Conservative Voices
Conservative Voices

Conservative Voices

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BOOM VIDEO – Aaron Rodgers goes to TOWN on “coward” Anthony Fauci
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therightscoop.com

BOOM VIDEO – Aaron Rodgers goes to TOWN on “coward” Anthony Fauci

Aaron Rodgers was doing an interview on ESPN today on Pat Mcafee’s show and totally went to town on “coward” Anthony Fauci after he plead the 5th in congress the other day. . . .

Iran-US tensions escalate as energy sites become targets in war of words
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www.brighteon.com

Iran-US tensions escalate as energy sites become targets in war of words

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BOMBSHELL VIDEO: Nick Shirley allegedly chased, threatened with knife in Spain
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BOMBSHELL VIDEO: Nick Shirley allegedly chased, threatened with knife in Spain

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spectator.org

You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics

I’m looking around the world right now, and what I see isn’t all bad. In fact, there are lots of indications of positive things happening or about to happen. What strikes me, though, in seeing the hopeful signs, is the contrast between those and the, er… other things going on in the world. For example, the Moorish invasion of the Spanish town of Ceuta. Much of the reporting, particularly on social media, that you’ve seen is overhyped and factually shaky. There was indeed a massive wave of migrants from Morocco into that North African town, which briefly doubled its population of 85,000. The migrants were almost exclusively male; most were Moroccans — unemployment in Morocco is as high as 29 percent in some parts of the country — and the remainder seems to be largely sub-Saharan Africans. That wave generated some utterly appalling video, to be sure, though the accusations made against the Spanish government, namely that it invited the wave and seeks to profit politically by it, appear not to be accurate. (RELATED: I’m a Spanish Taxpayer. This Is Why the West Doesn’t Need to Reward Illegal Immigrants.) Pedro Sánchez, the socialist president of that country, actually sent in the army to repel that invasion, and as of Monday it seems that all but 3,000-5,000 of the migrants had been returned to Morocco. None have made it across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Iberian mainland. But it’s fairly obvious that the human-trafficking cartels which control African migration — whether North African or sub-Saharan African — into Europe were simply testing the Spanish government’s resolve and capabilities, and with the better part of 100,000 people conducting a human wave into a small territory on a compressed timeline one can’t help but to see Ceuta as a textbook example of what happens when the bad guys go unchecked. Sánchez’s government is not in the business of checking bad guys. He’s been Spain’s president since 2018, and he’s all but wrecked the country with terrible economic policies, catastrophic immigration policies and rampant corruption. In truth, those migrants were almost certainly attempting to enter Spain as a way station to someplace better in Europe. (RELATED: What’s Wrong With Spain? It’s Pedro Sánchez.) Is that the U.K.? Some 2,000 illegal aliens have entered Great Britain through the English Channel since its new prime minister, Andy Burnham, was anointed to replace Keir Starmer as the captain of the sinking ship which is the Labour government, and the citizenry seems to be angrier than ever before. Burnham’s chief political opponent, Nigel Farage of the Reform UK Party, has come out publicly for employing the Royal Navy to blockade the English Channel and prevent crossings by migrants in small boats and rubber rafts, which has generated howls of opposition from the French, who have allowed their country to become the leading repository for African migrants. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Henry Nowak, the Inevitable British Civil War, and What It Means for Us) The old line that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out is very relevant here. The current governing class in Western Europe seems to be unanimous in its approach to migration by non-Westerners into their countries — namely, that they want as much of it as they can hide from the public, and any resistance to that wave they’ll put up is mostly performative and never long-lasting. Nobody really thinks the Moroccans turned back at Ceuta won’t eventually make it into Europe. It’s only a matter of time. And so the lands of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Charles Martel, are gradually being gobbled up by the modern-day Moors, with little real prospect of a Reconquista on the horizon. One may come, but before it does there will need to be a wave of political revolution, and perhaps bloody revolution, throughout Western Europe. The old line that you can vote yourself into socialism but you’ve got to shoot your way out is very relevant here. Allow these people political power, and they will eat away at your democratic and cultural institutions until there is nothing left but the corruption they’ve installed, and those institutions collapse into themselves. And you’ll have to build new institutions to replace them. Which is what you get when you allow the lunatics into power. The serialization of my new novel The Necessary Men will begin here at The American Spectator in just more than a week, as I’ve noted, and in writing it I did more research into Cuba’s maladministration under the communist revolutionary tyranny which controls that country than I would have cared to. The only conclusion anyone can come to in surveying the 67 years since Fidel Castro and his cronies seized power there is that the Cuban revolutionaries are lunatics. Crafty lunatics, who, as the State Department’s report on Cuban communism made clear, are far more dangerous and have been for a long time. That’s certain. But lunatics all the same. (RELATED: The Castroist Playbook Comes to America) To get a good glimpse of what they’ve made of that country, I’ll direct you to a YouTuber who goes by Adventure Elliot; he’s from Wisconsin but actually lives in Spain, and earlier this year he traversed Cuba to produce 12 travelog videos exposing what the Castroites have done to the place. They’ve turned it into a madhouse. Neighbor turns on neighbor. Every foreigner is mobbed and scammed. People live in filth, conditioned to accept what the revolution gives them — which is misery. Initiative is punished, and the supposed classless society now manifests itself in two tiers of people — those with relatives in the United States or elsewhere who remit money to them to pay for basic necessities in what private shops the communists allow, and those without who stand in line at the state stores. As everyone’s house falls down around them. Use Google Earth’s satellite view to navigate around Cuba, and you will see things which make no sense — there are literal ruins in every town on the island, buildings which collapsed from years of neglect and have just been left to molder. People raid those sites for bricks or other building materials; in some cases, the inhabitants of those collapsed houses remain in what shelter they can find. And in less than five years, Cuba’s population has declined from 11 million to less than nine and a half million. Just as Venezuela, Cuba’s protege communist paradise, ran off a quarter of its own population in a decade. To live like that is lunacy. Cuba won’t for very much longer; it can’t. And yet the lunatics are somehow not discredited. We’re watching the Democrat Party come apart at the seams. As David Catron noted on Monday, James Carville says he won’t be in the same party as Hasan Piker, and that’s a noble sentiment, but it’s too late. Polling indicates the Democrats can’t stop Francesca Hong, a committed — well, in one sense; in another she’s uncommitted, and this is a problem — lunatic running for governor of that state whose Twitter/X feed contains some of the most insane, hateful drivel imaginable. Just recently, Hong dropped a post on X which accused the patrons of the Wisconsin staple Culver’s Restaurants of genocidal racism based on her own feelings and perceptions without any concrete substance to them, which generated national buzz, and yet the Democrat voters of that state don’t seem to be coming off her. She’s going to win her primary unless something massive changes. (RELATED: Why Republicans May Defy Midterm History) And Piker just descended on Wisconsin to stump for her. Which doesn’t appear to be a scandal among the party’s voters. (RELATED: The New Brownshirts?) Piker is also stumping for Abdul El-Sayed, who is now as much as a 15-point favorite over the more establishmentarian Heather Stevens in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed comes from an accomplished academic background and has apparently made a lot of money based on the properties he and his wife own, but we don’t know how he managed it. He’s an avowed DSA socialist whose speeches and pronouncements contain open rejections of the American founding and way of life, and it doesn’t seem to bother Michigan Democrat voters in the least. Because Michigan Democrats, like Wisconsin Democrats, are now made up of a majority of lunatics who think that abandoning American culture, economics, and politics and putting people like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed, not to mention Darieliza Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in positions of power will create something better. And we see something else, which defines it as lunacy — namely, an utter refusal to recognize that these things do not work. This isn’t stupidity. It’s lunacy. It’s pathological, because we already see, in the decline in Western Europe and the destruction in Cuba, what those belief systems create. And we see something else, which defines it as lunacy — namely, an utter refusal to recognize that these things do not work. That’s a problem. Dealing with lunatics whose worldviews are impervious to their own failures leads to intractable dilemmas. A perfect case of this involves the lunatics in charge of Iran. (RELATED: When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers) It’s been five months since the current round of bombing started, and basically all of America is tired of the Iranian conflict, the off-and-on blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, the higher gasoline prices that blockage has fostered, and the intermittent reports of American casualties. President Trump is without a doubt looking for a suitable off-ramp from the conflict for domestic political reasons. But the truth is that beyond the perception of this five-month staccato of air strikes and negotiations,  there is indeed a forever war. It isn’t ours; it’s Iran’s. Since 1979, that regime has done everything it could to plunge itself into open conflict with the world’s largest superpower because the people in charge of Iran since their revolution believe that if they can start enough trouble, a 1,200-year-old man will climb up out of a well and perfect the planet. That’s lunacy. Those are lunatics. And Trump and his team, who keep going back to the table again and again after beating on the lunatics, destroying their military infrastructure, taking apart their capabilities to make war and affect the geostrategic situation, and yet nonetheless offering them an offramp to their own inevitable demise, are finding that you can’t negotiate with lunatics because their math is not the same as yours. Iran doesn’t want peace with us. Iran wants to destroy us. If we’re going to have peace with Iran, we’re going to need a different Iran. Just like we’re going to need a different Cuba. And just like there will have to be a different Western Europe if the continent is going to save itself from the demographic time bomb ticking ever more loudly as it packs migrant on top of migrant to weigh down an already sclerotic society. (RELATED: Spain’s Demographic Suicide: A Generational Error Europe Will Not Undo) And just like we will eventually come back to a reality this country once embraced, which is that there can be no bread broken or accord made with the Francesca Hongs and Zohran Mamdanis. You have to deny power to the lunatics. This is neither negotiable nor avoidable. It’s a lesson we seem doomed to repeat the hard way, and we will invariably learn it again soon. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Let’s You and Him Fight, Bernie Anthony Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Strategy May Not End the Investigation The Dangerous Precedent Behind the Shiloh Hendrix Verdict

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spectator.org

Defending ‘Adequate’ Humans Against AI

Yes, yes, I say modestly. I had a brief career in the movie business. That is to say, in a movie-adjacent support occupation. Nothing I did ever appeared on screen; my name isn’t in any list of credits (though I have a couple IMDb listings). I was a production script translator. That’s a title I invented myself, because nobody cared enough to give it a name. Historical background: Around the turn of the 21st century, Scandinavian cinema enjoyed a flourishing moment. Some breakout films had drawn international attention. In Norway in particular, the government, awash in oil money, offered cultural and artistic grants to ambitious production companies. Many of those companies calculated that they could increase their market potential through partnering with companies in England and America. To make that work, they needed their Norwegian scripts translated into English. And later on, when some of the projects actually went into production, the English-speaking participants would need those same scripts in hand. That’s why they called for our services. (It should be noted that our translations never made their way into subtitles. Subtitling is a jealously guarded fiefdom all its own.) In a Norwegian-American Facebook group, a woman in Oslo inquired whether anybody out there was a good English translator of Norwegian text. She was doing script translation, she said, and needed help. I am a good English translator of Norwegian text. I responded, and we began a profitable association. It was part-time work, never threatening to make me rich, but it made for a nice side income. Beyond that, it was fun. I’m a fiction writer; I know how to make words sing. I also relish the challenge of translation, the sheer sport of an exercise something like disassembling a grand piano, passing the pieces through a suspended iron ring, and reconstructing the whole instrument on the other side. Then came artificial intelligence. At first my boss employed it for preliminary drafts. She’d send me an AI translation, and I’d compare it with the original script and iron the howlers out. We kept our chins up. “It’s just a tool,” we said. “It makes our job easier, increases our productivity.” (RELATED: The Serpent’s New Promise) Within a year, nobody was sending us scripts anymore. I’d seen the technology evolve in real time — AI was getting better and better. Not great. Not as good as my own work. But adequate. AI had become entirely adequate, and adequate is just fine for work destined for the trash bin anyway. Our services got pared out of budgets, with no visible loss. I sit here as sort of a miniature Norma Desmond, telling the world, “I am good. It’s the pictures that got adequate.” The conventional wisdom is that technology destroys jobs, but creates more. The old Luddites smashed steam-powered looms, because those machines usurped what had been a hard-mastered craft and handed it over to soulless automata. But the soulless machines themselves went on to create new jobs. Now humans would tend the steam looms, or assemble them, or build and maintain the power plants that kept them running. There were more jobs in the long run. However far downstream the mechanization spread, there always came a point where humans were necessary. Only people could think. Only people could walk about and manipulate objects. (RELATED: Would the Whiff of AI Have Panicked Harold Ross?) Then came AI. Where will the consumer acquire purchasing power, when both manual and mental labor have been automated? It seems to me (prejudiced as I am) that artificial intelligence represents a whole different species of automation. The old model targeted drudge work (in fact, it killed slavery. Nobody really got serious about the obvious evils of that ancient institution until the industrial revolution was well underway. We began noticing the injustice only after we’d found alternative means of getting the scut work done). The dream of automation became one of freeing mankind from the curse of mindless labor. (RELATED: When Effort Becomes Optional) But from what does artificial intelligence free us? The curse of mindful labor? As a novelist, I now find myself competing for readership with books churned out in seconds by AI mills. Ever since the printing press was invented, there’s been a market for cheap, mindless literature, but now we’ve refined the process to a point where the mindlessness is literal. Lowbrow literature was once a training field for authors who sometimes transcended their genres — Hammett and Chandler and Bradbury come to mind. Today, actual writers (like production script translators) are a discretionary entry in the bookkeeping. (RELATED: The Peril and Promise of AI) There’s a whole realm of life that belongs to the Adequate. Good enough for the general public. That’s the realm where most of us live, and where skilled workers used to learn their crafts. In the AI future, infinite goods will be produced, but who will buy those goods? Where will the consumer acquire purchasing power, when both manual and mental labor have been automated? At what point will our AI masters decide that the human being, like Ned Ludd the weaver or Lars the script translator, is a downward drag on the bottom line? It may be true that there will always be work for geniuses. Those who can afford the best will still be happy to shell out for prestige goods. But what about the common people, the people who shop at Walmart and read thrillers and romance novels, the “all men” affirmed by our founding documents as being created equal? What work is there for them (us), when AI overruns the realm of the Adequate? How many of us are really better than Adequate? I can picture the finest ballerina on earth. She is exquisite in beauty, elegant in motion. She’s dancing in an empty hall, before a hundred cameras, artificial intelligence recording and analyzing her every movement. Perhaps even AI can never match her art. But where is the second-best ballerina? The 100th best? Lars Walker is a novelist, Norwegian translator, and lecturer. His 7-volume historical fantasy epic, The Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, begins with The Year of the Warrior and ends with The Baldur Game. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.