Amerika

~~~

We come back to a stumbling point for modern citizens at this point:

• Leftists want equality.
• Conservatives want order.

How can it be so simple? The difference between an oversimplification and a top-level view is that with the latter, all of the sub-parts flow from the basic summary.

To have order, for example, you need to know how both the world works and humans work, and have a theory for the optimal interaction between the two. You must be a realist, but also have a sense of the “transcendent” or what is eternally good, beautiful, true, and excellent.

On the other hand, the Left came about with The Enlightenment™ as a reduction of social order, itself based in natural order, in pursuit of the “liberalization” of the individual by relaxing values, mores, standards, and aesthetics so that the individual had more options.

To sell that kind of anarchy to a group, you have to promise them mutual safety, which is what pluralism does. When everyone has the same as everyone else, there is no need to attack anyone else, and in this social form of heat-death you get (in the human mind) peace.

Extend it to commerce, as socialism does, and you also get utilitarian satisfaction, or what most people would say made them happy if they were filling out a reaction survey. They have money, (perceived) safety, and believe they are safe from social attacks by others.

What is a social attack? Peer pressure. When you and the boys are chilling at the bar, and you make a pass at some girl, you raise in status if you get her number, and fall if you fail in some obviously inept way.

Same way it happens at work. If you take on a project and make it work, no matter what methods you use so long as they do not transgress the social minimum (no murder, blatant theft, assault) you get ahead; if you fail, you are downranked and seen as less reliable, capable, and desirable.

Those who rise in social rank, as opposed to hierarchical rank like aristocratic titles, get the best jobs, the most money, the acclaim in social pages, the healthiest and least promiscuous women, and all the toys that make ordinary people think they are living the good life, like a BMW air fryer.

Equality claims to provide a barrier to social attacks. Pluralism, like pacifism, divides power, wealth, energy, and focus equally in order to eliminate conflict. In reality, this reduces everyone to having nothing and intensifies the scrabbling for status to a dangerous level.

That in turn makes people manipulative, with the influencer being only the latest iteration, and narcissistic, at which point they treat their friends, families, and ideals as tools to be used to manipulate others in order to promote social status.

When you encounter a society this decayed, essentially made rotten by its own success and subsequent loss of direction at the same time it gained dependents, it will prevent any kind of excellence to rise. It idealizes victimhood, suffering, sickness, perversity, confusion, and insanity.

Consider the situation we find ourselves in where sickness is celebrated as health in the name of avoiding guilt and standing out:

Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

Another option available to girls who wish to escape or at least mitigate their status as oppressors is to have a diagnosed mental-health problem—especially ADHD, multiple-personality disorder, gender dysphoria, depression, or anxiety. Patricia said that it is not uncommon for teenage girls in her daughter’s community to one-up one another constantly based on who has more (or more severe) diagnoses. Data compiled over the past decade show a huge upsurge in mental-health problems in youth of both sexes but especially among teenage girls and young women.

In a society dedicated to equality, the good consists only of taking from the strong and giving to the weak, since the weak cannot raise themselves. This gradually eats away all of the competent and effective, replacing them with the neurotic and ineffectual.

Only victims get rewards, so everyone tries to be a victim in some form or another. The previous category of victim, rape survivor, has now been replaced by someone whose gender identity was misunderstood since they were a toddler.

All of this fits the pattern of the egalitarians, which is to destroy the strong and make everyone weak so that people feel a sense of safety. In the end, this makes everyone weak and you get the Last Days of Rome style attention stunting that rewards the bizarre, unhealthy, and unbalanced.

With that in mind, our goal this week is to point this out to other people: our society hates health, strength, intelligence, and competence. It wants to make everyone into a victim. If allowed to do so, it will turn us into a third world ruin and flush us down the PVC pipes of history.

~~~

• Biden adviser: ‘Liberal world order’ demands enduring high gas prices
  

  Americans will have to endure pain at the pump indefinitely in the name of the “liberal world order,” a top economic adviser to President Biden said Thursday — hours after Biden himself said US drivers would have to shell out the big bucks for “as long as it takes” for Ukraine to defeat Russia’s invasion.

  During an appearance on CNN Thursday, National Economic Council director Brian Deese was asked by anchor Victor Blackwell: “What do you say to those families who say, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable’?”

  “What you heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes,” Deese answered. “This is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm.

  None of this makes any sense until you recognize that Leftist hates strength. It wants everyone to be equally weak so that there is safety and peace. You cannot have pluralism if one answer rises above the rest, nor can you have a society without hierarchy if some are recognized as smarter, wiser, stronger, healthier, saner, or more competent than others. The Leftist ideal is a society of people who are essentially useless but friendly, more along the lines of your average tropical third world vacation destination than the Eloi, the Bonobo-like proles from The Time Machine:

  I looked at the half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

  I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilisation and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping.

  In other words, when a society reaches its end stages, the cynical become horrors and the everyday person becomes like a modern liberal: highly sexualized, pacifistic, short attention span, and undistinguished. We either rise to be giants or descend to be pygmies.

• Rare wild ancestors of feral pigeons found living on British and Irish islands
  

  The results confirmed that the Rock Doves of the UK and Ireland descended from the undomesticated lineage from which all feral and domestic pigeons originate, with varying degrees of interbreeding. Rock Doves in Orkney have experienced extensive interbreeding with feral pigeons and are at risk of getting hybridised to the point of their extinction as a distinct lineage. In contrast, Rock Doves in the Outer Hebrides remain almost free of feral pigeon influence.

  “We identified feral pigeon ancestry in most of the Scottish and Irish Rock Dove populations we sampled, and there have been feral pigeons in Europe for hundreds of years. It was therefore really surprising to discover that the Outer Hebridean Rock Doves showed negligible signs of hybridisation,” explained Will Smith.

  Allowing in the Other ensures your own death by outbreeding. All but a few of your citizens will not understand and will begin busily signaling open-mindedness, altruism, compassion, and coexistence in order to symbolicaly demonstrate their egalitarianism and raise their own social rank, but zero of them will think of consequences. Zero will think past the next pay period either. Consequently, it becomes essentially to not just oppose mass diversity, but to oppose any diversity. Natural mutations in populations above 2000 prevent inbreeding, but even tiny bits of foreign DNA will accumulate and erase you over time.

  The biggest threat from the Other is that, lacking the energy burden of the adaptations that make you optimal for your niche, they will simply consume it and breed recklessly, then because of a lack of those adaptations, experience a massive dieback as part of the adaptation process. In this light, all immigration is an invasive species that will devastate the host culture:

  The giant African land snail gobbles up plants and can carry a parasite known to give people meningitis, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

  The snails can grow to be about the size of a fist, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They eat many plants, including peas, beans and cucumbers. But if they can’t find enough vegetation, the federal agency says, giant African land snails will eat paint or stucco off a house.

  They can also lay more than 1,000 eggs in a year.

  The only plausible solution involves raising the cost of being in the new environment by systematically removing the invasive species. If you wage war against them, they will fight back, but if you treat them like an administrative problem, they can be encouraged to move on to their native environment, where they are already niche adapted, and if we shipped our native species, would be consumed by those invaders just as we are consumed by the foreign here.

• New U.S. Guided Rockets Strengthen Ukraine’s Hand Against Russia
  

  Ukrainian soldiers operating Himars say they have doubled their reach into Russian-held territory with greater precision and less risk to themselves. Kyiv officials say such weaponry is their best hope to defeat the Russians in what has become a grueling war of attrition.

  Washington was initially reluctant to provide Himars, fearing such a move could cause Moscow to retaliate against the U.S. or its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The rockets have roughly twice the range of the M777 howitzers that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine.

  Eisenhower feared the “military-industrial complex” because back in his day, that was the threat; since then, government generally has turned into a self-interested corporation that will do anything to justify its expansion. Consequently, we are seeing the liberalism-industrial complex find ways to spend money on the military now because they perceive it to be in pursuit of the Leftist goal of defeating Putin. In a great irony, Putin is actually a Leftist, and the goal of liberating Ukraine serves nationalism, but no sense reminding the luvvies of that one. The Ukrainians have adopted a simple plan: resist the Russians until they can stop the advance, then use high-powered artillery to destroy as much of Russian forces as possible. Once he has taken the territory, Putin must keep it, and as it turns out, this will be where the Ukrainians bleed him the worst.

• Former secret service agent says Trump is too big to have reached the steering wheel of his ‘Beast’ SUV
  

  On Tuesday, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House Select Committee that Trump had lunged for the presidential limo’s steering wheel after Special Agent in Charge Robert ‘Bobby’ Engel refused to drive him to the Capitol to join rampaging supporters.

  Another Leftist myth turns out to be as ridiculous as the pee dossier. If he was going to lunge through a narrow window to seize the wheel, he would have been unable to manage brakes or acceleration. However, the Left needs only make the right signals at their show trial to keep the fanatics among their base organized, because at 40% of America, this group is a plurality that can obstruct unified action by the rest of the country. Democracy is famous for protecting minority groups, and as it turns out, that destroys the host culture.

• Our Precarious Democracy: Extreme Polarization and Alienation in Our Politics
  

  • A majority of Americans agree that the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me,” including 73 percent of voters who describe themselves as a “strong Republican,” 71 percent who called themselves “very conservative” and 68 percent of rural voters. A bare majority (51 percent) of voters who call themselves “very liberal” also agreed. Overall, two-thirds of Republican and Independent voters agree that the government is “corrupt and rigged” against them, while Democrats are evenly split.
  • With the debate raging about the integrity of our elections, a majority (56 percent) say they “generally trust elections to be conducted fairly and counted accurately.” But that view is deeply divergent by party. Four in five Democrats (78 percent) say they generally trust our elections to be fair and accurate. Half (51 percent) of Independent voters but just 33 percent of Republicans agree. Among those who reported voting for Donald Trump in 2020, the number who say they generally trust elections is 31 percent.
  • Nearly half of Americans (49 percent) agreed that they “more and more feel like a stranger in my own country,” with 69 percent of strong Republicans and 65 percent who call themselves “very conservative” leading the way. Fully 38 percent of strong Democrats agreed.
  • And 28 percent of voters, including 37 percent who have guns in their homes, agree that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” That view is held by one in three Republicans, including 45 percent of self-identified strong Republicans. Roughly one in three (35 percent) Independent voters and one in five Democrats agreed.

  Diversity killed the USA. We look back fondly to the 1990s, before Clinton-era diversity and pluralism mania kicked in, because the USA was still mostly-functional and mostly under the control of the WASP hierarchy which created it and has ruled since its inception. With diversity, we no longer had any culture, and relied on the politics of pity, which soon had us showcasing diversity while penalizing, demonizing, and marginalizing Whites. Of course they do not recognize their country, see the elections are as corrupt as those by Tammany Hall and Richard J. Daley, and feel that it will soon be time for another civil war. Democracy has failed at the hands of its own ideological success, which came at the expense of success in reality.

• Key Fed GDP tracker turns negative, signaling recession is here
  

  The GDPNow gauge, a widely watched measurement from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, indicated Thursday that real gross domestic product shrank by 1.0% in the second quarter from April through June.

  People have no faith in the system and therefore are not spending much money. As a result, the already-savaged economy, severely restricted by the Biden administration ideological agenda, has ground to a halt just as supply chain disruptions, staff loss from overzealous COVID-19 protocols, and union grifting reach a fever pitch. It did not take [[[ BIDEN ]]] long to wreck the remaining prosperity here, but like Carter, he would rather have ideological purity and starving people than prosperity that threatens his view of what is “correct.” Obama was the same way, just like Clinton was in his second term.

• Have we had enough of the nanny employer?
  

  Some point to the growth of “workism(opens a new window)” — the idea that work has become a kind of religion, fulfilling workers’ spiritual needs and shaping their identity. Accordingly, a job should provide more than just money but self-actualisation, purpose and nurture too.

  There has also been a cultural shift. People are increasingly open about issues that used to be considered private. Recently I mentioned over dinner a family friend’s mental health problems. I paused to explain to my 10-year-old who rolled his eyes at my patronising tone. It was redundant, teachers talk about these things at school all the time, he said.

  In a society dedicated to equality, only victims are entitled to good things. If you have good things already, you need to find a way to be a victim. Mental health issues seem to be the chosen method because they require the least visible self-mutilation in order to show obedience to the dogma of our time. Work became a religion because our Worker’s Revolt mentality adopted during the quasi-socialist years of the 1930s-1960s emphasizes the importance of contributing to the People’s Crusade for Equality. In the meantime, diversity and affirmative action have crushed competence, while massive regulatory agendas have chopped most jobs into a series of communications, meetings, and paperwork requirements. No wonder people are having mental problems, and the jobs want to get inside their heads so that they have something to manipulate them with.

• Hershey, Nestle, Cargill win dismissal in U.S. of child slavery lawsuit
  

  U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said the plaintiffs in the proposed class action lacked standing to sue because they did not show a “traceable connection” between the seven defendant companies and the specific plantations where they worked.

  She said the plaintiffs also did not adequately explain the role of intermediaries in the cocoa supply chain, noting that the companies did not monitor activity in “free zones” where about 70% to 80% of the cocoa is produced.

  Finding out that a big company may have bought some of their product from someone who may have hired someone who used child labor to harvest it no longer qualifies for the big payout that the grifters want. If you want to make big money as a cocoa producer, you want to have vertical integration in your country, but third world labor is unreliable so the corporate model breaks down. Consequently, the big firms bid on what is produced and drive prices downward, keeping the third world poor because of the unreliability of third world labor. Smart money will simply shift this harvesting to robots in order to avoid the constant ongoing grift and guilt-shaming.

• How bottom trawling hurts ocean life
  

  When Bryce Stewart dived after the toothed, steel-weighted nets of a scallop dredger rumbling over the bottom of the Irish Sea 22 years ago, he witnessed destruction he could never have seen from a boat.

  “Half crabs. Smashed up sea urchins. Starfish missing some of their arms,” said Stewart, a marine ecologist at the University of York. “There was literally a trail of dead and dying things on the seabed.”

  Bottom trawling — a powerful practice in which heavy nets are dragged along the floor of the ocean to catch fish and seafood — is one of the most harmful ways to feed the world. It destroys ecosystems and sweeps up unwanted marine life that gets thrown overboard. From 1950 to 2014, bottom trawlers discarded $560 billion of bycatch, which was more than the value of all catches from longline fishers over the same period.

  The stuff you eat should come from near where you live and be handled through smaller farms, fisherpeople, and hunters. If you do that, there is less waste, but also not the fantastic profits that come from dredging the seafloor and packaging the desired species for freezing and sale far away, all while tossing aside millions of tons of dead “bycatch,” which means any species other than the one paying the bills. There is a reason people like me rarely if ever eat seafood.

• Family of Emmett Till demand arrest of female accuser after recovering 1955 warrant
  

  Donham — then just Carolyn Bryant and 21 years old — accused Till of making improper advances and obscene comments toward her while she was working the register of her family’s store in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955.

  Till, who was in town from Chicago to visit relatives, allegedly whistled at her, according to a cousin who witnessed the interaction. Such an interaction violated the racist code of behavior in the Jim Crow-era South.

  A woman, possibly Donham, identified Till to his killers, according to testimony from the case — prompting the warrant for her arrest.

  This warrant was issued most likely in order to find someone to indict and squeeze in order to get the actual killers, who were exonerated by a White jury. Were our ancestors villains? More likely, they knew that Emmett Till came from bad genetics:

  Louis Till, Emmett’s father, was serving overseas in the Transportation Corps of the U.S. Army during World War II.

  The army was still segregated at the time, and he and another African-American private, Fred McMurray, were found guilty by an army court-martial of raping two Italian women and murdering one during an air raid in 1944. Both men were hanged.

  Allied soldiers left a trail of rape and murder across Europe during the second world war. Many back home knew this and were wary of the ones who were likely guilty, knowing that traits are heritable and therefore the same lack of impulse control was likely in the offspring. Instead of heeding that as a shame on the family and good reason to walk softly, Emmett Till pushed his luck and encountered the wrath of those who were just beginning to see how much of a rape epidemic diversity had thrust upon the world.

• About half of Americans say Trump should be charged for U.S. Capitol riot: poll
  

  The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 48 per cent of U.S. adults say the former president should be charged with a crime for his role, while 31 per cent say he should not be charged. An additional 20 per cent say they don’t know enough to have an opinion. Fifty-eight percent say Trump bears a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for what happened that day.

  There is a reason that the Democrats rely on show trials: they work. If they had actual evidence, there would be a real trial, but there has not been, so instead they have carefully stage-managed an event where no dissenting opinion is allowed. This is their hope of rallying the goodthinker base and keeping attention away from the disaster of the Biden presidency. In the meantime, they trotted out the new Christine Blasey Ford who gave more “stunning and brave” testimony that was short on provable facts and long on hearsay and innuendo. In my view, this says more about the Left than the Right, namely that without constant outrage and fear, the Leftist audience stays home because their side has been in charge for most of the past century and the promised People’s Equality-Paradise-Utopia has not manifested.

• We must stop sleepwalking towards a surveillance state
  

  But the scope and frequency of biometrics usage is exploding while the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable is growing fuzzier. Already one can point to reckless or malign uses of biometrics. The companies that use the technology and the regulators that oversee them have an urgent responsibility to draw a clearer dividing line. Otherwise, worries will grow that we are sleepwalking towards a surveillance state.

  We either gain back control of our civilization from the bureaucracy or none of this matters. They have already shown that they flout the law and apply it selectively so that we end up in jail while they get rich through graft and crime. The bureaucracy creates government which replaces culture. Bring culture back, and reduce the bureaucracy to a subservient role, and suddenly we are less dependent on DEDS (democracy, equality, diversity, and socialism) and can remove those entirely, since even one drop is toxic af and leads to civilization downfall. Once we have a saner civilization, it will become a cultural value to have privacy and use this biometric technology where appropriate, which to be honest it should be used for, since a pseudo-panopticon makes it easier to catch the really bad crooks.

~~~

• ‘Safety in numbers’ tactic keeps Pacific salmon safe from predators
  

  Fish in larger groups were much less likely to be wounded, across species. For example, with sockeye salmon, an increase in 100 fish in a group cut predation risk in half. Also, wound data showed that fish whose bodies were larger or smaller than others in their group were more likely to be attacked by a predator. This suggests that the salmon’s safety in numbers comes from confusing their predators because visually distinct — larger or smaller — individuals were easier for predators to keep track of.

  The researchers also found that for two salmon species — sockeye and chum — fish in larger groups had less food in their stomachs. These fish sometimes sacrificed a meal to remain protected in a group and avoid predators.

  Do you wonder why Leftists like to create chaos? They want to assert control over their environment, true, but they also want to camouflage what they as individuals are doing, and social chaos makes them meld into the background. Avoiding human herding behavior is one of the primary goals of civilization and the only way to do it is by only rewarding the good, at which point fading into the background becomes a very negative thing, and social status seeking cannot compensate for a lack of hierarchical status.

• Faculty votes to scrap swim requirement
  

  The CEA found that from fall 2013 to fall 2019, 81 percent of students in the beginner swim course were domestic students of color, 16 percent were international students, and only 3 percent were white domestic students.

  People should know how to swim and have basic survival skills. If minorities need to opt out, make it mandatory for White kids only. This way, the people who need it to survive will have it, and the others will inherit the consequence of their choice whether for good or ill. In the bigger picture, this example shows us how diversity forces a lowest common denominator on us: when disparate groups exist in the same society, the areas where they have nothing in common become dangerous, so standards get lowered until everyone is speaking pidgin, doing their jobs through social media, and drowning the instant they step in a puddle.

• Yes, Taxes Can Drive People to Move
  

  While homes are a bit more affordable here on the east side of the Missouri River, property taxes still pack quite a punch. When researching cost of living, they mentioned that Missouri offered more affordable property taxes than Iowa, but a commute from Missouri to Omaha isn’t feasible. They bought a home in Iowa, albeit a smaller one than they desired because they needed to afford the mortgage and property taxes.

  Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law the most historic tax reform in Iowa’s history. The new law will gradually phase down the progressive income tax rates until 2026 when a flat tax of 3.9% will be implemented. In addition, Iowa’s corporate tax will be gradually reduced until it reaches a flat 5.5%.

  Property taxes drive up cost of living. No one will talk about them in the media, mainly because thanks to Plyler v. Doe, most of your property taxes go toward educating illegal aliens and providing them with free school breakfasts and lunches. Our government spends almost all of the money it takes in on destructive domestic programs; if we go to a flat tax system, suddenly it will not have its favorite weapon. At that point, we can start striking down all government programs that do not benefit the productive people who make our nation great. The poor will always be with us. We cannot sacrifice our future because some are flailing, and it is in fact more compassionate to refuse to subsidize poverty than it is to fund permanent self-esteem crushing quasi-poverty.

• Tocqueville’s Worst Fears
  

  Without explaining what he would regard as a satisfactory level of equality, Piketty calls for radical increases in the progressivity of income taxation, as well as taxes on wealth itself, to mitigate these alleged injustices. He ordains international policies combining “remedial” justice (to compensate descendants of the victims of slaveowning and colonialism) and “universalist” justice designed to reform the world economic system so as to “reduc[e] inequalities and ensur[e] that everyone has the most egalitarian access possible to education, employment, and property.”

  In other words, we should forget about the history of socialist movements and rush headlong into world socialism because it makes all of us feel good, especially those with enough money to stand above the thronging mob and toss out little gifts, forgetting that from a historical view, these same middle class philanthropists will be the first against the wall.

• An engaging leadership style may boost employee engagement
  

  Previous research also suggests that a certain style of leadership known as engaging leadership — involving leaders who fulfill employees’ need for autonomy, feeling competent, and feeling cared for — may boost employee engagement.

  Autonomy? This sounds more like independent business or tiered hierarchy like existed under the aristocrats than it does a modern job. If you want your employees to be happy, give them tasks and a deadline and let them figure out how to get it done. Recognize what they have done and get them in a position where their skills make them shine, even if that is a janitorial role (or worse, a Rust programmer).

• These red flags can let you know when you’re in an online echo chamber
  

  The analysis showed that elements of spontaneous communication that convey strong emotion, like swear words and exclamation marks, were good predictors of hyperpartisan echo chambers, as were “I” and “you” pronouns, which convey familiarity. There was also a strong link with elements that mimic the feeling of face-to-face conversation, including discourse markers, like “oh,” “well,” and “you know,” which direct the flow of conversation, and prepositions, like “with,” “in,” and “during,” that convey a sense of space and time.

  Non-hyperpartisan subreddits, on the other hand, used a very different style of communication. Those virtual spaces emphasized third-person pronouns, periods as the primary form of punctuation, and use of quotations. The research team suspects these language features may be used to convey a distanced, neutral approach, with a focus on evidence and precision.

  Spoiler: both are forms of signaling. “Look at me, I’m objective” and “Look at me, I’m dedicated” are two different poses for achieving the same thing, which is membership in a group so that the individual can explain his life as significant and engaged in relevant, constructive activity. A better guide to online spaces would say look for ones where people do the least amount of portrayal, or acting as they think they should. My informal analysis from thirty plus years of such spaces is that people who do not need a specific topic in order to converse have a greater chance of being serious, but are more likely to make broad conclusions about how society should be (“money is too important”) than about specific political mechanisms for getting there.

• Charts and maps show how over-65s now outnumber under-15s for first time EVER, women dwarf men in all but 13 council areas and there are 300,000 fewer children
  

  Experts said the increasingly elderly population is the result of falling birth rates — possibly caused by a housing crisis and costly childcare — and people living longer. There are concerns the trend will close schools and push up immigration to fill job vacancies.

  People threaten to revolt or strike, so you buy them off with benefits. This drives up the cost of everything. Now fewer people have children, which means that your tax revenues fall, so you have to import foreigners to pay for the taxes. Those people end up mostly living on benefits, so you must raise taxes, and now even fewer people have children. It is the democracy loop, and it goes round and round until one day you wake up in a grey race third world ruin and wonder how you screwed yourself so hard by voting for this nonsense and rubbish.

• Cave woman one million years older than thought
  

  Modern testing methods now suggest the group of early humans roamed the earth between 3.4 and 3.7 million years ago.

  This new timeline could reshape common understandings of human evolution.

  Again and again, we rewrite the timeline. At some point we will get to punctuated equilibrium, parallel evolution, co-existing related species, and eventually panspermia, at which point we will realize that modern humans are far older than is convenient for democratic science to recognize.

• With vast arable lands, why does Africa need to import grain?
  

  A major part of African farmlands is used to grow crops such as coffee, cocoa, and cottonseed oil for export, while the staple crops of the African diet, wheat, and rice, mainly come from outside of the continent.

  “Most of these nations are faced with a dilemma,” Bokelmann said. “They are forced to choose between the mass production of crops for exporting, which brings them more price value, or feeding the majority of their population by supporting small-scale farming of indigenous crops.”

  We see the problem of globalism. They can grow their food locally and be poorer, or import their food and churn out the cash crops that make them richer. Perhaps if the ships that carry these foods back and forth went away, people would turn back to what worked, and worry less about the wealth that will surely bring taxes and then decay.

• Bizarre new ‘space shuttle pods’ available for rent in downtown Melbourne
  

  The house, which is located at 15 Charles Abbotsford, offers single capsule bedrooms for $250 per week (or $900 per month).

  The capsule pods fit a single bed (can sleep one person only), equipped with own mirror, ventilating fan, USB ports, digital control panels, adjustable colour reading lights, safe locker, clothes hanger & curtain door for privacy.

  Mr Chan said that the pods are very popular in Asia and have been around for more than 50 years in Japan, as it is the only affordable accommodation there.

  When you raise taxes to pay for the free stuff for citizens, everything gets prohibitively expensive until we are living in plastic coffins, eating bugs, and watching endless entertainment in order to take our minds off how completely pointless and miserable of an existence it is.

• Eskom produces less electricity now than in 2010, but it costs 3-times more to make
  

  Unplanned outages accounted for 20.9% of generation capacity which was not available, much higher than planned maintenance at 11.2%.

  In 2010 Eskom had 39,222 staff members which cost the company R14.7 billion in employee benefits. Primary energy costs came in at R29.1 billion.

  Fast forward ten years and Eskom now has 44,772 employees which cost the company R33.0 billion in the last financial year.

  Under diversity, jobs become giveaways in exchange for favors or loyalty. Consequently you get a lot of affirmative action style workers who show up occasionally, do something symbolic, and then leave, while passing on the cost to the consumer. Western European ways work for Western Europeans only. Africa needs to find its own way, but it will not be able to do so in mixed-ethnic/mixed-racial South Africa. In the meantime, the American diversity experiment seems to be producing similar results, since energy generation is now uncertain in a great number of southern states.

• Calls for action as Biden voicemail reveals he knew of Hunter China deals
  

  In it, Joe Biden told his son, “I think you’re clear” after The New York Times published a story in December 2018 about Hunter Biden’s ties to Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, who vanished earlier that year after being arrested amid a probe into suspected financial crimes.

  These clowns are thoroughly corrupt and running an obvious political machine that has captured power in America on the back of the minority vote. We either find a way to escape it, or it consumes us, much as similar power structures have eaten up civilization in other prosperous places, leaving behind a clueless cultureless grey race with no direction or excellence.

~~~

~~~

Tags: harry potter, linkpost, news, periscope