Amerika

~~~

• The association of walking pace and incident heart failure and subtypes among postmenopausal women
  

  The risk of HF associated with fast walking with less than 1 h/week walking duration was comparable with the risk of HF among casual and average walkers with more than 2 h/week walking duration.

  Walk twice as fast, get twice the benefit. Our ancestors walked vigorously because they had to cover a lot of ground. Modern people drive to cover a lot of ground in the safety of a semi-armored vehicle because diversity and consumerism have rendered our society into a threat-studded hellscape.

• Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Feedback Form

  The esurient debt merchants at the Federal Reserve want to create a central bank digital currency which is basically BitCoin backed by American debt and drones:

  For the purpose of this paper, a CBDC is defined as a digital liability of a central bank that is widely available to the general public. In this respect, it is analogous to a digital form of paper money.

  This is pretty much a non-issue; the real problem is that we are funding our currency with debt in order to keep liquidity high, and this means that our money loses value because while it is in high demand, it is also in high supply.

• Hundreds stripped of British citizenship in last 15 years, study finds
  

  Research carried out by Free Movement, a website run by lawyers to provide information for those affected by immigration control, has found that at least 464 people have had their citizenship removed since the law permitting this practice was relaxed 15 years ago.

  Recognize a non-story by a hysterical Guarandian luvvy when you see one: this is a tiny number of people in contrast to the immigration into the UK, reflecting almost certainly that these people had ties to organized terror or bacha bazi gangs.

• Cannabis use produces persistent cognitive impairments
  

  The study found that cannabis intoxication leads to small to moderate cognitive impairments in areas including making decisions, suppressing inappropriate responses, learning through reading and listening, the ability to remember what one reads or hears, and the time needed to complete a mental task.

  These and other acute impairments mirror the residual effects documented for cannabis use, suggesting that the damaging effects of cannabis begin while it is being consumed and persist beyond that period.

• More than one in four Canadians support jail time for the unvaccinated, poll finds
  

  Many Canadians are in favour of harsh punishments for the unvaccinated, with 37 per cent saying in a new poll it would be acceptable to deny them publicly-funded health care — and 27 per cent that it would be OK to go as far as a short jail sentence.

  COVID-19 handily revealed how dumb humans can recognize certain categories like The Holocaust or the civil rights era, but not see how this applies to anyone other than those groups. When in mass panic, humans do hateful things, and no one dares stand up against the flood because they know they will be trampled. The perceived needs of the many always defeat the needs of the one.

• The metaverse is just getting started
  

  The metaverse isn’t a new idea. The term has circulated for decades. Virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D computing – the technological concepts behind it — are older still. The current boom in interest is just the most recent peak in a years-long push to make these advances useful to everybody.

  They want to combine video games, movies, and herd interaction with your internet just as predicted with television walls in Ray Bradbury novels. It is not new technology; more likely, this is democracy dumbing everyone down to the point where they want to live through an avatar fantasy.

• Hong Kong universities remove more monuments marking Tiananmen
  

  The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) tore down a Goddess of Democracy statue while Lingnan University removed a relief sculpture.

  Hong Kong University earlier removed a famous statue marking the massacre of students in Beijing in 1989.

  The Chinese state has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong.

  When they tell you what they are, believe them. Genghis Khan took over much of the world by exploiting advances in military technology, but then his empire imploded in chaos after just a few short centuries. The Asiatic tyrant always seems logical in a deductive, rationalizing, and theoretical way, but never can account for the greater complexity, nuance, structure, time-sensitivity, iterative complexity, and spectral gradation of nature.

• England is about to drop virtually all anti-COVID restrictions

  Oh, by the way, it looks like the COVID-19 panicdemic has just died.

  Most legal restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in England will be dropped next week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the British Parliament on Wednesday. From Monday, face masks will no longer be mandatory anywhere in England.

  “Our scientists believe it is likely that the Omicron wave has now peaked nationally,” Johnson said, attributing the end of the most recent COVID-19 surge to “the extraordinary [vaccine] booster campaign, together with the way the public have responded” to the restrictions brought in when Omicron hit.

  Boris is a political nihilist like Bill Clinton: he polls the crowd and approves whatever will get him in the least trouble and in the most media spotlight. His experts do not believe he will run into any problems by killing off the lockdowns, masking, and vaccines, mainly because many of them have figured out that the places which do these the most seem to have the most COVAIDS-19, which at this point has gone on long enough that the causation has inverted, i.e. it is no longer likely that they are using the most severe measures because they have the most severe cases, but instead that they have the most severe cases because they use the most severe methods.

  South Africa just announced peak COVHOAX-19 as well:

  Only eight weeks after the world first heard about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, when researchers in South Africa who discovered the strain notified global authorities, that country’s wave of infections has fallen as sharply as it climbed. Not only that, but South Africa has weathered its fourth wave of COVID-19 with very little interruption to people’s lives.

• Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from American Museum of Natural History

  Things ripen over time. At first, you see starving immigrants or former slaves who just want some of the crusts of bread from your table. Then there are more of them, and they want to be at the table despite having done nothing to place them there. Then they want to own the table. Finally they want to not just remove you from the table, but remove you and any trace of you, so that they can claim that they built this and therefore, as they destroy it because they are actually unable to build it, they can scapegoat some mystical sky-demon or another and ignore the fact that they as lower IQ beings can only destroy, not create. They do not know what they want, and that chaotic, directionless, voracious, self-centered, and oblivious mentality will destroy you. The third world is the way it is for a reason. Heed it, and end both racial and ethnic diversity by act of law, if you want to survive.

• Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission (1990)
  

  In Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission, 497 U.S. 547 (1990), the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, upheld the power of Congress to pass affirmative action policies favoring African Americans and other minorities in broadcast licensing in order to promote programming diversity. Although the Court had previously sustained affirmative action programs, Metro Broadcasting was the first case in which the justices upheld affirmative action for a reason other than to remedy past discrimination.

  A quick trip down memory lane, since people this week seem to be doubting that government action usually creates monopolies. In other news, affirmative action is not a racial quota, but most people understand it as a quota. What it really means is that you only choose a White option if you do not have a Black option.

• Open source developers, who work for free, are discovering they have power
  

  This isn’t the first time a developer has pulled their code in protest, either. The developer of “left-pad” pulled his code from npm in 2016, breaking tens of thousands of websites that depended on it following a fight with the Kik messenger over the naming of another open source project he owned.

  What’s astonishing is that despite the occasional high-profile libraries protesting the way the industry works, these types of incidents aren’t all that common: open source developers continue to work for free, maintaining their projects as best they can, even though multimillion-dollar products are being created off the back of their work.

  More rent-seeking by people who have that moment of realizing, like the Mask Karens and dancing Tik Tok nurses, that now their fifteen minutes of power has come their way, so they might as well abuse it. You develop open source software to give back to the world. You monetize it by selling consulting services. The people who are whining are the ones who were lucky in finding an opportunity, but now no longer want to do the maintenance but also do not want to hand off the power to someone else who will do it. In the big picture, software quality depends on the same thing as everything else: quality of the people involved, specifically those making leadership decisions. Lots of the best software is commercial, some is FLOSS, and some is just hobbyist code that has no license nor any sense of obligation to it. The hobbyist produces working code, sends it out there, and moves on, figuring that others will maintain it as necessary.

• China brings back anal swab testing for Covid two weeks before Winter Olympics begin

  At this point, COVID-19 seems to have decayed into comedy for the aliens watching from afar, waiting until they get bored to press the button that exterminates all human life on Earth. No one will blame them.

~~~

• Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now

  Famous medical journal calls out the concealment and misdirects which have characterized this whole panicdemic. When the real data comes out, the lawsuits begin, and then we are going to have a asbestos-level multiple-generation lawsuit fiasco. It sure was an expensive election theft, but most of the voters could care less, since they will not personally be paying anyway. This is why you need a flat tax: with equal pain comes equal responsibility.

• Sensitivity of airborne transmission of enveloped viruses to seasonal variation in indoor relative humidity
  

  Through a large ensemble of simulations, we found that dry indoor conditions typical of winter lead to slower virion inactivation than humid indoor conditions typical of summer; in poorly ventilated spaces, this reduction in inactivation rates increases the airborne concentration of active virions, but this effect was important to virion exposure only when the susceptible person was farther than 2 m downwind of the infectious person.

  If we achieved anything from the COVID-19 panic, it was a better understanding of colds. In dry environments, the saliva and other ingredients in moisture micro-droplets do not have enough of a chance to break down the virus, leading to higher transmission, which is why people get “colds” in the cold.

• New satellite images show extent of Russian buildup along Ukraine border

  The press specializes in misdirection. What is Russia going to do? Probably the same thing they did everywhere Communism took over: send in money, spies, and advisors who will help locals stage a pro-Russia revolution, then move tanks to the border so that no one else will intervene. That is how they took Crimea, apparently with Obama’s approval, while the voters slept as usual.

• Why a Judge Ordered FDA to Release Covid-19 Vaccine Data Pronto
  

  When it comes to the Pfizer vaccine, the need for transparency is unprecedented. A majority of Americans are now mandated to receive a Covid-19 vaccine under penalty of losing a job, or worse.

  Even more problematic is that Americans, if injured, cannot sue Pfizer. There is virtually no other product where a consumer is prohibited from suing the company that manufactures, markets, and profits from the product.

  The wave of lawsuits has just begun. The cope-hope rationalizers are striking back with a series of nonsensical correlation-equals-causation-if-you-cherry pick “studies”:

  1. Respiratory Aerosol Emissions from Vocalization: Age and Sex Differences Are Explained by Volume and Exhaled CO2
     

     On average, singing produced 77% (95% CI: 42,109%) more aerosol than talking, adults produced 62% (CI: 27,98%) more aerosol than minors, and males produced 34% (CI: 0,70%) more aerosol than females. After accounting for participant voice volume and exhaled CO2 (both of which were positively correlated with aerosol emissions) in linear models, the age and sex differences were attenuated and no longer statistically significant.

     People who breathe more exhale more particulates. “Science.”

  2. Many COVID-19 vaccine side effects caused by placebo effect: Study
     

     Researchers examined 12 vaccine safety trials, involving thousands of people, and compared rates of side effects reported between those who received a placebo shot and those who received a real shot. They found that after the first shot, two-thirds of people experienced side effects like headache and fatigue, which the researchers said were attributable to the placebo effect. Shockingly, nearly a quarter of the people — some who received the placebo shot — experienced side effects like a sore arm, also attributable to the placebo effect.

     Key weasel word: “many.” Also: attribution without proof. “Science.”

  3. COVID-19 vaccines do not cause infertility, study finds
     

     The researchers calculated the per menstrual cycle probability of conception using self-reported dates of participants’ last menstrual period, typical menstrual cycle length, and pregnancy status. Fertility rates among female participants who received at least one dose of a vaccine were nearly identical to unvaccinated female participants. Fecundability was also similar for male partners who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine compared with unvaccinated male participants. Additional analyses that considered the number of vaccine doses, brand of vaccine, infertility history, occupation, and geographic region also indicated no effect of vaccination on fertility.

     Based on user-reported data, does not include failed pregnancies or miscarriages. “Science.” Waow.

  Dying things tend to make crackling noises as their tissues decay. Crepitate with us, America. Disintegrate in peace. Or, just walk away from the concept of equality, accept realism, and join the future.

• Martin Luther King ‘looked on and laughed’ while friend raped woman, unsealed FBI documents claim
  

  The documents reportedly allege that Baptist pastor Logan Kearse invited several women back to his room with Dr King, where the pair were recorded discussing sex acts with the women.

  One claims: “When one of the women protested that she did not approve, [Mr Kearse] immediately and forcibly raped her”, adding that Dr King “looked on, laughed and offered advice” during the incident.

  Reminder: democracy chooses heroes because they make theoretically plausible arguments for equality and democracy, not because they were actual heroes.

• Teacher alleges she was fired for not ‘meowing’ back at student who identifies as a cat
  

  “I start looking on the ground, through the fourth row—everything’s good. Go to the fifth row—everybody’s there. Then I hear ‘meow!’ I’m like, ‘Okay, what’s up with that? Who’s doing it?’ And this little girl in the very front row says, ‘You have to meow back at him; he identifies as a cat.’ Are you kidding me?” she questions.

  “He gets up and he storms out of the classroom, and I’m like, ‘Ruff!’ Of course, the entire class is laughing. I think, ‘Oh, no problem, no foul.’ I go to the office—Are you ready for this?—to check out. They said, ‘We no longer need your services if you can’t identify with all the children in the classroom.’ And you wonder why they don’t have any subs!” the teacher exclaims on video.

  All egalitarianism works by liberalizing rules so that individuals do not face consequences (i.e. natural selection) for their internal mental delusions. Consequently, people become crazier every generation, with caste-mixing and miscegenation making the problem even worse.

• Grocery stores grapple with bare shelves

  The USA is going out for the same reason the USSR did: “equality” is an infinite void caused by infinite demand, and so you will crucify your productive in order to subsidize the unproductive, eventually destroying productivity. Egalitarianism always takes from the strong to give to the weak, thus subsidizing the weak and replacing the strong with the weak, resulting in third world wastelands. It is the Big Lie and leads only to death.

• Pronoun throwdown erupts as critics push back on transgender language
  

  Referring to male-to-female transgender people like Ms. Thomas as “she” and “her” has gone from being a matter of common courtesy to a near-universal expectation with social, political and legal consequences for those who resist.

  Welcome to the end result of The Enlightenment™: when the individual comes first before social order, reality, and the divine — that is the goal of The Enlightenment,™ and was only later collectivized into “equality” — then you cannot tell any individual that their reality is not the reality. Now your society tears itself apart over how many angels fit on the head of a pin named “equality.”

• The prince, the mayor, and the U.S. fish that ate Japan
  

  In 1966, the bluegills’ offspring were deposited into Lake Ippeki-ko outside Ito City in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture. Three years later, a stone monument was placed on the shore to celebrate the prince fish’s successful introduction. More bluegills were released into freshwater ecosystems across Japan.

  The research team, led by biologist Kouichi Kawamura at Mie University, southwest of Tokyo, compared mitochondrial DNA from 13 different populations of U.S. bluegill to 56 populations in Japan. In a pool of the Mississippi River near Guttenberg, Iowa, a small town nestled against limestone bluffs, the team found a perfect match: All of the prince fish originated from the 15 bluegills gifted to Akihito by Daley decades earlier. Limited genetic diversity from inbreeding didn’t seem to hinder the bluegills in Japan at all.

  Invasive species do not have the specific adaptations that make local species adapt to a niche and therefore, be both highly efficient and able to occupy a space in an ecosystem where they give as well as take. Invasive species are only takers. The only solution then is physical removal — end diversity — although this genetic method sounds like Frankenstein’s Monster.

• COVID testing company sued for allegedly giving people fake results
  

  The Minnesota lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that Doctors Clinical Laboratory sent the state’s Department of Health COVID-19 test results that showed a positivity rate of 74% — over 10 times the state’s rate during the same period.

  COVID-19 patients generate lots of government money, so the only profit model consists of finding them under every rug, rock, and trapdoor. This inflated statistics and allowed government to borrow even more money to deal with the non-crisis crisis.

• The true cost of policing
  

  With little notice, police regularly add tens of thousands of dollars to their paychecks through overtime, off-duty jobs monitoring traffic and a raft of contractual perks, NJ Advance Media found during a two-year investigation into the true cost of policing in New Jersey.

  In a high-tax but low-trust society masquerading as a high-trust society, the foreigners rob you blind because every public office to them is a sinecure, a legally safe way to extract wealth from the ethnic Other, which is how they see the rest of their society outside of their local ethnic community. Notice the names in this article: [[[ Callahan ]]], [[[ Colligan ]]], [[[ O’Reilly ]]], ||| Shimsky |||, {{{ Skoufas }}}, and {{{ Mazzeo }}}.

• IRS will soon require a selfie to access some of its online tools and applications
  

  Starting in summer 2022, if you need to login to the IRS’s website to access the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, get your tax transcript or view a payment agreement with the agency, you will need to create an account with third-party identity verification company ID.me.

  A simple username and password will no longer suffice: You will need to provide a government document with a photo, such as a driver’s license, state ID or passport, and take a video selfie with your smartphone or computer.

  Normies: “companies in free markets always seek more power and money, including rent-seeking!”

  Update: “bureaucrats and other small people in positions of power always seek more power, including control!”

~~~

~~~

• Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives
  

  Russia pushes the false claim that Western civilization is collapsing and has strayed from “traditional values” because it works to ensure the safety and equality of LGBTQI+ people and promotes concepts such as female equality and multiculturalism. The demise of Western civilization is one of Russia’s oldest disinformation tropes, with claims of “the decaying west” documented since the 19th century.

  This “values”-based disinformation narrative evokes ill-defined concepts including “tradition,” “family values,” and “spirituality.”

  Haha! We hid our disinformation in a “fact sheet” about their disinformation and just threw in everything that we hate, especially Heritage Americans (WASPs) and their demand for culture, genetic health, sanity, stability, humility, honor, loyalty, realism, and the pursuit of excellence. Join our mediocratist grey person third world empire of tolerance or die, cisbigots!

• Uganda: UN must reform to save Africa from ‘injustice’
  

  In Kampala, the Ugandan Minister told the audience the UN will lack effectiveness, lack adequate representation and weaken its democracy as long as some parts of the world continue to be dictated by others in the Council.

  The third world wants a vote in the UN, too. They will vote for liberalization: take from the strong (first world) to give to the weak (third world), in the process consuming the first world. If you needed another reason to exit the UN, here it is. This change is inevitable.

• Leaders must stop blaming colonisation for their failures
  

  I often wonder how far our great political leaders will go with their constant referrals to ‘decolonising’ everything they can think of. One thing is very apparent though: they live in the past and have no vision for a bright and prosperous future for our people. They have also turned it into a [demotist] weapon to appeal to those they have betrayed and forgotten about –merely to regain their support. Our government embarked on a silent but steady process of decolonisation some years ago already and look where we are now

  Sadly, behind a paywall, but an important realization: decolonizing the third world has not made it into the first world, but actually, pushed it farther into third world dysfunction. Diversity does not work, nor does trying to emulate the West when one is not Western.

• Time for Harris to Cut Biden Loose
  

  There’s no reason for Kamala Harris to participate any longer in the failing presidency of Joe Biden. If she chooses to assert her constitutional authority and seeks to build a majority political coalition, she can unify the country, ensure American prosperity and win election to the presidency in 2024. Starting today she can simply decide unilaterally to dominate policy-making in what’s left of the Biden era.

  Right-wingers — always morons, but not morons and liars like the Left — waved their little fetus hands over this one. Hint: the deal was made between China, international finance, and the Democrats to convey the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Quid pro quo occurred. What happens when that comes out? See our election 2020 coverage for some predictions.

• Joe Biden Reaffirms Kamala Harris Will Be His 2024 Running Mate

  Why does Trump keep banging on about the stolen election? He knows they intend to do it again if they can.

• Climate scientists: Ban solar geoengineering

  If you leave it up to the Official™ scientists, they will handle the “climate change” “crisis” by covering the Earth in tinfoil or the equivalent. Some have noticed that the more humans try to fix problems, because we think in terms of absolutes in the square sense of including all members equally of a category, the more we make everything worse.

• Study challenges evolutionary theory that DNA mutations are random
  

  Instead of randomness they found patches of the genome with low mutation rates. In those patches, they were surprised to discover an over-representation of essential genes, such as those involved in cell growth and gene expression.

  “These are the really important regions of the genome,” Monroe said. “The areas that are the most biologically important are the ones being protected from mutation.”

  “The plant has evolved a way to protect its most important places from mutation,” Weigel said. “This is exciting because we could even use these discoveries to think about how to protect human genes from mutation.”

  So yes, they are “random” or at least arbitrary, but no, they are not equal, meaning that organisms recognize that some genes are more important than others.

• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says stakeholder capitalism is not ‘woke’
  

  “Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke,’” Fink said.

  “It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism.”

  Fink’s annual missive to CEOs outlines the priorities that he sees as crucial to helping BlackRock’s clients achieve “durable” long-term returns and reach their goals. In recent years, the letter has focused on a range of issues, from boardroom diversity to the climate emergency.

  He spelled it out for us: they are making deals with China and the third world to preserve their global audience because global means “bigger” and bloated companies, struggling under the debits imposed by government regulations and taxes, want to grow in order to avoid getting crushed by these additional costs.

• In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found
  

  The “discovery” was first reported last May 27 by Tk’emlúps te secwépemc First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir after an anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, used ground-penetrating radar in a search for the remains of children alleged by some to be buried there. She is a young anthropologist, an instructor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of the Fraser Valley since 2018. Her preliminary report is actually based on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains. According to Chief Casimir, these “missing children” represent “undocumented deaths.” Their presence, she says, has long been “knowledge” in the community and “some were as young as three years old.”

  The Kamloops “discovery” of 2021 created a major sensation in Canada and abroad. Based on the preliminary assessment and before any remains were found or any credible report made, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately referred to “a dark and shameful chapter” in Canadian history.[3] British Columbia Premier John Horgan said he was “horrified and heartbroken” to learn of a burial site with 215 children that highlights the violence and consequences of the residential school system.[4] Several other Aboriginal communities and media outlets then followed up with references to unmarked graves.

  In the wake of unsubstantiated claims by Aboriginal leaders, several media outlets amplified and hyped the story by alleging that the bodies of 215 children had been found, adding that “thousands” of children had “gone missing” from residential schools and that parents had not been informed. The undisturbed sites even became “mass graves” where bodies were dumped in a jumble.

  Another fake hate crime, this time historical. If we look carefully enough, we will find that all of them were fake. People do not do horrible things to one another without reason unless they are deranged serial killers, and our ancestors were not that. In the meantime, no one in the first world knows what to do with the third world populations dumped on us.

• Unrepentant mass murderer Anders Breivik gives a Nazi salute as he applies for early release from 21-year sentence
  

  He also carried signs, printed in English, bearing slogans that said ‘stop your genocide against our white nations’ and ‘Nazi Civil War’.

  As the terror attacks pile up, the cost of benefits to migrants soars, and we see our cultures eroded as our statues are torn down and our history retconned to include minorities who were never of any significance, more people agree with Breivik: kill the White Leftists so that we can end diversity.

• Florida Man Once Involved In Historic Same-Sex Marriage Legal Victory Is Found Dead In Landfill

  Leftists specialize in boundaries. If your plan leaves out one person, especially because of their own insane actions, it is proclaimed to have an inequality problem and the solution is always more government power and more wealth transfer to the weak, stupid, insane, retarded, and criminal. Every now and then you wait long enough to see how these people conduct themselves and see how much the whole thing was always a giant fat scam.

• Michigan Democratic Party deletes post questioning parents’ role in schools
  

  A Saturday Facebook post from the Michigan Democratic Party questioning the role parents play in students’ curriculum was taken down after drawing criticism from Republican and school choice groups.

  The Democratic Party post, which appeared to be a screenshot, indicated the purpose of public education was to teach students “what society needs them to know.”

  And parents who want more input on what their kids are learning, the post said, “have the option to choose to send their kids to a hand-selected private school at their own expense.”

  We could do just away with the property taxes that fund public schools, have state-run schools that charge a set fee, and end this problem forever. In the meantime, Democrats have revealed that those smiling hippies turn into tyrants once they have sufficient numbers to force their idealistic egalitarian progress upon you, just like then did in Paris and Athens.

~~~

• U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021
  

  However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

  The Democrats pushed too far, and now they have driven more people — almost certainly rural and suburban whites — into the arms of the Right. The real question is whether people will stay. The mainstream Republicans are very happy to run as the losing party since they like to control Congress so that they can shut down the worst of the Leftist insanity.

• Why Are Some Zoomers So Wistful For the ’80s?
  

  Coupled with their passion is a yearning for a time when adolescence was synonymous with freedom. Less meticulously curating feeds, more hanging out with your friends at the food court.

  This article carefully calculates a misdirection in order to blame technology. None of this stuff was hateful until diversity took over and deplatforming began. Now we are isolated into our niche bubbles, avoiding the outside world because it has become hateful, and so online life has taken on a larger-than-life impact. Once we connected all of humanity, we were able to see just how far the decay had run.

• The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized
  

  I think of the Gen Xer with a bushy beard and colorful tattoos down the length of his arms, whom I saw hawking a motion sensor lighting system with these words of advice: “I know it sounds cold, but you want to keep people away as best you can.” Or this motto and promise from the home security company ADT: “a line in the sand between your family and an uncertain world.” Time and again, I’ve heard such ideas expressed by Americans I’ve met and spoken with around the country in my job as an anthropologist: businessmen and truck drivers, police officers and media personalities.

  Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life.

  They even straight out tell you that diversity ruined public life and in response people have retreated to gated communities. Then they blame the retreat instead of the cause of it. Much of liberalism involves blaming effects so that we can ignore causes so that we can keep believing that we are all equal. When we stop believing in equality, liberalism and modernity go away forever.

• COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated
  

  A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate.

  When your political philosophy is Utopian, it becomes binary: the good people support it, and any dissenters are bad and must be removed. Conservatives have no Utopian ideals and so, unlike the egalitarians, they tend to want to avoid smashing dissent but favor instead removing bad people through asylum, prison, or exile. Leftists make a Type II error: they assume that all people are bad except those who follow the methods of Leftism. Conservatives make a Type I error: they assume all people are good except for the few bad. Reality is more complex and demands a system like that in nature, a bubble sort which constantly pushes the good upward and the bad downward.

• New research advocates a basic strategy for native fish recovery: Access to water
  

  Dams have changed the natural flow in many rivers in the Colorado River basin, but a more pressing problem is the depletion of flow such that little remains in the channel. At a regional scale, water in the Colorado River basin is completely consumed and no water reaches the Gulf of California in most years. Thus, the delta of the river in Mexico has been transformed from an internationally recognized refuge of biodiversity to a dry, sandy channel.

  You would think it was obvious that if we take all the land and resources, the wildlife will die off, but no one cares because everyone wants a big house and to own their own chain of Taco Bells.

• Trafalgar Group Nationwide Issues Survey December 2021

  

  Democracy has self-destructed yet again, just as Plato warned us it would, and in the process it has driven us all insane.

• Political dynasties fueling crises in Africa, analysts say
  

  Kenyan political analyst Martin Adat told DW that the concentration of political power in one family alone for years gives it massive influence and gradually turns political rule in a country into a monarchical system.

  Other analysts, though, like Dr. Alidu Seidu from the political science department of the University of Ghana, said it is important to analyze dynasties before determining their usefulness or otherwise.

  “Sometimes the processes through which these people are elected or come to power, as well as the period between the transitions, can assist in saying whether it is a good or bad thing,” Alidu told DW. He also stressed the importance of culture and the individual’s leadership qualities.

  Under democracy, we have the same succession problem as with dictatorship. Competence is elusive and consequently, people trust big names over the unknowns, which both favors the good and some of the bad. Just transition to monarchy already.

• Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitism was grotesque. I should know – I saw it first hand
  

  Dahl had just reviewed the book God Cried, about the Israeli war in Lebanon, and his comments and criticisms of Israel were extreme and jarringly sweeping. There seemed to be something visceral about his anger, something more personal and dark than anti-Zionism or empathy with the Palestinians. He’d written of “a race of people” – the Jews – who had “switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers”, and that the US was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that “they dare not defy” Israel.

  Even so, Dahl was eager to be interviewed, and I was the person chosen to speak to him. He was polite and not unfriendly. And entirely grotesque. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he carefully explained. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” Pause. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

  [S]even years later he gave another interview with the Independent in which he said, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become anti-Semitic… It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

  Diversity makes enemies of people. Jews, by nature and by upbringing, are geared toward education and professional fields. This, couple with a higher-than-average average IQ of 115, means that they dominate these fields in many cases, and their religious nepotism means that they exclude others in order to promote their own. This is a good policy for every ethnic group to follow, but the benefit here accrues away from the majority.

  Consequently, there will always be an “anti-Semitism” and “racism” problem since diversity itself creates animosity. When any group succeeds, other groups will try to tear it down. The dummy solution invented by democracy, “protect vulnerable groups,” ends up simply giving those groups a better tool to bash down others, as we see with CAIR and BLM and every other. No, Jews do not control the world, but they are a powerful lobby like any other diversity group that gets entrenched. Catholics were once the same way but self-destructed because they could not stop anally violating young boys, making a slander which became a slur into a prophecy.

  There is no path to success for diversity.

  Consider the terror of Jews at the sight of a cross:

  Jesus wasn’t a Christian – that word exists for his followers and came later. He was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. He was circumcised as a Jew. He pretty much followed the Jewish law, departing from it only in the name of what he saw as its deeper meaning.

  It is a horrible irony, then, that Christianity bears primary responsibility for historic antisemitism. Few ideas can have been as poisonous as, and inspired more murderousness than, the idea that Jews were the Christ-killers. Of course, only the Romans had the legal authority to crucify someone: it was their signature way of dealing with troublemakers. But this fact became historically inconvenient for a religion that was eventually to place its global headquarters within Rome itself.

  While Christians regard the cross as an inevitable part of human salvation, for Jews it remains a symbol of centuries of oppression. And the right and proper Christian response to this is a confession of complicity, not a trumpeting of theological superiority.

  Jesus was a good Jew, and the point was that democracy killed Christ and that Pharisees/Sophists — think Anthony Fauci or Angela Merkel here — are the people who triumph in demotic contests. The crucifixation of Christ scene was a literary allusion to the execution of Plato, and the point was the same. Most internet dumbshits cannot grasp this, but they are dumbshits and thus cannot grasp it, mainly because they have no ability to compare patterns across different times, places, disciplines, or stories.

  If you read this this excellent article on the paradox of tolerance of egalitarians within historically inegalitarian religions like Judaism, the problem becomes even clearer:

  Litvin is not contesting the picture of the cross because of any theological dispute with Christianity. And it may not even be a reaction to a personal experience of Christian anti-Semitism. Rather, he offers a rather commonplace critique of the appearance of a cross in a Jewish home: “We all know what the goyim have done to us in the name of the cross.” The cross is understandably a symbol for many Jews of persecution and oppression; thus its very appearance evokes transgenerational memories of anguish and even trauma. But Buber’s response is equally honest and suggestive. He does not deny what has been done to the Jews in the name of the cross (“The cross on the churches is part of the historical and symbolic reality [of Christianity]”). And yet, Buber continues, “I do not hate them, despite everything that, as you say, they inflicted upon us.”

  From the Jewish perspective, they left their homeland because their culture clashed with that of the invading goyisch Romans, and since then, they have wandered between nations, fleeing whenever pogroms or genocide appear and returning when things appear calm. However, we have to ask: can pluralism of any sort be a good thing? In the diaspora, Jews will cease to exist as egalitarian traditions infuse their own, and soon they will be closer to Christians than they want to admit at this time.

  The right answer is to recognize that diversity — in any form: ethnic, religious, cultural, racial — is toxic and will destroy whatever society is dumb enough to host it (this joins other human Wishful Thinking enterprises like socialism, democracy, and idol worship, each of which is egalitarian because no individual wants to be punished for his defects, leading to a mob of greedy people dedicated to their own individualist supremacy). The right answer is to make Israel a place for only Jews, and all Jews, which means boats at dawn. What stands in their way? Mainly the Palestinians, a group of Arab Semites who would be happier in the nearby Muslim nations from which they originate, and the coalition of Western Leftists and National Socialists who hate Jews so much that they support Palestinians just to spite them.

  As it turns out, Leftism is eating the Jews from within the same way it destroyed Whites:

  The idea was simple: we must educate the population that Jews are not just white, but rather that there is an entire story of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, all of whom are dark-skinned. If we could just show the world that we are not white – today’s avatar of the bogeyman – we would clarify mass misconceptions about Jews. The unit would highlight the story of Jews from the Middle East and in doing so, Jews would gain sympathy.

  Modern Jews do not realize that they are going to be judged harshly by the same standards applied to Germans after the Holocaust. You cannot be assumed to be ignorant of what your co-ethnics have done; silence is consent, at a certain point, and so any lobbying found to be done by Jewish groups that was to the disadvantage of the majority is going to be taken out on all of them. This is what Theodor Herzl realized that spurred him to suggest ending the diaspora and Jewish ethnic repatriation to Israel.

• Trans ideology is distorting the training of America’s doctors
  

  Medical-school academics suggest two reasons for all this. One (reflected in the fact that none wanted their names published) is fear. Some trans-rights activists bully anyone who expresses concerns publicly. The other is ignorance. A paediatrician who teaches at a medical school in Florida says once doctors have finished their training, many pay scant attention to new medical research but rely on the media for information. In America there has been little coverage of the dangers of blockers or the woes of detransitioners.

  In nature, whoever is stronger, smarter, better, wiser, healthier, saner, more balanced, and more realistic wins.

  In egalitarian society, whoever is weaker wins.

  This means that we are forcing doctors to teach scientific nonsense for the sake avoiding the ire of a highly active and vocal but insane group of transsexuals.

• Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on western diet
  

  Internationally, it is now estimated that cases of autoimmune diseases are rising by between 3% and 9% a year. Most scientists believe environmental factors play a key role in this rise.

  “Human genetics hasn’t altered over the past few decades,” said Lee, who was previously based at Cambridge University. “So something must be changing in the outside world in a way that is increasing our predisposition to autoimmune disease.”

  “Fast-food diets lack certain important ingredients, such as fibre, and evidence suggests this alteration affects a person’s microbiome – the collection of micro-organisms that we have in our gut and which play a key role in controlling various bodily functions,” Vinuesa said.

  Eat what your ancestors ate. We stopped doing that because modernity thought it was more “enlightened.” Then the ripoffs took our new liberties and made them into profit. This pattern repeats in all human endeavors. We blame “capitalism” for our complete throwing out of any framework of order at a level above the individual.

• My Home Was Staged for Sale—and It Horrified Me. Here’s Why
  

  Had we skipped staging and allowed buyers to see our home as we lived in it, they would have been forced to make a huge leap of faith—to imagine what the place would look like without our suffocating wall of books, without our kids’ artwork, without the grandmotherly art deco rug.

  This would have made it much harder for buyers to imagine themselves and their belongings in these rooms, and many would have backed off.

  Constant advertising, government catering to your every fear, and social situations designed to be “inclusive” have produced people who are not even as smart as goldfish. Remember in the 1970s when they encouraged kids to develop their imagination? Without it, you have no options except those in front of you on the shelf. Democracy in its endgame has produced a generation without forebrains.

• Omicron Variant (B.1.1.529): Infectivity, Vaccine Breakthrough, and Antibody Resistance
  

  On the basis of 185 three-dimensional (3D) structures of antibody–RBD complexes, we unveil that Omicron may have an 88% likelihood to escape current vaccines.

  So…

  Vaccines:	FAIL
  Lockdowns:	FAIL
  Masks:	FAIL

  What did they do right? Seems like a mass panic where everyone lost just to crash the economy and steal the election in order to get Trump out of office because he, like Reagan, interrupted the postwar march of the Left.

~~~

~~~

• BlackRock, Temasek wealth management joint venture wins licence in China

  A quick reminder about who owns BlackRock now:

  BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said its majority-owned wealth management joint venture in China has won approval to start operating in the mainland, joining a growing band of financial service providers seeking to tap into rising incomes in the world’s second-largest economy.

  The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission granted an asset management licence to BlackRock CCB Wealth Management, BlackRock said Wednesday. The joint venture is 50.1 per cent owned by BlackRock, 40 per cent by a subsidiary of China Construction Bank and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek owns 9.9 per cent.

  One wonders if there was not some quid pro quo at work here.

• How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution
  

  Instead of being invented by different people independently, they were discovered once, then shared. That implies a few clever people created many of history’s big inventions.

  The Crowd did not get us to where we are today; lone inventors, probably getting mocked and called sissies and nerds by their contemporaries, labored away from a sense of vision and produced things that no one else could see. That is the power of creative genius, and this is why egalitarians — who take from the strong to give to the weak — persecute it:

  Because we live in a society where, for whatever reason, genius tends to be unacknowledged, denied, ignored and even (but usually indirectly, for other and usually ‘political’ given-reasons) actively persecuted.

  Also, because the world-historical geniuses, which for the past four hundred years used to be common in all major domains of life in The West – art, literature, science, medicine, law, politics, the military, and religion – has become extremely rare; indeed has almost disappeared.

  Therefore – if modern society wishes to avail itself of the benefits that genius (and only genius) can bring (e.g. solving unyielding problems by intuitive insights, making breakthrough discoveries), then modernity needs to become more sensitive in its detection, acknowledgement and recognition of genius: this is so even from the perspective of pure self-interest.

  Love nurtures genius. It wants to create good things to give it away. Like Christ on the cross or Plato drinking hemlock it mocks the crowd for demanding that it be allowed to destroy so that it can feel entitled to steal what was always given freely.

  We in fact can map the drop in genius caused by our modern emphasis on individualistic conformist mediocrity:

  Epidemiological studies suggest that educational attainment is affected by genetic variants. Results from recent genetic studies allow us to construct a score from a person’s genotypes that captures a portion of this genetic component. Using data from Iceland that include a substantial fraction of the population we show that individuals with high scores tend to have fewer children, mainly because they have children later in life. Consequently, the average score has been decreasing over time in the population.

  We have data that shows that even in the past century intelligence has dropped in the West:

  In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1889 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.16 IQ points per decade or − 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times.

  Contemporary people must jump through more hoops than those in the past in order to be “educated” and admitted to the scientific, managerial, economic, political, academic, and social elites. This pushes back the time in which they get married and start having children into their thirties, at which point they have a couple, and those genes decline in frequency while the lower IQ breed like mad whilst subsidized by government anti-poverty and anti-racism programs.

• SA Affirmative Action To Be Challenged At The United Nations
  

  The biggest problem of the South African affirmative action programme is that it has turned into a numbers game that has nothing to do with affirmative action and is just about race. The South African government’s exaggerated focus on racial representation will be strongly underlined in the shadow report.

  Affirmative action is just forced wealth transfer from the strong to the weak. It eventually destroys any economic system just as surely as other forms of socialism. When you take from the strong, you make it efficient to be weak, so the strong fade away and soon you have a society of incompetents ruled by criminals. No society so far has recovered from this third world state.

• DNA can now be pulled from the very air we breathe. It could help track endangered animals
  

  “We were even able to collect eDNA from animals that were hundreds of metres away from where we were testing without a significant drop in the concentration, and even from outside sealed buildings. The animals were inside, but their DNA was escaping,” Clare said in a news release.

  The van paused at the end of the block, its operator signaling the driver to stop. Collectors on its roof, constantly sampling and analyzing DNA from the air around it, had detected a non-WASP somewhere in the last block. At a hand gesture, the driver made the call, and soon SWAT teams surrounded a house halfway down the street. “Yoops!” they called as they kicked in the door, using the vernacular shorthand for the Eugenic Police. Soon the young police captain led a family of Irish immigrants in chains from the house. A waiting helicopter whisked them to a boat, and within hours the confused leprechauns were on their way to their ancestral homeland in North Africa. “Another good Galton job,” said the captain to his team as he spread a map on the table. “Now there’s rumors of Italians — honest-to-God, Arab-looking wops! — somewhere in north Burbank, so we’re going to do a sweep tonight…”

• US law professor condemned for ‘white supremacist’ comments by own dean
  

  In the podcast Wax asserted that most Asian Americans are Democrats and questioned whether or not “the spirit of liberty beat in their breast.”

  “As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” Wax said.

  She went on to criticize diversity and inclusion initiatives and said immigrants should be “abjectly grateful” rather than critical of the United States. Of diversity as a general concept, Wax said she was not convinced there were no downsides.

  Wax has come under fire before for previous arguments she made at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019 for “cultural distance” or “taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”

  Wax is completely correct but too much meaning is lost here by a focus on Asians. No minority group votes for the majority party. You would do the same as a minority in a foreign land because to be in such a position is to be constantly alienated, shuttling between Stockholm Syndrome and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in your psychology. You know this place was not made for you and will never be a fit for you, which means you either suck it up and pretend, or overcome cognitive dissonance and oppose it. Diversity is good to no one and destroys everyone.

• Mayo Clinic fires 700 workers who failed to comply with Covid vaccine mandate
  

  “Nearly 99 percent of employees across all Mayo Clinic locations complied with Mayo’s required Covid-19 vaccination program by the Jan. 3 deadline,” the clinic said of its staff, which consists of around 73,000 workers.

  The Mayo Clinic said approximately 1 percent of its staff, or around 700 people, would be “released from employment.”

  And to think that they were just a couple weeks from the pandemic being basically officially over. Now they get to face all those lawsuits. These staff did the right thing by forcing the clinic to fire them, since now they can sue, even if it served the goals of the clinic, since it wants to continue to claim it is overwhelmed.

• Rogues Are on the March Around the World
  

  Moving on to Russia, the Administration leaked on Friday that it believes Vladimir Putin is moving forces in preparation for an invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. “The plans involve extensive movement of 100 battalion tactical groups with an estimated 175,000 personnel, along with armor, artillery and equipment,” a U.S. official told the Washington Post.

  The U.S. is predicting dire consequences if Russia does invade, but it hasn’t sold more weapons to Ukraine and couldn’t marshal much collective action at last week’s meeting of NATO ministers. The White House says Mr. Biden will talk with Mr. Putin in a virtual call on Tuesday, though after their first meeting the Russian became more aggressive.

  Other nations, especially Europe and China, take great delight in weak American leaders. It basically lets them do whatever they want because Democrats are almost entirely focused on domestic issues, namely how to steal more money and give it out to buy more votes in order to keep their Federal Tammany Hall circular Ponzi scheme scam running.

• Parag Agrawal: Why Indian-born CEOs dominate Silicon Valley
  

  Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent.

  Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley’s workforce – and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why?

  “No other nation in the world ‘trains’ so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India does,” says R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director of Tata Sons and co-author of The Made in India Manager.

  All of them are doing a horrible job. Turning your technological force over to midwit NEETs and H-1Bs is a dumb idea, but it has happened because IT is in decline:

  Tech investor and Republican donor Peter Thiel said Silicon Valley has “jumped the shark” and there won’t be many more breakthrough consumer internet companies.

  “With respect to consumer internet, which has been the big area in tech for 25 years, it’s been the single area that’s dominated all others, perhaps there aren’t as many big breakthroughs left in consumer internet,” he said. “The big ideas have been tried.”

  By 1995, it was clear that the internet was going to be huge; the newcomers like land barons carved out their space, made their money, and gradually left, turning these “too big to fail” companies over to the type of person who wants to maintain and adorn products made by others, i.e. lesser people. Now only the stupid money remains in internet technology, because the bubble is popping.

• New ‘dark money’ financial disclosures expose the political outlook and power of teacher unions
  

  Between 2020 and 2021, the National Education Association provided more than $8 million dollars to liberal, dark money groups such as the State Innovation Exchange, Strategic Victory Fund, and State Engagement Fund. The latter received over $6.5 million and exists under the umbrella of the Democracy Alliance, which was described by Politico in 2014 as, “The Left’s Secret Club.”

  Unions always lean Left because the idea of collective reward is egalitarian and therefore belongs on the Left, not the Right, which when in its right mind opposes legal protection for unions.

• 70% Of Voters Say Big Pharma Has Too Much Influence
  

  A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 53% of Likely U.S. voters don’t trust large pharmaceutical companies, including 19% who don’t trust them At All. Only six percent (6%) say they trust major drug makers A Lot, while 36% of voters Somewhat trust them.

  What made Big Pharma big? Money from Big Government. All that free healthcare just leads to huge companies. Other nations do not have this problem as much since they rely on American firms to do the innovation, which costs a lot of money, but generally consists of care for those who are doomed in various ways. We were better off with a lower level of technology and more embrace of mortality, therefore less willingness to waste our lives screwing around as hamsters on the wheel for tax money to pay for anti-poverty and anti-racism programs.

• Scores lower compared to 2017 for lower-, middle-, and higher-performing students at both grades except for the highest performers in grade 4
  

  In comparison to 1992, the scores of the lowest performers at both grades in 2019 were not significantly different, while the rest of the performance distribution showed an improvement.

  In other words, the supposed benefits of egalitarianism, anti-poverty, and diversity have failed: students are where they were before, mainly because IQ determines educational ability.

• Hormonal contraceptives suppress oxytocin-induced brain reward responses to the partner’s face
  

  Treatment with OXT increased the perceived attractiveness of the partner relative to other men, which was paralleled by elevated responses in reward-associated regions, including the nucleus accumbens. These effects of OXT were absent in women using HC.

  Birth control interrupts natural bonding with the person you love. In the name of individualism, specifically sexual individualism or casual sex and feminism, we have abolished love. “Trust the science!”

~~~

• Gunmakers Not Liable in 2017 Las Vegas Shooting, Judges Say
  

  Nevada law states a person can’t take action against manufacturers or distributors of guns “merely because the firearm or ammunition was capable of causing serious injury, damage or death, was discharged and proximately caused serious injury, damage or death.”

  Laws like this are essential, or Leftists will use lawfare to bankrupt every gun manufacturer, abolishing the 2A through “private markets” weaponized by law.

• Second homes: Young people living in tents and caravans
  

  “I want to save enough money to buy a house but because prices are so high and people from outside the community have more money, the houses that we could afford are being swooped off the market.”

  When you tax too much, property becomes the only thing that retains value. Since Britain has continued dumping immigrants into the population, it has displaced people from a great deal of housing, causing them to buy upward and look for hedges to protect their retirement income.

• Study looks at brain flow, and how people achieve it
  

  “Flow is a state of peak enjoyment that occurs when you are doing something that is difficult and you are highly skilled at,” explained Richard Huskey, a University of California, Davis, assistant professor of communication and cognitive science and author of a new paper on flow.

  Very few regions in the brain are responsible for just one cognitive process. So, there is no “flow” region in the brain. Instead, flow results from networked interactions between multiple brain regions. When several brain regions are densely connected with each other but sparsely connected with other regions, this is called a “modular” network configuration.

  Importantly, modular network organization is energetically efficient. Research shows that during complex tasks, this modular configuration often reconfigures by connecting different brain regions into a new modular organization. This reconfiguration is called “flexibility,” and it is thought to help people adaptively respond to difficult tasks.

  A caste system provides this. Each person operates at the level appropriate to his abilities.

• 40-year-old rape conviction at the heart of author Alice Sebold’s memoir is thrown out
  

  Sebold, who is best known as the author of the 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, described her experience of being raped and beaten when she was 18 in her 1999 memoir, Lucky.

  In her memoir, Sebold, now 58, described being raped as a freshman in May 1981 while walking home through a park near campus.

  “He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,” wrote Sebold, who is white. “‘Hey, girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?'”

  In Clown World, everything is fake, and the most popular voices are liars.

• Rapid and Effective Vitamin D Supplementation May Present Better Clinical Outcomes in COVID-19 Patients
  

  COVID-19 cases (no comorbidities, no vitamin D treatment, 25OHD <30 ng/mL) had 1.9-fold increased risk of having hospitalization longer than 8 days compared with the cases with comorbidities and vitamin D treatment. Having vitamin D treatment decreased the mortality rate by 2.14 times.

  Just like with Ebola, the simpler treatments prevailed: kill off other bodily parasites, give nutrition and fluids, and wait out the disease.

• Workers Quit Jobs in Droves to Become Their Own Bosses
  

  The number of unincorporated self-employed workers has risen by 500,000 since the start of the pandemic, Labor Department data show, to 9.44 million. That is the highest total since the financial-crisis year 2008, except for this summer.

  No one will say this, so it must be said here: a great deal of this involves doing deals off the books in order to avoid the taxman. We all know what happens when the parasites get power, and the best way to dodge it is to work and buy on the black market for goods and services.

• Morally divided societies more likely to elect extreme political leaders
  

  Unorthodox leaders who shake up the political system are more likely to be elected if people believe their society is morally divided and breaking down, University of Queensland research has found.

  Big surprise. When business-as-usual breaks down, people crave disruptors who can end whatever cozy little arrangement has taken vampiric hold, and replace it with something closer to realistic governance.

• Leaked papers link top Chinese leaders to Uyghur crackdown
  

  The documents include speeches which analysts say prove senior government leaders called for measures that led to mass internment and forced labour.

  China has consistently denied that it is committing genocide against Uyghurs.

  Perhaps this is why they needed to steal election 2020 and put a weak American leader in power. A strong one would point out that the Chinese combine the worst of the Soviets, Fascists, and Genghis Khan into one giant dysfunctional system.

• Half of French Believe in Demographic Shift ‘Great Replacement’ Theory
  

  The Ifop survey, which asked a number of questions regarding immigration and topics such as Islamisation, found that 50 per cent of the French believe in the Great Replacement, a theory coined by French writer Renaud Camus to describe the demographic replacement of native peoples by mass migration.

  Nearly seven in ten of the respondents to the survey, or 69 per cent, stated they believed there were “too many” immigrants in France, while 62 per cent said that immigration was the primary reason for insecurity issues in the country, French news magazine L’Obs reports.

  This is what narrative collapse looks like. It is obvious that we are being replaced with those who vote the way the bureaucrats and big business want.

• Strategies to improve sales of imperfect carrots
  

  One 2018 study in North Carolina suggested that about 41% of unharvested food is edible but unmarketable because of its appearance. The researchers are assessing ways to “win” with ugly foods in the marketplace by testing consumer acceptance of imperfect foods that don’t come with a built-in discount — a tactic used by some brick-and-mortar and online retailers that hasn’t had much staying power.

  When you demand equality, you create the idea of a normal person who is equal, and any deviation from that is shown as a defect. We apply the same logic to food, creating great waste in the process.

• Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State
  

  In addition to the ideas of Karl Marx, those of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham are echoed in official Chinese doctrine. Though the two are quite different thinkers, they are both committed to an Enlightenment project that elevates reason and progress over tradition and that condemns the communities of the past as closed, static, inefficient and repressive. Only by leaving them behind can humankind be truly emancipated and social wellbeing maximally promoted.

  The paradoxical fact is that while East and West are devoted to Enlightenment ideas of human emancipation, they are in practice adopting similar systems of omnipresent surveillance. In each case, the logic of Enlightenment values has led to increased social control.

  In these conditions of social disorder, surveillance technologies are surrogates for the communities Western capitalism has destroyed. Ubiquitous video cameras replace the prying eyes of neighbors. The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy.

  Make society dystopian enough and people cling to those with police power, which is how you get tyrants. In your best interests, they will rule you and destroy you.

• Michael Nesmith — considerably more than a Monkee — dies at 78
  

  Nesmith was born in Houston, Tex., in 1942. His parents divorced when he was only four, and his mother Bette supported the family with her wages as a secretary: a job that led her to invent the correction fluid Liquid Paper, to deal with mistakes caused by early electric typewriters.

  Nesmith turned more towards production, founding the Pacific Arts Corporation to manage his music and television projects, including, in 1979, a show called PopClips, which combined music videos with commentary from a “veejay,” which later became one of the models for MTV.

  Another notable Pacific Arts production was the cult hit Repo Man, which starred Emilio Estevez as a young punk and Harry Dean Stanton as a repo man in pursuit of a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a possibly-alien secret in its trunk.

  Rare trailblazers walk among us and give much more than they take. Repo Man is the counterpart to Tolkien: humans seek alien technology for its monetary value, missing the point that adventure beyond valuing many await.

~~~

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