WE RANKED YOU LAST

Raqqa Courtesy The Independent

As dark misery settles down on us, and our refuges of lies fall in pieces one after one, the hearts of men, now at last serious, will turn to refuges of truth. The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.

Thomas Carlyle. 



A disgust had settled on the animal kingdom.

He opened the door and every surface was coated with crabs. Large, grey, inter-dimensional. 

Every last one of them was intelligent, and he slammed the door on the dank sea cave. 

There was a foreigner somewhere. Top of the morning to you. 

Pull my other leg, FBI. You really expect anyone to believe this nonsense? How about some truth from you clueless, corrupt, compromised, condescending functionaries? Robert Spencer, Undercover FBI agent who urged jihadis to "tear up Texas", Jihad Watch, 11 March, 2018.

He watched as the lyricism took hold.

They have all failed to conquer Afghanistan – the Greeks, Indians and more recently, the British in the mid 19th Century and the Soviets in the late 20th Century. And now the US empire is failing to subdue the tribes of Afghanistan despite enormous cost of people and treasure. What has not received much attention is that the Taliban depends very heavily on the opium trade which finds its market in the US and other developed countries. That opium trade determines what happens in Afghanistan and not military intervention.  Alongside the Americans, we keep fooling ourselves that a military solution is possible in Afghanistan. We have been told for 17 years that victory is just around the corner, with another surge of troops or improved training of the Afghan army. We keep conning ourselves. Countless people suffer as a result.
Australia’s involvement in the Afghan quagmire is our longest involvement in a war in our history – 17 years. Over 40 Australians have been killed in Afghanistan with over 260 casualties. It has cost about $A10 billion. We have lost lives and treasure for no purpose. But we won’t admit failure.
John Menadue, Afghanistan - the graveyard of Empires, Pearls and Irritations, 9 March, 2018.

The oligarchy had flooded the country with migrants for their own despicable ends. The left and right colluded in the destruction of the country. All was not lost. He did not believe them. What happened when the world was run by hysterics trapped in their own lies. 

Caged, they were, even before they opened the door. 

What was once taboo, population policy, was now widely discussed. These people had mismanaged everything. They had badly mismanaged migration, and the result was there for all to see. 

The ceaseless onslaught on all things male, which had reached an orchestrated crescendo on International Women's Day, was also curdling the country. 

"I wouldn't like to be a man, or a boy, growing up in this era," the librarian said when he made some passing reference. 

"It's gone too far," Old Alex replied as he ordered yet another book. "They spend billions of dollars denigrating half the population. Most men are perfectly decent, love their families, work hard. You'd never guess."

As women continue to scream about ‘toxic masculinity’, the debunked ‘gender pay gap’, and demanding even more equality without explaining which rights they don’t have that men do have — men are being sidelined.
They are sidelined in the workplace with quotas, they are sidelined when someone wears a ‘The Future is Female’ shirt, they are sidelined in lower university acceptance rates, and they are sidelined in the classrooms early where teaching styles tilt heavily towards girl-friendly learning — sitting still, collaborative learning, and consensus rather than activity, individual achievement, and competition.
Clash America.

The beginning of the night. 

What happened to all those who fell fowl of the new era of political correctness, an insane era where nothing could be discussed, where silence reigned supreme in marooned pockets, where those flowers had gone rank weeks before. 

An actor has been fired from the touring production of Green Day’s American Idiot, now playing at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne, for breaching its producers’ “Statement of Zero Tolerance to Inappropriate Behaviour”.
In an apologetic Facebook post today, the performer, Linden Furnell (pictured foreground, above), who plays the lead character of Johnny, said he was sacked for ‘serious misconduct’ which he explained as an inappropriate comment about menstruation told off mic to a co-performer while both were on stage.
“I made a crude allusion to menstruation amongst the banter. It was in poor taste and a lame attempt at humour,’’ he wrote.
Furnell said said he apologised to his co-performer later that night and “said that I would do what was necessary to avoid making that mistake again and reassured that I definitely did not intend to cause hurt or discomfort”.
The co-performer, he said, complained of his conduct to the show’s producers, Shake and Stir Theatre Company.
“I wasn’t asked to explain, give my account, dispute it or attempt resolution,’’ Furnell wrote. “The producers had a knee jerk reaction, probably as a form of damage control / prevention and I found myself fired without so much as a conversation. The climate is a sensitive one and there appears to be little room for nuance, intention, or even an accurate portrayal of events. .... 
 I am stating that there was no due process. It would have been nice to have been able to sit down, apologise in person and make it right with my colleague. I am fearful of a world where you can't come back from screw ups and make amends."

We ranked you last in a pivot of people we could trust. 

It was happening all over again. 

THE BIGGER STORY:



Writing in the UK's Independent, leading Middle East Eastpert Cascades of broken concrete line the streets of Raqqa. Few people are about and those who are look crushed and dispirited. An 80-year-old woman who says her name is Islim is scrabbling in the debris looking for scraps of metal and plastic to sell. She explains that she is trying to look after the wife and daughter of one of her sons who was killed by a mine.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by US air and artillery strikes, captured Raqqa from Isis on 20 October last year after a four-month siege. The destruction is apocalyptic. Houses, hospitals, bridges, schools and factories are gone, turned into heaps of broken masonry. There is no electricity and little water.
“After the war we were at zero and we are still at zero,” says Dr Saddam al-Hawidy. 

Flemish patriotic youth group “Schild & Vrienden” has launched a video in which they pledge to defend their Flemish heritage and their future.
The footage shows how the group successfully disrupts a leftist pro-immigration protest at a Flemish castle in the city of Ghent. According to the group’s leader, Dries van Langenhove, leftists and their actions “endanger the future of Europe”.
In a short amount of time the video had 300,000 views but Facebook was not amused and censored it. Several messages and movies of the group have also been removed from Facebook and the group’s leader has been suspended from the platform. But the group will not give up and reposted their viral video today.