90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, October 20, 2022

With UK Royal Air Force 'Pausing' Job Offers For White Men to Meet 'Diversity Targets,' RAF Pilots Hired by China For $270K a Year

The UK Royal Air Force reportedly "paused" the hiring of white men in favor of "women and ethnic minorities" to hit "diversity targets" earlier this year, prompting the head of recruitment for the Royal Air Force to resign in disgust.

"The defence sources accused Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the head of the RAF, of appearing willing to compromise UK security at a time of growing threats from Russia and China in pursuit of albeit important goals such as improving diversity and inclusion," Sky News reported in August.

On Tuesday, Sky News reported that RAF pilots are being hired by China and getting paid £240,000 (~$270,000 USD) to train pilots for the People's Liberation Army.

From Sky News, "China's armed forces recruiting dozens of British ex military pilots in 'threat to UK interests'":

China has recruited dozens of former British military pilots to teach the Chinese armed forces how to defeat western warplanes and helicopters in a "threat to UK interests", officials have revealed.

One official said some 30 mainly ex-fast jet but also some helicopter pilots - lured by annual salaries of around £240,000 - are currently in China training pilots for the People's Liberation Army, in what a defence analyst described as a stunning breach of security.

Despite the media's hysterics, there's no evidence any of these pilots committed a crime.

The situation is so grave, the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence service on Tuesday issued a "threat alert" to warn serving and former military personnel against such approaches.

Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Sky News' Kay Burley the recruitment of UK pilots to train Chinese counterparts had been a concern within the Ministry of Defence "for a number of years".

Personnel already in China have been approached and advised against continuing such work, he said.

Mr Heappey said the law will be changing to make it illegal to ignore such warnings in future.

"Don't go and train foreign air forces without checking with the MOD whether they are a foreign air force we want to see you train - would be a good rule," he said.

Don't systemically discriminate against your own people would be a...

Our current energy crisis was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West, and it’s getting worse.

he West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses — the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion.

The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply.

In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in a recent powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that.

As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to strangle at...

Visage à trois #541

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #722

A Target Rich Environment: Naming Some Of The Despicable Aspects of the Left...

We're in a war for the soul - and for the life of every human being on earth.

Books—many of them—have been written by people far smarter than I about the worst aspects of modern Leftism. So, in this article, I can only barely touch on a few of the depravities that irk me the most and are extremely damaging to all of mankind. Remember, this list could be extended almost indefinitely.

1. The Left judges previous generations by their current moral vision. As a historian, I find this to be particularly repulsive. I believe there do exist moral absolutes by which people of all generations can be assessed; some things are wrong, always have been wrong everywhere, and always will be wrong. But culture, tradition, and societal immaturity dictate behavior, too. History has shown what works and what doesn’t. But that isn’t the Left’s standard. Their moral values alter, repeatedly and constantly, and everybody alive today or dead for 1,000 years is judged by those subjective, constantly shifting criteria.

The Left is changing history and re-writing it to fit their norms simply because thousands of years of experience, wisdom, tradition, and truth disprove everything they hold dear. “Christopher Columbus was a mass murderer!” There is no attempt to understand the culture, history, and background of Renaissance Europe. He is just damned. Period. And this mindset justifies the Left’s total rejection of freedom and Western Civilization, to bring in socialism and godless totalitarianism. But that’s the point of all of it anyway. Destroy Western values to introduce those the Left wants to, subjectively, replace them with.

2. They judge people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. They scream “racism” to high heaven at every imagined affront, but it is they who believe that black people, for example, cannot succeed unless borne along by the Left’s ideology. Put 50 brown illegals in Martha’s Vineyard, and they’ve got to go—NOW! They can stay in Florida and “pick crops.” The Left does nothing about the horrible black-on-black violence except incessantly crying “racism” when somebody points to it, simply because they believe that only they can help an inferior race anyway. Inferior to the liberals, at least. Blacks need affirmative action because of intrinsic societal “racism” and “white supremacy”. Black people can’t make it without the liberals’ carrying them along. If I were black, I would be insulted to the nth degree by this philosophy. It is also a lie, as millions of successful non-affirmative action blacks in the country and world have proven.

3. They deny true human nature, believing only in a naturalistic, materialistic universe without spirit. This is crucial, and I will elucidate further in a future article. But, because they are materialists in presupposition, they must logically deny free will. Molecules in motion have no will. Humans, because they thus have no true freedom of will, can be “programmed” to behave in certain pre-planned and “beneficial” ways. Hence, liberals are socialists, which denies human economic freedom. Without the Left’s guidance and central planning, the wasteful market economy would only produce chaos and destruction. “Capitalism” (economic freedom) is a great evil because no one can control a person who acts of their own volition. The materialistic, naturalistic aspect of today’s Left underpins everything they believe and is the major source of all their errors and failures. People are NOT automatons, and by treating them so, by thinking they (liberals) have the intelligence and wisdom to direct all of the human affairs, we end up with totalitarian governments and mass murderers. If you reject their control and disagree with them too strenuously, don’t be surprised if the FBI, KGB, CCP, or Gestapo show up at your front door. Without a warrant. Why do they need one of those? Their verbal fiat alone is sufficient to establish truth and law.

You are a robot. Obey your programmer.

4. As a consequence, especially of point 3 above, liberals believe the government (controlled by them, of course) can solve nearly every human and world conundrum. Including fixing the weather. This is hubris of unimaginable dimensions. They believe they have evolved to a higher stage of human development (Trotsky said they would), and everybody, but them, is wrong. And if you disagree with them, you’re not only in error, you are evil (as they define it, though “evil” cannot objectively exist without free will), and you are a deplorable, despicable sub-human, condemned by their perfect moral standard, which is ever-evolving, but never arriving. But, even as it is changing, it can be used to justify any barbarity they wish to commit and condemn everyone who has ever lived, even people in...