Amerika

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One thing that you will find humans rarely do is attempt to get to the essence and bottom line of things. They want to talk about reactions, optics, symbolism, appearance, and feelings. They want sales figures, trendlines, and scatterplots.

Very few are willing to focus their minds on what something is, come to understand its character and spirit, and then figure out where it fits into the world. This type of thinking brings about ambiguity, which most people see as uncertainty and doubt, therefore it makes them feel unstable.

After all, most of us live through simple truths that, whether true or not or even simply mostly true-ish, guide us through life. We use them as pillars, crutches, foundations, and frameworks. We rely on them as the basis for our heuristics and estimations. Without them, it is just us adrift in an infinite ocean of uncorrelated data.

Looking at the essence of life, for example by asking what is real and what is the good life, moves one very far from where success in everyday life lies, which is in social competition meaning the ability to say things that make others “feel good” and therefore, becoming more popular and therefore getting ahead. The meritocracy is ultimately a social competition for who offers the most pacifying lie or semi-truth.

When black metal hit the world back in the 1990s, it operated by a simple device. A decade before heavy metal had warned the world that “Satan laughing spreads his wings” whenever humans screw up, then speed metal warned of nuclear war, and death metal saw humanity as self-destructing and doomed. Black metal flipped the script and endorsed Satan because in its view, everything society accepted as “good” was bad, and everything the individual knew to be good could not be spoken of in society because it would be seen as “bad.” Endorsing Satan, natural selection, and warlike aggression allowed them to wholesale reject the morality of Judeo-Christianity commerce equality, and instead choose hierarchy, or the good being rewarded while the bad are smote.

In the same way, the Dissident Right has inverted the symbols of our time. We see pluralism, equality, pacifism, diversity, meritocracy, individualism, utilitarianism, and inclusion as the same beast, a morality of letting peer pressure take over from what we know is (a) real and (b) good. Since the egalitarian-altruist bureaucracy has taken over using the diversity vote and now is The Establishment, we must invert their symbols and burn their ideological churches in order to get to actual good, because what they consider good is in fact our doom.

That is what it means to get to the essence of things. It is an activity worth doing in its own right because it involves mental discipline and clarity of mind, as well as a study of reality. Through that one transcends, or comes to appreciate the wisdom of nature including the scary parts, and consequently can begin to see life as good again and escape the trap of fatalism. When you get to the essence of modernity, you find the human ego, which not surprisingly has made an inverted society where peasants are kings and lies are truths. Burn it all down? We must first burn these thought patterns in our minds.

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• Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross (St. Martin’s Press, 288 pp., $29)
  

  They state that in a group setting, “status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity.”

  Status-seeking — a term derived from the work of Tom Wolfe and Max Weber — refers to the desire to gain social prominence by saying things that flatter, intrigue, provoke, and entertain other people. This is not real; it is a human construct, projected onto others in order to control them so that we can have a mental state that says our present way of life is the best possible option. People in the grips of status-seeking and success culture are really good at following procedure, trends, and details but very bad at adaptive thinking. They do not get to the essence of anything, but are certainly adroit at self-promotion.

• Political scientist examines a quarter-century of post-Apartheid government
  

  In the book, Lieberman contends that South Africa has successfully pursued “dignified development,” material growth along with a respect for the rights and inherent equality of people; and, despite the foibles of some corrupt officials, has been building a robust set of democratic practices, in stark contrast to the Apartheid era.

  When we say that people live in a symbolic world, this is what we mean: South Africa is a mess, but if you measure it by political symbols like equality, everything is going great because they are on the progress train to Utopia through diversity and pluralism. In reality, South Africa is a fallen civilization, killed by diversity just like the USA. In other words, this Lieberman fellow engages in what we call cherry-picking or choosing a few details of thousands to signify success, then ignoring all those other details in order to argue for his thesis. Ten years ago people would have been fooled. Today he gets a notch on his résumé but not much else.

• Mexico’s official ‘disappeared’ list grows to more than 100,000
  

  The Interior Ministry’s national registry of missing people dates back to 1964 and is updated periodically. Over the past two years, it has risen from about 73,000 people to more than 100,000, most of them men.

  There are reasons to stay in a first-world society. If you let in the diversity and socialism, your first world society goes away and is replaced by a third world ruin, at which point you too can experience death squads and missing people.

• COVID-19 may be linked to cases of severe hepatitis in children
  

  It is possible that the affected children, many of whom are too young to be vaccinated, may have had mild or asymptomatic COVID infections that went unnoticed, a separate team of researchers suggest in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology. If that were true, they theorize, then lingering particles of the coronavirus in the gastrointestinal tract in these children could be priming the immune system to over-react to adenovirus-41F with high amounts of inflammatory proteins that ultimately damage the liver.

  Spike proteins passed on to them by their vaccinated parents could be doing it too, while we are writing conjectural science to explain an event that no one understands but seems to march hand-in-glove with COVID-19 vaccination programs.

• Ghostly ‘mirror world’ might be cause of cosmic controversy
  

  If the universe is somehow exploiting this symmetry researchers are led to an extremely interesting conclusion: that there exists a mirror universe very similar to ours but invisible to us except through gravitational impact on our world. Such “mirror world” dark sector would allow for an effective scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates while respecting the precisely measured mean photon density today.

  We keep looking for dualism, or “another world,” when perhaps instead we should pay attention to the idea that our world consists of layers or dimensions stacked on top of each other, with the physical part being just the foyer.

• Company shuts down Neo-Nazi website with .cn domain after being unknowingly exploited in wake of Buffalo shooting
  

  “Daily Stormer” is a website that the world-shaking Buffalo shooting’s perpetrator Payton Gendron claimed had a strong influence on him. The website surprisingly had a .cn country code domain, which led some in the media and the public to accuse China of being involved in the incident and even “supporting the American far right and neo-Nazism.”

  It is time to bring back the liberal value of open discussion and let Anglin and company have their say. We do not have to agree with them in order to suggest that allowing these views into the light is less harmful than making them into contraband which by the very nature of the censorship it faces seems more likely to be accurate.

• Yuval Noah Harari | What To Do With All of These Useless People?
  

  Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?

  The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?

  My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time or solving their inner problems with the drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs.

  If he were serious, the answer would be to lower their cost of living and let them have relative liberty so that they could amuse themselves and have basic homesteads so they could survive. Instead, this is being used as an argument for Communism with legal drugs, porn, and computer games.

• ‘Polluted’ babies, millions dead: Scientists sound alarm on global pollution
  

  In early May, a groundbreaking study from the University of California, San Francisco of 171 pregnant women found more than 9 in 10 had measurable amounts of 19 different chemicals and pesticides in their bodies. Researchers said many of those substances pass through the placenta and into developing fetuses, adding evidence to a National Institutes of Health report that warned babies are born “pre-polluted” with chemicals.

  Tuesday, a study published in the journal The Lancet expanded on pollution concerns globally, revealing that air and water pollution causes 1 in 6 deaths worldwide. At more than 9 million deaths per year, such pollution kills more people than malnutrition, roadway injuries and drug and alcohol use combined, the study found.

  In 2017, Geyer found that since the mass production of plastics began in the 1950s, more than 8.3 billion tons have been produced, 79% of which ended up in the environment or landfills. That comes out to about 2,300 pounds for every person on the planet. Half was generated just in the prior 13 years, and the amount is set to double by 2050.

  Not only that, but our supposedly relatively harmless industrial gasses are turning into particulate pollution:

  “What we found is that the nitric acid and ammonia are susceptible to temperature changes. When the temperature gets colder, they can actually go through the gas to particle conversion process, creating new particles and increasing the overall particle number concentration,” said Wang.

  In other words, the modern miracle of technology has reversed itself by making our planet toxic. For now, it is only really hitting the third world, but we all share the same atmosphere, so that will not be a permanent limitation.

• It’s a female bonobo’s world: Ecologists propose new tools to assess sex and power among wild animals
  

  The common thread for species in which females hold power, such as hyenas, lemurs, and bonobos, is reproductive control, control over when and with which partner to mate. This comes in the form of resistance to mating, promiscuity, and even, in the case of hyenas, genitals designed specifically to allow the females to control fertilization.

  Women in power means that men exist only as fighters, and women do everything else, at which point breeding rewards the crude instead of the refined and the average IQ plummets. Setting aside the rage at women howling from the internet right now, patriarchy works for a (biological-genetic) reason.

• Why don’t computers work?
  

  Economist Robert Solow summarised the problem in 1987(opens a new window), saying: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Data keep on proving his point. All measures of IT spending have kept trending higher yet since 2005, rates of labour productivity growth at least halved in the US, UK, Japan, Germany and France.

  Computers are the worst thing to happen to the global economy in 150 years because . . . well, you will have probably guessed already(opens a new window). Every digital fix has a knack of creating three new problems(opens a new window). Any tweak threatens to invoke the recursive loop of pointless labour(opens a new window). A PC might look modular but it’s a morass of potential incompatibilities and performance bottlenecks, meaning entire corporate systems are junked whenever a software update or a withdrawal of OEM support prematurely terminates the usefulness of one part. And because of this accelerated replacement cycle, workers have to continually relearn their jobs.

  Even more, you have the dark organization of IT/CS itself: people want reliable jobs, which means making mediocre systems that require constant updates, which in turn translates to software bloat, unreliability, and a complexity of incompatibel options that renders computers a dead loss. We could do the same with a tenth as many lines of code and have it happen much faster, if the process were organized instead of geared toward rent-seeking by H-1B and NEET employees.

• Canada’s indigenous leaders ask for royal apology
  

  Indigenous leaders met Prince Charles in Canada and asked for an apology from the Queen over the “assimilation and genocide” of indigenous schoolchildren.

  RoseAnne Archibald, Assembly of First Nations national chief, said the prince “acknowledged” failures in handling the relationship with indigenous people.

  Canada is dealing with a scandal which saw indigenous children die or be abused in residential schools.

  They make towers of assumptions. People die in residential schools and go unclaimed, therefore you have graves, although most of the “graves” discovered are soil anomalies which are not actually bodies. No one should apologize to the Amerids; they attacked first and lost because they were disorganized. Then the diseases that Europeans had endured wiped out many of the rest. Our only future lies in repatriating all Amerinds to their ancestral home in Mongolia. Apologies are just the first step in the shakedown, and their hands are going to be out for even more money despite hundreds of billions chucked into that abyss already with nothing to show for it.

• US baby formula crisis highlights risk of reshoring
  

  The troubles are rooted in a highly concentrated domestic market that was distorted by government intervention and disrupted by pandemic-related hoarding, supply chain issues and safety concerns. This tangled tale holds important lessons for policymakers everywhere as they look to bring production of essential goods closer to home.

  Most laws are like most Microsoft Windows updates, basically designed as a jobs program for politicians. We need to end the “fourth branch of government,” the administrative agencies with three-letter names, and repeal most of the laws of the last 200 years. If you cannot write all of the laws of your nation in one normal-sized book, you are covering something up.

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