Amerika

~~~

A good temperature gauge for how things are going with humanity can be found in the behavior of people on the street. If they are driving erratically, both distracted and aggressive, or wandering around in a daze in grocery stores and post offices, something has gone wrong with The Narrative.

In this case, people are immediately freaking out about the stock market, which shows us the ongoing failure of the Carter II style Biden administration, but in the bigger picture, the fulfillment of the prophecies of Donald Trump.

DJT told us that Europe needed to re-arm, Big Tech was failing, that we needed to disconnect from failing China, and that a strong deterrent would be needed to prevent the rising Russia-China axis from seizing most of the world.

With the war in Ukraine, Europe is re-arming. They are dropping both their old gear and their new experimental toys into Ukraine through mad dashes and night flights during times when SovietRussian satellite cover is weak.

In the meantime, China seems determined to pursue an expansionist policy as the market senses for the first time just how fake the figures are. Speaking of figures: the markets are also sniffing around Big Tech and smelling corpse.

It has become clear that the nationalists got it right. The postwar order which extended itself after the Cold War ended now looks a lot like a bubble, and we are dealing again with the problems of the 1820s which we skipped over with the last few wars.

Russia-China in the meantime have revealed to us who they really are. Whether or not Putin reduces Ukraine to smoking rubble, he has lost the goodwill that came after the Cold War, and China has shown itself to be the new Genghis Khan.

When we say that history repeats, we mean that cycles repeat and the same patterns emerge as the same actors, responding to the same stresses, do the same sorts of things. Stalin and Khan are astride history once again.

In the US, it has become clear that the Biden Administration wants to transform the USA into Tammany Hall, where everyone is poor except those who work for the system. He will destroy the middle class if he can.

Like most Stalin-esque or Boss Tweed style figures, Joe Biden does not think far into the future. For him there is only today and maintaining his power, and if everything goes into the toilet, he is insulated and will laugh as the world burns.

Leftists, convinced of their absolute moral rightness by limiting their perception of morality to equality as a replacement for “evil” natural selection and qualitative assessments of character like we find in caste systems, favor tyranny or power for the sake of itself simply to exclude all competition. They want to win, and would rather rule over ashes than be little people in a thriving nation.

They want to make you dependent on a system that you voluntarily obey in order to take advantage of opportunities. This is the nature of soft totalitarianism. It does not compel you at gunpoint, but sticks you in an “equal” ghetto until you are willing to enslave yourself to a corporate or government job just to have a normal life.

Our current corporate environment has been created by the sheer burden of Leftist costs — high taxes for entitlements, affirmative action, legal protection for unions, burdensome and ineffective regulations — that ensures both that only large companies survive, and that they will be bloated and unaccountable because of high turnover and duplicative, conflicting roles.

We now have a bureaucracy as onerous as that in the former Soviet Union but have privatized it, and Biden wants this to continue. When you need to be part of the system to get ahead, no one will speak wrongthink for fear of losing their places.

Your corporate hell is in fact democracy as usual because once the forces of bureaucracy gain control, they take over everything and make it in their image. Bureaucracy arises when you get rid of social hierarchy and replace it with equality. Democracy, bureaucracy, utilitarianism, and bloat are one and the same.

People blame capitalism, forgetting that we live in a market socialist system and have not seen actual capitalism for a century. People blame corporations, but those are regulatory creations for the most part.

Most of us remain in denial because that is preferable to recognizing the need for inner change, meaning an alteration in the concept we have of life and what is good. When a system changes, we must alter our perceptions to stay centered.

No one wants to change their fundamental perception. This involves looking toward a society that is not based on bureaucracy and equality, but people quality as measured in the quality of the accomplishments they achieve in life itself and not some meritocracy.

In this world order, culture, not government or economics, would determine most of what was done. You would still have markets, but under a watchful eye. You would not have free stuff from government, or interact much with government at all.

Right now most live in a fantasy that our current system works and change is not on the horizon. But our governments are broke, people are not reproducing, ecocide is imminent, and social order has degenerated. Change is coming.

As a result, people adopt their little cope fantasies. The Republicans and Libertarians have their “parallel economy” and “just want to be left alone,” forgetting that this leaves them without a functional civilization.

Most of the Right has spent this week foaming on about $40bn sent to Ukraine to help them resist a Russian occupation. Apparently these average voters do not realize that we spend trillions yearly on anti-poverty and anti-racism programs.

Forty billion dollars might begin to tip the scales in this conflict, but it is a rounding error compared to what our governments spend on socialism. To be outraged by the Ukraine spending, and not the rest, is to be in total self-emasculating denial.

The Left wants to make everyone into the same thing to make them easy to manage. The Right, both public and remains of the alt-right, wants to set up a Leftist society based on race. Neither approach will work.

The sooner we escape our illusions and start focusing on self-sufficiency as nations, the stronger we will weather the coming storm.

Leftism seemed strong because it weaponized denialism. Instead of working to make a great civilization, it argued, make individuals “happy” and all will be well. This has ended in tears like all Utopian plans seem to.

Now we face a choice: do we keep repeating the past, or try something new, even if it is both ancient and futuristic? We hold the future in our hands but are paralyzed by fear.

~~~

• Passengers on German train overpower knife attacker
  

  A top law enforcement official said the 31-year-old attacker had been investigated for possible Islamic extremism while living in a refugee hostel in 2017, but that the motive for the train attack hadn’t been determined.

  Reul said the man had undergone a police check for possible Islamic extremism in 2017 after the refugee hostel where the man had been living reported that he had grown a beard, changed his behavior and isolated himself from his fellow residents.

  The double standard continues. If a White guy owns a copy of The Turner Diaries and shoots a home invader, it is White Supremacist Nazi Terrorism. But if the diversity, obviously motivated exclusively by hatred of Whites, decides to run over people with a truck or slash them with a machete, there must be a lengthy investigation of their motives that goes nowhere lest someone be accused of the one sin in our degenerate society, “racism,” itself a proxy for “classism” or noticing genetic-biological differences between racial, ethnic, or social class groups.

  In other news, with diversity you get the surveillance state because they have to keep constantly checking on jihad and other forms of covert race warfare in order to maintain the fa¸la;ade that diversity is functional in any form. Worse yet, it abolishes your culture, gets you a permanent Leftist Regime, and then erases your genetics. Diversity is suicide.

• Netflix to Employees: If You Don’t Like Our Content, You Can Quit
  

  “We let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” Netflix says in the updated part of its culture memo. The company added that it supports offering diversity in stories, “even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.”

  Someone finally notified Big Tech that their material geared toward baizuo Leftists both alienated their core audience and failed to appeal to the racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities to whom it endlessly panders. They want their own streaming services and hugboxes. Companies in diverse societies face the unhappy prospect of trying to sell services to endless niches who will in the end simply choose products from their own communities. After decades of American companies trying to make Hispanic food, most Hispanics still buy Mexican brands.

• Mysterious spike in N.B. deaths in 2021 not due to COVID, health minister says
  

  The figures show that beginning the week of July 17, 2021, and extending through the week of Nov. 27, New Brunswick experienced 636 more deaths than would normally be expected to occur in that period.

  Excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic are believed to be connected to the effects of the virus circulating in the community, although the exact links to individual deaths are not necessarily known.

  Experimental vaccines need to be treated carefully. In addition, the great COVID-19 fakeout freakout led to lots of other medical conditions not being treated. In the end, this era will be remembered as a time of the elderly and sick dying out because public-funded medical systems could not deal with their normal end-of-life costs. End of life is the most expensive medical event in most lives, and if government wants to fund all those new diversity cases, it will have to get Grandma and Grandpa Boomer to die quickly instead.

• Are all court-created rights now in peril?
  

  If a woman’s right to an abortion no longer exists, we are being forewarned, the right to birth control, gay rights, interracial marriage and same-sex marriage could be the next to fall to the Alito ax.

  America is slowly facing the ugly fact that the Constitution ceased to exist in its prior form when the Fourteenth Amendment was written. Instead of natural rights protected from government, we now have civil rights and human rights created by government, which means legalized anarchy and the removal of all culture. Since this has turned out horribly, the courts are slowly swinging the pendulum back, but it can be re-swung, until we remove the 14A. The 14A came about because diversity meant increasing complexity of government, which saw it as its duty to promote pacifism between the different groups as a means of managing society to avoid “problems” which if taken seriously would show how our underlying approach is suicidal.

• Is religion the new divide between Russia and the west?
  

  But the second, more important, point is that, under Kirill, the church hierarchy is taking up cudgels on Putin’s behalf and arguing that Russia is defending Orthodox Christianity against a godless, degenerate west.

  This is more than mere propaganda. For Kirill, it is a sacred cause. For Putin, it is a political project that, he calculates, will gain strength from the long Orthodox tradition of nurturing an obedient patriotic citizenry.

  It all comes down to race. The Russians will select a religion that makes them feel good about being Russians; the Pope, who does not actually speak for the West, shows more of what the rest of the world is thinking. In the meantime, in the West people are abandoning Christianity because dualism rejects the real world and in doing so, as Fred Nietzsche noted, eliminates the need for religion. The symbolic theology of the Jews, when hybridized with the idealism of the Greeks, translated into a belief system that confuses the symbolic with the literal. That produces a schizoid outlook despite the best attempts of legions of Western Christians to synthesize a functional hybrid.

• Johns Hopkins U. hires academic who wants to ‘destigmatize’ pedophilia
  

  Johns Hopkins University has hired a transgender academic who had said they (the academic uses plural pronouns) want to “destigmatize” pedophilia.

  Allyn Walker said last November they preferred to use the term “minor-attracted person,” or MAP, in place of “pedophile” so as to “lessen the stigma.”

  Academia, like most places with wealth, tends toward the liberal and ironic as a means of individuals distinguishing themselves through social signals for altruism and egalitarianism. That leads to one-upmanship and it gradually drives itself further to the Left, embracing all sorts of insanity starting with Communism, which became very trendy in the 1920s but was endorsed by all sorts of “learned” people since the 1800s. While many of us feel that this latest one goes too far, the bigger picture is that meritocracies reward distinctiveness instead of just being a good person and doing a solid job of what actually works. The best teachers and professors often publish nothing and make no headlines, which in a mass culture society dooms them to obscurity despite their excellence.

• Philip Morris has resolved big tobacco’s burning issue
  

  Tobacco companies, like oil majors, have a choice to make: 1. get ahead of the future where the product that sustained you for the past couple of hundred years becomes unsellable or 2. stick with the status quo, keep printing money and pay a fat dividend.

  Yet investors now demand option one. There is a business case for action; take the cautionary tale of Blockbuster passing on the chance to buy Netflix in 2000.

  In other words, fear motivates this change, which is why companies gambled on “woke” products at the risk of alienating their core audience.

• Russian operator to suspend electricity supply to Finland
  

  The Finnish grid operator said Russia provided only a small percentage of the country’s electricity and that it could be replaced from alternative sources.

  It makes sense to get Europe off of dependency on Eurasian power. This furthers the split between West and East that is the result of the decoupling from China, and will further push the West toward self-sufficiency and not merely living large on Eastern labor and consumer purchasing.

• Biden campaign adviser called white people ‘incredibly racist,’ new book says
  

  The quote was attributed to an unidentified advisor, who reportedly made the statement while discussing the pick of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2020.

  “You know, white women are incredibly racist. As are white men,” the adviser said, the book reportedly read. “None of it was safe. It was a risky thing to do. But it was the safest of choices we had.”

  Meritocracies form byzantine procedural structures based around maintaining compromise because waffling is safer than taking risks with decisive choices. This gives us insight into how diversity has ruined the American electorate, since the party that wins is the one that chooses the least offensive options to the most and therefore is able to maintain a plurality. Now in its second century of ruining American politics, diversity continues its inevitable fatal march to Tower of Babel style dissolution.

• US is recycling just 5% of its plastic waste, studies show
  

  According to the Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, the organization behind the report released on Wednesday, the recycling rate for post-consumer plastic was just 5% to 6% in 2021.

  The Department of Energy also released a research paper this week, which analyzed data from 2019, and came to the same number: only 5% of plastics are being recycled.

  Plastics stand out as egregiously wasteful in the world of recycling: paper is recycled at 66%, according to the American Forest Products Association, while the figure for aluminum cans is about 50.4%, according to the EPA.

  Until you have cultural will to actually clean up the mess, it becomes a question of economics, and the diversity voters would rather spend trillions on anti-poverty and anti-racism programs.

• Study finds same-race friends help teens connect to school
  

  “All friends were influential in fostering school belonging for these teens,” Hoffman said. “But we found that the kids who were matched on race, those friendships were more influential in their school belonging compared to cross-ethnic friendships.”

  In other words, diversity stands in the way of people bonding to their communities.

• In Texas, two lizards battle for territory
  

  When the lizards meet, the Texas spiny lizard exhibits aggressive behavior, chasing the terrified prairie lizard from its territory. The two species have similar preferences in vegetation, temperature and rainfall—presumably making the same regions and conditions attractive to them. But more than 200 population surveys conducted by Murray throughout Texas reveal that the prairie lizard avoids areas inhabited by the Texas spiny lizard.

  “We are witnessing a behavioral change, where the prairie lizards now stay away from habitats that they previously enjoyed,” Murray said. “Areas that could be suitable homes for prairie lizards usually don’t contain any if there are Texas spiny lizards present.”

  White flight, lizard version. The more pointlessly aggressive species wins, which eliminates the benefits achieved from stability.

~~~

• Vulnerable Democrats spend heavily on dark-horse Republicans they hope to beat in November
  

  Democratic candidates and groups are muscling into heated GOP primaries, showering controversial or hardline Republicans with free air time and other benefits. The strategy has surfaced largely in races that are rated highly competitive by political prognosticators.

  If you want to win an election, find a crazy from the other side and give them a big boost so that you do not face a viable alternative. Does anyone really think that democracy is working?

• Seeing more species at the coast improves wellbeing: Yet another benefit of biodiversity
  

  Studies of land-based environments such as meadows, woodlands, and city parks have shown that people often find places that contain lots of different types of plant and animal life to be more visually pleasing and interesting, as well as more likely to relieve stress.

  “People found structures that had more species to be more appealing, interesting, and calming to look at. This suggests that high numbers of species provide a range of human benefits, despite occasional negative feelings towards species. This occurred because structures were perceived to be more “natural” and have greater “biodiversity” when they were home to a wide variety of sea life: strongly influencing how we see natural spaces.

  Parks and zoos will not cut it. People need nature. It is smarter than we are, and this irritates people so much that they become Leftists.

• Four shades of deglobalization
  

  In very recent times, an earthquake in Japan, a blackout in Texas, the grounding of a container ship in the Suez Canal, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine have disrupted important supply chains, restricting the flow of essential goods such as microchips, gas, and food, and thus calling into question globalization as we have known it for the past 40 years—starting, that is, with the reforms of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and China’s transition to a market economy.

  It turns out that self-sufficiency works. Now the only things standing in the way are high taxes to fund diversity, legal protection for unions, affirmative action, and business-killing regulations.

• Almost all the world’s population breathes harmful air, says WHO
  

  Ninety-nine per cent of people breathed in air that sometimes or always exceeded harmful levels, the health body said on Monday as it highlighted the urgent need to curb pollution caused mainly by burning fossil fuels.

  Modernity — the “Roman Holiday” of the prole as fellow Amerika writer J.P. Wilkinson calls it — is coming to an end as we see the cost of rampant individualism. It eats society from within and in the process, chooses short-term rewards over long-term goodness, producing a toxic and destructive environment.

• The secret to better coffee? The birds and the bees
  

  The combined positive effects of birds and bees on fruit set, fruit weight, and fruit uniformity — key factors in quality and price — were greater than their individual effects, the study shows. Without birds and bees, the average yield declined nearly 25%, valued at roughly $1,066 per hectare.

  Linear, categorical thinking that reflects the perspective of the individual turns out to work OK for manufacturing and laboratories but terrible in more complex environments, where ecosystems — flexible, mutual systems based on natural selection and niche-seeking — consistently enhance quantity and quality of output.

• Inflation barreled ahead at 8.3% in April from a year ago, remaining near 40-year highs
  

  The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of prices for goods and services, increased 8.3% from a year ago, higher than the Dow Jones estimate for an 8.1% gain. That represented a slight ease from March’s peak but was still close to the highest level since the summer of 1982.

  The price gains also meant that workers continued to lose ground. Real wages adjusted for inflation decreased 0.1% on the month despite a nominal increase of 0.3% in average hourly earnings. Over the past year, real earnings have dropped 2.6% even though average hourly earnings are up 5.5%.

  Democrats like demand-based economics, meaning that they want to make currency easily available for speculation, where Republicans tend to emphasize production. With all production offshore, we have nothing left but shuffling paper, which devalues the currency and creates “stagflation.”

• Large study in Botswana finds daily micronutrient supplementation during pregnancy reduces complications at birth
  

  A six-year study of nearly 100,000 women in Botswana has provided new evidence that relatively inexpensive daily diet supplementation of iron, folic acid and vitamin supplementation in pregnancy can reduce complications at birth. Researchers found that iron and folic acid supplementation (IFAS), as well as iron and folic acid plus essential vitamins and trace minerals (multiple micronutrient supplementation, or MMS), are associated with significantly lower rates of babies born at low birthweight and other complications at birth, compared to iron or folic acid alone. For example, the rate of low-birthweight birth was under 10.5 percent for women supplementing their diets with multiple micronutrients, the lowest rate of any comparison group.

  Nutrition matters, if you want a healthy population. Modernity has done nothing but reduce nutrition in order to boost calories, making food more available and therefore, swelling the world population.

• Genetic study confirms sarin nerve gas as cause of Gulf War illness
  

  Dr. Haley’s research group not only discovered that veterans with exposure to sarin were more likely to develop GWI, but also found that the risk was modulated by a gene that normally allows some people’s bodies to better break down the nerve gas. Gulf War veterans with a weak variant of the gene who were exposed to sarin were more likely to develop symptoms of GWI than other exposed veterans who had the strong form of the gene.

  “Quite simply, our findings prove that Gulf War illness was caused by sarin, which was released when we bombed Iraqi chemical weapons storage and production facilities,” said Dr. Haley, a medical epidemiologist who has been investigating GWI for 28 years. “There are still more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans who are not getting help for this illness and our hope is that these findings will accelerate the search for better treatment.”

  So much for the “there were no WMD” trope.

• The REAL story behind Anthony Albanese’s name – and the incredible message it will send to the world about Australia if he becomes PM
  

  ‘Members of the Italian community are saying to me that they are going to vote Labor for the first time in their life because they want an Australia that reflects modern Australia,’ Mr Albanese said.

  ‘I have a non-Anglo-Celtic name, and so does our Senate leader as well. I think it send a message out there hopefully to multicultural Australia that you can achieve anything in this country.’

  Italians confirmed as “diversity.” Deportations to follow.

• Inhaled CO₂ concentration while wearing face masks: a pilot study using capnography
  

  The proportion of the sample showing a CO2 concentration higher than the 5000 ppm acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers was 40.2% while wearing surgical masks, 99.0% while wearing FFP2 respirators.

  Maybe the best approach to strange new flus is to build up immune systems and give everyone a couple weeks off to recover.

• A shrinking fraction of the world’s major crops goes to feed the hungry, with more used for nonfood purposes
  

  Rising competition for many of the world’s important crops is sending increasing amounts toward uses other than directly feeding people. These competing uses include making biofuels; converting crops into processing ingredients, such as livestock meal, hydrogenated oils and starches; and selling them on global markets to countries that can afford to pay for them.

  If you produce everything that your country needs, you do not need to worry about these problems. When you are dependent on globalism for selling high-value crops, those displace the ones that your people need to survive.

• Who is Amit Jain? Social Media ‘Identifies’ Clerk Behind Supreme Court Abortion Law Leak
  

  As a Yale student, Jain blasted Yale for supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.

  Jain was quoted in a 2017 Politico piece by Josh Gerstein.

  Today, Gerstein published the draft SCOTUS opinion on Roe.

  If true, it has ominous implications for how the diversity will run a Supreme Court.

~~~

~~~

• Elon Musk puts $44bn Twitter deal ‘on hold’
  

  The entrepreneur announced the move in a Twitter message on Friday, sharing a link to a Reuters news story this month that suggested the number of fake accounts on the site represented less than 5 per cent of its 229mn users.

  Twitter now trades at a 33 per cent discount to the $54.20 per share price Musk agreed to pay in mid-April, signalling that investors do not believe a deal will happen anywhere near that price and possibly not at all.

  Musk has staged a classic dealmaking move. He forced Twitter into a defensive position, revealing the weakness of the company. Now he is forcing attention to how incorrect the statistics in not just Twitter but Big Tech generally are, causing a drop in stock prices as the market realizes it may be watching a bubble pop. Either way, he can now buy Twitter at a lower price, start charging for the service, and get it off the ad model, at which point it can have something closer to open speech.

  In the meantime, it looks like the markets are reevaluating Big Tech as an investment:

  Revenue multiplies are also quickly falling out of favour as investors try to assess the sustainability of companies that were built for growth but are encountering financial shock and potential economic downturn. Both investors and tech executives are starting to turn away from two favourite profit measures that took hold among tech investors as the market boomed — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation; and net earnings that exclude stock compensation costs.

  An industry built around the model of growing big and then finding a way to claim profitability will fool people in the short term, but in the long term their model is built on advertising to people with nothing better to do, making them the new daytime television.

• Baby drowned in three inches of bathwater when her lawyer mother fainted a day after taking AstraZeneca Covid vaccine
  

  Mrs Atkinson, who is a senior lawyer for the AA, said it was unusual for her to faint and it had only happened twice to her prior to Ellie’s death, both times in her late teens.

  She said she experienced another black-out while visiting Ellie’s grave the day after receiving her second Oxford-Astrazeneca jab in June 2021.

  Spike proteins might kill you, so let us inject you with weird mRNA science to cause your body to generate lots of spike proteins and see what happens.

• Australia says Chinese spy ship has been hugging west coast
  

  He said it was without precedent for a Chinese warship to venture so far south and that authorities were monitoring the ship closely with planes and surveillance techniques. He said he wanted to be open and honest with Australians about the situation.

  “I think it is an aggressive act, and I think particularly because it has come so far south,” Dutton said.

  A lesson from history: strong empires seize what they want, but generally only do so to acquire resources or travel routes. Weak empires attempt to take over those around them out of fear of their own inability to manage threats.

• Boris Johnson wants to cut up to 91,000 civil service jobs
  

  Mr Case, in the letter to civil servants on Thursday night, acknowledged the job cuts would be “challenging” and that civil service staffing had grown “substantially” since 2016, partly because of the pandemic.

  “We must consider how we can streamline our workforce and equip ourselves with the skills we need to be an even more effective, lean and innovative service that continues to deliver for the people we serve,” he wrote.

  The government bloat has finally been noticed since the threat of war in Europe hovers on the horizon, requiring nations to both direct more resources to the military and remove the massive inefficiency of a system of people who face no consequences for doing their jobs badly, only for the optics of failure. That applies to most corporations now as well since personnel are insulated by layers of management. Some have noticed bloat via individualism in the civil services:

  He added: ‘Well, guess what – the popular working in the office days were Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

  ‘I do worry that the desire to take off Monday and Friday is an indication that people think that the working week is shorter than the reality is.

  ‘One can’t help but be suspicious about the desire to work from home on Mondays and Fridays.’

  Hint to Americans: with our affirmative action policies, this condition is even worse here.

• Judge orders Steele dossier firm Fusion GPS to turn over 22 emails to John Durham
  

  But the emails, which largely consist of internal communications between Fusion employees, aren’t protected from disclosure because they “appear not to have been written in anticipation of litigation but rather as part of ordinary media-relations work,” Cooper said.

  “It is clear that Fusion employees also interacted with the press as part of an affirmative media relations effort by the Clinton Campaign,” he wrote.

  One of Hillary’s favorite hidey-holes just went away. You cannot protect materials unrelated to litigation from discovery even if attorney-client privilege exists.

• Congress warned U.S. is in the dark about foreign investment, vulnerable to Chinese takeovers
  

  “As the former head of CFIUS at the Commerce Department, yes, we were completely in the dark, our intelligence community didn’t have adequate information, and I was frequently in the office until three in the morning using any open source information I could to get to the ultimate beneficial owner,” Ms. Nikakhtar told the Senate Intelligence Committee at a hearing this week.

  Ms. Nikakhtar, now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, also said in written testimony that American data and technology transfer enabled China to race ahead in artificial intelligence and China would use American production against the U.S.

  “We have had decades of unregulated supply chain and technology transfer to the [People’s Republic of China] that has systematically eroded our own supply chains and rendered us dangerously dependent on the adversary,” she wrote. “This is not a good national security strategy. We need a new strategy.”

  Finally someone mentions the obvious, but should look at the even bigger picture: China inflated its own value so that it could buy up much of the West, allowing it to trade its lower-value assets for our higher-value ones without actually having the money to do so. They will use these assets to extract value from us like a vampire while applying it toward their next iteration of the strategy, which is to seize more valuable areas in order to bolster their failing economy.

• A Tax-Reform Future for States?
  

  Twenty-nine states enacted significant tax cuts in 2021, and 33 have passed or are considering major tax changes in 2022. Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Utah have already reduced individual income taxes. While the details of the reforms vary, they have typically led to a flattening of the income-tax structure. Some of the changes, like those in Iowa and Kentucky, are part of a long-term plan aimed at reducing or possibly eliminating the state income tax.

  Having seen what it does, and who it hires, Americans have tired of government and want to reduce the tax load and starve the beast, starting at the state level.

• Texas has declared open season on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with censorship law
  

  Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”

  The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users’ online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.

  The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans — and decades of established precedent.

  Since the 1950s, the Left has bulldozed ahead by using civil rights courts to re-write the law. Now they are being challenged by those who want to expand the law to protect Whites, conservatives, and normal people from the wokemob. In the end, this will backfire because even with new rights, normalcy will still be targeted by the herd. We need to repeal civil rights entirely and go back to natural rights. We do not want a place on Big Tech, we want to destroy it and make our own to replace it.

• Multiple people shot at Buffalo supermarket in the US
  

  A suspect was in custody after multiple people were shot Saturday afternoon at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in the United States, police said.

  The supermarket is in a predominately Black neighborhood and the surrounding area is primarily residential.

  Alleged manifesto:

  Alleged video:

  In the long term, nothing will substitute for our goal: take control of our political systems, repatriate diversity, purge the ruined, and get out of the democracy and equality game. St Breivik shot White Leftists, getting to the core of the issue, but killing random minorities only punishes other victims of diversity.

• Ukraine, the UN and history’s greatest broken promise
  

  The law faculty of the University of Lviv was the alma mater of Raphael Lemkin who invented the word genocide to describe the attempt to exterminate “in whole or in part” a national, religious or racial group. Aghast at the Nazi Holocaust Lemkin coined the term in 1944 and, four years later, succeeded in having the UN define genocide as a crime under international law.

  Once they permitted White genocide in Europe and America, no one cared about the UN or international law anymore.

• Meet the forever renters: 1 in 3 is priced out of buying a home
  

  Soaring costs for homes and increasingly severe debt burdens mean that one out of every three renters is getting completely priced out of the homebuying market, according to a new survey by Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm.

  Leftist high tax regimes drive up the price of housing and make it too expensive for much of the more pleasant properties to be rented, resulting in lots of slumlord activity and driving those who are not enriching themselves in the corporate-government fake economy out of the desired areas. This creates a little goodthinker hugbox where people who have not encountered the real world decide how things “should” be in order to look good to their social group and keep feeling pleasant judgments about themselves.

• Study suggests why most smokers don’t get lung cancer
  

  Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online today in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations.

  Smoking became another excuse for all of the failings of our healthcare, much like White Supremacy is blamed for the failure of diversity and capitalism is blamed for the endemic poverty of the low-IQ.

~~~

• The World Is Piling on Debt as It Battles Inflation
  

  Spooked by protests that have broken out recently from Bangkok to Sicily, many governments have adopted subsidies or tax breaks to shield households and businesses from the soaring prices.

  Yet the handouts are boosting already high government debt just as borrowing costs are rising. For some countries, the increase may prove too much to afford, raising the specter of political unrest.

  Subsidies “might support consumer confidence in the short term, but they also prevent healthy adjustments in the economy,” deterring companies and consumers from adjusting to economic shifts, said Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt.

  The debt bomb awaits.

• Sleeping with even a little bit of light isn’t good for your health, study shows
  

  Unlike those who spent both nights in the dark, the group exposed to the light had elevated heart rates throughout the night. They also had increased insulin resistance in the morning, meaning they had more trouble getting their blood sugar into a normal range.

  An explosion of health problems awaits modernity as we slowly discover that we have been doing much of life quite wrongly.

• Germany: Over 1 in 4 people have ‘migrant background’
  

  The latest numbers, published by Germany’s statistics agency Destatis on Tuesday, show that “people with migrant background” make up 27.2% of Germany’s population.

  With some 82 million people living in the EU country, officials estimate that about 22.3 million are foreign-born or people with foreign roots — the highest number since the survey was first conducted in 2005.

  White people are waking up to the fact that this is ethnic replacement. First they outbreed enough of you, then meld the rest into the new genome with trace admixture, and then nothing remains of the original. Diversity is genocide. It was always intended this way to erase your culture, break your spirit, and make you into low-IQ drones who are easy to rule.

• Tensions rise over new mobile home regulations in Tate County
  

  The law limits where all manufactured homes known as trailers or mobile homes can be placed in unincorporated parts of the county. It’s impacting rural communities like Strayhorn.

  Gray Ouzts, who works for the consulting firm that helped draft the plan, said any existing manufactured homes will be grandfathered in until they are destroyed or need to be replaced.

  Ouzts said brick and mortar style homes have more property value which means revenue for essential services like public safety, roads, and schools.

  This means more money to take care of the growing diversity, especially illegal aliens, which pays almost nothing.

• Transgender psychologist suggests ‘peer pressure’ causing teens to transition
  

  “For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant,” Anderson told the Times.

  “I think it’s gone too far. Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’ To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality. Teenagers influence each other.”

  Peer pressure (and “optics”) created democracy and society has kept going down that path, always expanding the scope, so that now we have reached present insanity levels.

• Supreme Court won’t review New York-led SALT deduction cap challenge
  

  New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Connecticut had sued the federal government in 2018 over the deduction cap, which was part of the tax reform law enacted by the 45th president in 2017.

  The cap blocks taxpayers from deducting more than $10,000 per year in their state and local taxes when itemizing federal deductions.

  These deductions allow states and local governments to pass on costs to the federal tax load, which causes a situation where low-tax red states subsidize high-tax blue ones.

• Irish Travellers say racism is causing a suicide crisis
  

  Racism and discrimination are being blamed for high suicide rates amongst Irish Travellers.

  They suffer some of the worst discrimination and poverty of any ethnic group in Europe, according to EU research.

  Suicide accounts for more than one in 10 deaths in the community.

  These people belong somewhere else. Living among us is not good for them, so they and their ilk need to return to their Afroasiatic homelands in North Africa.

• Texas opens probe into whether state lawyers’ group aiding illegal immigration
  

  Paxton said evidence he received from Rep. Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, and other complainants gave him probable cause to open the investigation into the Texas Bar Foundation.

  “Unfortunately, at the very time that our state is facing an unprecedented border crisis and our brave men and women are serving Texas in Operation Lone Star, it appears that the liberal State Bar’s handpicked cronies are misusing charitable funds to make the situation even worse,” Paxton said Friday.

  Immigration lawyers make a lot of money. If you went through law school and found everything else too hard, going before administrative courts and arguing for disability or immigration status fills in the gap with a nice paycheck. The parasites eat the corpse.

• Employees everywhere are organizing. Here’s why it’s happening now
  

  Between October 2021 and March of this year, union representation petitions filed at the NLRB increased 57% from the same period a year ago, according to recent data from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board. Unfair labor practice charges increased 14% during the same period.

  When Leftists are in power, unions rise because this is how Leftists control industry. Unions, insurance, and entitlements form the basis of the socialist system that Leftists have implemented within capitalist societies. These collective reward principles encourage people to hook into the system, then feed off of it, as a means of controlling them and therefore, insulating leadership against the consequences of its failure at the important decisions. It battles over the irrelevant, distracting, and compensatory instead because this keeps the crowd happy since its bread and butter is guaranteed by government regardless of what is destroyed or who dies.

  In the meantime, even state media admits that economic problems are insoluble owing to the globalism system:

  • The stock market has been creating its own reality for years.
  • Energy prices are set by OPEC, which isn’t increasing oil production to anybody’s liking quite yet.
  • The supply chain problems emanate from China, which has its own economic troubles.
  • The interest rate hike announced Wednesday by the Federal Reserve, which operates independently from the White House, will make it harder for home and car buyers and businesses to get access to cheap money.

  In other words, because we are not self-sufficient and therefore ceded control to other nations, we have no control over what is making our economy ailing. All of these issues relate back to unions, who drove labor offshore by raising costs above market value and imposing devastating shutdowns.

• Evidence for Aerosol Transfer of SARS-CoV2-specific Humoral Immunity
  

  The data we show provides evidence for a new mechanism by which herd immunity may be manifested, the aerosol transfer of antibodies between immune and non-immune hosts.

  When your neighbors get this disease and survive it, they shed antibodies through the air that also protect you. In other words: masks and locksdowns were a mistake.

• Kids’ book ‘Our Skin’ in NYC schools blames racism on white people
  

  An “inflammatory” children’s book being distributed to New York City schools teaches kids as young as 2 that the concept of race was created by white people who claimed they were “better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else.”

  The book “Our Skin” was penned by Harlem activist Megan Madison and Brooklynite and library worker Jessica Ralli, and published last year. It begins with a simple discussion of skin tones — then launches into a screed that blames the idea of race on white people along with an illustration of scary-looking human skulls encased in glass and sitting on shelves.

  The Left blames Whites and the Right blames Blacks and Jews, but the reality is that diversity — of any form: racial, ethnic, religious, cultural — divides society and replaces culture with bureaucracy, leading to ongoing covert race warfare disguised as crime and eventually, outright racial conflict leading to hybridization, at which point a talentless and low-IQ grey race appears and the society is dead to history.

• Northern Ireland: Sinn Fein secures historic election win
  

  Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party that aspires to remove Northern Ireland from British rule to create a united Ireland, has on won the largest number of seats in the Belfast legislature, official results showed on Saturday.

  The lower-IQ primitive Semitic/Neolithic people of Ireland want to absorb the more Nordicized Scots-Irish in order to abscond with their wealth. The crisis of Northern Ireland has always been another diversity conflict like Yugoslavia, Tigray, Rwanda, and Detroit.

~~~

~~~

• How to Avoid PFAS
  

  The chemicals—officially known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are also used in a host of other products, from nonstick pans to water-resistant clothing.

  Modern miracles result from using laboratory tests to assess chemicals and procedures for certain single, linear, categorical effects, for example discovering that boiling water kills germs. They do not look beyond these results, which serves democracy and commerce by allowing them to slap products out into the world without considering long-term consequences.

  We know that random industrial chemicals are accumulating in pregnant women:

  Researchers measured 103 chemicals, mostly from pesticides, plastics, and replacement chemicals for BPA and phthalates, using a new method that captured dozens of chemicals or chemical traces from a single urine sample.

  More than 80 percent of the chemicals were found in at least one of the women in the study, and more than a third of the chemicals were found in a majority of the participants. The study also found that some of these chemicals were present in higher amounts than seen in earlier studies.

  Over time, this will likely lead to increased mutations.

• Supreme Court draft decision leaked to energize Democrats’ base, former Clinton adviser says
  

  “The leak of the … potential Supreme Court decision was, I think, clearly designed to affect both the court, and I think perhaps the midterms,” Harris Poll chairman and Stagwell CEO Mark Penn told Fox News. “I think that Democrats were rather lackluster going into these midterms, had kind of a feeling of growing defeat coming.”

  “This is going to provide an ability for Democrats to energize their base somewhat more than was going to happen without this,” Penn added. “I think that that breathed new life into Democratic hopes for those midterm elections.”

  “Bottom line is this leak probably energized Democrats more than Republicans,” he said. “It probably will energize the entire electorate.”

  As reported here.

• Half machine, half artist – meet DALL-E 2
  

  DALL-E 2 (a mishmash of WALL-E and Dali) builds on the success of its predecessor DALL-E, which OpenAI unveiled in early 2021, and improves the quality and resolution of the output images thanks to advanced deep learning techniques.

  Generating realistic images isn’t new to AI. What sets DALL-E and DALL-E 2 apart is they can generate them from natural language prompts of varying complexity.

  Most modern jobs are clerkships. That is, you file the right paperwork to get the system in motion. As a result, almost all of them can be easily replaced with machines, since bureaucratic jobs like clerkships are ultimately mechanical in nature. What happens then? The Left wants Communism, the mainstream Right has no idea, and the Ult-Right would favor something like feudalism. Most likely, a few humans will get off Earth and explore the stars while the rest of the species consumes itself in pointless resource wars.

• On World War II anniversary, Ukraine President Zelensky says evil has returned
  

  “The evil has returned. Again!” Zelensky said. “In a different form, under different slogans, but for the same purpose.”

  Moscow calls its actions since Feb. 24 a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it what it calls “Nazis” and anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression.

  The comedy is rich: both sides calling each other “Nazis” because that is essentially the only evil that democracy recognizes, namely a lack of democracy. An egalitarian system rejects goal and intention and replaces them with obedience to method. For this reason, anyone with the “wrong” methods is assumed to be a Satan-figure trying to harm people. Even if the Nazis were a bit off in the head, they won the war ultimately by proving that democracy is an out-of-control chain reaction that is consuming itself.

• Toronto man charged with making child pornography ran Reddit porn community
  

  The Toronto Police Service Child Exploitation Team executed a search warrant on April 20, after which Burdett was charged with child luring, making child pornography, possessing child pornography, accessing child pornography and making available child pornography, according to the release.

  A Reddit community with more than 5,000 members started in 2017 by the user f_stop_Fitzgerald was taken down Thursday evening soon after Toronto police announced Burdett’s arrest.

  Social media rewards content creators who are distinguished by their ability to produce drama not sanity. Consequently, many of them have mental health issues, especially on Reddit, which is social media for low self-esteem people despite having the best software. Since these content creators are the most popular users, they take over these sites, and run out the sane, leaving behind an increasingly deep cesspool of dysfunction, perversity, and dubious mental health.

  A quick reminder: eight percentage of internet users make up most of the interactions, and only about two-thirds of Americans use social media regularly, most in a casual role. Our policy is being dictated through social media by what is popular to less than a tenth of the population.

• Former Freelance Reporter Arrested on Charges of Vandalizing Temples and Setting Fire at Mosque
  

  Mike Bivins, 34, is charged with one count of arson in the first degree and three counts of criminal mischief in the first degree, related to what police describe as a weeklong string of vandalizing houses of worship. He’s accused of breaking a window at Congregation Shir Tikvah in Northeast Portland on April 30, throwing a rock through a window and scrawling anti-Semitic graffiti at Congregation Beth Israel in Northwest Portland on May 2 and 4, and setting fire to the Muslim Community Center of Portland on May 3.

  Until recently, Bivins worked in nursing resource management at Oregon Health & Science University and was a freelance reporter for news outlets, including Willamette Week and Eugene Weekly, covering the polarization and violence in city streets following the election of President Donald Trump. He reported primarily on clashes between anti-fascists and their adversaries, such as the Proud Boys. Bivins sold photos and videos of street conflict to national and local outlets.

  Anti-fascists fan the flames of diversity conflict with false flag “hate crimes.”

• Mickey Gilley, who helped inspire ‘Urban Cowboy,’ dies at 86
  

  Gilley — cousin of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis — opened Gilley’s, “the world’s largest honky tonk,” in Pasadena, Texas, in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, he was a successful club owner and had enjoyed his first commercial success with “Room Full of Roses.” He began turning out country hits regularly, including “Window Up Above,” “She’s Pulling Me Back Again” and the honky-tonk anthem “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”

  Meanwhile, the giant nightspot’s attractions, including its famed mechanical bull, led to the 1980 film “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta and Debra Winger and regarded by many as a countrified version of Travolta’s 1977 disco smash, “Saturday Night Fever.” The film inspired by Gilley’s club was based on an Esquire article by Aaron Latham about the relationship between two regulars at the club.

  Back in the 1980s, stickers for Gilley’s were a feature of about every third motorcar in the region. Country music exploded as White America tried to find an identity in the featureless world created by the civil rights revolution.

• How mindfulness can make you a darker person
  

  In general, mindfulness seems to calm uncomfortable feelings, he says, which is incredibly useful if you feel overwhelmed by pressure at work. But many negative emotions can serve a useful purpose, particularly when it comes to moral decision making. Guilt, for example, can motivate us to apologise when we have hurt someone else, or to take reparative action that might undo some of the damage we’ve done. If mindful meditation leads us to ignore that emotion, it could therefore prevent us from righting our wrongs, suspected Hafenbrack.

  Paying attention to reality gets you out of the constant guilt cycle. Nothing about mindfulness suggests writing off guilt, but it does cause people to reach for the good instead of wallowing in the usual human karmic drama of being hurt and therefore entitled and in turn hurting others.

• Inside the space hotel scheduled to open in 2025
  

  Originally premiered by Californian company the Gateway Foundation — and then called the Von Braun Station — this futuristic concept consists of several modules connected by elevator shafts that make up a rotating wheel orbiting the Earth.

  But there’s still a pretty unbelievable price point attached to any space trip, which makes it hard for many of us to actually envisage spending our annual leave out of this world.

  Tim Alatorre, Orbital Assembly’s chief operating officer, thinks this barrier will lift as space tourism takes off.

  The wealthy kick open doors to good things that trickle down to the rest of us. Features common only on high-performance cars in the 1960s are common now, and the computers once accessible only to well-funded research labs are now available for pocket change. Hatred of the wealthy is hatred of the growing shoots of the plant that is humanity.

• Americans flocked to these 10 cities last year — and none are in New York or California
  

  Houston, Las Vegas and Phoenix topped this year’s edition of truck rental company Penske’s annual Top Moving Destinations report, which uses data from its one-way consumer truck rental reservations to compile a list of the country’s 10 most popular cities for movers. More generally speaking, the Sun Belt led the way, with Dallas, Austin and San Antonio also ranking highly.

  High-tax blue states have squeezed the cash cow too hard.

• Quadruple-stranded DNA seen in healthy human cells for the first time
  

  “We know exactly what DNA does,” says Di Antonio, “but how does the cell know where to express genes and how much protein to make?” The researchers speculate that the quadruplex structure forms to hold the molecule open and facilitate the reading of the genetic code and thus the production of proteins. It may also influence the amount of each protein that is made.

  Usually, this function is performed by epigenetic markers – chemical tags on DNA that increase or decrease the activity of genes – and it seems that the quadruplex form of DNA has a similar role. “There is a sort of crosstalk between the formation of quadruplex DNA and epigenetic markers,” says Di Antonio. “The quadruplex form is an epigenetic mark in its own right.”

  The Left used epigenetics to argue that genetics do not matter. In this view, we see epigenetics as a Lamarckian reflection of health and will regulating what is already present in the genetics, therefore swings the argument back toward nature and farther from nurture. In other words, you cannot amplify what is not already there. This is consistent with IQ research, which shows you can lower IQ through disease or abuse but not raise it.

• Ncuti Gatwa: BBC names actor as next Doctor Who star
  

  The 29-year-old will become the 14th Time Lord on the popular science fiction show, and the first person of colour to play the lead role.

  They will destroy every icon of your society in their quest for equality. The Doctor from Doctor Who expressed primal masculinity: eschewing conflict, he simply fixed problems by outfoxing his generally primitive and violent adversaries. This must be replaced in order to humiliate and lower the native population.

~~~

• Anti-Capitalist Teens Are Sharing Shoplifting Tips on TikTok
  

  The “borrowing” community is made up of anonymous accounts, primarily run by teens with voice changer effects, who bond over their love of five-finger discounts, share hauls and how-to videos.

  Sixteen-year-old Destiny, who’s behind the 25,000-follower strong @borrowingguid3, first heard of capitalism around the age of 13, and remembers thinking about how unfair it is that big corporations control trade instead of local businesses. Back then, the teenager didn’t recognise this as Socialism 101, but now knows that she dislikes capitalism and believes she can do something about it – even if shoplifting is illegal.

  Anti-capitalist = pro-theft. When they tell you who they are, believe them.

• Apple and Google hit back at ACCC’s proposal for major antitrust reforms
  

  In its discussion paper that was published in February, the country’s competition watchdog put forward a slew of legislative measures that took aim at big tech issues, including anti-competitive conduct, bargaining imbalances, insufficient consumer and business user protections, and more.

  Google controls 90% of the search market in the USA, forces technical changes on sites, censors content, and uses its algorithm to boost partners. A clearer definition of an abusive monopoly would be harder to find.

• Nonprofit Gets No-Bid U.S. Contract after Hiring Biden Official, $17 Mil in Unused Hotels for Migrants
  

  A nonprofit that hired a Biden administration official received a huge no-bid government contract that wasted $17 million on unused hotel rooms for illegal immigrants, a federal audit reveals. The politically connected group, which had no experience providing the services covered by the sole source federal contract, also failed to meet COVID-19 health protocols required by the government when the deal was signed. The highly questionable arrangement was executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Homeland Security agency responsible for housing migrant families in detention.

  Political machines work by granting favors. If you do favors for the machine, you get gifted with some useless contract or other access to the big money. The machine then uses those favors to grow like a cancer, mafia, gang, cult, autoimmune disease, or clique.

• German populism takes a blow
  

  The humiliation was more significant for the AfD, the upstart right-wing populist party that experienced an electoral surge following its birth nine years ago, and who until Sunday had been represented in all of Germany’s 17 parliaments, and had never failed to win re-election to any of them.

  The Ukraine war has also exacerbated the small parties’ problems, partly because both the AfD and the Left Party have been seen as Russia-friendly.

  “Both parties have traditionally seen the Russian position as more justified than the NATO or US position,” said Wolfgang Seibel, chair of politics and public administration at the University of Konstanz. “It could also be the ‘rally around the flag’ effect could be playing a role — that in crisis situations, where the issue is war and peace in Europe, the parties that ‘represent the state,’ so to speak, are strengthened at the expense of those at the margins of the political spectrum.”

  The Right made themselves Useful Idiots for Russia and this scares people when Russia is doing evidently bad things. We need better quality Right-wingers, both in the mainstream and underground. Dramaocracy may not be the best political system, but it is what we have now, and it makes sense to use it well to achieve the type of society we want to see.

• To decolonize the curriculum, UK university swaps Jane Austen for Toni Morrison
  

  Topics to be covered in the revised special authors module include “racial difference and critical race theory, gender and sexuality” as well as “black postmodernism, Gothic, as well as the aesthetics of the contemporary US and African-American novel.”

  The Leftist takeover of academia has been driven by the democratization of the franchise. When academia was the purview of upper-middle-class, 120+ IQ kids with good moral character — the “bad eggs” having been mostly filtered out at a lower level — it could tackle Western literature. Now you get glorified cartoons and movie themes prtending to be significant.

• Distantly related mushrooms gained the ability to make toxin via horizontal gene transfer
  

  Scientists have known for some time that the three mushrooms—the deadly dapperling, the destroying angel and the funeral bell—are not only toxic, but also have an identical toxin. Some scientists assumed they must have a common ancestor, but the researchers in this new effort suspected something else was afoot because the three species are so distantly related.

  To find out which part of their genome was responsible for making the toxins, the researchers sequenced all of their samples. They found two genes that were responsible for creating the toxins and were identical in all three species. A closer look at the genes showed that they were, indeed, distantly related, but it also showed that the genes responsible for producing the toxins were not passed down from a common ancestor. That left just one other possibility—sometime in their past, all three had received a horizontal gene transfer from another, possibly extinct, mushroom.

  Like markets, natural selection works by spreading ideas. Those which prevail are borrowed by nearby competitors first, and gradually distribute to the group as a whole, at which point they become the norm and create a “plateau” of stability, which prevails until something new challenges it. For example, predators gain immunity to toxins, and then a new Cold War between prey and predator kicks off.

• Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition software to most US companies
  

  A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to its controversial business model.

  Privacy died some time ago because diversity has made society so unstable that constant surveillance is required. For example, businesses surveil employees in order to try to enforce productivity:

  A study by the European Commission found that global demand for employee-spying software more than doubled between April 2019 and April 2020. Within weeks of lockdowns starting in March 2020, search queries for monitoring tools rose more than 18-fold. Surveillance-software makers reported huge increases in sales. At Time Doctor, which records videos of users’ screens or periodically snaps photos to ensure they are at their computer, sales suddenly trebled in April 2020 compared with the previous year. Those at DeskTime, which tracks time spent on tasks, quadrupled over the period. A survey of more than 1,000 firms in America in 2021 found that 60% of them used monitoring software of some type. A further 17% were considering it.

  When you can no longer promote the good, but must hire for political reasons, you crack down on visible inactivity, missing out on a lot of the other ways people flake out on the job. Soon you will have nothing but the diligent who follow every procedure to the letter, which tends to accumulate people who can nothing more than that, therefore concentrates incompetents.

• What makes some creatures more afraid of change than others?
  

  In a new study published today, scientists have discovered significant differences in how the brain works in two distinct personality types: those who act fearless and those who seem afraid of new things. Being fearless can help wildlife, specifically birds, find new food sources, explore new nesting areas and help them adapt to changes in their environment; but being afraid can also help protect them from dangerous novel things in their environment such as cars.

  “Fearless” may simply mean oblivious, but it can also lead to evolutionary success in the short term, weakening the species in the long term for those rare times when it encounters a threat. This could explain the conservative shift in Western society at this time.

• Psychopathic individuals are more likely to have larger striatum region in the brain
  

  Professor Adrian Raine from the Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study, said: “Because biological traits, such as the size of one’s striatum, can be inherited to child from parent, these findings give added support to neurodevelopmental perspectives of psychopathy — that the brains of these offenders do not develop normally throughout childhood and adolescence.”

  If only psychopaths were our only problem.

• Shipping poses significant threat to the endangered whale shark
  

  The team mapped shark ‘hotspots’ which overlapped with global fleets of cargo, tanker, passenger, and fishing vessels — the types of large ships capable of striking and killing a whale shark — to reveal that over 90 per cent of whale shark movements fell under the footprint of shipping activity.

  The study also showed that whale shark tag transmissions were ending more often in busy shipping lanes than expected, even when they ruled out technical failures. The team concluded that loss of transmissions was likely due to whale sharks being struck, killed and sinking to the ocean floor.

  There are many advantages to being self-sufficient. Global shipping not only produces massive amounts of pollution, but kills off a lot of wildlife, including with all of the cargo losses that float around in our oceans degrading into random chemicals.

• The Great Resignation has changed the workplace for good. ‘We’re not going back,’ says the expert who coined the term
  

  The initial surge was due to the backlog of resignations since workers weren’t quitting during the height of the pandemic, he explained. They also were burned out, unhappy and reevaluating their lives.

  People need to spend less time on high-stress make-work activities and more on the minority of workplace tasks that actually lead to results. Given jobs, most people simply “play office” while trying to look relevant, which creates a proliferation of method-based activity that inundates everyone despite being ultimately unrelated to what makes money or achieves the goals of the job. How many meetings that should have been an email does the average person endure before they spit on their hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats?

• Antisemitism ‘deeply rooted’ in German society
  

  While the issue is most prevalent among the far-right and observant Muslims, according to the study, 60% of those polled said antisemitism is “somewhat” or “definitely” widespread. About two-thirds see the problem as having grown in the last decade, with the worst cause viewed as coming out of far-right extremist circles, followed by anti-Israel attitudes, and Islamist influence.

  Diversity does not work. The sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can stop blaming Germans or Jews for the failure of diversity.

~~~

~~~

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