Amerika

~~~

Big Tech finally met its comeuppance. The stocks will recover, but the goodwill cannot; the Silicon Valley companies were seen as a way forward but now it becomes clear that we are stagnating in an eternal 2007 where the same old battles over free speech hide the fact that relatively few real people use these services.

This leaves the Western economies headless, since a steady retreat from an economy based on doing everything online. People before wanted openness, compromise, and a universal standard. Now that diversity has punched us in the face with its failure, and online culture has revealed itself as group bullying of ideological non-conformists, people want to find their local tribe and stick within it.

Then they want to shut out the world.

In the meantime, the debt bomb keeps cranking as inflation eats into the excess wealth going into those funds. Pensions will go first, probably at the city level, followed by statewide reductions. This will coincide with a creeping world depression. Your leaders do not mind: desperate people cling to government.

However, at this time, such things may not prevail anymore. After COVID-19 was revealed to be the panic that ate the world economy and revealed that our fellow citizens are wannabe totalitarians, our experts are careerists who will say whatever gives them airtime, and our leaders want to use tragedy to force us into their Utopian visions, goodwill toward government no longer exists.

We are headed toward Regime Change.

Future generations are going to see democracy as “political Onanism” (pO) because it emphasized popularity of ideas over any type of verification that they were consistent at all with external reality. Humanity crawled into its own egotism and narcissistic self-aggrandizement at the same time it used this to justify a savage destruction of its environment.

In the meantime, the roles have flipped. Back in the 1930s-1990s, the dissidents were Leftists and the Establishment were conservative; now, the Establishment is a hybrid of Communism-Consumerism and the dissidents want organic life. That includes kings and culture, but also an everyday lifestyle based around homestead, marriage, and family.

This is somewhat misleading because conservatives have never changed. We have always liked the organic and time-proven over the human and conjectural; we distrust humanity because we know most of humanity does not think, only reacts. That changed slightly with the Leftist onslaught.

We might see the Left as “humanists” in a difference sense, meaning that they attempt to replace everything organic and time-proven with theory that instead shows us that humanity is fine just the way it is; it does not need to adapt, morally improve, think, dare, or change. It is living its best life just as it is, they say.

Because they sought to replace so many things, the Right rushed in to defend those things, and therefore abandoned its true base, which is the simple idea that reality matters more than human social opinions, and therefore we stay with the organic instead of the designed (managerial, administrative, bureaucratic, humanist).

Now that the Left has power and its power is failing, both because it has achieved none of what it promised and has brought misery and weakness instead, the Right is slipping back into its aspirational role: we are less focused on what we do not want, because that is almost everything that is, but more on what we actually desire.

This is giving rise to homespun intellectualism based around the homestead and culture instead of aspiring to build great cities of shining steel:

In the cultural domain, the Quiet Right has broken significant new ground. In the arts, right-wing pseudonymous authors have created new magazines, publishing houses, and literary prizes. More mainstream companies, such as the Daily Wire, have sought to create conservative media institutions at industrial scale. Figurative painting and neo-classical architecture have gained appreciation. At the grassroots level, faith-based and family-oriented social media content have seen rapid growth, with “mom bloggers” revalorizing family and motherhood and a “back-to-the-land” movement appealing to classic Americana imagery and offering an alternative to millennial aesthetics.

The Quiet Right is also reshaping America’s social geography. The past decade has seen a movement to repopulate small towns and create culturally moderate communities that offer an alternative to misgoverned coastal enclaves. Covid-19 accelerated this shift, with many families packing their bags and seeking more ideologically compatible communities. They fled California, Illinois, and New York for Florida and Texas. Even within states, the flight to the suburbs is, in large part, a flight from left-wing culture and policy.

Though it might not make headlines, the Quiet Right represents a key social shift. Its adherents believe that human life is not cultivated primarily in the abstract—through ideology, media, and technology—but in the flesh.

This type of cultural secessionism shows a belief that America has left behind continuity with its origins and embraced something alien for the usual reason, peer pressure a.k.a. the committee method a.k.a. control, or the need for humans to feel “safe” because everyone is united on a means-over-ends process that neuters them and therefore engenders warm herd feelings.

We saw the first inklings of this in the crunchy conservative movement which was basically hearth and home thinking applied in an anti-corporate, pro-culture way:

Alexis de Tocqueville complained that the literary class—detached from real political responsibility—is singularly lacking in prudence, and there’s evidence he remains right when it comes to both our left and our right.

[Rod Dreher] identifies himself as a crunchy conservative. That means, in his own mind, that he’s localist in politics, orthodox in religion, but as totally organic and as ecologically conscious as some nostalgic ex-Hippie. To be a crunchy con, Rod claims, is to be a “Birkenstock-loving [Edmund] Burkean.” He’s always fun to read and sometimes he’s even right.

He’s more consistently ecological than those “do your own thing” ex-Hippies. He worries about both natural ecology and social ecology: The world has to be a proper home for both trees and families, and people, like trees, can’t flourish unless they’re securely located in a particular place.

Dreher is a bit of a RINO of course because he does not believe in culture; he wants Christianity to replace it, and has adopted the Benedict Option like the last few generations of conservatives to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

However, what these two movements — the Quiet Right and Crunchy Conservatives — together show us is a desire to discover tradition and live according to the ways of our forebears because these are eternal, where modernity is always temporal, and therefore alienates us from our roots and future:

That none of the several people in Germany live together in cities, is abundantly known; nay, that amongst them none of their dwellings are suffered to be contiguous. They inhabit apart and distinct, just as a fountain, or a field, or a wood happened to invite them to settle. They raise their villages in opposite rows, but not in our manner with the houses joined one to another. Every man has a vacant space quite round his own, whether for security against accidents from fire, or that they want the art of building. With them in truth, is unknown even the use of mortar and of tiles. In all their structures they employ materials quite gross and unhewn, void of fashion and comeliness. Some parts they besmear with an earth so pure and resplendent, that it resembles painting and colours.

They therefore live in a state of chastity well secured; corrupted by no seducing shows and public diversions, by no irritations from banqueting. Of learning and of any secret intercourse by letters, they are all equally ignorant, men and women. Amongst a people so numerous, adultery is exceeding rare; a crime instantly punished, and the punishment left to be inflicted by the husband. He, having cut off her hair, expells her from his house naked, in presence of her kindred, and pursues her with stripes throughout the village. For, to a woman who has prostituted her person, no pardon is ever granted. However beautiful she may be, however young, however abounding in wealth, a husband she can never find. In truth, nobody turns vices into mirth there, nor is the practice of corrupting and of yielding to corruption, called the custom of the Age. Better still do those communities, in which none but virgins marry, and where to a single marriage all their views and inclinations are at once confined.

In all their houses the children are reared naked and nasty; and thus grow into those limbs, into that bulk, which with marvel we behold. They are all nourished with the milk of their own mothers, and never surrendered to handmaids and nurses. The lord you cannot discern from the slave, by any superior delicacy in rearing. Amongst the same cattle they promiscuously live, upon the same ground they without distinction lie, till at a proper age the free-born are parted from the rest, and their bravery recommend them to notice. Slow and late do the young men come to the use of women, and thus very long preserve the vigour of youth. Neither are the virgins hastened to wed. They must both have the same sprightly youth, the like stature, and marry when equal and able-bodied. Thus the robustness of the parents is inherited by the children. Children are holden in the same estimation with their mother’s brother, as with their father. Some hold this tie of blood to be most inviolable and binding, and in receiving of hostages, such pledges are most considered and claimed, as they who at once possess affections the most unalienable, and the most diffuse interest in their family. To every man, however, his own children are heirs and successors: wills they make none: for want of children his next akin inherits; his own brothers, those of his father, or those of his mother. To ancient men, the more they abound in descendants, in relations and affinities, so much the more favour and reverence accrues. From being childless, no advantage nor estimation is derived.

The moment they rise from sleep, which they generally prolong till late in the day, they bathe, most frequently in warm water; as in a country where the winter is very long and severe. From bathing, they sit down to meat; every man apart, upon a particular seat, and at a separate table. They then proceed to their affairs, all in arms; as in arms, they no less frequently go to banquet. To continue drinking night and day without intermission, is a reproach to no man. Frequent then are their broils, as usual amongst men intoxicated with liquor; and such broils rarely terminate in angry words, but for the most part in maimings and slaughter. Moreover in these their feasts, they generally deliberate about reconciling parties at enmity, about forming affinities, choosing of Princes, and finally about peace and war. For they judge, that at no season is the soul more open to thoughts that are artless and upright, or more fired with such as are great and bold. This people, of themselves nowise subtile or politic, from the freedom of the place and occasion acquire still more frankness to disclose the most secret motions and purposes of their hearts.

Simultaneously, much of the herd is discovering that the great modern experiment has not turned out so well. We are near ecocide, divided internally by diversity and class warfare which is always proles versus anyone with money, and none of our institutions or technologies really work that well anymore.

For that reason, people want a civilizational redesign based on organic living instead of symbolic living like ideology, commerce, and popularity:

In the future: (1)

• We will have learned to fit in with the ecosystem. (2)
• By having smaller families, we will consciously and humanely reduce our population to 1 billion or fewer. (3)
• All our energy and food will be from sustainable sources. (4)
• We will have developed a steady-state, more circular economy. (5)
• The vast majority of the earth’s lands and oceans will be left alone, to manage themselves. (6)
• Our population will be dispersed on 6 continents to provide some resilience in case of a major meteor strike, pandemic or other natural catastrophe.
• With a smaller population and a greater emphasis on resiliency, trade in commodities between continents will be greatly reduced. (7)
• Bounded by the overarching principle of fitting into the ecosystem and by the understanding that all humans are members of one branch of the larger tree of life, cultural diversity will be valued and encouraged. (8)
• Different environments will continue to stimulate a variety of appropriate technologies and customs. (9)
• Humans will focus on meeting their psychological needs in the ways that have proven robust over the millennia: i.e. through cultivation of relationships, art, music, humour, physical activity, meaningful work, connection with nature, spiritual exploration, etc. (10)
• Humans around the globe will continue to participate in the cooperative exercise of learning about ourselves, the universe, and our place in it. (11)

This requires humanity to reverse millennia of utilitarian living, brought about by the problem of permanent civilization, namely keeping everyone on the same page since we are already obligated to keep them alive simply because they are members of our society. That is the ideology of the parasite.

Parasites create a kind of entropy by distracting us from the center, or ends-over-means goal-oriented thinking, toward looking at endless exceptions and sob stories, focusing our energy both in the margins and toward the negative problems of yesterday instead of positive opportunities of tomorrow.

This marginal thinking, much as it did in the Jacobin era and Soviet Union, produces declining quality at raised costs while the sob stories and endless exceptions continue:

I have a whole ghost kitchen in this landfill, and soon I will need to reserve a bigger plot. For the nifty under-the-counter fridge that has stopped getting cold after three years and no one in the area can fix. For the cool, bagless vacuum cleaner that clogs and chokes when I run it over a rug. For the set of glass measuring cups whose numbers and hash marks are swiftly fading and becoming illegible, much like those on the dials of the washer my wife bought just three years ago. For the remains of the Pyrex casserole that shattered when I removed it from the oven, strewing the floor with blade-like shards, some so tiny I probably won’t find them for another couple of months, and only when they lodge in my bare feet. 

Should I go on? I think I will. It’s important to get to the essayistic part, where I ask what it means when the objects in our lives demoralize us in a blizzard of malfunctions that seem to be hastening by the month.

In short, we have reversed the modern miracle. The good life — the American Dream — has been killed by our need to fund (endless) anti-poverty and anti-racism programs, with several billion more people hoping to come here. By egalitarian thought, we have more and therefore should share it, even if it kills us.

Our pursuit of the perpetual human illusion of unity through pacifism leads us to invite in the world which promptly erases our prosperity and destroys us as we struggle to pay for a welfare state debt burden we have no chance of paying:

The remark came in response to a question about whether Biden viewed migration as a human right.

“Well I think it is a human right if your family is being persecuted,” Biden said. “I thought it was a human right for, you know, Jews in Germany to be able to go […] escape and get help where they could.”

Insert anti-poverty system, get more poverty. Invite in the world to make them less poor, everyone becomes poor. Start Communism so wealth is spread equally, watch the wealth dissipate. To dumber humans, the great illusion always seems like a good idea, but those with experience as executives, military, or leaders know it is false.

The more we try to solve the negative problems of the world, instead of aspiring toward the good, the more we entrench ourselves in a cycle of consumerism and communism linked by the circular Ponzi scheme that requires constant growth and consumption:

I felt unmoored for months. Why would the same item be worse years later? Shouldn’t it be better? But here’s the thing: My lackluster bra is far from the only consumer good that’s faced a dip in comparative quality. All manner of things we wear, plus kitchen appliances, personal tech devices, and construction tools, are among the objects that have been stunted by a concerted effort to simultaneously expedite the rate of production while making it more difficult to easily repair what we already own, experts say.

In the 10 years since I bought that old bra, new design norms, shifting consumer expectations, and emboldened trend cycles have all coalesced into a monster of seemingly endless growth. We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked — for far longer than the last decade — into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way. By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have. Worse yet, we’re playing into corporate narratives that undercut the labor that makes our items worth keeping.

“If you change the style regularly, people get tired of the style,” says Matthew Bird, a professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. “They start to treat cars like sweaters — it’s become grossly accelerated. The pressure to make more stuff, of course, lowers the quality of what’s being made, because the development and testing is just accelerated even more.”

When the money gets frittered away by taxes, unions, regulations, lawsuits, and quotas, the quality of products decline. All costs are passed on to the consumer; the only way to avoid high prices is to cut corners, and now everything is made of inferior materials in third world sweatshops.

Even more, our miracle of scientific innovation has died as diversity and socialism impose heat-death upon us:

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

We did the same thing as the Soviets: we raised the costs through details and ignored the big goal, at which point no one got rewarded for doing good, so the efficient response was to do the bare minimum, which in huge bureaucracies becomes amplified to be total mediocrity.

Our Abrahamic morality teaches us good and evil, but in reality life seems to operate not through binaries but dualities. Every action has an opportunity and an opportunity cost, but that latter provides opportunity to something else, gradually enmeshing the two into the start of an ecosystem.

For example, living in a civilization requires giving up many freedoms but also grants most of your time back. However, that creates grifters as well, and the society that does not remove its waste humans dies by parasitism, like the Soviets or Jacobins.

At the core of human psychology rests Control. As individuals, we want control over nature because we fear it, therefore we demonize it and use that as an excuse to do what we want and ignore the reality of the situation. Instead of looking toward the good in the future, we look toward the negative in the past and center on that.

Whatever you focus on, you get more of. This means that instead of building wealth, we subsidize poverty, and therefore get more of it. Instead of making beautiful culture, we demand individual freedom from culture, and therefore get more atomized.

If realist morality has a cornerstone, it is “always reward only the good,” meaning that when people do good things, they alone get rewarded and one does so vigilantly in order to ensure none fall through the cracks. A society that does this becomes more competent, efficient, prosperous, gentle, and wise.

The only other option — reward everyone in advance, then hope they decide to do great things — gradually eats away at the number of producers while increasing the ranks of the parasites. Eventually you get equal mediocrity, but everyone still has warm feelings about the pacifism unity so no one will be the first to say the system has failed.

The system has failed. We are looking toward new options in many different ways, but at some point, we have to ask whether we believe more in function or good feelings. History and nature reward function, but good feelings will always be popular with the fearful and therefore power-seeking self-destructive human herd.

~~~

• Portland State U. DEI summit includes ‘white’ and ‘black’ race-based tables
  

  According to a slide show from the event posted by the university, participants were instructed to “Please sit at the tables that most align with your salient identities. You are also welcome to self define multicultural and intersectional tables that extend beyond single definitions.”

  Diversity has failed, so people are embracing segregation again, which back in the day was popular with most people of all races. Everyone needs their own space. Segregation is a half-solution; reparations-with-repatriation is the full deal.

• U.S. unemployment rate falls in December, but rises for Black women, Hispanic men
  

  Black women saw unemployment increased to 5.5% last month, up 0.3 percentage points from 5.2% in November, data from the Labor Department showed Friday. Overall, Black employment held steady at 5.7%, while the unemployment rate for Black men actually declined to 5.1% from 5.4% last month.

  Meanwhile, Latino men saw unemployment rise to 4% in December, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from 3.6% the prior month. The overall unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1% from 4.0%. Unemployment among Latino women also ticked up to 3.7% from 3.6%.

  Somehow, this is a problem that everyone must solve, instead of something that the economy is solving by selecting for the workers who do what is in demand. A society designed for first-world people will reward those. If affirmative action goes, so does diversity, but each ethnic group will instead develop its own parallel economy.

• Public Schools Lost More Than One Million Students During Pandemic
  

  Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public-school enrollment, according to school officials.

  If you design your schools around a population with an average IQ of 100, you can teach complex materials to a degree; if you norm instead to the low 90s, you can only teach simplistic memorization, and consequently the promising students abandon the schools. Diversity just killed education hard. In the meantime, the exodus of the intelligent will crush the public school system:

  The study found evidence of stratification in academic preparation and socioeconomic status, with high-performing students and students from affluent families and privileged castes disproportionately drawn to private schools. But the researchers also found that these moves did not academically harm students who remained in public schools.

  The higher achievers leave everyone else behind, and as that norm falls, so does the quality of education, since if you are teaching low-ability students you need simple material so that they do not all fail.

• EU refugee plight could worsen in 2023 without policy change
  

  However, some EU states have already complained of being overwhelmed. In Germany, too, the federal and local governments have cited difficulties with accommodation. Johansson faces the challenge of maintaining a sense of unity among the member states in 2023. That’s because so far, the war refugees have not been distributed according to any formula, and are instead moving freely within the EU under a special protection status without asylum procedures.

  The so-called Dublin rules, which designate responsibility for asylum seekers in the state of first entry, are not working. The European Commission has presented various proposals for reform, but of the ten draft laws, only three are under serious discussion. According to EU Home Commissioner Johansson, further laws will be passed in the coming year to finally establish a system of responsibility and solidarity in EU migration and asylum policy.

  Immigration replaces your people; a sensible society would have zero of it, because random genetics does not support culture. Only consistent genetics can do that. In the meantime, some four billion other people will come to the first-world if they can. The only sensible immigration policy is to end all immigration for all reasons. Democracy, bound by ideology, is inflexible here and thereafter will soon depart, followed by diversity.

• Group of Santas reportedly beat up by Hindu nationalists at Indian carnival
  

  The Santas were giving out free chocolates and Christian books to visitors at a zoo in the western city of Ahmedabad when they were attacked by members of Bajrang Dal, a Hindi nationalist militant organization in India, according to the New Indian Express.

  “When we went there to protest against the people who were doing religious conversion activity, there was a clash with some of them,” North Gujarat Bajrang Dal president Javalit Mehta told the news site.

  Jai Shri Ram! Every culture wants to preserve itself, which means keeping its religions consistent with its origins. Hinduism and Buddhism can coexist, but everyone else is an invader.

• Is America suffering a ‘social recession’?
  

  Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friendships, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation and community involvement. The continuing shift has been called the “friendship recession” or the “social recession” – and, although it will take years before this is clearly established, it was almost certainly worsened by the pandemic.

  That is what diversity does: it causes people to hunker down, as Robert Putnam told us. Without a dominant culture, the outside is a cancel culture warzone and no one wants to interact, so they stay at home on Netflix and social media.

• Jordan Peterson: I will risk my licence to escape social media re-education
  

  For my crimes, I have been sentenced to a course of mandatory social-media communication training with the college’s so-called experts (although social media communication training is not a scientific and certainly not a clinical specialty of any standing). I am to do this at my own expense (some hundreds of dollars per hour) and for a length of time that is to be determined only by those retraining me and profiting from doing so. How will this be determined? When those very re-educators — those experts — have convinced themselves that I have learned my lesson, and will behave properly in the future.

  With diversity comes tyranny, since different groups go to war with each other by adopting victimhood, the only position of power in an egalitarian society. For this reason, wrongthink must be banned to keep the dubious unity of the group together, and freedom of expression, association, religion, and thought go out the window just like under the Jacobins and Soviets.

• Diversity of US workplaces is growing in terms of race, ethnicity and age, forcing more employers to be flexible
  

  Increased immigration, longer life expectancy and a decline in birth rates are transforming the U.S. workforce in two important ways. The people powering this nation’s economy include far more people of color and workers over 55 than was the case four decades ago.

  White Replacement is real. To accommodate it, employers will have to abandon the practices that made a first world economy and settle for the more permissive practices that are common in the third world.

• We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter
  

  We do not have, in this country, a mainstream press that is devoted to exposing bullshit. Even Matt Levine of Bloomberg, probably the country’s best financial journalist, said after the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire that he thought Bankman-Fried was “likable, smart, thoughtful, well-intentioned, and candid.” In fact, Bankman-Fried was a sociopath who lied to everyone he knew. (Astonishingly, Bankman-Fried had previously admitted to Levine’s face that he was “in the Ponzi business” but Levine apparently saw no red flags.) Men like this never fool Current Affairs (we described Bankman-Fried as having a fraud-based business model before his company’s collapse), but it would be nice if the mainstream financial press would be a little more cynical toward obvious bullshitters.

  Our official narrative is happy bullshit about how the obviously failing policies of socialism and diversity are working just great when all visible evidence points to the contrary. Naturally, once you build society around the Big Lie — equality — everything else becomes nonsense too.

• Germany: NYE violence sparks debate about integration
  

  On Tuesday, the Berlin Police Department said that of 145 people arrested in connection with the violence, 139 were male, two-thirds were under the age of 25, and 27 were minors. They have all been released.

  Of the 145 arrested, 45 were reported to be German nationals, 27 Afghan, and 21 Syrian.

  In Germany, one-quarter of the population has a so-called “migration background,” meaning that they themselves or at least one of their parents was not born in the country. Among people under the age of 25, this number is higher. And in some urban areas such as Berlin’s Neukölln district, around 40% of the population has such a “migration background”.

  Diversity does not work. Each group works to advance itself at the expense of the majority, which is then replaced. Democracy cannot deal with this because it contradicts the notion of equality itself.

• Negative online reviews from Black people perceived as less credible, according to new study
  

  Results showed that they perceived the credibility of reviewers with profile pictures reflecting Black race as more favorable when they posted positive reviews compared to negative reviews.

  Diversity fatigue hits as people associate diversity with endless complaints that scapegoat others for common problems and assume “racism” is the root. On the other hand, endorsement by a Black person means that the service is acceptable to the System.

• LA County to pay $20M for black family’s seized land
  

  The land in the city of Manhattan Beach was purchased in 1912 by Willa and Charles Bruce, who built a small resort for African Americans on the south shore of Santa Monica Bay.

  The Bruces suffered racist harassment from white neighbors, and in the 1920s the Manhattan Beach City Council condemned the property and took it through eminent domain. The city did nothing with the property, and it was transferred to the state of California and then to Los Angeles County.

  Somehow there is missing history here. We assume “racism” and therefore theft, but never look into how communities clashed back in the day. In the meantime, the wealth transfer machine funded by the voters just keeps going.

~~~

• Michel Houellebecq says Great Replacement is ‘fact’
  

  “The Great Replacement, I was shocked it’s called a theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact,” said Houellebecq. “When it comes to immigration, nobody controls anything, that’s the whole problem. Europe will be swept away by this cataclysm.”

  “It’s objectively what the figures say,” added Onfray, who said he thinks that the decline of the West is primarily a demographic decline. 

  The fact that France’s greatest living writer, as he is often described by the mainstream press, has said the Great Replacement is fact will only add to the growing body of intellectuals, academics, and politicians who have increasingly been willing to describe the Great Replacement in public forums.

  Civilization can only exist with culture, and culture only exists in a mono-ethnic society. In the name of making government powerful so it can continue the welfare state, Europe has abolished itself. Democracy always ends this way.

• Zebrafish testing identifies a gene potentially at the root of domestication
  

  Domesticated species — such as dogs and cats — show genetic differences compared to their wild type counterparts, including variation in the baz1b gene. These genetic changes correlate with physical and behavioural traits including smaller facial features such as skulls and teeth, as well as being more sociopositive, less aggressive, and having less fear.

  However, studies have also suggested that modern humans domesticated themselves after they split from their extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. In doing so, we experienced similar physical and behavioural changes.

  By domesticating ourselves, we made ourselves responsive to the thoughts of other humans, not to nature and logic. This made us weak and set off a decline cycle.

• Colorado plans to send more migrants to New York
  

  Like many major cities around the country, Denver has been struggling to provide services for a surge of people who have fled their home countries in Central and South America, crossed the southern border and sought asylum in the United States. Over the past month, more than 3,500 migrants have arrived in Denver, according to the city, and each night around 1,800 asylum seekers have sought shelter in the city.

  In response, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock declared a state of emergency and later appealed to the local Catholic archdiocese for assistance. He and Polis — both Democrats — also launched a fund to raise money to support services for migrants.

  In total, Polis said the state has recently made $5 million available to assist with expenses. And while roughly 70 percent of asylum seekers who arrive in Denver are traveling to other destinations, the cost of helping them purchase bus tickets constitutes a fraction of the overall pot of cash.

  The federal government passed the cost to the states by refusing to enforce immigration law, and now the states are looking at bankruptcy and realizing that it is cheaper to simply ship the problem away.

• The U.S. Government’s Woke Training
  

  Also, stiff upper lip: “Anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, or shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex.” Transgender soldiers aren’t “required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers.”

  A NASA training on “Allyship for Executives” says that the term “African American” is “utilized heavily in white spaces,” and it “can make Black people feel excluded as the term tends to ‘other.’” Another NASA slide series explains that inclusive leaders “are willing to be ‘uncomfortable’” in exploring “race, gender, sexual orientation” and so forth. “We have been taught to act as if we are colorblind and gender-neutral,” it adds, but “these efforts actually limit us.”

  In order to make diversity appear to work, which it believes it needs in order to staff the replacements for White people, government has adopted a hard pro-diversity line which will quickly ensure that almost no sane people participate. That is fine with government, since insane people are easy to manipulate.

• Google develops free terrorism-moderation tool for smaller websites
  

  Jigsaw’s tool aims to tackle the next step of the process and help human moderators make decisions on content flagged as dangerous and illegal. It will begin testing with two unnamed sites at the beginning of this year.

  “In our experience, we find that terrorists seek to exploit smaller platforms where content moderation is challenging due to limited resources,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism.

  Today it is optional. Tomorrow you will have to install this in order to have your site appear in search engines.

• Jerusalem: Palestinian anger over far-right Israeli minister’s holy site visit
  

  The hilltop site is the most sacred place in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. It is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, site of two Biblical temples, and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, the site of Muhammad’s ascent to Heaven. The entire compound is considered to be al-Aqsa Mosque by Muslims.

  Jews and other non-Muslims are allowed to go to the compound but not pray, though Palestinians see visits by Jews as attempts to change the delicate status quo.

  Mr Ben-Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, has long said that he wants to bring about a change to the rules to allow Jewish worship at the site. There is no indication that Mr Ben-Gvir prayed during Tuesday’s visit.

  “The Temple Mount is open to everyone,” he tweeted, accompanied by a photograph of him surrounded by a security cordon with the golden Dome of the Rock in the background.

  In diversity, special interests win because they play the victimhood card, and so “open to everyone” fails. Everywhere diversity is tried, no matter what the ingredients, it always ends in the same lugubrious way.

• Rotherham rape gangs cover-up councillor holds senior diversity and inclusion NHS role
  

  Mahroof Hussain was embroiled in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal in 2015 when Dame Louise Casey’s review into the council named him and went on to conclude that the authority was in ‘denial’ and warped by a culture of bullying, sexism and cover-ups.

  The inspection found that Hussain and Akhtar both rebuffed a police officer when he proposed an initiative to target abusers after a pattern emerged that the abusers predominantly worked as taxi drivers and were from the Pakistani community. That pattern was borne out showing that males from Pakistani backgrounds were vastly over-represented in group localised child sexual exploitation.

  GB News can now reveal that Hussain’s role in the Rotherham cover-up has not denied him a career in the public sector, with the disgraced politician now working as the National Diversity, Inclusion & Participation Manager for Health Education England.

  In a diverse society, every group works for its own advancement, except the majority which is so cowed by the fear of being “racist” that it keeps appointing its enemies to lucrative and powerful positions.

• Days of e-tolls numbered: Lesufi says deactivation will be finalised soon
  

  The Gauteng government had committed to cover 30% of the R47bn debt roads agency Sanral incurred as a result of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP).

  The honesty necessary for function in first-world systems does not extend to the third world, and once you adopt diversity you abolish that culture of goodwill and honesty and replace it with me-first individualism, at which point all of those institutions fail and the taxpayer covers the gap.

• 97% Of Anti-Jewish Hate Crimes In New York Were Committed By Other Minorities
  

  The report documented 194 cases of assault against Jews from April 2018 to August 2022, and, in 99 of those assaults, official reports included the ethnicity of the perpetrator revealing 97% were committed by other minorities.

  Black perpetrators were responsible for 69% of physical or verbal assaults, Asians made up 17%, Hispanics accounted for 11% and white attackers committed 3%.

  Every group attacks other groups because all are vying for control. Diversity is suicide.

• Amazing Grace: How the town of Olney created a world-famous hymn
  

  The hymn was written in the town by curate – and former slave ship captain – the Reverend John Newton, for his sermon at St Peter and St Paul Church on 1 January 1773.

  Tim German, a volunteer at the Cowper and Newton Museum in the town, said while Newton said he rediscovered his childhood faith during the storm, the words of Amazing Grace were not an apology for his role in the slave trade but “about his redemptive journey back” to Christianity.

  Slaves were sold on the open market as an alternative to execution. Many did not view that institution as immoral, but as benevolent.

• More than 40% of U.S. households will owe no federal income tax, down from last year, according to a new analysis
  

  An estimated 72.5 million households — or 40% of total households — will pay no federal income taxes for tax year 2022, according to an analysis from the Tax Policy Center. The share marks a substantial decline from the 59.3% who paid no federal income taxes in 2020 and from the 56% in 2021. Both years were dominated by Covid-related shutdowns and restrictions.

  Despite the widespread claim that it’s the wealthy who pay no tax, the vast majority of Americans who pay no federal income tax are low- to middle-income earners.

  This is the wealth transfer adored by socialists, and in America, it mostly functions to deplete the majority so diversity can take over.

• How the philosophy of the past can help us imagine the economy of the future
  

  The richest country in the world, the U.S., is among the most drastic examples of this trend. Today, American CEOs earn 940 percent more than their counterparts did in 1978. A typical worker, on the other hand, only goes home with 12 percent more money than workers from 1978 did.

  As average IQ falls, the smarter ones get paid more because so few are competent.

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Tags: diversity, diversitywatch, linkpost, news