RUTHFULLY YOURS

The CIA had spent years carefully building a solid network of spies and sources in China, only to have the whole thing unravel between 2010 and 2012 when the Chinese government systematically dismantled it. The New York Times is reporting that current and former intelligence officials say that at least a dozen operatives were executed with several others imprisoned.

The agency now believes a mole was responsible. And they will be years repairing the damage to our ability to gain adequate intelligence in China.

Daily Caller:

Beijing killed at least a dozen CIA sources and imprisoned several others, former and current U.S. officials told The New York Times. One asset was reportedly shot in front of his coworkers. The systematic campaign largely did away with a CIA espionage network that took the U.S. years to build.

Intelligence coming out of China was at its best early in 2010, but by the end of the year, the flow had decreased. By 2011, the CIA realized that their sources were disappearing.

“The CIA considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there,” reports The New York Times, highlighting the significant damage caused by the eradication of intelligence assets.

Some officials think a mole tipped the Chinese off, revealing the identities of CIA sources. The FBI and CIA launched an investigation, code-named Honey Badger, into the situation. Investigators suspected a former agency operative who oversaw operations in China and decided to remain in Asia after he left the CIA. The man, a Chinese-American intelligence officer, left the CIA before the leaks began. He had access to the identities of key informants.

Other officials who talked to The New York Times suspect that China hacked the covert communications channel. Still others believe that American officers and their sources simply got careless at a time when Chinese spycraft was improving rapidly.

By 2013, the CIA had managed to blunt China’s elimination of intelligence assets, although it is unclear how the agency achieved this outcome.

China is particularly sensitive to the dangers of foreign espionage, but at the same time, it is highly aggressive in its own spy operations against other countries, especially the U.S.

No matter how it happened – and it could have been a combination of factors – our intelligence on China is at a low point at exactly the wrong time. It’s easy to forget that tensions in the South China Sea are still at a high level and it wouldn’t take much for the current stand off to erupt into a hot war. If that happened, we’d be at a huge disadvantage given our intelligence capabilities having been crippled.

China has been active in stealing secrets from the US: CONTINUE AT SITE

French authorities imposed on students ridiculous books such as Daddy Wears a Dress. It would have been comical if the following years would not have been so tragic. What, in fact, wrecked these French illusions was Islamic terrorism.

The only enemy these French élites knew were patriarchal privileges, since for them “domination” comes only from the white male Europeans.

Obsession with gender is a convenient distraction to avoid facing matters that are more difficult and less pleasant. If the West will not commit itself to preserving Western societies and values, it will fall. And its extraordinary progress will be blanketed over by darkness, along with all those gender rights.

Welcome to the progressive “next frontier of ‘liberation'”, where the most urgent question in Western democracies is “genderism”.

North Carolina was subjected to a year of being boycotted, until it withdrew its transgender bathroom law. Last month, the National Union of Teachers in Great Britain asked the government to teach children as young as two new transgender theories. New York recently presented the first “trans-doll”. American universities are wracked with hysteria over the correct use of neutral pronouns. Even National Geographic, instead of writing about lions and elephants, started covering the “Gender Revolution”. One of the first announcements of Emmanuel Macron, as the French President-elect, was that he would appoint officials from a “gender equal” list.

(Image source: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

What does it mean that this gender mania is permeating every corner of Western societies and culture? According to Camille Paglia, the contrarian feminist, it is a sign of the decline of Western civilization. In her new book, Free Women, Free Men, she writes:

“Civilizations have gone through recurrent cycles. Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force”.

She then asks:

“How has it happened that so many of today’s most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. Transgender phenomena multiply and spread in ‘late’ phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline”.

It is not a coincidence that this obsession with gender grew out of Western culture during the 1990s, the decade of peace and prosperity before 9/11. The decade was free of any existential angst, consumed by the Monica Lewinski scandal and dominated by Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”. According to Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, gender ideology is a symbol of our epoch of “weakening”, pointing to a globalized future “governed by the hearth gods of health, wealth, and pleasure”. The high priests of this ideology, however, did not take into account the rise of radical Islam.

Before the French cities of Paris, Nice and Rouen came under the assault of jihadist groups, the French Socialist government had just one cultural priority: the “ABC of gender equality”. The name came from a controversial program that France’s women’s rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, had launched in 500 schools.

In 1963, President Kennedy spoke to members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Kennedy asserted that “what makes editorial cartooning such a wonder” is the ability to “entertain and instruct us … and … place in one picture a story and a message and do it with impact and conviction and humor and passion – all that … makes [editorial cartoonists] the most exceptional commentators on the American scene.”

According to Randall P. Harrison, “there are a handful of basic techniques which the cartoonist manipulates to create a symbolic world of make-believe.” The first process, known as leveling, is when “the cartoonist radically ‘levels’ what we usually see in our perceptual field thus creating a cartoon which is 2-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional.” Then there is “sharpening,” where “some items drop out so that the remaining items gather in importance.” Thus, “[a]s a cartoon body shrinks, the head expands. As wrinkles and minor features drop out, the expressive features of eyes, mouth and brows (features that move and are therefore the most informative in the human face) become more prominent.” And, finally, “the cartoonist assimilates through exaggeration and interpolation so that the fantasy, while still make-believe, ‘makes sense’ for the reader.”

But the true art of the cartoon figure is centered on the “thought balloon and the speech balloon.”

This is why Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, is a refreshing rebuke to those who cannot abide common sense and logic. James Delingpole explains how the latest Dilbert strip is “causing liberal heads to explode.” Concerning global warming, Adams “invites a climate scientist to explain the risk of climate change to the company.” The expert (in a white coat, of course) patiently explains how scientists “put that data into dozens of different climate models and ignore the ones that look wrong[.]” And “then [the scientists] take that output and run it through long-term economic models of the sort that have never been right.” Dilbert innocently asks, “What if I don’t trust the economic models” and is instantly reproached with “[w]ho hired the science denier?”

At his own blog, Adams asks, “[I]f scientists can make climate prediction models that are reliable (or so they tell us), why can’t they do the same with Muslim immigration predictions?” Thus:

Predicting the average temperature on Earth ten years from now is hard. There are too many variables. But predicting the outcome of immigration policies probably involves far fewer variables. All we need to do is look at other countries that experienced lots of Muslim immigration and subtract out the countries that reversed the trend with military force[.]

A good immigration prediction model would find the ‘tipping point’ where the percentage of Islamic population nearly guarantees the entire country will become Muslim in the long run. Is that 10% or 65%? I have no idea.

Suppose I said to you that 20% Islamic population will guarantee that eventually – perhaps in a hundred years or more – the country will have a dominant Islamic culture, with all that implies for women and the LGBTQ community.

The list makes no mention of German culture as being the guiding or core culture (Leitkultur), nor does the task force explicitly demand that migrants assimilate to the German way of life. Rather, the guiding principles appear to be aimed at encouraging Germans to embrace the foreign cultural norms that migrants bring to Germany.

“We cannot ask anyone to respect our customs if we are not ready to articulate them…. Our country is shaped by Christianity…. Germany is part of the West, culturally, spiritually and politically speaking.” — German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

Proponents of a Leitkultur argue that it necessary to prevent the establishment of parallel societies, including those governed by Islamic sharia law.

A government task force created to promote the integration of migrants into German society has published a list of the core features of German culture.

The list studiously omits politically incorrect terms such as “patriotism” and “leading culture” (Leitkultur), and effectively reduces German traditions and values to the lowest common denominator. The task force, in fact, implicitly establishes multiculturalism as the most complete expression of German culture.

The so-called Cultural Integration Initiative (Initiative kulturelle Integration) was created by the German government in December 2016 to promote “social cohesion” after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened German borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The task force — led by the German Cultural Council (Deutscher Kulturrat) in close cooperation with the German Interior Ministry and two dozen media, religious and other interest groups — was charged with reaching a consensus on what constitutes German culture. The original aim was to facilitate “cultural integration” by encouraging migrants to assimilate to a shared set of cultural values.

After five months of deliberation, the task force on May 16 presented a list of what it considers to be the top 15 guiding principles of German culture. Encapsulated in the catchphrase “Cohesion in Diversity,” the list consists of mostly generic ideas about German culture — gender equality, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, pluralism and democracy — that are not at all unique to Germany.