinkable racism and ethnic bigotry. Obviously that’s what it is, when disparate impact is the moral equivalent of intent, and that’s a fact we all agreed to in common, rigorous debate preceding our great enthusiasm, boy that was a day to remember wasn’t it, when we made that an institution what a day that was, what fun I got shitfaced everyone got laid no disparities.

So anyways we know it would be that, evil sin utter nazism, even though we know it would be about propensities to murder. So our certainties are literally absurd, and our values are practically suicidal, worse than suicidal even, because suicide is far more respectable than retarding defense against murderers, of your children, for no good reason at all.

But what’s interesting is the absolute universal perfection of the principle’s application. (Are any nations flat barred?) I don’t know how the functionaries slice the thing. When can you say it’s ok to say “might be pro-murder”? He’s from Saudi Arabia. He’s from this town. His family are these people. This lists the friends he lists. This is his story, etcetera. When does suspicion become decisively suspicious? Do they even deal with mere likelihood? I would bet they do not deal with likelihood but only proved connection. Does it only become OK to say he might be out for murder when we know his plan?

But the most interesting question is: why is this matter of how we decide who to let in unknown to me I mean I read the media? Why does no politician exploit what is doubtless about the incompetents of bureaucrats, and say this is how we fix what is vital: None of these fuckers from Pakistan no more.

* The visual identity of “Tashfeen Malik” is complicated by the fact that apparently Syed Farook has a brother who is a US Navy veteran who is married to a Russian born woman (Tatiana Farook) who is, actually, quite a babe. My photo posted earlier today, which I found on an Australian site, is apparently of her and the “other” brother who has the same first name, Syed.

I think we are finally getting some clarity here since some seem to be distancing themselves from the identification of Tatiana as “Tashfeen Malik”, which I have found in other sources as a legit Arabic (male) name for a famous Jihadist from the 12th Century. (I had reversed the letters earlier, but in Arabic script it is “Tashfeen”.)

Here are a two new links, as before, for what it’s worth, and maybe, not much:

From the more or less reputable Daily Mail:

From the unknown provenance “Daily Entertainment”:

An older link from a Palestinian journo.

* Daily Mail: “The radicalized San Bernardino gunman clashed with a Jewish co-worker over religion just two weeks before he and his Pakistani wife stormed an office holiday party where they massacred 14 people……Syed Farook, 28, got into a heated argument with colleague Nicholas Thalasinos, a Messianic Jew who was identified today as one of the victims of Wednesday’s rampage……it is unclear if the earlier argument between Farook and Thalasinos played any role in the massacre – but authorities said Farook had left the party ‘angry’.

both men worked as county restaurant inspectors and regularly discussed politics and religion. Thalasinos was passionate about pro-Israel causes and was known to rant about Islam on Facebook. The New York Post reported that Thalasinos’ Facebook page was filled with negative comments about Muslims and references to his conservative beliefs.“

* How about no immigrants from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?

Chaim Amalek: “That’s racist! Instead demand of our politicians RECIPROCAL immigration with respect to these countries: we take in no more people from them than they took in from ours in the previous year. Problem solved, without need of any invidious discussion of the relative merits of our respective societies.”

* People who want to emigrate to a foreign land thousands of miles away and leave their families and friends behind, these people are often greedy, or just jerks, sociopaths, or mentally unstable or have some mental illness such as incipient schizophrenia or bipolar. Immigrants are often biological machines that don’t work quite right. These are often people who don’t have many friends and whose family dislikes them. Quite often, not always, there is something wrong with them, which explains why they couldn’t make it in their homeland.

I say drop immigration to a mere pittance–doctors, nurses, scientists, that is the only sort of people we need.

* What happened in San Bernardino was getting off easy as far as insulting The Prophet on Facebook is concerned.

* Americans love fantasy football — why not use a similar approach? Have an online “draft” of prospective immigrants, with each having a “card” showing their photo, country of origin, level of English proficiency, religion, education/skills, etc. The whole process could be self-funding: in addition to prospective immigrants’ fees, American citizens could pay $10 or $100 or whatever to draft a team of immigrants. Pics that get green cards win points for them by becoming net tax payers, and lose points by breaking the law or going on welfare.

* Yep.

Truck driving.

Another job Americans can’t or won’t do.

* Hannity is actually pro-Trump. He always defends him when others criticize, and I heard him say he’s one of the three Republicans he’s thinking about supporting. He used to give Ann Coulter a platform too, before she said the thing about the Jews and stopped being allowed on TV.

* Women have run the social/political show for decades now. They have made great strides protecting women at home and in the workplace.
Serious question: How can they justify/agree with allowing the immigration of the most patriarchal, domestically violent, woman hating culture of men, into their country?
Does multiculturalism exceed feminism?

* Basically a Clash of Civilizations episode with free speaking American/Jewish culture meeting and colliding with Paki/Muslim culture celebrating Charlie Hebdo/Satanic Verses type delicate sensitivities leading to Supernova.

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The Power of HIV-Positive Thinking

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jim Goad writes: There are multiple documented cases of people purposely infecting others with HIV, which makes me puke just a little bit more into the bag.

“While most people try to avoid acquiring viruses online, these fellas make it their mission.”

But surely one of the sickest, saddest, and most revolting social phenomena of the past, I don’t know, ten thousand years is a small yet virulent sub-community of gay men who actively seek to become infected with HIV. While most people try to avoid acquiring viruses online, these fellas make it their mission.

They are known as “bugchasers.” The men who willingly infect them with HIV, usually straight up the cornhole without a condom and hopefully with a little bit of blood smeared into the spermy fecal mix, are known as “giftgivers.”

Feeling sick yet?

The bugchaser/giftgiver “community” is but a tiny subset of the larger “barebacking” scene of homo dudes who have unprotected sex without the explicit intent of getting infected or infecting someone else. Again, that’s a bit more passive than doing it on purpose, but if you wind up weighing ten pounds and shitting your diapers because you have AIDS, the difference is nearly meaningless.

Some bugchasers say they merely operate from a sort of suicidal impatience and simply want to “empower” themselves by taking their HIV infection into their own hands—to be precise, their own asses—because it’d be a relief to just go ahead and “get it over with” since they’re not going to stop having sex with bajillions of partners anyway. Some say they feel it’d be a relief to actually know you’re HIV-positive than having to, you know, worry about it.

Others eroticize the act of getting infected—or, as they call it, “charged” or “pozzed”—framing it as the ultimate sexual taboo, and who wouldn’t be thrilled by that?

Still others say that by purposely allowing their HIV-positive partners to infect them, they are choosing to enter a quasi-mystical “brotherhood” of gay men, a spiritual fraternity dedicated to fight a hatefully straight society that stigmatizes and is bigoted against the act of infecting yourself with a fatal disease by asking someone to squirt his HIV-positive cum up your rectum. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!

Finally, there are those who frame it as the gay version of reproducing. They refer to it as “breeding,” getting “knocked up,” or even being “impregnated.”

Posted in AIDS, Homosexuality | Comments Off

Pentagon Opening All Combat Roles in Military to Women

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* This is almost a comical level of disassociation from reality. For those who are familiar with the Bible (and if you are not you should be) the foolishness has gone beyond Proverbs level and has entered Isaiah level (that is not a good thing, for the record).

* Because nothing gets America juiced up and clamoring for war like the thought of some poor woman being held by jihadis. So we will send a couple platoons of pretty white girls to Syria where they can be captured. In a few weeks there will be jihadi videos decapitating or torturing them. After that, every politician in America will be demanding full scale war against every Arab country.

* Trump is a Sailer reader. Watching him on Hannity and he says we need to retaliate against terrorist family members. I suspect he got (or his advisors anyway) the idea from Sailer’s taki article on 4 ways to save Europe…

It’s a pretty common sense approach, which I always thought was necessary, but only Sailer can verbalise it so well..

This is really turning out to be a Sailer/Breitbart News election….

* There was a Chuck Norris movie in the 1980s called Invasion USA. The plot was that a bunch of Muslim terrorists entered the US via Zodiac boats. What a quaint idea! They could have just applied for visas.

* The Selective Service System is the last sane bureau in the entire federal government. Largely because no one’s paid it any attention since 1980. Don’t screw it up.

Its very existence is a tacit admission that double standards can be valid.

* Let’s just ban men entirely from the US military.

Then we can sit back and see how much women like doing this job that men have had the “privilege” of doing for so long.

Of course then the sea lanes would be stolen from the world in short order, air and space would be lost in a flash, and we would be conquered overnight by the first opportunistic army to come along.

* America has already been invaded. It’d be more accurate to say America is being colonized. Immigrants who don’t assimilate are really colonists.

* Why the hell would anyone invade us, when they can come here freely and suffer no risk of death?

The real people who suffer from this will be the women who join the military and wind up getting sent into battle. The amount of gear you have to carry into battle is hell on the backs of even lots of strong men. Good luck if you’re a woman trying to do that.

I’m not really sure this is meant as a serious policy. It’s either meant to completely destroy the military, or to bait Republicans into fighting “the war on women.” A responsible Republican administration will have to reverse this, and it will make them look bad.

* Why the hell would anyone invade us, when they can come here freely and suffer no risk of death?

* The real people who suffer from this will be the women who join the military and wind up getting sent into battle. The amount of gear you have to carry into battle is hell on the backs of even lots of strong men. Good luck if you’re a woman trying to do that.

* In 2003 a female reporter with the Chicago Tribune was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. The reporter, Kirsten Scharnberg, recounted her experiences with trying to live in the field and keep up with the soldiers in an article entitled A woman goes to war in a man’s world. Here are some choice excerpts from this Iowa-raised farm girl who had run a marathon before the war.

“After learning that I was to be the Tribune’s only female embedded journalist, I promised myself never to write the woman-on-the-front-lines story.

It just wouldn’t be an issue. I would find a way to blend in. I wouldn’t be treated differently because I wouldn’t let anyone treat me differently.
…

The soldiers I had met up with said I could accompany them into the city–a 4-mile hike. I didn’t know whether I could hike 4 feet with all that gear, let alone 4 miles, but we set out. At about mile 2 1/2, I was about to give out. I was contemplating saying something needlessly melodramatic like, “Go ahead, save yourselves,” when a soldier asked, “Ma’am, can I carry that battery for you?”

All my resolve failed. I handed the battery to the young man–who already was lugging a much heavier load than I was, including a fully loaded M-4 assault weapon that he would be expected to use in case of an attack.

The decision nagged at me for days. Not only had I not been able to pull my own weight, I also had potentially put that young soldier at risk. What if he had not been able to aim his weapon effectively had we been ambushed in that wooded expanse of territory approaching Najaf? What if he had fallen on the rough terrain and misfired his weapon, injuring someone?

As tough as I think I was out there, as proud as I am to have lived for more than two months in conditions I never dreamed possible, those questions bother me still.

Back in Chicago recently, the Tribune had a welcome-home party for a bunch of us who had covered the war. A female editor asked me whether my experience had given me an opinion about putting female soldiers into the infantry and on the front lines. I told her about the car battery and also about the many times I watched big, tough, burly male soldiers nearly collapse during 10-kilometer hikes with rucksacks, ammunition, TOW missiles, radios and machine guns. I’m not qualified to say that no woman could do that job, but I suspect that it would be a rare one who could.

I had run a marathon not long before the war and worked out almost every day. I grew up on an Iowa farm where manual labor was part of the bargain. But I had been bested by a car battery, and when I handed my load to that soldier, I admitted that I never could have cut it in the infantry.”

My guess is she was in better shape than most of the females going into the military today. I wonder if Ash Carter has read this first hand account. God help the infantry.

* Captured female soldiers being raped and or used as sex slaves is a distinct possibility. Becoming the star of an ISIS snuff film/propaganda video is also in the cards.

* Just the other day, my 40kg girlfriend was wearing her child-sized pink Converse sneakers and saying, “I’d love to shoot me some towel-heads–if only I could have a combat assignment in the army! Life is so unfair…” when my 60 year old mother replied, “Yes, deary, I really wanted to squat next to a jungle trail for hours, waiting to put some bullets in the Viet Cong, but the army has been holding us back for years!”
That’s when my grandmother put down her tea and said, “I always said these hands were made for throttling Krauts, not holding teacups. My youth was wasted!”

* There are some very high quality people who join the armed forces, and some very low quality ones, but I personally think they are all daft to do so, the women are slightly more so. As the Sailersphere knows full well, the threat to America is through immigration not ground wars. If we were under real threat from these Arab holes we could simply let the air force drop some bombs from a comfy chair. No, these wars are for show and profit, and for the greater good of Israel. No thanks. Not worth my life or a soldier’s life… why can’t they see that?

* We need a rapid response team consisting entirely of women and we can send them over to Syria and see how they do. If having a Japanese Regiment was OK in WWII then why not an Amazon Regiment?

Sometimes you have to let your kids fall off the bike before they learn a lesson.

* Do you think uglier officers would send prettier soldiers on more dangerous missions out of spite?

Or hold them back out of concupisence?

* First, the Russians and others were in dire straits and had to use women in a manner akin to scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

Second, they were used on their home turf to fight an invader. Because of this, both males and females, were able to get resupplied by friendly villagers and nearby weapons caches that were located throughout the countryside. So these folks did not need to carry heavy rucksucks full of food and ammo to sustain themselves for multiple days.

The US Army on the other hand is an expeditionary force. Ideally it means we won’t fight on our home turf. As a result we have to take our gear with us. Soldiers going out on patrol must carry a lot of gear because they might have to sustain themselves for 3 days or more without support. They don’t have the luxury of buried caches or helpful villagers. Notice how the Russians used scorched earth to deny the Germans anything they could scrounge on Russian soil.

This is why women are going to kill the infantry. If one soldier in the squad cannot carry his load, the load is not left behind. It is simply redistributed among the rest of the squad members. Not only does each squad member carry a few days rations of food and water, he carries his personal ammunition PLUS he will carry extra rounds for the crew served weapons that are attached to the squad.

For example, everyone will have to carry one or two rounds of 60mm mortar ammunition along with a couple of 100 round boxes of ammunition for the medium machine gun. If one guy pulls up lame, the other guys have to double up. That story of the lady reporter giving up her load to the already burdened infantrymen is going to be repeated a lot unfortunately.

* If you listened to Serial (season 1), you’ll remember that Rabia Chaudry is the name of the woman who inspired Sarah Koenig to investigate the case to begin with–and that, among other things, she complained that Adnan Syed was a helpless victim of The Backlash. It seems very likely that the Rabia Chaudry of Maryland quoted in the Post story is the same woman. If so, she has quite the talent for attracting attention from the national media.

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