Amerika

~~~

• Facebook parent Meta loses $200B in value as users abandon site
  

  In the last quarter of 2021, daily active users for Meta’s core Facebook product fell from 1.930 million to 1.929 million — the first time the company reported a drop in daily usage since its founding 18 years ago.

  During an earnings call Wednesday, Meta CEO Zuckerberg said competitors like TikTok have siphoned off users. “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” Zuckerberg said. His comments were reported by the Washington Post.

  The company said most of its drop-off in usage was recorded in Africa and Latin America. The development could be a sign that Facebook’s effort to add as many users as possible appears to have reached its peak.

  The big story here is the third paragraph. Big Tech realized it hit a peak with American users because only a small segment of the population, generally nerdy and socially inept low self-esteem people, spend enough time on the internet to really use these services. Others, like the young and the retired, screw around for awhile but are hard to retain. In order to capture the third world audience and the diversity audience in the US, Big Tech went “woke,” but this set off a censorship war that drove away people who wanted to avoid the controversy entirely. The intended audience, seeing this, sussed out that Big Tech is dying and its popularity is based on mostly fake numbers anyway, so they have gone to platforms where there is more of a chance in the lottery of instant celebrity and less likelihood of having whatever work you put into the platform deleted casually by some $12-an-hour stooge forced to wade through the insane muck people post to social media.

• Do all Jews really share a certain gene?
  

  Atzmon: Jews share more genetic material with each other than with their non-Jewish environment.

  WELT ONLINE: So the Jews are really a family?

  Atzmon: Well, in a way, the Jews have a common ancestor whose traces can be traced back to the Middle East.

  This is controversial to people? Ethnic groups have a common genetic root. So do social classes and races. Ethnic groups also differ by amount and type of admixture, such as Southern Europeans (Asiatic, Semitic, and North African), Irish (Semitic), and Eastern Europeans (Asiatic, Turkic, Semitic). We are not all one. The world cannot be made into one tangible simple thing for our minds to control. Instead it is many parallels aiming toward the same goal but by different methods. Those who want to control seek to impose rules that force us all to use the same methods and therefore, act the same in conformity and obedience, but this backfires because it denies mother nature. After centuries of individualism brought about by The Enlightenment™ and “personal” religions, diaspora Europe is finally facing the reality of the biological/genetic differences between groups. False unity — including diversity, universalism, and internationalism — can only divide us.

• Worst President Ever? Voters Rate Biden Below Trump, Obama
  

  A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The National Pulse finds that 54% of Likely U.S. voters think Biden will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history. Only 15% believe Biden will rank in history as one of America’s best presidents, while 25% think his presidency will be remembered as about average.

  If Trump had designed someone to prove that Leftism is insane, he could not have come up with a better stooge than stalling Joe Biden, in the same way that “Baby Doc” Barack Obama proved to be everything the KKK would have said he was.

• Google and Yelp remove business reviews that criticize vaccine passport rules
  

  Google has explained how it keeps user reviews on Google Maps free from “abuse” in a new blog post, that also mentions moderating comments from people criticizing businesses for forcing masks or vaccine passports.

  Meanwhile, Yelp also admitted removing tens of thousands of reviews in 2021 for violating its policies and similarly removed reviews that mentioned vaccine passports.

  What killed the internet? The audience shifted: instead of the previous group of academic and computer hobbyist users, who tend to be higher IQ and more intellectually curious, we brought in the general public who want infotainment. The market adjusted to them, and now we have curated hugboxes designed to amplify the “everything-is-fine” narrative, which oddly has Leftists in a “conservative” position defending the status quo because with only a few exceptions, the postwar order has shown America moving Left toward socialism and World Federalism.

• Whoopi Goldberg suspended from ‘The View’ for 2 weeks over Holocaust comments
  

  On Monday, while discussing a Tennessee school district banning the graphic novel “Maus,” Goldberg said, “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race.”

  Goldberg said instead it was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and that both groups of people were white.

  To those outside of a race, the differences between ethnic groups are harder to see. How many people see an Asian, but balk when asked if this person was Mongolian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese? To a Black person, Jews look about as white as Italians, Slavs, Spaniards, or Irish people. In the bigger picture, Goldberg is correct here in that the root of the Holocaust was a rage at the failure of the West which found a scapegoat instead of pointing out that removing social hierarchy was a grievous mistake.

• Joe Rogan apologizes to Spotify and musicians amid boycott over his podcast
  

  Musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell recently boycotted the service for continuing to host “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has been accused by medical professionals of spreading Covid misinformation. Both musicians have since pulled their music libraries from Spotify.

  “I want to thank Spotify for being so supportive during this time and I’m very sorry that this is happening to them and that they’re taking so much heat from it,” Rogan said Sunday.

  To be fair, I do not consider Rogan a podcast at all. Podcasts are DYI underground material. Rogan has always been mainstream Left-libertarian. He is just the new Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, someone who is provocative as a means of attracting bored listeners looking to blow off steam on their way to their pointless jobs. You will not find anything on mainstream sources, whether old fashioned radio or internet, that challenges the Narrative. Why: it is a paid-for product, and those have backers, and those have advertisers, and the latter do not want to be associated with anything honestly controversial. No one is lining up to sponsor content that points out that our society is decaying and we need to do something really unpopular, like ethno-nationalism and anarcho-monarchism, to save ourselves.

• Life insurers adapt pandemic risk models after claims jump
  

  The global life insurance industry was hit with reported claims due to COVID-19 of $5.5 billion in the first nine months of 2021 versus $3.5 billion for the whole of 2020, according to insurance broker Howden in a report on Jan 4, while the industry had expected lower payouts due to the rollout of vaccines.

  Dutch insurer Aegon, which does two-thirds of its business in the United States, said its claims in the Americas in the third quarter were $111 million, up from $31 million a year earlier. U.S. insurers MetLife and Prudential Financial also said life insurance claims rose. South Africa’s Old Mutual used up more of its pandemic provisions to pay claims and reinsurer Munich Re raised its 2021 estimate of COVID-19 life and health claims to 600 million euros from 400 million.

  In the initial “shock” period of the pandemic in 2020, the insured U.S. population suffered 12% more deaths than average, according to research from life insurance trade association LIMRA shared with Reuters…The impact for insurers in 2020 was more muted because deaths were mainly among older people who typically do not take out life insurance.

  These are likely vaccine-related deaths, since that was the major change since 2020. Those will be reported as COVID-19 deaths because there is unlikely to be a “vaccine-related death” option on the checklist they file in triplicate PDF to the reporting agencies. This looks like the start of the avalanche.

  As you may recall, such behavior is not uncommon in socialized medicine where government pays the tab:

  Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

  Corporations live and die on their stock prices because speculation drives the markets. For them, reporting a massive boost in income can make them reach the tops of their industry and retire everyone involved, and if the next year — or the next fifty! — the company pays out lots of money to the mutilated and dying, that is not their problem. I would like to say that they burn in Hell, but knowing this world, they just get reincarnated as pugs and nutria.

• In China, Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Virus
  

  His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks.

  Then his app turned red, flagging him as high risk. Airport security tried to put him in quarantine, but he resisted. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of meddling with his health code to bar him from traveling.

  “The Chinese Communist Party has found the best model for controlling people,” he said in a telephone interview in December. This month, the police detained Mr. Xie, a government critic, accusing him of inciting subversion and provoking trouble.

  Easy for us to point out the mote in their eye, but the beam in our own is that we have done the same to even mild critics like Joe Rogan, using medical and scientific justifications for forcing them to toe the line of Narrative-approved speech.

• Most voters, including the youngest surveyed, think the president was ‘lying about campaign promises to just get elected’
  

  As bad as things are going for Biden, only a plurality (44%) said they were their lives were worse off, while only 30% said better off and 27% stated the same.

  Only one age group, 30-49-year-old likely voters (43% better off/33% worse off/24% the same), felt their lives were better off under Biden.

  Bribes work. The people who are wholly enmeshed in career building have noticed that there are lots of new opportunities related to government. In another two years, they will feel differently as these evaporate or go to minority candidates, but they are not there yet.

• COVID-19: Most Democrats Want to Make Vaccine Mandatory for Students
  

  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 39% of American Adults believe public schools should make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for students, while 53% are against requiring students to get vaccinated. Those findings are little changed from November, when 55% opposed forcing the COVID-19 vaccine on students.

  In Late Stage Democracy, government no longer addresses opportunity, only fears, and those whose identity is vested in media consumption find themselves caught up in the Narrative.

• Majority of Ballots Cast on Italian Presidential First Round Vote Blank, No Winner
  

  Under the Italian system, the President is selected by an electoral college of politicians from across the country who gather in Rome to vote. Of the nearly 1,000 elected officials eligible to vote in the presidential election, which includes members of the chamber of deputies, the Italian senate and regional politicians, 672 placed blank votes in the ceremonial urns in the Chamber of Deputies on Monday.

  The secret of democracy appears to be a magic formula of gaslighting, gatekeeping, and meritocracy. The meritocracy rewards the obedient; the gatekeepers smash down anyone who is not an enthusiastic supporter of the Inner Party or the Narrative; the gaslighting continues through media which uses retroactive continuity to twist, spin, and bend history to seem as if it was always twisting toward the direction of unlimited Leftism with global markets. When the Narrative fails, people start to vote against democracy itself.

• Federal judge blocks enforcement of Texas’s anti-BDS law
  

  “The speech contemplated by [Rasmy’s company] may make some individuals — especially those who identify with Israel — uncomfortable, anxious, or even angry,” U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen wrote in his ruling.

  “Nevertheless, speech — even speech that upsets other segments of the population — is protected by the First Amendment unless it escalates into violence and misconduct,” he continued.

  The bigger principle of this case has not yet been widely understood: you cannot obstruct commerce because of the opinions of those involved. Nationalists of all types can use this as a lever to pry their way into the halls of government and business. Notice that no one mentions how government contracts always go to “minority-owned” contractors, and how that compels the rest of us to seem to be speaking in favor of diversity when actually we are generally disinterested if not outright alienated from it at this point.

~~~

~~~

• Twitter is testing ‘downvote’ and ‘upvote’ buttons
  

  Upvotes will be displayed as likes, while downvotes will not be shown publicly, the company said. Votes won’t change the order in which replies are displayed.

  “We’re testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them,” Twitter said.

  The concept of upvoting and downvoting posts is crucial to design of Reddit, which relies on users’ votes to decide what content is prominently displayed on its site.

  Rare take: downvotes attract low self-confidence people who want to feel power by obstructing the opinions they dislike. Twitter has found a way to self-select for the audience of urban and rural nobodies who want to come to the internet all day as a way of feeling superior to others. Although this feature was experimental, apparently it is hitting more accounts now like a roll-out.

• Americans Still Like Amazon, But Worry About Local Business
  

  Thirty-two percent (32%) now view Amazon unfavorably, including 12% who have a Very Unfavorable impression.

  Many seem to figure out that if you wanted to make corporate rule, COVID-19 did it the same way all regulations and taxes do: when you raise costs, the little guy cannot compete, so the big get bigger in the absence of competition. Funny how Leftists accept this when talking about progressive taxes but not when thinking about corporate budgeting.

• ADL alters definition of racism for second time in two years
  

  According to a report in Breitbart, the ADL’s original definition of racism was: ”Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”

  In late 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the ADL changed its definition of racism to state: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

  But this week, the ADL again changed its definition of racism to…“Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”

  When the definitions change constantly, you are looking at a defensive action against criticism, not an affirmation of a social ill. The presumed social ill is being expanded to be a convenient slur to censor any inconvenient truths. On the plus side, their new definition would categorize affirmative action as “racism,” showing that the Left has finally tied itself in knots.

• U.S. Orders 3,000 Troops to Bolster European Allies in Russia-Ukraine Crisis
  

  In all, the moves are intended to try to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine and avert war in Eastern Europe, the officials said. Along with these moves, the Biden administration is trying to find a diplomatic solution, readying a barrage of economic sanctions should Russia attack and authorizing the transfer of some weapons and other equipment to Ukraine.

  Almost none of the voters or commentators understand the geopolitical dimensions here. First, Russia has no intention of sending troops in; they have already set up a fake color revolution style insurrection which wants Ukraine to be annexed by Russia, and this will revolt against the government, at which point government will crack down and Russia will intervene for “humanitarian reasons.” Biden, like Obama, has set up a situation where he will do nothing but pass sanctions as posture, since he has predicated his action on a Russian invasion, which means he will do nothing about an insurrection.

  On the bigger stage, Ukraine is important. Invading Russia has been historically difficult because of the long supply lines over unimproved ground. Ukraine is part of this buffer zone. If it is allied with Russia, this protects Russia against invasion by Western Europe; if it is allied with the West, it protects Germany against Russia and allows German tanks a shorter distance to get to Moscow.

  In reality, most of this consists of Putin posturing. His country still has no functional economy and remains destitute, so any war will end with a loss of Russian territory. However, if he postures like a third world tyrant and makes the West look weak, it ensures his popularity for a few more years. Obama gave away part of Ukraine the same way Biden will give away the rest.

• Scientists develop insect-sized flying robots with flapping wings
  

  Taking inspiration from bees and other flying insects, researchers from Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering, led by Professor of Robotics Jonathan Rossiter, have successfully demonstrated a direct-drive artificial muscle system, called the Liquid-amplified Zipping Actuator (LAZA), that achieves wing motion using no rotating parts or gears.

  Generally, by the time some technology hits the science news, the military has had it for two decades. Most likely these little flying guys have been used to monitor influential people worldwide and will soon be used to enforce your COVID-19 credit score.

• IRS Issued Grand Jury Subpoena to JPMorgan for Hunter, James Biden Bank Records In Probe into Biden Family’s China Connections
  

  A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in connection with the investigation.

  Other leaders think in terms of finding a singular problem and whomping it with One Big Solution. Trump, who can think in 4D space (time) as well as space, wages his wars by assembling lots of indirect influences so that eventually, what he desires simply falls into place. Watch the details pile up as the official sources miss what is going on yet again.

• Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
  

  The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.

  Censor something and you validate the paranoia of that group, which reinforces their message and radicalizes them. The solutions they suggest may be even more draconian, however:

  • Supporting media plurality and independent fact-checking – A robust, diverse, independent news media benefits science and public understanding. Policies which threaten its sustainability, including algorithms that determine outlets’ trustworthiness or position in social media feeds, should be carefully scrutinised. Long-term sustainable funding is also needed to support independent fact-checking organisations that play a vital role in a healthy online information environment.
  • Monitoring and mitigating evolving sources of scientific misinformation online – Interventions to stop harmful disinformation spreading on private forums or direct messaging services without breaching encryption could include sharing limits or technologies that help users verify the validity of messages or images; monitoring “fringe” social media platforms, which are not currently a focus in the UK’s draft Online Safety Bill.
  • Investing in lifelong information literacy – Education on digital literacy should not be limited to schools and colleges. Older adults are more likely to be targeted by, and be susceptible to, online misinformation.

  Translation: block fringe sources, censor fringe sources, and increase propaganda.

• How thousands of ‘mules’ dropped harvested ballots in 2020
  

  Trump explained Englebrecht and her team uncovered “massive illegal ballot harvesting and other forms of ballot fraud, the scheme with 2,000, they call them ballot ‘mules,’ these are people, they call them ‘mules,’ people – and they walk in early in the morning with thousands and thousands of ballots, and they stuff the ballot boxes in Georgia and other states.”

  Leftists have been doing this for a couple hundred years now. As the evidence piles up, it becomes clear that we cannot both accept election 2020 and believe we have a functional democracy. This leads to a split path: either undo the failed election, or get rid of democracy. Both of those lead to the same place.

• Anxiety and neuroticism linked to ability to experience ASMR
  

  Statistical analysis of the participants’ responses found that ASMR experiencers had higher levels of neuroticism and trait anxiety, as well as higher levels of state anxiety before watching the video — however, this type of anxiety was reduced after the video, and ASMR experiencers reported a greater level of benefit from the video. In contrast, non-experiencers did not undergo a reduction in state anxiety after the video.

  As trace admixture and dysgenic policies hit, the low-grade mental health problems crises intensifies. These are one solid push away from becoming more serious conditions.

• Lockdowns, school closures and limiting gatherings only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2% at ‘enormous economic and social costs’, study finds
  

  Economists who carried out a meta-analysis found draconian restrictions imposed in spring 2020 — including stay-at-home orders, compulsory masks and social distancing — only reduced Covid mortality by 0.2 per cent.

  They warned that lockdowns caused ‘enormous economic and social costs’ and concluded they were ‘ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument’ going forward.

  We sacrificed our economy for a tiny amount of lives “saved,” despite most of these people being headed for the grave shortly with multiple comorbidities anyway. On the plus side, crashing our economy will have massive ripple effects across China and Europe which will hit just as we are able to rebuild, especially if we have a Trump and not a Clinton-esque candidate in office.

• State capture: Ex-Zuma attorney to be disbarred again?
  

  Mantsha was disbarred as a lawyer in 2007 after many transgressions, most of which included financial misconduct.

  Shockingly, he was to remerge as Denel board chair in 2015, with the appointing minister at the time, Lynne Brown, pleading ignorance of Mantsha’s serious historical career blemish.

  What makes a country third world? Just as there is no One Big Idea behind the first world, the third world is a collection of things. The population is individualistic, lawless, and focused on personal interactions. Institutions are corrupt and widely used as sinecures. These societies are highly tolerant and pluralistic, as the One Big Idea of The Enlightenment™ tells us we should be, but nothing works and everything is manipulated to steal. Just like Communism, this eats the seed corn and they end up impoverished and dysfunctional, and if the high IQ people had not died out before, they surely do after this point. It is a fate worth avoiding.

• NYPD officer charged with hate crime in alleged anti-Muslim attack, prosecutor says
  

  The incident is alleged to have started after Kwong blocked the vehicle of the victim, a 32-year-old man who was driving a Toyota Rav 4, the DA’s office said in a statement. The victim allegedly followed Kwong’s vehicle, a Honda Accord, to an intersection before driving in front of it and cutting off the officer.

  Kwong is alleged to have videotaped himself telling the victim: “I’m trying to make a left here on the service road and this terrorist is terrorizing me, you’re upset because I didn’t let you make a U-turn, Mr. Mohammed … Al Qaeda, Terrorist, ISIS …”

  What do you do when the diversity hate each other? When they recognize stereotypes about each other?

~~~

• Fidesz and allied parties open joint office in Brussels
  

  The Vox spokesman also said that “the office would allow for continuous cooperation between the right-wing parties of the European Parliament, which currently belong to three different groups or are independent. It would serve to coordinate their policies, positions and voices while respecting the freedom of each party”.

  As the Leftist system fails, Right-wing coordination comes together.

• Study finds men and women have different strengths
  

  The SD-WISE includes 24 items related to six defined components of wisdom: pro-social behaviors (empathy and compassion), emotional regulation, self-reflection, acceptance of uncertainty and diversity of perspectives, decisiveness and social advising. The 3D-WS contains 39 items covering three dimensions of wisdom: cognitive, affective or compassionate/and reflective.

  The researchers found that, in general, women scored higher on compassion-related items and on self-reflection while men scored higher on cognitive-related items and on emotional regulation. Generally speaking, the total 3-D-WS score was higher in women than in men, but there was no gender difference in the total score on the SD-WISE.

  This surprises no one from the traditional end, but shows us how men and women complement each other with their strengths. Sexual liberation alienates them and makes us all dumber as a result.

• Seattle Officer Fired After Punching Woman Sues for Wrongful Termination
  

  According to The Seattle Times, the former police officer, Adley Shepherd, was terminated because he punched a handcuffed woman in the face in 2014. Shepherd filed a lawsuit that alleges the Seattle Police Department was negligent in his training and supervision and unfair in his dismissal because he is Black.

  The great racial shakedown continues. We fear the optics of inequality, so we always tip the deck, and the taxpayers always fork out in the end.

• Neil Young heavily linked to big pharma and Pfizer
  

  On January 6, 2021, Neil Young sold half of his catalogue to Merck Mercuriadis’ Hipgnosis Song Management company. Later that year Hipgnosis merged with Blackstone in a USD$1Bn deal. However, just a month before the merger Blackstone announced that they appointed Pfizer’s former Chairman and CEO Jeffrey B Kindler as the company’s Senior Advisor.

  Dubious links, but Neil Young knows his audience: Boomer liberals. They wanted the election to be stolen, so they believed in the COVID-19 Narrative, and they cheer him on. In the meantime, he is busy selling his music so that he can get out of the dying music industry. If any conspiracy is going on here, it would be in defense of the other half of his catalog, which is sold by Old Media, and they want to replace Spotify with a streaming service of their own.

• George Soros says leadership of China’s Xi threatened by omicron and real-estate crisis
  

  The Chinese Communist Party will decide at its National Party Congress this year whether to give Xi a third term in office. But Soros argued Xi’s attempts to impose “total control” over the country via a series of severe lockdowns could jeopardize his chances of being reinstated as the party’s leader as the strategy is “unlikely to work against a variant as infectious as omicron.”

  “Although nobody can oppose him publicly because he controls all the levers of power, there is a fight brewing within the CCP that is so sharp that it has found expression in various party publications,” he said. “Xi is under attack from those who are inspired by [former leader] Deng Xiaoping’s ideas and want to see a greater role for private enterprise.”

  “The model on which the real estate boom is based is unsustainable,” he explained. “People buying apartments have to start paying for them even before they are built, so the system is built on credit. Local governments derive most of their revenues from selling land at ever-rising prices.”

  We see the same pattern here and in Europe: demand-based economies require high taxes to keep money flowing, which impoverishes people in every area but real estate, so you get insane real estate speculation that makes housing unaffordable. Leftist economics is solely a Ponzi scheme.

• Ethnicity of child abusers MUST be recorded to tackle grooming gangs, says landmark report
  

  The landmark inquiry found that ‘poor data collection on the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims’ made it difficult to identify whether there is in fact any link between ethnicity and group-based exploitation.

  The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) said ‘some of the high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions have involved groups of South Asian males’ – and that the lack of data on ethnicity also ‘hampers the ability of police and other services to provide culturally sensitive responses, interventions and support’.

  The report comes after a decade of concern over groups of men mostly of south Asian origin targeting girls – most notably in Rotherham, but also in the likes of Rochdale, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Dewsbury and Halifax.

  In other words, this was always a diversity crisis. Diversity brought third world problems and then, for fear of being seen as “racist,” people lied about them.

• Scientists engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy
  

  “Imagine a rubber band,” says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile.”

  This sounds promising, if nothing else for being able to launch rubber bands of this stuff at semi-distant fast food restaurants.

• Trump felt used on Soleimani strike: “Israel did not do the right thing”
  

  Donald Trump expected Israel to play a more active role in the attack, and he griped that then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier,” according to a former senior Trump administration official. Trump himself told me, “Israel did not do the right thing.”

  Trump sees just how ruined international politics has become by the self-interest of all nations. America First should be a good motto abroad as well as domestically. In the meantime, he just broke a major taboo, allowing US Presidents to criticize other allies in the future, including the wayward NATO.

• Immigration Provisions in the America COMPETES Act
  

  Here’s a summary of the America COMPETES Act immigration provisions:

  • The creation of a W nonimmigrant visa program for foreign investors of start-ups and entrepreneurs, their families, and “essential” foreign workers who work for them. Family members are eligible to receive work permits.
  • A one-year path to an unlimited number of green cards for any W visa holder who meet certain investment and ownership stake requirements.
  • An unlimited number of green cards for foreign citizens who hold a doctoral degree from a U.S. institution of higher learning -OR- an equivalent degree from a foreign university.
  • A 5-year program that creates a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) for Hong Kong residents. The program would be capped at 5,000 per year, amounting to an additional 25,000 green cards over a 5-year period.
  • Authorization for unlimited refugee/asylee status for certain Hong Kong residents.
  • A change in existing law to treat Hong Kong as a separate state from China in determining per-country limits for existing green card categories.
  • TPS for Hong Kong residents currently in the U.S., regardless of immigration status.

  The Left has one agenda at this point: import enough foreign people to vote out the native American majority so that Leftists can rule forever and hide just how grimly bad their market socialist system has become.

• Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales
  

  The ATF disclosed to lawmakers that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, including both digital and hard copy versions of these transactions. When a licensed gun store goes out of business, its private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia. The practice has contributed to the fears of gun advocacy groups and Second Amendment champions in Congress that the federal government is creating a national database of gun owners, which violates longstanding federal statutes.

  They want to know who to entrap or round up if things get hot.

• The brain’s secret to life-long learning can now come as hardware for artificial intelligence
  

  The hardware is a small, rectangular device made of a material called perovskite nickelate, which is very sensitive to hydrogen. Applying electrical pulses at different voltages allows the device to shuffle a concentration of hydrogen ions in a matter of nanoseconds, creating states that the researchers found could be mapped out to corresponding functions in the brain.

  When the device has more hydrogen near its center, for example, it can act as a neuron, a single nerve cell. With less hydrogen at that location, the device serves as a synapse, a connection between neurons, which is what the brain uses to store memory in complex neural circuits.

  Through simulations of the experimental data, the Purdue team’s collaborators at Santa Clara University and Portland State University showed that the internal physics of this device creates a dynamic structure for an artificial neural network that is able to more efficiently recognize electrocardiogram patterns and digits compared to static networks. This neural network uses “reservoir computing,” which explains how different parts of a brain communicate and transfer information.

  For everything we try to invent, mother nature got there first.

• Spotify’s Rogan problem is a cautionary tale for other tech platforms
  

  It was excelling at all the tech startup things—attracting users and losing money—but like most businesses, it eventually wanted to make a profit. The company was having a tough time doing that simply by streaming music, which proved to be expensive since the labels demanded a hefty fee to access their catalogs. Without another product to sell alongside music, Spotify was hemorrhaging money.

  So the company started looking afield, searching for a product that would complement its existing music offerings. It found one in podcasts.

  Spotify had finally found a path to profitability. Podcasts brought in big ad spends, and they could be made for less than it cost to license music catalogs. Plus, podcasts kept users coming back. After all, the big streaming services all offer most of the music people listen to, which makes switching easier. But exclusive podcasts aren’t available anywhere else. They lock fans in.

  When no one is making money, look to high costs, and you will find the usual suspects: taxes and regulations.

~~~

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