And there's nothing inherently good or bad about it.
I have a general observation about critics of Jordan Peterson that's been growing for a few months. It seems to me that the most common objections to things that he says (yes, usually taken way out of context and cut into soundbite form) are a product of a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between positive and normative claims, and also often from deep ignorance of psychology and related fields.

More than 700 people have been poisoned after eating wild mushrooms in Iran, the country's emergency services said. At least nine people have died, while dozens more remain in critical condition, local media report.

"The latest emergency statistics show that 721 people have been poisoned by poisonous mushrooms, of which 190 were hospitalized, 523 were cleared, and nine died," Mojtaba Khalidi, an emergency services spokesman, told Iran's ISNA news agency.

Maybe it's simply fortuitous convenience or maybe it's a Tarantino-esque black comedy, but it's amazing how much radical leftists and radical Islamists have in common with each other. It's not a suggestion that the two movements secretly communicate with each other via cipher messages from underground command bunkers, but it's impossible to miss how much their ideology often calls for the same things.

Let's take a cruise through some of these similarities. Leftists want socialism to reign supreme via an all powerful controlling government. Islamists want the exact same thing. Just replace the words "Democratic Socialist president" with "Caliph." Exchange "Socialist Republic" with the word "Caliphate." One uses a distorted and modified Constitution while the other just calls it Sharia Law. Add it all together and you get the same result. A socialist fantasy world under the direction of an oppressive government.

To achieve all this, both Islamists and leftists are willing to weaponize a laundry list of like-minded causes and tactics.

A resolution of the council prescribing a probe into the latest deadly clashes between Israel and Palestinian protestors along the Gaza border has been adopted after six weeks of violent demonstrations, led by Hamas.

29 members of the UN Human Rights Council voted on Friday for a proposal to set up an "independent, international commission of inquiry" to investigate the ongoing conflict in Gaza, while 14 countries abstained and Australia and the US opposed the move.

The Australian representative stated that Israel had the right to "protect its population," adding that the draft resolution appeared to be one-sided.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday filed an amicus brief in the cases filed by San Francisco and Oakland against energy producers, slamming the lawsuits and asking the court for dismissal. The lawsuits seek financial "damages" from energy companies for the risks posed by climate change.

The Northern District Court of California invited the DOJ to provide its expert opinion on the cities' claims and advise on relevant information the court should consider for the case, in which the cities allege that combustion of the companies' products create a public nuisance.

On Friday, The New York Times released a 3,400-word, spectacularly brutal and dishonest hit piece on Jordan Peterson. Its none-too-subtle title: "Jordan Peterson: Custodian Of The Patriarchy."

The author, Nellie Bowles, can't hold back her obvious antipathy for her subject; instead, she lets her sneering condescension drop from every comma. She never lets Peterson spell out an argument; she satisfies her id with every snide aside. It's an extraordinary performance by a person deliberately attempting to misunderstand her subject.

The piece is tailored to Bowles' message: Peterson is a horrifying misogynist. Her evidence of this is that lots of young men listen to Peterson, and that Peterson believes in innate differences between men and women. She then proceeds to snip his comments, surround them with her suggestive perspective, and roll the whole ball of wax into an anti-Peterson grenade.

If the U.S. economy is performing well, then why can't 51 million households in the United States "afford basics like rent and food". A stunning new report that was just put out by the United Way ALICE Project shows that the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country is perhaps the biggest that it has been in any of our lifetimes. In some of the wealthiest areas of the nation, homes are now selling for up to 100 million dollars, but meanwhile tens of millions of families are barely scraping by from month to month. Many believe that this growing "inequality gap" is setting the stage for major societal problems.

In general, the U.S. economy seems to be performing better than expected so far in 2018, but the ranks of the poor and the working poor just continue to grow. The following comes from CNN...

Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the United States.

The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE - Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy."

Gina Haspel has been confirmed as America's new CIA Director, fulfilling her predecessor Mike Pompeo's pledge to turn the CIA into "a much more vicious agency". "Bloody Gina" has reportedly been directly involved in both torturing people and destroying evidence of torture in her long and depraved career, which some say hurts the CIA's reputation.

Others say it just makes it more honest.

The lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency has done some of the most unspeakably horrific things to human beings that have ever happened in the history of our species. If you think I'm exaggerating, do your own research into into some of the CIA's activities like the Phoenix Program, which used "Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners," and "The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission."

This is what the CIA is. This is what the CIA has always been. This is what Mike Pompeo said he wanted to help make the CIA "much more vicious" than. Appointing Gina Haspel as head of the agency is just putting an honest face on it.


It really couldn't be more fitting that the US now has an actual, literal torturer as the head of the CIA. It also couldn't be more fitting that it has a reality TV star billionaire President, an Iraq-raping Bush-era neoconservative psychopath as National Security Advisor, a former defense industry director as Secretary of Defense, a former Goldman Sachs executive as Secretary Treasurer, and a former Rothschild, Inc. executive as Secretary of Commerce. These positions have always facilitated torture, oppression, war profiteering and Wall Street greed; the only thing that has changed is that they now have a more honest face on them.

The House on Wednesday passed 347-70 a major overhaul to veterans health care, voting to expand their access to private sector care on the government's dime and to bring the Veterans Affairs Department through a process that would close some of its federally run facilities.

The Veterans Affairs Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act won widespread support in the lower chamber and will now head to the Senate, where it already has bipartisan backing. The massive bill dealing with multiple areas that have for years proven to be political landmines moved quickly through the House, with House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., introducing the bill just one month ago. Roe had worked for much of the 115th Congress with Democrats, his counterparts in the Senate, the Trump administration and an array of veterans stakeholders to reach a compromise bill.

The measure this week also won the official backing of the White House, which put out a statement saying the bill would "strengthen the VA's ability to deliver timely, high-quality healthcare in its own facilities, while ensuring seamless integration with community care providers." President Trump personally praised the bill in a tweet, saying the Senate should act within the next two weeks.

The Defenders Day Ball is just another example of the Russian love for tradition. Russia is the embodiment of the high ideals that the West formerly displayed in times past.

The following clip taken from Russian nightly news with transcript below shows just another example of high society in Russia