Amerika

~~~

May Day has come and gone again and the workers have celebrated their triumph. For realists, the problem of humanity remains, namely that any successful group immediately becomes inundated in people who, oblivious to common sense, want “their share,” and quickly convert that group into the same old thing, namely sharing with good and bad alike, therefore steaming steadily toward bad.

More people are currently thinking about Amber Heard and her digestive tract than about civilization collapse. This effectively summarizes what goes wrong with humanity: most people have no capacity for creation, only consumption, and when power shifts to them, they destroy everything good. The most successful societies become the most self-destructive, wracked by guilt over the fact that there are still poor among them, not willing to buck the Equality trend and recognize that most (98.6%) who are poor are that way because of the decisions that they make.

A sane society simply aims to reduce costs to the poor so they can live well enough on what they have. A saner society might simply reduce the permanent poor by shipping them off somewhere else, or even drowning them in bogs. Natural selection exists for a reason.

Nonetheless, here in the worker’s paradise of the West, we must celebrate May Day and endorse all kinds of lies about how unions and the worker’s movement got us eight-hour days, weekends, and so on. Like all really effective lies, this one conceals the obvious: the market drove down costs and raised quality, rewarding effective workers so that they could receive more salary for fewer hours, but this outraged the rest of the people who as ineffective workers benefitted not at all from this. Consequently they formed a collective reward movement that demanded that all workers be compensated regardless of quality, which promptly drove quality down and prices up.

Very few connect the dots. The power of unions in America in the 1980s, especially in the automobile industry, led to the 1990s globalism where parts are made worldwide and assembled here by relatively few workers. This broke the power of the unions since they were no longer the only shop in town; if the UAW got too ornery, production moved to China, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, or Japan. It also ensured that not just labor but eventually all production was going offshore as the remaining unions bickered over the breadcrumbs remaining.

As usual, the workers did it to themselves. Instead of accepting that rewarding only the good is necessary, they demanded a collective reward system, which benefitted only the bad, and therefore drove up costs while smashing quality down, reducing the value of the industry. And so it left, mirroring what happened in little coal-mining towns when the unions came in. At first, the workers rejoiced in their new wealth, but then the company simply folded up and left and no one else was signing up to take over a troubled plant and area. Now the multinationals have bought the rights to the plots, and they ship in their mobile workforce which extracts the wealth and sends it somewhere else. The unions left behind a string of impoverished dead towns, but at least those union organizers got paid handsomely and could send their kids to Harvard.

The herd always destroys groups, including civilization, in order to reward the bad as well as the good because this offers a numerical advantage to manipulators big and small. Most things in our world are disorganized, including the minds of most people, which makes them mediocre workers, but since there are a lot of them, “reward the good and the bad alike” means you have a larger constituency and therefore win out at democracy game. You either relentlessly promote your most intelligent people and have them rule, or you kick the question to the crowd which always picks the worst options because it is hiding its real activity, collective reward. At that point, your civilization self-destructs in an orgy of misery, perversity, cruelty, intoxication, and malevolence.

It is interesting how nature is constructed of parallels. The pathology of the disordered mind exists in parallel between individuals (egotism) and groups (equality) manifesting in people without goals who instead pursue distractions and deflections, ruthlessly removing any who do not follow them in their folly. You either create a natural selection style upward pressure and get your best on top, or you avoid this and end up with what remains, which is various sociopathic narcissists who will steal everything and ruin everything without a second thought because they are oblivious to anything but themselves.

Ironically, the only way to change this is to adopt what people fear: ownership of all things so that someone is reponsible for all. Public bathrooms have a bad reputation for a good reason. Similarly, things which are not owned are subject to the tragedy of the commons. On the other hand, owned things are only valuable when not destroyed, and this keeps the madding herd at bay, since crowds specialize in destroying things because there is no cost to the crowd. The essence of the crowd is anonymity and collective reward, meaning that it sweeps in, takes everything of value, and leaves a ruin, sort of like the LA Riots or the 2020 “election.”

We saw this parallel in abundance in 2022. The Mask Karens on the streets showed the same abusive psychology as the Biden Regime or even the wannabe Asiatic dictators in Putin and Xi. They are defined by opposing the idea of natural selection. Remove that idea, and people naturally turn toward hierarchy, or giving power to the smartest and most sane. Ordered minds lead to sanity, disordered ones toward larceny in a mob. Hierarchy means ownership of things in order to have stewardship and constantly move them toward health and order, not disorder and insanity. Humanity has been running in fear from this for too long, but our salvation consists in embracing what we see as “evil” that is in fact a great good because it is realistic. What works is more moral than what feels good but does not work.

Increasingly, those of us who are still paying attention find that “evil” has no relevance. There is no evil; there is only order and the lack of order. “Lack of order” is a broad category ranging from merely cluttered to full-on hoarder, if we can use a domestic metaphor, or from mildly disordered like religious fanatic George W. Bush (like Stephen King and Eric Clapton, he belongs Back On Drugs) to full-blown insane like Joseph Stalin. When a mind is disordered, it cannot handle anything but the very animalistic basics like how to seize power and maintain it, and it has no plan for what to do with that power. A sane leader does good things and then steps aside to enjoy them; insane leaders cling to power until they die and are forgotten, since they did nothing good for anyone or anything, including the organic ecosystem of civilization itself.

~~~

• Cerebral’s Preferred Pharmacy Truepill Halts Adderall Prescriptions for All Customers
  

  Some nurse practitioners at Cerebral say they have felt pressured to prescribe stimulants like Adderall, and say the companies’ 30-minute evaluations aren’t long enough to properly diagnose ADHD, the Journal reported in March. Cerebral said it encourages proper treatment and its clinicians aren’t required to reach a diagnosis in a half-hour.

  Hint from the market: liability for medical trends that present easy answers to problems like depression, boredom, and COVID-19 will be increasing soon, so the smart actors are proactively dodging it.

• Man charged with murder after breaking up fight on San Diego bus
  

  While the victim was being restrained by Hilbert, he passed out and experienced medical distress, authorities said. His cause of death remained unknown as of Monday morning.

  Following the Derek Chauvin conviction, you are now liable for the bad health of others if you restrain them. The only correct course of action is to let the victimization continue and then, after the funerals, sue somebody, or something.

• Ikea’s restaurants were failing. Then it turned to Swedish meatballs
  

  Ikea doesn’t want to feed you right away, instead preferring that you work up an appetite while you shop and then visit the restaurant to take a break, Xu said.

  When you’re hungry, your mind is focused on acquiring food. This can spill over into acquiring other products, she said. Xu’s research has found that hungry mall shoppers spent 64% more money than shoppers who were already full.

  This probably applies to our dying economy as well. Desperate confused people fling money about which kicks up the “growth” economy and therefore allows more taxes.

• Israel lashes out at Russia over Lavrov’s Nazism remarks
  

  In his bid to legitimize the war to Russian citizens, President Vladimir Putin has portrayed the battle as a struggle against Nazis in Ukraine, even though the country has a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

  In an egalitarian society, those who were not egalitarian become our nü-Satan. This in turn means that we are forever making Nazi comparisons, forgetting that this method of manipulation forces us into monolithic ideological thinking. Are we tired of dumbing ourselves down yet?

• Florida mom filing suit after child transitioned at school without her consent: ‘Happening all over’ US
  

  According to Littlejohn, her daughter, who was 13 years old at the time, expressed confusion over gender during the pandemic after a group of friends transitioned to the opposite sex.

  She eventually found out the school was working on a “transgender support plan” with her child, but the school initially declined to allow her involvement given she was “protected by a nondiscrimination law.”

  “Eventually we did see the transgender support plan, which was a six-page document that they completed with my daughter, that was 13 at the time behind closed doors, where they asked her questions that would have absolutely impacted her safety, such as which restroom she preferred to use and which sex she preferred to room with on overnight field trips,” Littlejohn said.

  Liberalization means relaxing standards so individualism can thrive. You do that by finding lots of egregious examples, claiming their right to equality has been violated, and then using that to force everyone to abandon the rules. The driving force behind liberalism is anarchy, but the motivation behind that is a desire to abolish social hierarchy so that Leftists no longer have to pretend to be good.

• Body found in barrel in Lake Mead may date back to 1980s, more likely to appear as water recedes, Las Vegas police say
  

  “It’s going to be a very difficult case,” Spencer said. “I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains.”

  Is that a common thing? Apparently it keeps picking up the pace while many murders go unsolved:

  To use the FBI’s terminology, the national “clearance rate” for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent.

  Criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders have gone unsolved since the 1960s, leaving family and friends to wait and wonder.

  Since at least the 1980s, police have complained about a growing “no snitch” culture, especially in minority communities.

  Apparently, this pattern extends to crime generally since most cases go unsolved:

  According to the most recent FBI “Crime in the United States” report, only 45 percent of violent crimes lead to arrest and prosecution. That is, less than half of violent crimes result in what is known as a “clearance” of the crime. Property crime clearances are much worse. Only 17 percent of burglaries, arsons, and car thefts are “cleared.”

  Among violent crimes, homicides experience the highest clearance rate by far, at 61 percent. Aggravated assault comes in at 53 percent, and rape at 34 percent.

  This is assuming that a crime is even reported and not merely a missing person who falls between the cracks:

  As of December 31, 2019, the NCIC had nearly 87,500 active missing person records. Youth under the age of 18 account for 35 percent of the records, and 44 percent of the missing person records are people under 21.

  When we wake from the stupor of modernity, there will be a heck of a cleanup and hangover.

• The global stagflation shock of 2022: How bad could it get?
  

  Fast forward a few months and the more commonly cited parallel is the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargo helped create a prolonged period of economic hardship. Inflation surged to double-digit rates even as economies around the world stagnated — a painful mix of high prices and low growth known as “stagflation”.

  Now, stagflation is again on the cards. After the double shock of Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation rates have exceeded expectations, surging to the highest levels in decades in many countries, while economic growth forecasts are rapidly deteriorating.

  The consensus is now for global economic growth to average only 3.3 per cent this year, down from 4.1 that was expected in January, before the war. Global inflation is forecast at 6.2 per cent, 2.25 percentage points higher than January’s forecast. Similarly, the IMF downgraded their forecast for 143 economies this year — accounting for 86 per cent of global gross domestic product.

  Carter-style policies began Carter-era results. History does repeat, just never exactly, so you have to look for the principles: ideological crusades for equality plus cutting back on oil and favoring immigration leads to permanent semi-poverty for everyone. This is why the world’s largest consumer economy — the USA — must remain out of the hands of Leftists. Everyone suffers when America has Tammany Hall style leaders.

• The Avoidable War — averting a conflict between the US and China
  

  Xi’s second priority is arguably the most important, namely Chinese national unity and the political future of Taiwan, where Xi is “a man in a hurry”. China’s leader intends to settle this question “in his political lifetime”, a period that may now stretch well beyond a third term this year and into the middle of the next decade.

  If Xi seizes Taiwan, he makes it look like the Chinese Consumerist Communism Project (CCCP) is working and also becomes the strongest leader since Mao, granting him not just immortality but perpetual rule. Like Biden and the other Boss Tweed style clowns in America, Xi just wants power and has no idea what to do with it except expand, since if he contracts or stagnates he is not only removed but probably shot at the base of the skull in a lonely field with his family billed for the bullet (have you looked at the price of 7.62x39mm ammunition lately?).

• Defending freedom on faculty listserv creates ‘hostile environment’ for black professors
  

  An open letter signed by dozens of faculty at San Diego State University argues that the “mostly white tenured professors” who use the faculty listserv to defend free speech and academic freedom create a hostile environment for the school’s black scholars.

  At issue is a debate raging at the public institution regarding Professor J. Angelo Corlett’s use of racial epithets to explain the difference between racial and racist language.

  The Latino philosophy professor was removed from teaching a class earlier this semester as SDSU investigates his pedagogy and other concerns.

  You cannot have both diversity and freedom of speech. Something will be mentioned that offends the myths of one or more groups, and so either the diversity fragments into race war because you allowed it, or you become like the Communists by suppressing mention of the obvious. Diversity delenda est.

• The device hoping to answer the ultimate existential questions
  

  The current theory is that, although matter and antimatter were created as almost perfect mirror images, there must have been some tiny misbalance, or blemish. This meant that some were not perfect reflections. This difference, however tiny, might have been enough to give matter the edge.

  Inequality — properly understood as numerical distribution, particularism, and localism — exists in nature for a powerful reason: without it, the universe would cancel itself out or otherwise reach a state of ultra-stagnation known as “heat-death.”

• Blackface Morris dancers who were axed from national body for refusing to give up controversial make-up continue to defy critics by entertaining May Day pub crowd
  

  The dance body ruled that ‘full face black or other skin tone make-up was a practice that had the potential to cause deep hurt’ and members must stop in response to the Black Lives Matter campaign.

  But the group defied instruction and continued to take part in traditional celebrations, appearing in the same costumes and make-up, in front of the Crown Inn on Sunday.

  And despite growing criticism, local ethnic minority charity, Lancashire BME Network, backed the dance troupe and said they had ‘never seen it as a racial thing’ within the context.

  Black Lives Matter showed the world that Political Correctness is just another Leftist shakedown so that organized crime style bosses can steal elections and run our civilization into the ground.

• After the War
  

  In the 11 presidential elections from 1948 to 1988, only once did the unambiguously more dovish major-party presidential candidate win the election—Jimmy Carter in 1976.

  From the demise of communism until 2020, every time the White House changed political parties the winner was always the candidate with the less interventionist foreign policy platform—Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump in 2016. Both Obama and Trump shocked prognosticators by overcoming heavily favored primary opponents, largely (though not only) on the question of war.

  Without an enemy, the West turned on itself. Now we have an enemy again, both foreign (China-Russia) and domestic (diversity + Leftism).

~~~

• “Elephant in the room”: Clean energy’s need for unsustainable minerals
  

  Renewable energy technologies are central to the fight against climate change, but they’re heavily reliant on minerals—naturally occurring, solid materials made from one or more elements. But extracting and refining them presents humanitarian, environmental, and logistical challenges.

  The report found that to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, overall mineral requirements would need to increase six-fold. In that scenario, the demand for lithium would rise by 90 percent. But those minerals have to come from somewhere, and that often involves harmful sourcing, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and limits on the mineral supply.

  Those thorium reactors are looking better every day.

  The molten-salt nuclear reactor, which runs on liquid thorium rather than uranium, is expected to be safer than traditional reactors because the molten salt cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, insulating the thorium, so that any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors.

  As this type of reactor doesn’t require water, it will be able to operate in desert regions.

  Thorium — a silvery, radioactive metal named after the Norse god of thunder — is much cheaper and more abundant than uranium, and cannot easily be used to create nuclear weapons.

  Considering that our nuclear reactors are still basically giant teakettles attached to turbine generators, we might consider the technology in its infancy, but maybe worth pursuing.

• Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe
  

  Spearman’s correlation coefficients between mask usage and COVID-19 outcomes were either null or positive, depending on the subgroup of countries and type of outcome (cases or deaths). Positive correlations were stronger in Western than in Eastern European countries. These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.

  This surprises no one. COVID-19 is the latest iteration of the flu; like with other flus, people are either susceptible to it or have a regular flu infection. Even more, it looks like the vaccines bring death instead of deliverance from the non-event:

  In only 38 countries is there a discernible reduction in Covid deaths after vaccination programmes began. For the other 164 countries both the rate and the number of Covid deaths after vaccination programs are higher than before.

  In not one of the 101 countries that report all-cause mortality is cumulative excess mortality lower than it was at the time mass vaccination programs began. And in 70 of these countries, the rate of cumulative excess mortality is higher after Covid vaccination programs began.

  Only a small group of people are actually at genetic risk from COVID-19:

  Through this combined analysis, the authors identified 13 loci that were associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease severity (Fig. 1), including 6 loci not reported in previous human genomics studies of COVID-19. Four loci affect general susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, whereas nine were associated with disease severity. Two of the previously unassociated loci were discovered only when individuals with East Asian ancestry were included in the analysis, highlighting the value of including diverse populations in human genomics studies.

  In other words, as with any flu, some are more susceptible than others. Most likely, most of the deaths were from people who were stressed and exhausted or had lots of comorbidities like obesity, high blood pressure, and AIDS.

• Study finds children with vegetarian diet have similar growth and nutrition compared to children who eat meat
  

  A study of nearly 9,000 children found those who eat a vegetarian diet had similar measures of growth and nutrition compared to children who eat meat. The study, published in Pediatrics and led by researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health Toronto, also found that children with a vegetarian diet had higher odds of underweight weight status, emphasizing the need for special care when planning the diets of vegetarian kids.

  Researchers evaluated 8,907 children age six months to eight years. The children were all participants of the TARGet Kids! cohort study and data was collected between 2008 and 2019. Participants were categorized by vegetarian status—defined as a dietary pattern that excludes meat—or non-vegetarian status.

  Researchers found children who had a vegetarian diet had similar mean body mass index (BMI), height, iron, vitamin D, and cholesterol levels compared to those who consumed meat.

  Right now, all of the goodthinkers want to hear that we can go vegetarian, live in coffin hotels, drive golf carts, and own nothing except subscriptions to Amazon and Netflix and be happy. What are the problems with this study? First, it is self-reported data. Second, it looks at only a few factors, not general health. Third, this is a highly selective audience since these are the people most likely to volunteer for studies, also indicating a bit of ideological bias. Finally, although the abstract does not say this, they could reject results arbitrarily on the basis of being non-conformist. If your kid ate one cheeseburger but is sickly and scrawny, for example, he can be excluded. Give it another three years and this one will fall but in the meantime, everyone involved will get promoted, sponsored, and book deals or some combination thereof.

• Biden’s ‘Disinformation’ czar is latest assault on free speech
  

  Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that his agency is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board.” Given the Biden record, it is unclear whether the new board will be fighting or promulgating “disinformation.”

  Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new board, is a Bryn Mawr graduate who worked for the National Democratic Institute, which is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which spurred perennial controversy for interfering in foreign elections.

  Increasingly, the Biden Administration resembles a mental hospital doing its best to set the world on fire before it is banished back to the sewers below New York.

• Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows
  

  The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

  The Uniparty has found a way for the Left to win in November: the conservatives will boot Roe, then immediately go back to sleep at the same time the Leftist audience becomes hypercharged by what it perceives (correctly) as an assault on its right to have casual sex, even if mostly symbolic in the days after Plan B. The Left will come up with a stronger version of Roe, probably legislative, and so the conservative victory will last exactly eighteen months and then be thoroughly obliterated. This is a major defeat for the Right being sold to us as a major victory.

• Scientific Publishing Is a Scam Fed by the Government
  

  OUP is more than an academic publisher: it is one of a group of four mega-publishing houses which together dominate scientific journals. The others include Elsevier, Nature Springer (the publisher and owner of Nature), and Taylor Francis. One of these, Elsevier, manages about 2,500 scientific journals. It is a very profitable business: in FY 2018, Elsevier raked in about $3.3 billion in revenue, at remarkable profit margins (35%-50%).

  World-wide, the 2018 count was 2.6 million journal articles in one year, generating a revenue stream of roughly $8 billion annually.

  The revenues are raised further by the practice of bundling many journals into a package, a tactic learned, no doubt, from the cable television industry. The high subscription rates for these bundles can eat up as much as 90% of a university library’s budget.

  The modern profession of science has come to be dominated by an ethic of production: advancement and rewards are assessed, not by discovery, but by how “productive” a scientist is.

  Just like any other job: the optics dominate, and you must constantly generate activity to be noticed.

• Houston City Council passes law banning vaping, smoking e-cigarettes in public spaces
  

  This distinction is not addressed in Houston’s current anti-smoking law, which only prohibits smoking “tobacco” broadly. The statute focuses on the places in which smoking is illegal and defines such areas as “all enclosed public places.” City documents list “bars,” “workplaces” and “aquariums,” as among the places where it is illegal to smoke in Houston. Violators of the statute face up to a $2,000 fine per offense.

  Another expensive law for the Karens that achieves nothing good but helps hide government activity behind a wall of complexity.

• China building collapse leads to arrests
  

  Changsha police said the building’s owner and three people responsible for construction and design were detained over the collapse. In a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, police said they were suspected of “major responsibility for an accident.”

  Another five people who work at a private building inspection firm were also detained on suspicion of providing “a false safety report.”

  Authorities in China often blame such disasters on a lack of adherence to safety standards, such as the illegal addition of extra floors.

  These are the people who want to rule the world? Their Russian allies are faring badly as well:

  A set of 50 Michelin XZL tyres retails on Alibaba at approximately $36,000, whereas 50 sets of the Chinese equivalent retails at around $208.

  Poor vehicle maintenance could also partially explain the stalling. Leaving tyres in direct sunlight for months on end often causes them to rip, adding to the amount of abandoned vehicles Ukrainians have encountered in various parts of the country during the war.

  One photo shows a Russian Army Pantsir-S1 SAM stuck in the mud after its tyres burst.

  Just like in the US: charge the full price, substitute inferior goods. But what does this tell us about the Chinese economy? Answer: that it, too, is corrupt at every level and will fall apart under any stresses. In fact, we may be seeing that kind of econopocalypse right now:

  But economists say that underlying conditions, worsened by Covid lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere, are starting to feel more akin to a recession—something China hasn’t experienced in decades.

  Millions of new graduates are struggling to find a job. Business confidence has fallen. Imports have plummeted and nervous Chinese are socking away more savings.

  On Saturday, purchasing manager indexes released by China’s government showed contractions in factory and service-sector activity for a second straight month in April. They fell to their lowest levels since the pandemic began in 2020.

  Castles of made of sand fall down into the sea eventually. This applies as much to Genghis Khan and Joe “Boss Tweed” Biden as it does to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

• The L.A. Riots Were 30 Years Ago. I’m Still Trying to Understand Them.
  

  Race made my editors nervous. It stirred up the passions of our readers, and in a city with a history of cyclical race-related violence, racial passion was no small matter. I found my editors’ timidity both amusing and offensive, but being both obedient and ambitious, I never spoke out. It felt to me as if the media couldn’t consider race as anything other than the looming potential for disorder and violence, a source of division.

  Diversity killed America. The LA Riots, like 9/11, were a warning to us that diversity was not only not our strength, but actively failing and would end us as a civilization.

• Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
  

  Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.

  “Free” public health care always runs into triage because resources are finite while demand is infinite. The only answer is to avoid free stuff, and instead to lower cost of living by reducing taxes, which requires cutting government back to roads, military, police, legal system, and a few other basic functions. Liberal government — based on civil rights justifying the entitlements state which takes from the producers to give to the consumers — has failed.

• San Diego Antifa man has useful girlfriend in public defender’s office
  

  An Antifa member in San Diego who was charged with multiple felonies, allegedly has a close relationship with an investigator for the San Diego Public Defender Office. And together they may have obtained privileged information with which to intimidate victims and witnesses, according to a prosecutor in explosive court filings uncovered this week.

  “I am also aware that Jesse Cannon is or was romantically involved with Leah Madbak who works as an investigator for the San Diego Public Defender Office,” wrote San Diego County deputy district attorney Will Hopkins. His three-page declaration requesting a protective order regulating the release of discovery was originally filed in December 2021.

  Leftists are a Fifth Column for international socialism. We will have to physically remove them (exile to Venezuela).

• A Google billionaire’s fingerprints are all over Biden’s science office
  

  More than a dozen officials in the 140-person White House office have been associates of Schmidt’s, including some current and former Schmidt employees, according to interviews with current and former staff members and internal emails obtained by POLITICO.

  Schmidt maintained a close relationship with the president’s former science adviser, Eric Lander, and other Biden appointees. And his charity arm, Schmidt Futures, indirectly paid the salaries of two science-office employees, including, for six weeks, that of the current chief of staff, Marc Aidinoff, who is now one of the most senior officials in the office following Lander’s resignation in February. The chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures, OSTP alum Tom Kalil, also remained on Schmidt’s payroll while working as an unpaid consultant at the science office for four months last year until he left the post following ethics complaints.

  Secret from inside the industry: computer guys are not intelligent per se but masters of labyrinthine, idiosyncratic detail which relates more to the history of technology, market forces, and endless proliferation of “new” methods which turn out to be worse than what they replace more than it relates to technology in itself. When you make these peasants into kings with mega-wealth, they promptly pursue the type of low-IQ Utopia that Leftism is famous for, and actively conspire with other Leftists to take over and keep the scam going. Silicon Valley thrived because thanks to government regulations, jobs are simplistic and easy and no one can be fired, so everyone is on Facebook all day.

~~~

• Four in five people in the UK believe in being ‘woke’ to race and social justice
  

  Four in five Britons believe in being attentive to those issues – the definition of “woke” used by the Merriam-Webster dictionary – leading researchers to claim the country is not as divided by culture wars as is often assumed. An overwhelming majority of Conservative voters and those who backed Brexit also said it was important to be attentive to the issues.

  Hint: it is not “the elites” doing this to you; it is public opinion. The enemy is us.

• How To Leave Twitter for Mastodon
  

  Instead, it’s a federated service more akin to email. Just as you can create an email account on any service you like—ProtonMail, Gmail, Hotmail, and so on—and still send email to users on different providers, Mastodon lets you sign up with one of many sites running Mastodon software, called instances. Any user can communicate with Mastodon users on different instances.

  In response to the “don’t be evil” 1990s generation of Silicon Valley turning into the same abusive monopolies that At&T, IBM, and Microsoft were back in the day, the internet is decentralizing slowly. An even better idea: go back to blogs, email lists, and forums. Get away from the idea of one big thing that everyone uses entirely. The real growth in social media is in locally-targeted bulletin boards and group broadcast social media, since that way you can actually communicate with your neighbors (and punch them in the face if they get too salty).

• Headcounts are down at public schools. Now budgets are too.
  

  Money for schools is driven partly by student headcounts, and emergency provisions in many states allowed schools to maintain funding at pre-pandemic levels. But like the billions of dollars of federal relief money that have helped schools weather the crisis, those measures were not meant to last forever.

  Anyone who can has taken their kids out of the system. Let us celebrate the death of the public school system which is essentially free daycare and meals to keep moms working because taxes have driven up the cost of living to where one income will not afford a decent life in most cases.

• The origins of SARS-CoV-2: still to be determined
  

  In contrast to SARS and MERS, there is no direct evidence for a natural spillover of COVID-19. Neither the virus nor antibodies to the virus have been identified in animals sampled in Wuhan in 2019 or early 2020. In an article currently undergoing peer review, Gao et al. found that zero out of 457 samples taken from 18 species of animals sampled in Wuhan in early 2020 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. In addition, no correlation has been observed between human occupational exposures to animals and higher rates of infection or seropositivity to the virus.

  This possibly correlates to funding and the incentive to avoid reporting what the goodthinker horde finds objectionable:

  Innocent of most journalists’ skepticism about human motives, science writers regard scientists, their authoritative sources, as too Olympian ever to be moved by trivial matters of self-interest. Their daily job is to relay claims of impressive new discoveries, such as advances toward curing cancer or making paralyzed rats walk. Most of these claims come to nothing—research is not an efficient process—but science writers and scientists alike benefit from creating a stream of pleasant illusions. The journalists get their stories, while media coverage helps researchers attract government grants.

  We want to believe The Narrative, which is that increasing human incursions into natural land brought out some really evil stuff. This is most likely partially true, but not so in the case of COVID-19, which was stylized to resemble Contagion (2011) by our media, which knew that an audience already prompted would buy into the panic and sell more media.

• Pro-Confederate protesters march in Stone Mountain Georgia
  

  About 200 members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Georgia were met by counter-protesters as they gathered at Stone Mountain to commemorate the group’s unofficial “Memorial Day.”

  Demonstrators, roughly 100 in all, shouted expletives and held signs in support of “racial justice” and “black lives matter.”

  “Nothing historic with regard to the Civil War happened at this park,” Gerald Griggs, Atlanta attorney and president of the state conference of the NAACP, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So there’s no need to memorialize traitors to the American democracy.”

  “American democracy” seems to mean Pendergast/Tammany style political machines driven by immigrant votes designed to displace the founding population so that Asiatic tyranny could take over. Like them or not, the Confederates were right about States Rights and diversity being fatal.

• The Hidden World of Octopus Cities and Culture
  

  The idea of animal culture emerged after scientists noticed that in some groups, animals perform actions that aren’t seen in other groups of the same species.

  It turns out that culture is more vital and widespread than previously thought, including being vital to ecosystems.

• Men’s Feminist Identification and Reported Use of Prescription Erectile Dysfunction Medication
  

  Feminist-identified men were substantially more likely to report EDM use than non-feminist men, even after controlling for alcohol use before sex, erection difficulties, sexual arousal, sexual health, mental health, and physical health.

  Maybe low testosterone correlates to Leftism after all. Men who feel helpless want the Crowd behind them, not to challenge it.

• Great cities are wasted on the rich
  

  But to not treat those homes as lily pads from which to explore the more textured and protean quarters of those cities would seem to defeat the purpose of an urban life in the first place. You are left to deduce that what the class in question adores are not cities so much as addresses. To buy into some is to ask for the last bottle on the last page of the wine list, whatever it is.

  The wealthy recognize that cities are blight and retreat from them into enclaves, letting the rest of democracy self-destruct outside those gated communities. And who can blame them?

• Over 3,000 migrants dead or lost at sea en route to Europe in 2021, UN says
  

  More than 3,000 people died or disappeared in 2021 while attempting to reach Europe by sea, according to a new report from the agency. An additional 478 are dead or missing so far in 2022.

  “Most of the sea crossings took place in packed, unseaworthy, inflatable boats – many of which capsized or were deflated leading to the loss of life,” the Friday report states.

  The deaths come amid a dramatic rise in recent years of Africans desperate to reach Europe. Italy alone last year reported the arrival of 13,203 children by sea, most of them, 10,053, unaccompanied.

  Let zero in, and zero will come. This means abolishing a whole bunch of “human rights” laws written by people who live in gated communities and will never encounter the disasters their pens create.

• The bond market has crashed. Why one strategist says embrace the pain and get back in.
  

  Roberts argues the U.S. economy is more leveraged than ever, with the average consumer needing $6,400 a year in debt to maintain the current standard of living. “Such is why, with the heavy requirement of cheap debt to support the standard of living, sharp rate increases have an almost immediate impact on economic activity,” he says.

  Technically speaking, he adds, the yield on the 10-year Treasury is now 4 standard deviations above its 52-week moving average, and near the top of the long-term downtrend channel from 1980.

  This looks more like a lack of faith in the stability of our present regimes.

• Joe Biden used alias of KGB spy from Tom Clancy novels, emails from Hunter’s laptop show
  

  Joe Biden wrote to his son Hunter and others close to him using the pseudonym “Peter Henderson” – a fictional Soviet Union-era spy in several Tom Clancy novels who infiltrated the US government, emails show.

  When they tell you what they are, believe them.

• Illegal immigrant population increased by ONE MILLION in Biden’s first year in office and cost the taxpayer an extra $9.4billion
  

  A study by Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for cracking down on immigration overall, found that the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. grew from 14.5 million in 2020 to 15.5 million now and cost the American taxpayer an additional $9.4 billion.

  FAIR roughly estimates that the U.S. now spends $143.1 billion on public services for undocumented migrants, including on public schools, migrant schools, English language proficiency, uncompensated hospital stays, Medicaid, law enforcement and other welfare programs.

  Democrats want more voters, less social stability, and more need for a police state. That is not the desire of someone with the best interests of the nation at heart.

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