Amerika

~~~

If you go into a darkened, quiet room and shut the door, pull the window blinds, then turn off all gadgets, you will descend into what is as close to silence as your situation allows. Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and listen deep into yourself.

Once the chatter of the brain subsidizes and your body starts to ignore temporary discomforts, you will begin to pick up on the mood of the world. The mechanism remains unknown to me — some say vibration, some waves, and some psychic energy, while others claim all three are the same — but humans can pick up on the sensations of the herd.

We are in a time of panic. You can feel it out there. The old way is clearly not working and we are afraid to consider what the new way might be, much less to mention it in public. If we were sane we would see that mob rule is our problem and go back to monarchism, but most of even the top one percent who do all the thinking are not there yet.

Humans decide what is true based on what makes them feel that the world is understandable to them, that they are in the best position they could achieve in their situation, and that they are safe going into a future of positive expectations. This type of rationalization is currently breaking down.

As a result, the madness spreads in ordinary ways. People leave doors unlocked, park their cars in random places, and burn noodles in the microwave. They are not fully here; they are constantly distracted, at a loss, and swimming through a mental fug that leaves them confused.

This must happen for us to get to the next stage. For now, there will be much scatterbrained distraction, but over time, realistic ratiocination will win out as people realize that in order to survive, they must figure out the situation in which they find themselves.

The top few percent — those who are really in command of their own minds, and effective in the real world — have been riding along with the inertia of history since WW2 and deferring to our egalitarian dominant paradigm. Slowly however this is changing, and as this process completes, the plate techtonics of history will gyrate again.

~~~

• Trump would ‘fire tens of thousands of civil servants’ and ‘gut the government’ to sort his agenda if he runs and wins in 2024
  

  After interviews with over a dozen Trump-world insiders the outlet’s investigation found that Trump is planning to use an executive order called ‘Schedule F,’ which he issued in October 2020 and Biden later rescinded.

  The order would reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who were deemed to have some influence over policy as ‘Schedule F’ employees, which would strip them of their employment protections.

  You have to shut the door they used to gain power. In his case, this means killing off the Deep State — the permanent bureaucracy that spans both parties because it works for Democracy Inc and not a particular constituency — by removing their jobs. A small government no longer has a blank cheque provided by infinity wars like anti-poverty, anti-“racism,” anti-drugs, and anti-terrorism. If he peels government back to the basics, the conspirators no longer exist. Even better, however, would be if he removed affirmative action, disparate impact, and the current interpretation of the 14A (even better if Republicans repealed it, since it is a far worse disaster than Prohibition) so that those working in government are no longer political appointees but private citizens contracted to do a specific job. Potentially government should stop having employees altogether and rely on contracting with vetted privatized sources to do all of its bureaucratic work, allowing it to super-simplify its byzantine labyrinth of rules and therefore, make daily interaction with government rare again.

• California’s trees are dying, and might not be coming back
  

  “The forests are not keeping up with these large fires,” said study co-author James Randerson, the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor of Earth system science at UCI. Across the entire state, tree cover area has declined 6.7 percent since 1985. “These are big changes in less than four decades,” he said.

  California represents a wealth nexus, or a place where citizens can tap into wealth simply by participating in local jobs. Consequently, lots of them move there, and as they acquire wealth, they want homes, so builders develop areas that abut national forest. This in turn disrupts forest ecosystems and the processes which normally keep them moist and therefore, decay the groundcover that becomes humus. Even more, the new concrete creates rising heat columns — the urban heat island effect — which then displaces jet streams:

  The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon whereby cities experience higher air temperatures than the surrounding countryside. This effect can be quite noticeable. On average, cities tend to be 1-7°F warmer during the daytime. This difference continues well into the night, during which cities can still be as much as 5°F warmer than the areas around them.

  And since nearly 70% of humanity will live in cities by 2050, finding ways to alleviate urban heat islands has become even more pressing.

  As cities grow, new development such as roads and buildings displace natural surfaces like trees, ponds, and soil. This change in the local environment results in a corresponding change in the local climate. That’s because these natural surfaces help moderate air temperatures.

  The displacement of jet streams, or natural wind patterns that circulate heat around the globe, results in the urban heat island effect altering both local and global weather:

  As described in a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, they discovered that ambient heat generated by a city’s buildings and cars often gets lifted up into the jet stream, leading to weather changes over a massive area.

  In studying the excess heat generated by daily activities in cities around the Northern Hemisphere, Zhang and colleagues from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and elsewhere found that a significant amount of the heat is lifted into the jet stream, causing the fast-moving current of air to widen. Overall, this causes an average of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warming during the winter for most of North America and Asia, and 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooling during the fall for Europe.

  This means that the forests become warmer and lose moisture at the same time that natural species are displaced by human habitation and cannot break down the organic matter that piles up, resulting in dry forests that burn catastrophically instead of locally when an ignition event occurs. People should ask what happened in 1985 that kicked off this process, and they will find that it was the explosion of human settlement in areas that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were wise enough to leave to nature.

• Hyundai subsidiary has used child labor at Alabama factory
  

  Reuters learned of underage workers at the Hyundai-owned supplier following the brief disappearance in February of a Guatemalan migrant child from her family’s home in Alabama.

  The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren’t going to school, according to people familiar with their employment.

  “They should know that these cars are being built, at least in part, by workers who are children and need to be in school rather than risking life and limb because their families are desperate for income,” [former OSHA executive David Michaels] added.

  Government keeps agitating for more free stuff for illegal aliens. The outrage over “child slave labor” will give them that blank cheque, even though the real story here is probably a family living in subsidized housing, farming out its many members to work, collecting benefits, and sending the profits back home to Guatemala. If the US wants stability, it will have to invade Central and South America and repatriate the Amerinds there to their ethnic homeland in Mongolia.

• DNA from ancient population in Southern China suggests Native Americans’ East Asian roots
  

  They found that the bones belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans. Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.

  Most Americans, raised on the political/symbolic anti-reality of herd logic, talk about “Native Americans” and do not realize that they, too, were immigrants whose society here failed and collapsed into rape, murder, cannibalism, and constant infighting motivated by theft. Repatriate them all to Mongolia and the problem is finally solved.

• U.S. confirms first two cases of monkeypox in children — one case is in California
  

  Both cases are “likely the result of household transmission” and “had no contact with each other,” the agency said in a statement.

  One is a toddler who lives in California and the other is in an infant who is not a resident of the U.S. and was “transiting through” the Washington, D.C. area when the test was done.

  The agency is also now aware of at least eight cases in people who identify as cisgender women, McQuiston said. Most cases so far have been among men who have sex with men.

  These will most likely turn out to be mistaken diagnoses, but they will not report on that one for two years, and then only on page thirty-eight of a forty-page newspaper. They badly want to hype monkeypox into the next “pandemic” because this grants more power to government while distracting from how badly things are going for Democracy Inc, which seems to have bungled everything it has touched, chased after hobgoblins and superstitions, spent us deeply into debt, and killed off the populations it was supposed to protect. It has failed just as hard as the USSR has, which makes people afraid because now everything but monarchy has failed us. We were living the best life we could under the kings, and all of the substitutes turn out to be failures, even if democracy takes two centuries to manifest its doom while Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, and theocracy tend to detonate a lot quicker. When we are all effectively Semites, having bred Asian and African into ourselves, living in the third world ruins of a once-great empire, maybe then we will realize how good we had it under the kings.

• Steve Bannon: Trump ally guilty of contempt of Congress
  

  Bannon, 68, was indicted last year over his refusal to co-operate with the congressional committee probing the events leading up to the Capitol riot.

  He faces up to two years in jail and up to $200,000 (£167,000) in fines.

  Speaking to reporters outside court, Bannon vowed to have the case reversed on what his lawyer called a “bullet-proof appeal”.

  In a country armed to the teeth, the possibility of this riot being an “insurrection” is remote. Add to that the presence of federal informants among the group and the mysterious orders to stand down the Capitol Police after refusing to re-inforce them the day before and you see a Reichstag fire event. Bannon will be vindicated upon appeal because of the utter failure of Congress to prosecute anyone for refusal to cooperate with the Durham probe. The Left merely wanted the headlines as usual.

• Study finds happiness in multiracial neighborhoods
  

  He surveyed 1,500 residents in more than 100 multiracial neighborhoods in 2016 and polled a random sample of people from neighborhoods throughout the area in 2018. Areas included Washington, D.C., Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland, and the cities of Alexandria and Arlington, as well as Fairfax county, in Virginia.

  He found more than 70% of multiracial neighborhood residents, across races, were happy living in integrated areas. Though Bader suspected residents in multiracial neighborhoods would be happy there, he was surprised that their satisfaction was so high.

  The weasel word here is “random”; he carefully cherry-picked for wealthy communities where most people have government jobs. If we read the paper itself, we see that he crafts it as a response to Putnam and surveyed wealthy areas:

  Both surveys represented residents in the Washington, DC area, which was defined as Washington, DC and the surrounding jurisdictions of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland, Arlington and Fairfax Counties Virginia (including the cities of Falls Church and Fairfax in Fairfax County), and the independent city of Alexandria, Virginia, an area that comprises 4,096,851 residents.

  These criteria resulted in a sample frame of 114 neighborhoods that represented just under 585,000 people. The majority of neighborhoods were in Montgomery County, Maryland, followed by Fairfax County, Virginia, then Prince George’s County, Maryland.

  Montgomery County is 42% White and has an estimated median household income of $110k/yr in an area where 22% of the workers have government jobs; keep in mind that many more work for government contractors. Fairfax County is almost half White with an average income of $128k/yr, and Prince George’s County is mostly Black but has an annual average income of $86k/yr. In other words, this study shows our government elite querying itself for its satisfaction with a known political objective, namely arguing that diversity in fact works out great. In reality, they are asking a cosseted elite for their satisfaction with their own policies, at which point 1,500 of them (out of 585k) said that everything was just fine. Cherry-picking knows no finer example.

• Watchdog directs Secret Service to stop internal investigation into deleted texts
  

  In a letter sent Wednesday night, DHS deputy inspector general Gladys Ayala informed U.S. Secret Service Director James Murray that the agency should stop investigating the matter because it could impede the inspector general’s own probe into the agency’s Jan. 6 response.

  Washington investigates itself only to exonerate itself. All of the riots of the last few years could have been stopped by simply having police presence that was arresting malefactors, but government seemed to believe that the chaos was useful. The BLM/Antifa riots burned cities and cowed voters, while now the January 6 “insurrection” is being used to demonize the non-cucked Right.

• The secret to staying skinny is eating less… not exercising more, study finds
  

  Surprisingly, these naturally thin people were found to spend 96 per cent of their time being sedentary or doing only light physical activity.

  But they appeared to eat significantly less than people of a normal weight, whose BMI was below 25 — the threshold for being overweight — and above 21.5.

  So much for the idea of constant manic exercise as our solution. Most likely, we will eventually find that people eat more because they are not getting the nutrition they need from foods loaded with carbs, seed oils, and sugars.

• Polls show Democrats becoming party of elites as working class and minorities shift toward Republicans
  

  Republicans are starting to attract more voters in the working class, while Democrats are gaining more votes from wealthier Americans as midterm candidates make their priorities clear in the last four months before the election.

  The majority of voters consist of working-class citizens, a group that has historically leaned Democrat. Minority voters are likely to see inflation as the country’s greatest concern, but the Democratic Party has made clear its main priorities approaching the midterms are abortion, gun laws and climate.

  The parties flip-flop when one gets control by having made all of the changes it intended. The Left has held sway since WW2; successful people, as is common in dying societies, parrot to each other whatever seems to be the winning paradigm of their era. Consequently, the Left has become an echo chamber of people with corporate and government jobs talking to each other about what they already agree upon, but because they need to have something new to talk about, they keep pushing further and further into the symbolism of the Left. If equality is good, then transsexualism is good, too, because it affirms equality, which is the political arm of individualism, or the idea that social order, natural order, and hierarchy must be flung aside so that the individual can pursue its own wishes and illusions. That is the social order of our time. No one cares how well this turns out; it is all symbolism, and the middle class as the army of shopkeepers cares only about making good feelings of safety and moral superiority for its consumer audience. These people make their money selling stuff to each other and saying things that make audiences approve. Now that government handouts determine how the economy goes, good feelings matter more than reality. We are stuck in an endless poll, with whatever is popular because it avoids real problems and talks about good feelings and moral superiority winning out over actual issues, which is about how you would expect democracy would end. Rome and Athens went out the same way.

• Experts don’t always give better advice — they just give more
  

  “Top performers didn’t write more helpful advice, but they did write more of it, and people in our experiments mistook quantity for quality,” Levari told APS.

  First, skilled performers may overlook fundamental advice because “natural talent and extensive practice have made conscious thought unnecessary…A natural-born slugger who has played baseball every day since childhood may not think to tell a rookie about something they find utterly intuitive, such as balance and grip,” they wrote.

  Second, top performers may not be skilled communicators. “Even when an excellent performer does have explicit information to share, they may not be especially adept at sharing it,” the researchers wrote. Finally, a large quantity of advice may be more than what can realistically be implemented.

  A cause-effect analysis makes this clear: people value options more than known quantities because the options, not having yet been tested, have no downside. Consequently, conjectural advice easily fills the head because we see possibilities without opportunity costs. Those who give advice manage to spam the consciousnesses of those who receive it by saturating them with potential options full of possibility, which is more fun to think about than limiting the field based on known results. In this way, conjectural thinking takes over higher-IQ groups:

  • If Heaven exists, then living a moral life is worth it to achieve Heaven.
  • If equality brings peace, then adopting equality is the highest moral goal.
  • If distributing wealth ends conflict, then socialist societies will thrive.
  • If individuals are naturally good, liberalizing rules will produce goodness.

  Each of these forms a begging-the-question fallacy. Does Heaven exist, equality bring peace, ending conflict bring prosperity, and individualism produce goodness? We never get to that point because our brains are still swimming in all of the possibilities that might be true, and since we want them to be true, are assumed to be true. These all arise from the fundamental assumption that since the goal of permanent civilization was safety, once that is mostly true, another goal has not taken its place.

• Amazon’s Ring dinged for handing over footage to law enforcement
  

  Ring states that it will not share customer information with law enforcement without consent, a warrant or “an exigent or emergency” circumstance. The home security company told Markey in a July 1 letter that it has provided footage to law enforcement 11 times this year in response to emergency requests for information.

  Ring currently has 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments enrolled on its Neighbors Public Safety Service (NPSS), a platform that allows Ring users to share suspicious videos captured by their devices. The figure represents a more than five-fold increase in law enforcement partnerships with Ring since November 2019, according to Markey’s office.

  We got to a surveillance state not by others imposing it on us, but by our own fear. After 9/11, the Patriot Act rolled around, and now everyone is afraid to revoke it lest there be a terrorism attack following it for which the revoker will be blamed. Social media and a network of door cameras gladly hand over information to law enforcement, and cities are mandating public cameras on private businesses. Huxley was right: societies go bad not through external manipulators like the Illuminati or the Learned Elders of Zion, but through internal desires for safety, comfort, wealth, and pleasure.

~~~

• Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions
  

  At its most basic level, decision-making boils down to a series of computations meant to maximize benefits and minimize costs. For instance, in a common type of decision-making called sensory response thresholding, an animal has to detect sensory input like heat past a certain level to produce a certain costly behavior, like moving away. If the rise in temperature isn’t big enough, it won’t be worth it.

  In other words, these are economic decisions based on probable reward, including but not limited to avoidance of risk.

  When they increased the size of the colony from 10 to 200 individuals, the temperature necessary to trigger the decision to vacate increased. Colonies of 200 individuals, for example, held out until temperatures soared past 36 degrees.

  Groups take into account how hard it is to move the group and that raises the threshold between inactivity and action.

  Neural networks operate the same way. Each node attempts to gain a reward and avoid penalties. Cooperation occurs when multiple nodes are positioned to be rewarded. If reward becomes simplistic, like being popular with other ants, then the nodes work together in working against each other, and breakdown occurs.

• The vibes theory of politics
  

  Twenty years in and around politics have left me sure of one thing. Most people’s ideological commitments are extraordinarily soft. What they think of as a belief is often a post-hoc rationalisation of a group loyalty. Crucially, this is more true, not less, of degree-holding, “high-information” voters. What education can do is estrange people from parents and home town. It leaves them casting around for an alternative identity. Political tribe is as good as any.

  Tribes? This sounds Wolfeian:

  The bohemians were artists plus the intellectuals and layabouts in their orbit. They did their best to stand bourgeois propriety on its head through rakish dishabille, louder music, more wine, great gouts of it, ostentatious cohabitation, and by flaunting their poverty as a virtue. And why? Because they all came from the bourgeoisie themselves originally and wanted nothing more desperately than to distinguish themselves from it.

  Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles. Politicians, the rich, the celebrated, become mere types. Does this apply to “the intellectuals” also? Oh, yes. . . perfectly, all too perfectly.

  In other words, people are born into tribes but in an effort to distinguish themselves, will turn on their own tribes through a process of ironism, contrarianism, and iconoclasm in order to stand out and achieve individual social success. Egalitarianism vastly accelerates this process, since when everyone is equal, the only manner of success involves standing out, whether as a victim or a leader. Ideology serves as symbolism to anchor their place in the group, whether as loyal member (conservative) or ironist (liberal).

• Cytotoxic lesions of the corpus callosum after COVID‑19 vaccination
  

  According to a prior study of healthcare workers, 98.34% of those who received the mRNA-1273 vaccination (Moderna) had unpleasant symptoms and 61.2% of them had trouble doing everyday activities [1]. As for the BNT162b2 vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech), 20.3% of the recipients had troubles in activities of daily living [2]. Headache, dizziness, decreased appetite, muscle spasm, decreased sleep quality, and brain fogging were the most commonly reported symptoms relevant to the central nervous system

  If the virus produces nasty spike proteins to get into cells, having a vaccine program your cells to produce those spike proteins may turn out to be a bad idea.

• World Health Organization declares monkeypox a ‘global health emergency’
  

  There have now been more than 16,000 reported cases of the disease in 75 countries, and five deaths related to the disease, the WHO said.

  The new cash-in is here. One wonders how many comorbidities the dead had, and how much more hype we will hear leading up to the November 2022 elections in the USA.

• Bring back the wolves — but not as heroes or villains
  

  The U.S. deer population is at an historic high, in part because humans have given them ideal living conditions and plenty of food. “What we do to landscapes, whether that’s forestry, agriculture or gardening, provide deer with a perfect landscape for them to live in,” Blossey said. “Hunters don’t remove enough deer, cars don’t remove enough. Their populations exploded, because the living conditions were just absolutely wonderful.”

  And the wishful thinking — that wolves and other predators can control deer populations and restore degraded ecosystems — lacks evidence as well. When large predators are present in a landscape, deer and other herbivores simply graze when wolves are resting.

  In other words, we have to look at land use, not try to manipulate animal populations by introducing or removing predators, even human ones. When we maximize the amount of greenery we can produce, the result is like the over-abundance of nutrition that produces “red tides” with coastal algae. We might view permanent agricultural civilization as doing the same to humans, and the only solution being a limit placed on the amount of land humans can use.

• China: MI5 and FBI heads warn of ‘immense’ threat
  

  FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and had interfered in politics, including recent elections.

  MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again.

  MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added.

  Elections, you say? How interesting. China wants to take over the world. Since their belief system is conjectural, messianic, and Utopian, it is anti-realistic and therefore can be shown to fail, although there is a pocket of time between when it sounds good and its failure is revealed. That pocket is nearing its end, so China must take over the world before its system collapse from within. If it controls the world, it will have competition, and therefore it can keep kicking the can down the road even as its system falters.

• Connectivity of language areas unique in the human brain
  

  The researchers found that while the connectivity of the posterior middle temporal areas in chimpanzees is confined mainly to the temporal lobe, in humans a new connection towards the frontal and parietal lobes emerged using the arcuate fasciculus as an anatomical avenue. In fact, changes to both human language areas include a suite of expansions to connectivity within the temporal lobes.

  Separating the human from language is impossible, but as is true of all things, our strengths are our weaknesses. We process language before we know whether what is said is true or not, so we are endlessly hackable by deception. Culture seems to serve mostly to impose boundaries on what is considered so that we do not become frozen by brain-spam, endlessly assessing what we are told to see if it is actual, relevant, and useful.

• Poll reveals white Americans see an increase in discrimination against other white people and less against other racial groups
  

  [N]early a third of white Americans say they have seen “a lot more” discrimination against white people in the past five years – and more than half of them say they have not seen a rise in discrimination against Black and Latino Americans.

  A May 2022 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll further found that a majority of [W]hite Americans do not believe that there has been a rise in discrimination against minority groups.

  In stark contrast, the poll found a large majority of Black Americans believe they have been on the receiving end of discrimination.

  In a diverse society, you never know if the reason you did not receive an invite to a birthday party is your race, your personal characteristics, or a misunderstanding of the latter owing to your race. Diversity is cruel and, as the data from Black Americans shows, never ends up well for any group. People used to repeat “diversity is our strength” like a mantra but we are not hearing much of that now. Wide opposition to diversity does not yet exist, but criticism of diversity is no longer so widely opposed, nor does anyone seem to believe that more diversity will solve any problems. This is why the Biden administration is so energetically importing Mexicans: their window is closing as the pocket between an idea sounding good and it being discovered to be fallacious is expiring.

• Measuring Intergenerational Exposure to the U.S. Justice System: Evidence from Longitudinal Links between Survey and Administrative Data
  

  We find substantially larger prevalences of intergenerational exposure to the criminal justice system than previously reported: 9% of children born between 1999–2005 were intergenerationally exposed to prison, 18% to a felony conviction, and 39% to any criminal charge; charge exposure rates reach as high as 62% for Black children. We regress these newly quantified types of exposure on measures of child well-being to gauge their importance and find that all types of exposure (parent vs. non-parent, prison vs. charges, current vs. previous) are strongly negatively correlated with development outcomes, suggesting substantially more U.S. children are harmed by crime and criminal justice than previously thought.

  In other words, as diversity increased crime increased, and with that, more children are growing up broken, creating a cycle whereby crime will always increase.

• Deaths with unknown causes now Alberta’s top killer: province
  

  In 2021, ill-defined and unknown causes of death snagged the first spot with 3,362, up from 1,464 in 2020 and 522 the year before that, according to statistics from the Government of Alberta.

  Too much focus on COVID-19 meant that people stopped paying attention to other maladies and did not investigate that thoroughly after death, conveniently also burying any vaccine-related injuries.

• Natural selection may be making society more unequal
  

  “Scores which correlated with lower earnings and education predicted having more children, meaning those scores are being selected for from an evolutionary perspective.”

  “Scores which correlated with higher earnings and education predicted having fewer children, meaning that they are being selected against.”

  In other words, socialism is finally making us equal: the poorer, dumber, and less aware are replacing those with higher capacities because we have depleted the latter group in order to subsidize the former. Thanks to our good intentions, we are headed back toward hominid status.

• Dutch farmers’ protests over emission cuts resume after police fire shots
  

  Protesters are angry about new environmental law proposals that seek to curtail emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 50% by 2030. According to estimates by the government itself, some 30% of livestock farmers will have to shut down their businesses.

  Climate change is the latest “blank cheque” for government to expand its power, which in turn enables it to continue enforcing equality via wealth transfer and civil rights. It views that as essential in order to avoid revolution, since only by buying off citizens with entitlements are governments able to survive the complete incompetence of their rule. Governments of the democratic sort manipulate their citizens by using symbols of absolute good (equality) and constructing a bogeyman of all human fears (inequality). However, at some point, the symbols become pursuits in themselves and mass emulation and expansion on them by the herd results in taking them to a ludicrous last-days-of-Rome place where common sense is forgotten and maintaining Control becomes more important than thriving. That is Late Stage Democracy, and it is where the West finds itself now.

~~~

~~~

• Part of Georgia Guidestones damaged by explosion, GBI says

  The advice on the stones did not seem that radical:

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule Passion — Faith — Tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

  Like many of the idealistic notions coming out of the 1970s, this has aged poorly. The term “diversity” has been trashed by equating it with multiracialism. The idea of a new created language like Esperanto now seems quaint and pointless that English has united the world. Now that we have had a few decades of the UN, WHO, and WEF no one wants a world court or any world authority. The rest seem fairly sensible, although leaving half of Earth to nature makes more sense than trying to explicitly regulate population.

• Russia’s Tactical Shift in Ukraine Raises Prospect of Protracted War
  

  Russia is massing “a very heavy concentration of artillery and armor in every square kilometer that we are unable to cope with,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is giving them the advantage.”

  Ukrainian forces are seeking to slow the Russian advance, wearing them down and preparing to counterattack when they can bring more Western weapons to bear.

  The burden has shifted. When Russia attacked, it had the advantage because its targets were clear and it could destroy and occupy them. Now that it has taken that terrain, like in Afghanistan, it must defend it from what are effectively insurgents who do not need to take new territory, only destroy what is Russian on their territory. The West will continue providing a flow of weapons and the price in blood paid by Russia will be great. Putin will make a peace offering amounting to him keeping the territory he took, probably in the form of a puppet breakaway state, but if Western leaders are not cowed into accepting this, the Great Bombardment will begin with heavy Russian losses. Even though our moron democratic leaders in the West support Ukraine, there is no reason to give up the principle of nationalism here to allow Russia to take more territory in order to bolster its failing economy.

• Buying into conspiracy theories can be exciting—that’s what makes them dangerous
  

  Political scientist Michael Barkun points out that conspiracy theory devotees love what he calls “stigmatized knowledge,” sources that are obscure or even looked down upon.

  In fact, the more obscure the source is, the more true believers want to trust it. This is the stock in trade of popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience”—”scientists” who present themselves as the lone voice in the wilderness and are somehow seen as more credible because they’ve been repudiated by their colleagues. Ninety-eight percent of scientists may agree on something, but the conspiracy mindset imagines the other 2% are really on to something. This allows conspiracists to see themselves as “critical thinkers” who have separated themselves from the pack, rather than outliers who have fallen for a snake oil pitch.

  This clever spin misses the point: if you believe that your society is going in the wrong direction, the last thing you want to do is trust the established wisdom which represents the inertia of the herd. Conspiracy thinking shows people looking for an alternative to the groupthink, but they are easily misled because symbols and other forms of categorical logic which aim to be complete and explain everything tend to treat the world as a series of visually-discrete groups which act from absolute conviction, instead of lots of disorganized people looking for some idea that helps them make it through the night and only later turns out to be deceptive like most things which are inspired by suppressing fears and pursuing idols of goodness.

• Why groupthink might be a good thing after all
  

  My experience is that political parties, NGOs and other “mission-aligned” organisations are more prone to groupthink than other forms of business. None of these organisations face the pressure that comes with having to make money by buying and selling goods or services. I’m not saying that profitmaking outfits never drift into dangerous groupthink but, because they tend to face more immediate consequences for their mistakes, they are often forced to course-correct faster.

  The history of political parties making obviously bad decisions is long, and often those mistakes happen precisely because members of the in-group decide they value their continued presence within the party more than they do avoiding catastrophe.

  Nonetheless, when I think about the winners and the losers of every campaign or contest I have covered, the victors have been more prone to groupthink than the defeated. Winning campaigns have a unity of purpose and a strong internal camaraderie. Those that lose are much more likely to be leaky and paralysed by disagreement.

  This explains a great deal of human history. Whatever is simplest works, even if wrong, because it holds the group together. The West united on equality as a goal because anything else was too complicated. Aristocracy, by reducing the number of participants in the committee, makes for better decisions, but in the process loses the ability to be vicious which ideology confers to those who believe in a world of black and white decisions.

• Fewer in U.S. Now See Bible as Literal Word of God
  

  A record-low 20% of Americans now say the Bible is the literal word of God, down from 24% the last time the question was asked in 2017, and half of what it was at its high points in 1980 and 1984. Meanwhile, a new high of 29% say the Bible is a collection of “fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.”

  We are leaving the age of symbolism. While it united people toward simple tasks, it turns out that it ignores the complex ones, and categorical logic is hostile to complexity and tends to create a “precedent cascade” by which errors are always compounded in order to avoid shattering the unity of the group. Humanity needs something more to guide us, something organic like culture and transcendent like religion, but without the tendency to become a loyalty test that then, by being more important than results in reality, drives us away from any kind of realistic thinking. Nihilism provides this entry point by recognizing that nothing can unite us but some are more competent than others and should lead us.

• If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups
  

  This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

  The assumption here is that the world breaks down into zero-sum and non-zero-sum values because wealth, power, and status simply exist as variables. In reality, they are produced. Increasing equality results in less power for those who produce them and, consequently, they are produced less. The problem here is that researchers are treating civilization as a static and not living entity which can be affected by changes in composition of those who are producing its wealth, power, and status.

• Pelosi’s husband buys $5 million in chip stocks before Senate vote on chip subsidy bill
  

  Mr. Pelosi purchased roughly $5 million, or 20,000 shares of Nvidia, last month, according to a financial disclosure report released this week by the speaker’s office. Mr. Pelosi also sold portions of his stock in Apple and Visa.

  The purchase comes on the heels of a vote next week on a China competition bill in the Senate that would shore up the U.S. computer chip manufacturing industry.

  Technically/eckshyually Pelosi did not engage in insider trading because she has no certain knowledge that the bill will past. In a more realistic assessment, she knew that speculation would drive the price wild as the bill was debated, and so it made sense to acquire quite a bit of stock in order to take advantage of that buying frenzy. When we set up rules, we both make some behaviors illegal and, by specifying exactly what is illegal, make everything else legal. No wonder everyone in Congress ends up a multimillionaire.

• United States Dietary Trends Since 1800: Lack of Association Between Saturated Fatty Acid Consumption and Non-communicable Diseases
  

  As observed from the food availability data, processed and ultra-processed foods dramatically increased over the past two centuries, especially sugar, white flour, white rice, vegetable oils, and ready-to-eat meals. These changes paralleled the rising incidence of NCDs, while animal fat consumption was inversely correlated.

  Non-Communicable Diseases are those which are not caused by a pathogen but by general ill-health including poor nutrition. It turns out that democratizing food by making it more affordable in turn relates to poorer general health, with those who have the money for raw ingredients like meats and vegetables living better than the general population wolfing down fast food.

• I’d send more migrants to Africa says Liz Truss, as the Tory leadership favourite promises to expand refugee policy and protect the UK’s borders
  

  Ms Truss says: ‘The Rwanda policy is the right policy. I’m determined to see it through to full implementation, as well as exploring other countries that we can work on similar partnerships with. It’s the right thing to do.

  ‘I’m also determined to make sure we have the right level of forces at our border. I’m going to increase the Border Force to make sure that we have the proper protection in place directly at the border.’

  Socialism caused our refugee problem. In order to fund the benefits, more taxpayers were needed as the population, already taxed to the hilt to provide those benefits, began having fewer children. When the newcomers arrived however, it turns out that they were both not suitable replacements for the original and more competent population, but also had been selected for their willingness to abandon home and family for free stuff abroad. Consequently the refugee experiment has failed but, thanks to international laws foolishly entered into in some ideological fervor generations ago, no one can get rid of them. Almost no one is willing to simply say the plain and obvious thought that we should end diversity entirely, since that rejects the egalitarian pretenses we adopted during the second world war. However, as the population stops seeing diversity as a benefit and recognizes it more as a threat, support for decreasing the number coming in rises, especially with the recognition that this would spur voluntary repatriation by many of those here.

• Menstrual changes after Covid vaccines may be far more common than previously known
  

  An analysis published Friday in the journal Science Advances found that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles said they bled more heavily than usual after vaccination. Meanwhile, 44% reported no change and around 14% reported a lighter period. Among nonmenstruating people — those post-menopause or who use certain long-term contraceptives, for example — the study suggests many experienced breakthrough or unexpected bleeding after their Covid shots.

  The survey included over 39,000 people 18 to 80 years old who were fully vaccinated and had not contracted Covid.

  This is user-reported data, so the weakest type, but taken in conjunction with previous research it seems likely that these vaccines have some issues.

• UK police told to back off “offensive” tweets and get back to real crimes
  

  New interim guidance by the UK’s College of Policing says police should focus on catching criminals rather than social media “offensive” speech. The guidance reminds police that they have to respect freedom of speech and avoid getting involved in lawful debate on social media simply because an individual has been offended.

  Last year, former police officer Harry Miller successfully challenged the recording of non-crime hate incidents after he got a visit from an officer from the Humberside Police over a tweet that was considered transphobic.

  The Court of Appeal ruled that the recording of non-crime hate incidents was “plainly an interference with free speech.”

  Bureaucracies make careerists because only those who make their bosses happy will get promoted and these bosses, being removed from the job itself by layers of management, cannot discern a job well done from a tick mark on a checklist. Consequently police officers compete for number of arrests and convictions more than having taken a sensible approach, and busting people for social media comments is easier than going after hardened criminals. Meritocracy and bureaucracy in this way select against competence, and without periodic slaps upside the head like delivered by this court, will naturally tend toward petty enforcement of niggling little rules rather than going up against real problems. This parallels how democratic leaders, dependent on votes, will avoid real problems at which one can fail and instead crusade “on the optics” against symbolic and emotional non-issues.

• Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems
  

  While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount.

  In the 20th century, not only were consumer electronics full of differentiated analog desirables, aerospace, the military, and industry were too. Now everything is a screen with a UI. You still need a lot of specialized hardware, but it’s vanished deep into the background. No wonder everyone who once had the itch to solder now gets ensnared by software.

  People go where opportunity seems to exist. Teaching everyone to “code” (badly) has resulted in lots of people re-inventing the wheel with web applications and mobile apps that do not necessarily show return on investment. Like all trends, this one will burn out, but leave us with a loss of ability. When the history of technology is again written, it will show that many real skills were lost because of the huge money chain that internet technology provided.

  MULTICS was a mixed success. It was designed to support hundreds of users on a machine only slightly more powerful than an Intel 80386-based PC, although it had much more I/O capacity. This is not quite as crazy as it sounds, since people knew how to write small, efficient programs in those days, a skill that has subsequently been lost. — Operating Systems Design and Function, Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Albert S. Woodhull

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