Amerika

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Often you will read here about the end of the era of symbolism and with it the notion that projected human solipsism, amplified by peer pressure, acts as a reality substitute; countering it is a realism consisting of the nihilism notion of refusing to indulge the mass superstition of universal truths, values, and communications, as well as a drive for the transcendent and historical-mythological hermetic view of life as infinite beyond death.

The two match up in the idea of destiny, or that we each have our own path, and we can only comprehend to the limits of our Dunning-Kruger circuitry, but also see a different world based on where we are in the process. On this stage, we are all actors, with our unequal minds playing out the hand dealt to them not just by situation but by genetics and a fate assigned by the gods.

An age of symbolism comes out when society decides to manipulate people into using the “correct” method, instead of like markets and natural selection simply rewarding those who figure out on their own how to achieve the correct goals. That in itself shows a society coming apart, but the continued reliance on universalism by conservatives shows how empty thinking on the Right has become (although still not as empty as the perpetually one-note Left):

“What after all has underpinned the Western, European and Christian civilisation that National Conservatism claims to defend and uphold if not a universalist ethical, spiritual and, yes, political vision?”

I affirm total nihilism; this means that I refuse to affirm the notion of universal truths, values, and communications. “Truths” are human conclusions, which makes them specific to one human and incommunicable as a whole between humans; “values” similarly are human tradeoff heuristics which can be understood only by their creators; “communications” involve the use of tokens, words, symbols, images, numbers, and pictographs to gesture at what both parties can only partially understand based on how much they share these methhods and how much they share the ability to understand.

We are all islands. We can say however that a group of people who agree on roughly the same goals and standards can become a culture, and that if this group wants to persist for more than one generation, this culture must be based on genetic similarity a.k.a. ethnic homogeneity. Race is not enough; the group must be the same specific strain of human, and it will have internal variation like a class structure.

This group can share something better than universals, namely shared instincts toward aesthetics, metaphors, lifestyles, valuations, and preferences. With those shared, the group is freed from the constant internal bickering that turns into a struggle over power and is the origin of the human sadness, namely that we always destroy our best hopes so that everyone can self-express and distinguish themselves by being “unique”; generally, we call that “individualism” because the individual being important and distinctive becomes more important than logic, reality, culture, nature, or the divine.

In that light, “universalism” is the opposite of conservatism. Conservatives exist to conserve a specific culture and genetic strain; they do not want to save the world because that is backward thinking: good behavior should achieve good results, but bad behavior achieves bad results, and trying to “save the world” like other forms of collective reward such as socialism, unions, entitlements, and mob rule attempts to save the bad as well as the good. Save the good, cull the bad.

Queen Elizabeth died this week and while no one expected it, having spent the previous decade talking about the “irrelevance” of the monarchy, the streams of people leaving flowers, weeping, and holding vigils at Buckingham Palace tells us something different. We love our monarchs because they are part of us; they are not paid managers like politicians and bureaucrats, but the best of us dedicated to us by bonds beyond money and power. As the democracy experiment, having bungled COVID-19 and diversity, circles down into a graceless crash in bankruptcy and dystopia, the time has come to reconsider monarchism. The West grew great under the aristocrats, and declined under democracy.

We also find ourselves revisiting religion. How can we go through life without believing that it is good, which for most us includes the possibility of an afterlife? Only those who have seen the infinity open in their minds can realize that life itself is what we worship, and religions are dialects of expressing this, usually with lots of randomness and control methods tacked on.

The original religion is to trust life and to enhance its beauty in ourselves through pursuing the good, but this is the opposite of modern religions, which are collective reward schemes and simultaneously control methods. They want to force everyone, good and bad, to use the same methods so that the end result is “good” as defined by the religion, usually in opposite to “evil,” both of which are universals. In reality, you can only reward good as your culture sees it, and anything else is failure, whether intended, random, or simply apathetic.

In my view, Christianity is crashing around us because no one can believe in symbolic religions anymore. A burning bush and a golden calf are too close for us to ignore; we prefer, perhaps, the ancient form of animistic panentheism that sees a divine spirit in every aspect of life, like the ocean and the storms. In my view, 99% of people just want a religion that teaches their kids that life is infinite and doing good things is the only path to happiness. They don’t care if it’s Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Zoroastrian, or hermetic pagan. Change is on the wind there too.

As Putin loses in Ukraine, he faces the choice between full mobilization that may bring WW3, or quietly retiring before he gets murdered in the time-honored tradition of Slavic leaders. The American political system, seeing its false election narrative dissolving, has resorted to retaliation in the Soviet tradition against dissidents. There may be a god of the boomerang motion of a historical cycle, and he has us in the throes of the backswing. Maybe there is a god of gravity, too? Perhaps that is Apollo, and Dionysus is the god of flight.

~~~

• Eagle-eyed Delaware hunter chances upon ‘holy grail’ of tree lovers — full-grown American chestnut
  

  The adult American chestnut, long thought to be extinct in Delaware, was discovered by a deer hunter with a sharp eye and an encyclopedic knowledge of local flora. The one White is hugging is the only one known to exist in the state; he calls it a “precious resource.”

  White thinks about what this swath of woods in the rural Centreville area looked like in the early 1900s.

  “This forest would have been 30% or more chestnut trees, American chestnut,’’ he says. “Of course, the blight came in at about that time when they started to bring the Chinese chestnuts over.”

  Diversity always means suicide. When you introduce two species within the same niche, they struggle and the less adapted version wins. Over time, this replaces the efficient adaptation with generalists who ravage other parts of the ecosystem, creating an Easter Island style crisis. Adaptation increases efficiency and in the process creates the ecosystem in which all outputs from one species become inputs to one or more others.

• ‘Full-time work doesn’t pay’
  

  More than one-third of U.S. families that work full time year-round do not earn enough to cover a basic family budget, according to a recent report from researchers at Brandeis University’s diversitydatakids.org program at the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy.

  The situation is even more dire for Black and Hispanic families, according to the report. More than half cannot afford basic needs, compared to 25% of white families and 23% of Asian and Pacific Islander families. Inequities remain even when controlling for education and occupation.

  In theory, the Democrats are pro-diversity, but in actuality they want to keep minorities as a captive voting base who are perpetually impoverished and therefore always vote for more taxes and free stuff (one does not occur without the other). When looked at from the highest level of abstraction, the inflation caused by the Biden taxes has done one thing effectively: it has destroyed the value of real estate holdings and salaries. The Left wants you impoverished and miserable so that you cling to them and they can hand out favors to those who demonstrate appropriate obedience.

• Blocking Kiwifarms
  

  However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.

  No one sensible believes this. Corporate America is stuck in a loop of trying to avoid controversy so that it can continue its rent-seeking behavior. CloudFlare, for example, has made itself basically required for any website, so they can only lose by alienating customers, so when two thousand blue-haired lunatics write in wailing about KiwiFarms the powers that be decide to cut themselves free from the controversy. Instead they have opened up a debate about whether the Internet can afford to have any monopolies, including not just CloudFlare but the rest of the FARTNAGS (Facebook, Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, Apple, Google, Spotify).

  Remember how hysterical this situation has become because someday you are going to be looking at a post-transgender-trend world. The percent of a percent of our population with untreatable gender dysphoria will be able to get transsexual surgery just as they have since the 1960s, but all of the me-too types from Reddit and Instagram will have moved on, almost all through suicide or overdose. Death will feast, and then silence will return. But right now, corporate America thinks that transgenders are a good cash-in because that is what government has told them to do, and they know that government now creates most economic opportunity in America and Europe, so they are ramping up the absurdity as they pander to the latest group of suckers they intend to sell garbage to at high profit before the suicide wave necessitates moving on to another group:

  RITA KATZ: These are not just hate sites as Cloudflare is trying to pretend them to be, but there are terrorist factories.

  On the plus side, transtrenders are no longer buried under their “deadnames” (pre-transition, original gender names) because people are getting cremated and the ashes handed back to the family with a stern admonition to scatter them somewhere dramatic as was promised. In the case of most failed trend-seekers who have put their families through agony and drama, most likely they are getting buried in a three-inch PVC pipe leading downward from the toilet or on a shelf in the basement, likely to be bulk-relocated to Goodwill when the Boomer parents finally gurgle and splat for the last time.

• How does nature nurture the brain?
  

  “The results support the previously assumed positive relationship between nature and brain health, but this is the first study to prove the causal link. Interestingly, the brain activity after the urban walk in these regions remained stable and did not show increases, which argues against a commonly held view that urban exposure causes additional stress,” explains Simone Kühn, head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience.

  These scientists attempted to differentiate between lower stress people who chose to live near nature and the effects of nature on people who might not ordinarily choose to live closer to it. It turns out that getting past the blocky, busy, and utilitarian structures of modern society helps ordinary people feel a greater sense of peace, probably because the logic behind nature is more detailed than that which humans use, therefore considers more factors and creates a sense of balance among all of them. This is the sort of thing that we can “feel” but not articulate our perceptions about. In either case, it shows that the modern city intensifies stress, while avoiding cities releases it.

• +NIGGER License
  

  By including the word “NIGGER” in a LICENSE file that must be distributed with the software you will ensure:

  • The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship
  • The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship
  • Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others

  While deliberately offensive, this license provides a future for Right-wing creators: insist that the license include something that Leftists cannot tolerate, and you splinter them off into their own little economy and environment separate from us. We want to marginalize them, so it makes sense to deprive them of products they need so they are forced to compensate with lesser alternatives, gradually squeezing them out of our economy and forcing them to develop an alternative.

• Digital nomads want to replace the nation state
  

  To Razavi, membership of a nation state “offers incredibly poor value … The aspects that are really stuck in the past include citizenship, passports and tax. Our vision is to upload the nation state to the cloud.”

  As said here before, whatever nation manages to abolish the entitlement taxes and offer government as a service will quickly become self-sufficient and dominate all other economies. The first world has hobbled itself with taxes in order to keep the third world, both foreign and domestic in the ghettos, from exploding into chaos, but the high cost of this is the entitlements taxes which drain vitality so that a Soviet-style collapse is imminent.

• Visa, Mastercard, Amex to Track Gun Shops With New Merchant Code
  

  Until now, gun shops were often categorized as specialty retailers or durable-goods sellers—categories that include a much broader collection of companies.

  The new code is for retailers whose primary business is firearms sales; big-box retailers that sell guns have different MCCs.

  This means that any retailer that is big enough to warrant the bulk discount will be unable to sell firearms, continuing the Leftist strategy of suing gunmakers in order to raise costs to the point where guns will be inaccessible to ordinary White people. They know that without our guns, we will depend on them to save us from the rising diversity and poverty violence, and therefore will become more obedient. On the other hand, they have just launched a black market gun industry that they will be unable to regulate.

  We are seeing the rise of soft totalitarianism which enforces itself through third party intermediaries such as the postmodern phone book, DNS:

  The injunction, issued by the District Court of Hamburg, required the Swiss DNS resolver to block access to a site that links to pirated music.

  The foundation stressed that it doesn’t condone piracy but believes that enforcing blocking measures through third-party intermediaries goes a step too far.

  All of this follows the pattern established by political correctness: do not target people directly, but target the people who might help them by depriving them of livelihood and social contact. Make it socially unacceptable to be anything but a pro-diversity Leftist. Then make it socially unacceptable to be in any way connected with anyone who is not a pro-diversity Leftist. Finally, cast suspicion around so that people affirmatively agitate for more pro-diversity Leftism so that they do not get ensnared by a spurious accusation. This works similarly to the strategy they are using to bankrupt gun manufacturers

• Mercury pollution makes ducks more likely to get bird flu
  

  The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that ducks contaminated with mercury were up to 3.5 times more likely to have had bird flu at some point over the last year or so.

  Pollutants of any kind probably depress immune function because the immune system has to work overtime to remove them from the body. If this is happening to one species, it will happen to more. This means that whole ecosystems will collapse in unison as the pollution gets worse, and then humans will find nowhere to run for the fresh air and open spaces it needs to avoid the increasingly mutating diseases of the cities.

• The Left Is Demonizing Populists — For Pushing What the Left Once Believed
  

  But populism is the Jeffersonian tradition in American life. It is a democratic, left-wing movement. It’s about building a mass movement, a transracial mass movement of working class people for economic democracy.

  Not quite. “Populist” movements arise when the voters realize that all of their meritocracy, accountability, and affirmative action programs have appointed an entirely hostile “elite” of permanent bureaucrats who need to be removed in order for normal function to resume. Bureaucrats — those who control via rules and make decisions through committees — tend to become a self-referential precedent rationalization echo chamber. Sometimes the outside world has to whack them against the head to wake them up and change things. On the other hand, the West was built under the monarchy and fell under democracy and bureaucracy.

• Scientists discover how air pollution causes lung cancer
  

  Researchers found the fine particles in polluted air cause inflammation in the lungs, which activates pre-existing cancer genes that had been dormant. It was previously believed that air pollution triggered genetic mutations that lead to cancer.

  Everyone gets exposed to pollution; only some get exposed to cigarette smoke. It turns out that tobacco was the spook and the big problem was diesel and gasoline pollution, something no one would touch because our economy runs on internal combustion engines. This means that the same technologies that propel our modern miracle are killing us. This means that we must change. It is no longer a personality accessory in a world of products and social thoughts with no consequences; this determines the moments that will follow this one. If we cut entitlements, immigration, diversity, and big government, we might make it to self-sufficiency and survive.

• Who benefits most from student loan forgiveness?
  

  Roughly two in three of the lowest-income borrowers would have their federal student debt fully erased, the JPMorgan study found. Black and Hispanic borrowers would be more likely to have their debt fully forgiven than white borrowers, according to the analysis.

  In other words, this is another underclass support program, a.k.a. the usual toxic brew of anti-diversity and anti-poverty rationalizations for an expansion of government, hiring more bureaucrats and lawyers, and suppression of the middle and working classes who have no idea what is good for them (in this, I agree with the faux elites).

• Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain
  

  In this randomized clinical trial, 33 of 50 participants (66%) randomized to 4 weeks of pain reprocessing therapy were pain-free or nearly pain-free at posttreatment, compared with 10 of 51 participants (20%) randomized to placebo and 5 of 50 participants (10%) randomized to usual care, with gains largely maintained through 1-year follow-up.

  The study misstates this a bit: if you believe you can control your pain, and take ownership of that pain, you can bond to it and change its attributes. As a result, you can make it less of a constant interruption than a background influence which stays to its territory and leaves you to your own. One wonders: to what else could we apply this paradigm? Among those who are actually human and not Human Shaped Objects (HSOs), it seems that mind can rise over matter in some circumstances.

~~~

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• Adding One Sentence to Every Email Can Free Up Hours
  

  The reason is something called “egocentric bias,” which leads most of us to think we understand what others are thinking and feeling better than we actually do.

  In other words, the nature of consciousness is solipsism, and we are guessing at what others intend by their signals and the position we perceive them to have in the interaction.

• Psychological distress before COVID-19 infection increases risk of long COVID
  

  Depression, anxiety, worry, perceived stress, and loneliness measured early in the pandemic, before infection with COVID-19, were associated with up to 45% increased risk of developing long COVID.

  In other words, this was a panic. The most panicked had the worst symptoms. Our symbols dominated reality for a short time, but now the balance returns and humanity stands revealed as incompetent, neurotic, bloated, and delusional. Those who bought into the panic not only injured themselves with Vioxx-Thalidomide-Gardasil style experimental treatment, but when they finally did get the disease suffered more intense cases because they were panicked. The mind is a powerful organ and will determine or at least guide many outcomes. When all of humanity panics at once, things tend to go badly as if the Earth itself came to agree with our neurosis.

• Personal Loan Statistics: 2022
  

  More than 20 million Americans owe a collective $178 billion in personal loans, according to the latest industry data. That’s more than double the $88 billion owed in 2015, showing the growing popularity of personal loans.

  In my view, many people are taking on loans as a form of bet against the continuity of the Regime. If the political system falls, debts are going to become useless, and if the currency goes into default, then it will be easy to pay back these loans with what will have become the price of a loaf of bread. In the same way, lots of people are cashing out on real estate because as the currency loses value (“inflation”) the homes become proportionately cheaper, which means that selling them translates into a loss.

• Americans Spent More on Taxes Last Year Than on Food, Health Care, Education, and Clothing Combined
  

  Overall, taxes accounted for about 25 percent of average consumer spending…This outpaces average spending on food, clothing, education, and health care combined.

  The mean for total spending per unit on taxes was $16,729.73. This included $8,561.46 in federal income tax, $2,564.14 in state and local income taxes, $2,475.18 in property taxes, $5,565.45 in Social Security deductions, and $105.21 in other taxes, offset by an average stimulus payment of $2,541.71.

  At the end of democracy, government directs the economy by creating rent-seeking opportunities. If everyone must file Form #666, there will be an industry in those who provide this service, and soon a few winners will emerge and raise the costs of doing business so that no one else can take their place (costs are passed on to the customers directly, after all). When free money goes out in the form of subsidies, industries will spring up around that and soak up the money in order to keep enough people employed so that the circular Ponzi scheme keeps going. To keep all of this working, government must tax the living hell out of the 53% who pay all the taxes. At some point, just as in the Soviet Union, this marginal cost eats up productivity itself.

• You’ve spotted a flaw in a top journal’s paper. Good luck getting your critique published
  

  The study, one of the largest of its kind, identified 330 top-ranked journals by compiling the 15 titles with the highest journal impact factors in each of 22 scientific disciplines. It analyzed their policies as of late 2019 to early 2020, finding that 123 don’t offer formats for critiquing papers after publication, such as letters, commentaries, and online comments.

  Of the 207 journals that do publish critiques, the authors found many limit length and require submission within a few months after the paper’s publication — too strict a deadline, the authors said, because “important critiques may arise at any time.” Together, those policies raise barriers to critiquing flawed papers, the study’s authors argue. Just 2% of 2066 papers randomly selected from these journals mentioned the existence of an associated postpublication review, the team found.

  Some of this is fluff, since the scientific world seems to be a war of papers, speeches, or other organized thought and study. If you notice a flaw in the research done by someone else, you do your own research, publish your own paper, and gain the glory. Very few scientific debates are appealing enough to sustain this process however. If someone botches research on a detail, everyone else records the actual knowledge in their notes and never tells anyone else because it might give them a competitive advantage.

• God and Garbage
  

  Visually, trashworld what you see when you search “cursed images” on Google. Intellectually, it’s what Haddad describes as a surrender to certain shitty realities of modern life — namely, climate change and capitalism — because you feel powerless to change them.

  “If you accept the atrocities of the situation, that the world is a nihilistic place, then it’s easier to move past rather than just deny, deny, deny, deny,” explains Haddad.

  Basically, if things are bad, you just join the party and make them worse. “Yeah,” adds Newman, reading my mind. “If you know you’re in a trashworld, then you can just move trash.”

  The flaw in their thinking is that if you are in a trashworld and try to pick the best form of the trash that is there, you are still promoting trash. You must get outside of its thinking by looking at big taboos — for example, our fear of aristocracy, any mention of genetic differences, and the passage of time — to see where the growth areas are. Trashworld must burn, which means the real opportunity is for those who make torches.

• The astonishing rise of the right-wing Sweden Democrats
  

  While final results aren’t expected before Wednesday, Social Democrats have so far received the largest percentage of votes, 30.5%.

  But currently, the Sweden Democrats are the second-strongest party, gaining 20.6% of the vote in their best-ever election performance. That makes them the biggest party on the right, in front of the Moderates who came as a close third with 19.1%.

  “The main reason for the party’s success in the last decade has been Sweden’s uniquely high number of asylum-seekers and unusually rapidly changing demographics in terms of ethnicity and the share of foreign-born citizens,” [Johan Martinsson, a political science professor at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg] told DW in an interview from Gothenburg.

  People generally make a big show of having agency but in fact demonstrate the passivity of yeast. That is, they choose the best options from those available to them: jobs, wives, houses, votes, and then rationalize what they did as altruistic, moral, patriotic, artistic, scientific, or any other term that makes them feel important, smarter than everyone else, and above the conditions around them. As a result, people rarely understand that diversity never happens naturally, is always enforced by manipulative tyrants, and always requires force and bribes to accomplish. It serves as a good way to break a society open so that parasites can feast on its wealth, and the voters sleep through it until the crisis starts blowing off hand grenades in their front yards; this is why democracy can never work. Even so, the voters are still clinging to the dream of the pro-democracy party, the Social Democrats, who basically offer liberal democracy with a mixed-economy, essentially a mishmash of the big political systems of the last century. Enough of them have started to realize that something is very wrong and will not improve until radical action outside the norms, which serve to limit any change, is taken. The Sweden Democrats offer a ray of mild hope in that they can reset the norm toward the center, but this will still leave intact a diverse half-socialist society.

• A looming railroad strike next week could cost U.S. economy $2 billion a day
  

  Major freight railroads, in a bid to apply pressure on unions and Congress, say a strike that could come after a key deadline passes next week would cost the economy more than $2 billion a day and disrupt deliveries of all kinds of goods and passenger traffic nationwide.

  Individualism reflects an unwillingness to consider the impact of decisions beyond the self. Individualists are therefore lazy thinkers whose first response is to distract, deflect, or look for an exception. They hide behind complexity as a way of avoiding reductionism. Consequently, they punt on every real issue and go all-in on symbolic and inconsequential ones. If the voters were not individualists, they would realize that unions are always and without exception collective reward schemes, which means that they are nothing but parasites. They excel at one thing and that is replacing workers with automation, offshoring, or contractor labor. Votards are simple and their minds do not understand marginalized costs, so they do not realize that as worker costs rise, very little of that goes to the worker and most goes to the lawyers and community organizers. Then the costs are passed on to the consumer so the price of living rises. The voter/worker — since the French Revolution, we have lived in a tyranny of the worker in which our only metaphor is work and all are forced to “work” even on things that need play or contemplation instead — does not figure out how things will end, but instead is obsessed with new starts. He gets a new salary! All is good now! Oh no, costs rise; what to do? Obviously another new start, another strike, another revolution. There is never an attempt to ask where the money really goes because the average votard/worker cannot understand that. And so the cycle begins again, with most of the profit going to lawyers and bureaucrats.

• Illinois law eliminating cash bail has some in law enforcement concerned
  

  But reform advocates say keeping people locked up simply because they can’t afford bail is wrong.

  “That’s just inequitable that some people get to be free because they have money and other people have to remain incarcerated, which has all kinds of terrible consequences for people’s ability to work, for their housing, their whole families suffer,” said Ben Ruddell, ACLU of Illinois.

  Every now and then they tell you exactly what they are thinking. Equality means that those with the money, health, power, status, sanity, wisdom, intelligence, and abilities subsidize those without such things; it is not merely a reversal of Natural Selection, but outright war against it, and we see this occurring in parallel between our religion of equal souls, our democracy of equal votes, and our consumerism of equal buying power. What if “equality” actually means the end to variation in life? We would see it then like the Christian conception of Heaven as simply a domination of our thinking by generalized fear of life itself because we, as ego-obsessives competing passively for “our share” of the wealth of society, fear everything beyond our own whims, desires, and crutch-like justifications.

• Repression and poverty trigger record migration in the Americas
  

  “We have never had . . . such a large movement of people across the whole region at the same time . . . it’s no longer [just] movement from Latin America to the United States. Everyone is dealing with this everywhere.”

  Taking this out of politics and into population dynamics, the democratic victories in the world wars and subsequent adoption of Leftist programs across the world has created a population bloom of humans at the low end of the ability scale. Too many of these people renders any society toxic, so every society is trying to shed them, with the most totalitarian being the only ones capable of acting now. Since the people whose brains have been rotted by democracy in the West are the only saps who will accept them, the “solution” that “most” people “think” is good involves the third world excreting all of its waste humans into the West, which will then pay them to ??? profit by living in terrifying housing projects, accepting welfare checks, and then grifting on the basis of “muh racism” to have a little extra for the holidays and touring van season. Luckily the ensuing defaults will kill democracy dead and lead to the exodus of the diversity, since without the free stuff, it has no reason to stay in countries that it obviously finds odious because of “racism.” Without the free stuff from grubmint here, life in Asia, the middle east, Africa, or Eurasia seems a lot more appealing. They are here for the wealth; when the wealth goes and affirmative action falls, the problem mostly fixes itself, which is conservatives should be pushing for those things but none of them will do it.

• Aaron Rodgers blasts California’s COVID closures he says destroyed small businesses in his hometown
  

  ‘My thing is I have an issue with the hypocrisy in society in general and I know you do as well, but abortion has been a hot topic, right? And especially after Roe v. Wade got overturned and sent back to the states, or whatever. I don’t believe the government should have any control over what we do with our bodies.

  ‘As much as I might lean more pro-life, I don’t want the government to tell me I can’t smoke a cigar, I can’t have a drink of alcohol, I can’t choose my own medical decisions. And if I’m a woman, don’t f***ing tell me what to do. Like whether or not I agree with what you decide to do, who cares? And the government should not have a decision that infringes upon my own personal freedoms.’

  As it turns out, Libertarianism is the true third way, and will fail for the same reason all other attempts to be independent of the conservative/liberal divide have failed: it does not address the civilization question, only complains about government that has become overbearing in part because it has failed on the civilization question. That question is: how do we make a functional structure in perpetuity? It naturally implicates homogeneity and hierarchy, the two things that conservatives understand because we respect genetics unlike the Left, and this makes it taboo so we stay at the level of scheming. However, conservatives might do well to stop pandering to the Christian audience and to look toward ordinary people instead who simply want the raw competition of capitalism with government there to catch bad guys. All the other stuff — 90% of what government does, like social security, medicare, HUD, education, and welfare — can be tossed and the productive people in America will miss none of it. The people who do miss it are probably better off living in the third world anyway.

• Satisfaction with US education dropping: Gallup
  

  Of those who were dissatisfied with public education, 65 percent highlighted issues with curriculum and educational standards, while 28 percent mentioned a lack of resources and 17 percent mentioned political concerns.

  Most parents who have children in K-12 education are satisfied with their children’s education, the survey showed. Eighty percent of respondents are completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education, an eight-point increase from a year ago. Only six percent said they were completely dissatisfied with their own child’s education.

  Removing the fancy political theory, what is happening here is that people are bragging about their neighborhoods. We see it all the time: people whose kids go to moron farms of schools will defend those schools to the bloody end because if the schools are terrible, this means their neighborhoods are terrible, which means they are in turn both less successful and make worse judgment-based decisions, which reflects on their worth as people. They would rather eat their own children than admit there is a problem, which is that other than a few Whitopias where everyone works in the professions and sends their kids to the local public school, American public education is uniformly horrible because it was dumbed down for the lower classes and diversity. That is the raw and brutal truth, and until we admit that, any “education” policy is just an excuse to dump more money on some lucky lottery winning category of employees for this year.

~~~

~~~

• In Defense of Slippery-Slope Arguments
  

  Indeed, the slippery-slope argument, especially in the context of social decay, has a noble pedigree. Plato observes in The Republic that democracy leads to authoritarianism; as freedom and equality expand beyond orderly limits, only hardheaded authority can rein them in. The fall of the Roman republic to authoritarian empire and the rapid collapse of French republicanism before the rise of Napoleon stand as examples.

  …Contemporary progressives tend not to be satisfied with certain political victories, which, once achieved, give way to new demands: for example, activists hoping to secure rights for sexual minorities initially made assurances that those who disagreed would be left alone; now they intend to stamp out dissent and expand the universe of rights beyond gay marriage. Given this history, one may be forgiven for suspicion of progressive intentions, or for concluding that the slippery slope is itself embedded in the progressive posture. It is also a definitional question. Whereas conservatism wishes to remain in one place, or, at most, to move only in certain limited respects, the very definition of progressivism is to progress—that is, to keep moving.

  This only makes sense when you realize that the force behind Leftism is individualism united into a dark organization by mutualism. Their goal is to remove everything except the individual and his desires so that he is “free” from the scapegoat he has chosen, namely those in power, instead of admitting that statistically he is a Dunning-Kruger case who defeats himself by making stupid decisions. There is no compromise with Leftism because like diversity it is a civilization-eater; if you allow one drop into your society, it will toxify the rest and soon the end will be nigh even if you were not paying attention.

• Man Behind US Navy’s Largest Corruption Case Hires a U-Haul, Cuts Ankle Tag, and Flees
  

  The owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, a Singapore-based maritime ship servicing company with ports across the Asia-Pacific, Francis bribed his way into lucrative contracts with the U.S. Navy in the 2000s. At the heart of his sprawling corruption network was the USS Blue Ridge, a command ship that sails around Asia and serves as the floating headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet.

  He would shower officers from the Blue Ridge with gifts—often involving luxury hotel cocktail parties, Michelin-star dining experiences, sex workers, and thousand-dollar bottles of booze and cigars—in exchange for classified ship schedules and other information. At one party in 2008, held at the Mandarin Oriental and the Makati Shangri-La hotels in Manila, the Philippines, prosecutors said Navy officers drank an entire inventory of Dom Pérignon Champagne and were entertained by “a rotating carousel of prostitutes.”

  Officers also redirected military vessels to Francis’ ports so that they could be serviced by his company, where he would overcharge the Navy for fuel and other services. Prosecutors said that, over the years, he defrauded the U.S. military of more than $35 million, although some believe the figure is much higher.

  Now imagine an entire government run this way. Lobbyists offer lavish perks to those in power and capture them at their worst, so there is mutual obligation between lobbyist and bureaucrat, then demand that the government contracts or laws favor the companies that the lobbyists represent. In the end, nothing gets achieved because much like on the surface government redistributes wealth and creates industries by lawmaking, underneath the veneer of DC the government exists to move money around the economy based on who pays the right bribes. All the people whining about capitalism are actually talking about this, but they are Useful Idiots because their solution invariably involves more government power over wealth redistribution and therefore, more corruption.

• Having kids linked to being more socially conservative, study finds
  

  Researchers found that contrary to a popular belief that people adopt a more right-wing worldview as they get older, the decisive factor might be parenthood and not age, according to a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society.

  They will probably eventually find, as our ancestors knew, that marriage and either having a business or a position of decision-making authority at a business changes how people view the world. If you are making decisions for an organization and will be judged by their outcome, you stop thinking like an individualist and start paying attention to cause-effect logic; similarly, when married, you can no longer rely on “what I want versus what she wants” because you need to choose what is cost-effective, expedient, and yet avoids long-term problems regardless of what you both want; extending that, at the point where children exist, parents experience a hammerstorm of complaints and suggestions that reflect the desires of their offspring and have to say NO to all but a few of them. These things make you conservative, or trusting of both empirical-historical data (not laboratory data) and general principles of aspiring to the good, instead of an individualist, which is what Leftists remain like children with stunted growth.

• Cancers in adults under 50 on the rise globally
  

  “From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time (e.g., decade-later) have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age,” explained Shuji Ogino, MD, PhD, a professor and physician-scientist in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham. “We found that this risk is increasing with each generation. For instance, people born in 1960 experienced higher cancer risk before they turn 50 than people born in 1950 and we predict that this risk level will continue to climb in successive generations.”

  People used to imply I was being hysterical when I ranted about this issue on USENET, ANUS, Corrupt, DMU, and the early days of Amerika. As pollution goes up, mutations go up, and at some point the immune system cannot keep up and you get an outbreak of tumors. The solution is to leave lots of land behind for nature and to drop the incapable portions of our populations. We are subsidizing the idiots that generate most of the pollution.

• Amazon Suspends Rings Of Power Reviews Amid Review Bomb Rumors
  

  The first two episodes of The Rings of Power released last night after a slew of positive early critic reviews, and the tide quickly changed in terms of online ratings. Though episodes 1 and 2 set up an intriguing start for the exciting new high fantasy series, reviews following the premiere quickly became mixed. Praise has generally gone to the performances, cinematography, and production of the show, while criticisms have mostly pointed to a slow start and a lack of grounded storytelling in the early episodes. However, the Rotten Tomatoes audience score of the series goes far beyond the moderately mixed showing, with a shocking 37%. Due to the swift plummet, reports of review bombing and online trolling for the series quickly arose.

  According to THR, Amazon has taken action in a unique move and is now holding premiere reviews for 72 hours in order to weed out the trolling and make sure that all reviews sport some credibility. While unusual, the streaming service’s decision makes sense since some early online chatter has sought to reduce the series to surface-level casting decisions, deriding its diversity despite The Rings of Power’s setting in a fantastical world based on a fictional novel.

  Let us translate: Amazon created a version of LOTR for a diverse audience, which outraged fans of the books, who promptly complained with the only mechanism available to them, the online reviews. Amazon suppressed this long enough to get the credulous and egotistical audience of broken waste humans to watch it, giving it numbers that while inflated will justify more filming of this series. Five years from now we will find out that they accidentally counted twenty million phones as viewers when only downloaded the trailer in a pre-cache, but at that point, it will not matter because the money will already be spent. In the meantime, Amazon has forgotten that the goal here is the long term. Twenty years after they were released, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films still attract people and are regularly watched. That will not be the same for The Rings of Power just like it was not for The Hobbit, and for basically the same reason: these are cash-ins, not a loving tribute based on quality. The people watching this stuff now came to it from Game of Thrones or Reddit and do not care about the original books, since they just want a new type of telenovela-like superhero movie to distract them at their pidgin dystopia prole jobs and failed broken family events.

• Canadians now less confident in their health-care system than Americans are
  

  Two out of five Canadians say they were unable to access essential health-care services in the last six months, according to a new Angus Reid report.

  The study, which surveyed nearly 3,500 Canadians and Americans combined, also found that Canadian confidence in our health-care system is currently lower than American confidence in theirs, with Americans less likely to report issues accessing care.

  Socialized medicine systems do not do so well; the American answer is to have lots of alternatives so that people can find a solution somewhere, but the British-Canadian approach has been to make one giant pipeline and run everyone through that. The problem is that then it is a government job, so you get less performance, and since it is free people use more of it to the point of not avoiding common health problems, at which point the entitlement expands to fill all available space and triage programs are implemented in response.

• The U.S. has a pilot shortage — here’s how airlines are trying to fix it
  

  Management consulting firm Oliver Wyman estimates the industry is facing a deficit of about 8,000 pilots, or 11% of the total workforce, and says the shortfall could reach 30,000 pilots by 2025.

  In a bid to slash costs during the Covid pandemic, airlines grounded planes, and offered early retirement packages to thousands of senior pilots. Carriers have also seen fewer pilots coming from the military which has faced recruitment issues of its own.

  What happens when you burn down the founding majority because you pursued the Christ-and-Revolution-blessed abstract ideal of equality among the races and social classes? You run out of the nice supply of steady competent pilots, and we go into third world behaviors like lowering standards so that you can have a pilot at all for your plane made by affirmative action and outsourcing. It is going to get exciting as the diversit planes rain from the sky. In the meantime, business is noticing that diversity is failing hard in the workplace:

  Nearly 70% of business leaders said they struggle to recruit Black, Hispanic or Latino/a/e, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and other historically underrepresented talent at every organizational level—including entry-level talent (39%), mid-level talent (28%) and senior-level talent (18%)—while 43% said the same about retaining their historically underrepresented employees.

  This challenge is well recognized by most organizations. Sixty-one percent of business leaders are aware of a continuing lack of diversity on their tech teams, with 37% noticing a lack of gender diversity, 32% a lack of ethnic and racial diversity, 27% a lack of socio-economic diversity and 16% a lack of neurodiversity.

  Despite nearly 60% of business leaders saying their companies work hard to foster an inclusive culture, half of Gen Z tech workers (50%) have still felt uncomfortable in a job because of their gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic background or neurodevelopmental condition. This number rose to 55% for women, 56% for LGBTQ+ respondents and 61% for Black respondents.

  You will only feel comfortable when you are in an environment run by your people, designed by your people, and serving your people; otherwise, you will always feel alienated, which seems to be the emotional sensation of modernity. Diversity is not going well. No one says “diversity is our strength” anymore, but every speech opened with that before the 0bama administration.

  In the meantime, we are seeing a crash in innovation mainly because the people who can innovate realize they are subject to be replaced by easier employees from the diversity — women, minorities, LGBT — strata instead, causing them job insecurity and resulting in something like “quiet quitting,” but in this case, simply putting their heads down and doing the minimum while finding some unique role for themselves that keeps them from getting fired:

  Additionally, as job insecurity increases, employee creativity declines — and then flattens out.

  Insecurity of any kind makes inflexibility. High marginal costs mean that managers randomly cut essential players in order to get in more of the bread and butter, since once costs go up only government initiatives provide wealth. So the manager fires the 25+ year programmer to replace him with affirmative action, Green New Deal, Gen Z, or whatever the trend of the month is, and then quickly gets his next job so he does not have to face the disaster he is created. At some point the company realizes that it can no longer do what it once did, and falls into lazy rent-seeking because this keeps most of its employees happiest.

  Consider also that our mixed economy just became centralized under the crazy halfbreed Irish soft tyranny of known pedophile Joe Biden (explained here):

  When Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a bill seeking to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, the Washington Post trumpeted it as “a new era of industrial policy.” One might also call it a version of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” — a foray into state-directed market policy.

  The real crisis here is that we are repeating the Soviet experiment of the centralized economy, where government creates markets by inventing programs like the Green New Deal and manufactures jobs with regulations like affirmative action, ESG, and ISO 9002 compliance. We are managing the risk of revolution by keeping people fat and happy by inventing bullshit McJobs to waste their time. This society is basically a condom for humanity with a receptacle tip to trap our energies, hopes, thoughts, and dreams so that they can be disposed of down the festering sewer of diverse egalitarian mixed economy dystopia.

• Princeton students win campaign to get free speech program added to orientation
  

  Princeton University incorporated mandatory free speech programming into its freshman orientation following a year of advocacy from the undergraduate free speech organization Princeton Open Campus Coalition.

  Everyone emulates the guys at the top. Princeton realized that whether or not it meets diversity quotas, without enough smart young White and Asian students, its brand will drop like a stone. Consequently it is taking more of an Oxford style approach and basically teaching the controversy, figuring that it will both get around this stumbling block and further cuck minority students by forcing them to deal with the supremacy of historically important Whites, ironically only so that they are better at accepting authority blindly at their future jobs. What is education at this point but an attempt to weed out the disobedient?

• Sen. Lindsey Graham to intro nationwide abortion ban after Roe overturn
  

  Sen. Lindsey Graham is set to introduce a new nationwide “late-term” abortion ban Tuesday — fewer than three months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and just two months out from the midterm elections, where the issue is likely to be front and center.

  I called it yet again. They could fix Amerika, but the conservatives want to pander to their version of the minority vote, which is the “evangelical” Christian bloc. This means that instead of focusing on what they need to do, namely ending affirmative action and other 14A practices, they will go crusading after abortion again, only to have the Left reverse it six months later. The cucks love this game because they secretly hate their voters. These voters ignore sense, demand immediate responses after choosing badly for years, and are easily distracted by shiny objects like patriotism. This makes them hard to deal with and also, necessarily deceived for any function to occur, so my guess is that Lindsey Graham makes fun of his voters with his Democrat friends who agree that these people are stupid, ignorant, and prideful. He will not say out loud what he thinks of the Democrat voters, which is that they are narcissistic parasites, but we all know that anyway and Mr Graham is doing nothing to stop the vampiric marginal takeover of the country he purports to love.

• Burning Man highlights the primordial human need for ritual
  

  The overwhelming majority of Burners identify as nonreligious, yet the deeply spiritual experiences they report resemble those of religious groups. Indeed, the similarities with religion are no accident.

  Burning Man, as the event became known, started as a solstice get-together by a handful of friends on Baker Beach in San Francisco. In 1986, they decided to build a wooden effigy and then torch it. Co-founder Larry Harvey called this a “spontaneous act of radical self-expression.” As people started gathering to watch, they realized they had created a ritual.

  Harvey was an avid reader of anthropological theories of religion. He was particularly interested in the role of ritual in creating meaningful experiences. These experiences, he argued, address a primordial human need: “The desire to belong to a place, to belong to a time, to belong to one another, and to belong to something that is greater than ourselves, even in the midst of impermanence.”

  We need something bigger than ourselves with ritualized components? We could always try culture, which includes seemingly meaningless activities that nonetheless bring people together for the purposes of something “greater than themselves,” which is the essence of tradition: instead of individualism, guided by individual desire and whim, we attempt to fit into an order larger than ourselves.

• Over 120 Countries, but Never Israel: Queen Elizabeth II’s Unofficial Boycott
  

  The Queen’s fans, on the other hand, are quick to point out in her “favor” that a Jewish mohel circumcised her son Charles, in the best tradition of the royal family, deriving from a claim to Davidic descent.

  It is funny how Christians consistently try to worship but simultaneously replace Jews, as if the weapon to force the world to respect the Jews in turn made them a target. As critics of Christianity are quick to point out, the religion serves as a foreign culture among us even if interpreted at the most charitable level. Similarly, no matter how we dress up diversity, the differences between groups — if not races, ethnicities; if not ethnicities, social classes; if not social classes, regions — will eventually shine through and obliterate any perceived advantages.

• Over one-third of white Democrat college-educated women say men can get pregnant
  

  For the statement “Some men can get pregnant,” 36 percent of white Democratic women with a college degree replied “true.”

  In comparison, 29 percent of the same demographic without a college degree replied similarly, as did 22 percent of all Democrats.

  This is what a deductive rationalization precedent chain looks like. We like equality, so we do things to affirm equality, and the latest of these is the transgender trend, so when someone asks if a man can become pregnant, the ideologically correct answer is that oh yes, of course he can. In the same way, we are trained to say that money should be given to charity, the poor should receive aid first, and meritocracy selects the best; we are trained to accept the theft that is taxation for wealth transfer programs and worry only about how to spend “the” money. In a time based on lies, we rationalize from those lies, and therefore end up developing new, crazier versions of those lies. The “some men can get pregnant” of today is the logical extension of the LGBT movement of the 1970s and the Civil Rights craze of the 1960s, much as those were in turn further developments of the anti-nativist pro-Irish movement of the early 1800s and the Bohemians of the 1500s.

~~~

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• The differences between experimental evolution and natural adaptation
  

  The study, which was co-authored by Technion Ph.D. student Yasmin Cohen, sought to explain an apparent paradox noticed by the authors when reflecting on the mutations identified in their own evolution experiments involving bacteria: namely, that the proteins in which mutations most often occur in the lab are the same as those that change most slowly over long evolutionary timescales.

  Their literature survey identified adaptive mutations at 140 amino acid positions across these proteins in response to 12 different laboratory conditions, including exposure to antibiotics, prolonged resource exhaustion, growth at high temperatures, and growth within low-nutrient (minimal) media. Surprisingly, there was very little overlap in these adaptive sites, with only four out of the 140 appearing under more than one condition.

  In other words, much like a meritocracy or a climate, a lab tends to test for adaptation to the lab, where nature which has much greater complexity ends up testing each organism against the influence of all of those factors at once. Human symbols narrow reality to thin models of only a few factors, allowing them to like political correctness both seem like a reflection of reality and be engineered to replace it with a symbolic, idol-worshipping, superstitious, and deductive rationalization which never questions the fitness of its original narrowed model.

• Denmark’s left-wing government will begin sending asylum seekers to Rwanda after groundbreaking agreement
  

  The plan, which has long been a goal of Denmark’s right-wing parties, took more than a year of negotiations, but the policy goal is now closer than ever to being realized. The deal does not apply to only Rwandan migrants — instead all asylum seekers would be forced to wait in Africa until their asylum procedure is finished. The fact that the plan is being implemented by a left-leaning government points to the strange circumstances in Denmark in which the left has embraced many of the anti-immigration polices of the right.

  Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has become known for her push to reduce immigration and deport migrant criminals.

  “Every fifth young man with a non-Western background born in 1997 had broken the law before turning 21. It’s not everyone. But there are too many young men who take the freedom of others, steal children’s futures, intimidate prison guards – and leave behind a long trail of insecurity,” said the Danish prime minister.

  Everyone understands that diversity no longer works and immigration is ethnic replacement. They are still afraid of breaking the WW2-Holocaust Covenant, which says that thou shalt not make any policies which disadvantage any race, effectively dooming all of us to suicide by immigration. However, if the benefits go away, the diversity is going to flee as well.

• How quiet quitters gain from doing just enough work
  

  Hinckley explained that a major driver behind the growing interest of the topics on social media was the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed many workers out of the office and into their homes.

  There they had free time to pursue their passions and placed a greater emphasis on mental well-being.

  “We realized there’s so much more to life than just going to work,” Hinckley said.

  You probably saw us ranting about this here: when workers stay home, they realize that Whatever and Office Space were right: 90% of what of we do in offices is unnecessary and pro-forma, and most people really “work” only about fifteen minutes a week. If that is the case, why not skip all the meetings, emails, trainings, and team-building activities, since you will get everything done just the same except without all the junk generated simply to give other people something to do?

• Japan harvesting junk electronics to tackle resource shortages
  

  Hiromi Murakami, a professor of political science at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, said recycling resources is critical for weaning Japan off imports that are susceptible to disruptions that are beyond the government’s control.

  “There is a critical national security aspect in play here,” Murakami emphasized. “In the last few years, we have seen the impact of a global pandemic, the effect that has had on supply chains and the damage that has caused to industries that rely on timely and regular arrivals of components or raw materials from abroad,” she added.

  As said here before, whoever manages to make a society that is both (a) self-sufficient and (b) cuts government down to the bare basics, lowering taxes, regulatory, and lawsuit costs as a result, is going to make out like a bandit. The race is on to escape The Civilization Problem because whoever gets out first is going to rule the world. We will know Japan is serious when they cut their tax rates, stop offering services to citizens, and start privatizing infrastructure. Government is a parasite, and now international trade is unstable because years of peace just laid the groundwork for centuries of war.

• Google spins out secret hi-speed telecom project called Aalyria
  

  The spinout comes as Google parent Alphabet reckons with a slowdown in ad spending and looks to advance or wind down experimental projects. That in part means seeking external funding for some of the projects that it’s incubated for years. Businesses such as life sciences company Verily and self-driving car maker Waymo have raised money from outside investors, while Alphabet has shuttered initiatives such as Makani, which was building power-generating kites, and internet-beaming balloon business Loon.

  As predicted here before, the dot-com 3.0 burnout is real. Ad revenues have been falling for decades but since 2009 the Big Tech firms have successfully faked the statistics in order to make it seem like they are doing more than advertising to the people who are least successful in reality. Social media is an inversion of the regular world. It attracts people who are not happy in the world, so the people who are popular on social media are those who deny the existence of reality, and posit a social replacement instead. This works until you need to actually sell products and influence decision-makers, at which point the post-2007 online world stands revealed as the nerd herd out behind the cafeteria smoking Kools that it is.

• Newsletter research reveals the rate of unique baby names in Japan increased over the 40 years since the 1980s
  

  Thus, unique names increased not only after the 2000s, but also from the 1980s for 40 years. This result shows that parents increasingly gave unique names to their babies and that Japanese culture increasingly emphasized uniqueness and independence for the 40 years, providing further evidence of the rise in uniqueness-seeking and individualism in Japan. This finding is also consistent with prior studies showing the rise in individualism in other aspects such as family structure and values.

  This is a pretty good proxy for what we talk about around here too, namely the rise of individualism from the Peasant Revolts through the Cold War. WW2 effectively made rule-by-culture dead, since that was too much the Axis powers, so everyone adopted the Civil Rights model of “everyone do whatever you want and society pays for it,” apparently not realizing that this is just a naïve version of Communism. The more individualistic you get, the more every action is an exception and your marginal costs rise, at which point you drain your productive to subsidize the rest which gradually kills off the productive. The only solution involves keeping society focused on a transcendental, qualitative, but realistic goal at all times, the type of thing that operates like natural selection or the accumulation of knowledge.

• 97 members of Congress or their families bought or sold stock that may have been a conflict of interest
  

  Of the 435 House members, 183 traded stocks through themselves or their immediate family members from 2019 to 2021. At least 97 bought or sold stocks, bonds or other financial assets through themselves or their spouses that directly intersected with their congressional work.

  These are being revealed by state organ The New York Times so that they will be investigated, and the investigation will find either no wrongdoing or misbehavior only by a outsider Republicans. The real way you make money is this: you get the stock tip, you swap it to someone else for a stock tip about their industry, and then you make money off the trade in their industry, not your own. For extra deniability, you might get a tip passed along a chain of people. In this way, the malefactor is never connected to the inside knowledge directly. Think of the math: 183 members trading stocks does not account for how all members of Congress and ranking bureaucrats go into government poor and, on salaries of only a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, end up multi-millionaires within a decade.

• Citi expands program to help diverse communities reach ‘transformational’ homeownership
  

  The program, called HomeRun, seeks to help eliminate the key barriers to homeownership, particularly with regard to cost and affordability. The program, which offers down payments as low as 3% with no mortgage insurance requirement, is paired with a lender paid assistance program that helps offset closing costs.

  Separately, Citi is launching two new pilots aimed at giving more credit access to people with limited or no credit information, as well as providing access to capital to small businesses owners in Los Angeles, with a focus on those businesses run by women, minorities and veterans.

  The moves are part of a legacy focus on financial inclusion and racial equity, according to Lisa Frison, who serves as head of financial inclusion and racial equity of U.S. Personal Banking at Citi.

  Because corporate socialism for anti-diversity programs worked so well last time, we have to try it again, apparently. If you want to raise minority home ownership, kill the property taxes. Yes, the minorities will lose all the free school lunches and diversity programs, but they will be able to own normal homes instead of serving as a means through which government redistributes income to Section 8 landlords.

• ADL will review its education materials after Fox News calls the group ‘far-left’
  

  Among the organization’s supposed “far-left ideas” highlighted by Fox News: its materials’ use of the phrases “intersectionality,” “structural racism” and “white privilege”; its recommendation of articles written by award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Ta-Nehisi Coates; references to gender-neutral pronouns and the Black Lives Matter movement; books about trans and gender non-conforming children, and a post praising the Women’s March, one of whose founders has ties to the antisemitic Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan. (That same founder, Tamika Mallory, also criticized Starbucks at one point for using ADL anti-bias training.)

  In a statement, an ADL spokesperson told JTA that Fox’s story “raised important issues” and said the group “plans to undertake a comprehensive, in-depth review of all of our education programs.”

  Any group investigating itself will do so in order to exonerate itself of the big charges. They may drop one of the items flagged, but only so that they can keep the others, and once the furore has died down and the worries go back in the memory hole, they will restore that one too. History repeats because incentives never change and humans in groups are less perceptive than a goldfish swimming in PCP.

• How Biden’s Irish Catholic mom who hated the English told him NOT to bow to the Queen when he met her while working as a senator in 1982
  

  Biden also repeated his mother’s concern about showing undue deference to the Queen in his autobiography, Promises to Keep, this time recalling: ‘When I told my mother I was going to have an audience with the Queen of England, the first thing she said was: “Don’t you bow down to her.”

  He went on: ‘”Remember Joey,” she’d say, “you’re a Biden. Nobody is better than you. You’re not better than anybody else, but nobody is any better than you.”‘

  The egalitarians reveal their basic motivation: they are willing to accept others as equals only so that they do not have to accept that they have superiors as well. These people are motivated by hatred that is pathological and reflects the Dunning-Kruger Effect; they think they are intelligent, moral, and far better people than those they hate. In reality, bad hates good as much as good should hate bad, and so naturally Biden thinks he is a normal person who is morally good, although if pressed he might be forced to admit how much he rationalizes — changes the focus from the whole picture to a minor detail in order to use it to manipulate major points — in order to hide his own consummate self-interest. Like Carter, he is merely a socialized narcissist, but then again, most people of peasant origin tend to be this way, and they are all egalitarians. Notice also more direct revelations of how socially inept, weird, and disconnected from others this guy is:

  Biden was initially speaking about Ukraine, from where he had just returned, but was advised to switch topics.

  Noting that Pritchett was British, he discussed how much his mother ‘hated the English’, telling her she had written ‘hundreds’ of poems on the matter.

  Pritchett wrote: ‘He went off to find them and returned with hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on our heads.’

  He went on to recollect the time his mother, who was of Irish descent, traveled to the UK and spent a night in a hotel where she was told the Queen had once visited.

  Referring to the hotel stay, Pritchett wrote: ‘She was so appalled that she slept on the floor all night, rather than risk sleeping on a bed that the Queen had slept on.’

  They are not like us. These are the people who show up to be free labor for civilizations, then try to steal those civilizations, not the people who can create a new society and make it good.

• After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
  

  Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.

  I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.

  Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.

  But my emails are just not delivered anymore.

  DMARC/DKIM, https, and AMP serve zero purpose for your average website. If you do not use them, you fall in Google’s ranks, and Google controls up to 90% of the search market, so everyone does what Google says. Naturally, Google is abusing this power, as are other large corporations in implicit collusion, simply because that way they can keep their power and do not have to admit the competition that will un-do them because they are bloated corporate welfare dinosaurs.

• US Senate nominee is toxic, not reflective of SC Democrats after white people comment
  

  Ms. Matthews’ recently released comments on treating white people like “s—” on purpose sickens me. Just because she is black or a Democrat in a political world where we see the dehumanizing of minorities on a daily basis does not make it OK. Treating anyone badly because of their race, ethnic background, or any other reason outside of WHO a person actually is will NEVER be acceptable.

  Conservatives have not yet realized that egalitarianism in any form is a death trap because most people will read it as the classic revenge fantasy of “the rest of us” versus “the few who are in power.” The Declaration stated “all men are created equal” meaning that the limits on equality were creation, and that after that, nature and degree of motivation took over. This does not mean that all people are equal, only that they have the same opportunity at birth to maximize what they have been given; this was a revolt against the idea of genetic caste as expressed by the English monarchy. It was never intended to extend to anyone other than the Anglo-Saxon settlers of the new world, nor was it ever designed to be a justification for subsidy programs like it is today. To the founders, the point of the USA was not equality but opportunity and letting the best rise. Since that produces “racist” bell curves, we have opted for the “subsidized equality” model that always comes about in Late Stage Democracy. When Marx wrote about capitalism leading inevitably to socialism, he got it wrong: democracy leads inevitably to socialism because as the principles of democracy fail, it must re-assert them in order to remain in power. Consequently you always get a good-victims-versus-bad-victors narrative.

~~~

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• Biodiversity is critical to ecosystems
  

  The researchers said they discovered different bee species pollinated the same types of plants at different times of the year. They also found that different bee species were the dominant pollinators on the same kind of plants in different years. Because of natural fluctuations in bee populations, researchers said, all bee species present were needed to maintain a minimum threshold of pollination during lean years.

  Lemanski said the study offers substantiation to a long-standing concept ecologists refer to as the “insurance hypothesis.” The idea is that ecosystems probably benefit when nature “diversifies the portfolio,” supporting multiple species of a category of a plant or animal, rather than relying on one dominant species.

  Solid design involves having backup plans that fail gracefully, meaning from the smallest detail outward with the bigger infrastructure only threatened after multiple failures. Nature uses solid design because that is what survives after aeons of evolution, so it tends to create ecosystems with multiple niches that are highly efficient. Monocultures — like, paradoxically, equal humans in order to avoid the ecosystem of caste hierarchy, no matter how fakely “diverse” they make themselves by including lots of different races in their low-IQ equal citizenry — tend to obliterate ecosystems or at least keep that at bay, which is why people have lawns: believe it or not, very few of us want the insects, lizards, mice, toads, and snakes in our houses that would be there if we had forest coming up to our walls.

• Biden Dept. of Interior releases new names of federal lands deemed ‘racist and derogatory’
  

  The Board on Geographic Names voted on the final names to replace the names of landmarks on federal lands that feature the term “squaw,” the department said in a news release.

  The removal of the term, which the department says has “historically been used as an offensive ethnic, racial and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women,” is part of an ongoing effort to review and replace derogatory names from federal usage.

  Claiming the moral high ground — as opposed to making things actually work — has always been the refuge of charlatans as well as the deceived bourgeois Useful Idiots of the suburbs and luxury condominiums. In reality, no one except the neurotics care about these names, but that makes changing them appealing to the empty people, who want a moment of feeling supremacy before life reminds them that they are lost, lonely, and have wasted their days in the vainglorious empty pursuit of control and individualism. More accurately, we should replace all names in North America that are not English, German, Greco-Roman, or Nordic in origin. Erase the interloper “Native Americans” — basically immigrants from Mongolia who got here after the ancient Europeans — and send them back to their homeland for more yak meat, pointless warfare, and poverty.

• Can We Manage to Integrate?
  

  Rothstein cites surveys showing that most whites and blacks speak favorably about integration in the abstract. But the data immediately reveal a difficulty: whites consider a neighborhood integrated when the proportion of blacks residing there is around 10 percent, close to the present national total of 12.1 percent. (Rothstein ascribes this preference to whites’ desire to “dominate.”) The same polls show that African-Americans believe that a neighborhood is integrated when blacks account for 20 percent to 50 percent of the inhabitants, two to four times their proportion in the national population.

  The Left needs to believe in diversity because without it, the obviously conjectural and anti-realistic theoretical concept of “equality” stands revealed as utter nonsense. If all humans are equal, a Bantu must be equivalent to an Ainu in intellectual and therefore moral capacity. If that cannot be the case, all humans are not equal… which means that egalitarianism is suicide. And so the pretense must go on, forcing “integration” on people who have no interest in it, and bribing the diversity to participate with the promise of free money taken from the hated White people. It is a revenge tragedy, not a logical policy expansion, and the non-White Irish and Italians are at the forefront of it.

• Migrants say they are grateful to Florida Gov. DeSantis for sending them to Martha’s Vineyard
  

  “The life there is good,” said Eliud Alguilar, a 27-year-old from Venezuela in an interview with The Post, referring to a military base where he and the 49 other migrants were sent by Massachusetts authorities after they landed in Martha’s Vineyard this week. “They treat us well, they provided us with food and medical assistance. We are all well.”

  On Wednesday, 50 migrants who arrived in the US from South America were flown by the Florida state government to the summer resort community, where former President Obama has a lavish mansion. They were taken to a nearby military base Friday where many received medical attention and cell phones to contact immigration lawyers and family members in the US, according to reports.

  Are we going to claim that refugees in Europe and illegal aliens in America exist for any reason other than the free stuff? We are seeing French Revolution fallout here: the upper middle classes hate the lower middle and working classes because they see these people as dumb and likely to support the type of moronic revolution that turned France from a superpower into a backwater. There is some truth to this: working and lower middle classes are generally significantly dumber than upper middle class people, who tend to be somewhere between 120 and 125 IQ points. That loathing manifests in a desire to smash the vote of the proles by constantly bringing in fresh blood which will vote for scientific government, not the excesses of the crowd, and displace the usual stew of jingoism and religious fervor that marks failing societies. Your (meritocratic, not aristocratic) “elites” use diversity to neutralize you because the voters are retards.
• Scientists debate how lethal COVID is.
  

  Gandhi and other researchers argue that most people today have enough immunity — gained from vaccination, infection or both — to protect them against getting seriously ill from COVID. And this is especially so since the omicron variant doesn’t appear to make people as sick as earlier strains, Gandhi says.

  Historians will regard COVID-19 as a classic panic, or mass reaction to symbolism caused by instability. The Left saw its window closing as White America woke up to the Kennedy Hart-Celler scam, and created a panic to crash the economy in order to steal an election and take over so they could import enough new third world minority voters to dominate the founding White population.

• Nanoplastics can disrupt human liver, lung cells’ processes in lab experiments
  

  As liver and lung cells were exposed to more nanoplastics, they produced more reactive oxygen species and different amounts of nucleotides, nucleosides, amino acids, peptides and carboxylic acids, indicating that multiple metabolic processes were disturbed. In some cases, mitochondrial pathways appeared to be dysfunctional. These observations demonstrate that while nanoplastics exposure doesn’t kill human lung and liver cells, it could disrupt critical processes, potentially causing negative impacts to organs, the researchers say.

  Plastic is terrifying because it has more seeming uniformity than natural materials, but we might say this about anything processed. The more we enforce equality on our environment, the more we strangle ourselves with too many possibilities and not enough certainties.

• Land of Limping
  

  It’s impossible to overstate how much the Democratic Party in Illinois is beholden to public-sector unions — or how much more power it wants to give them. Last year, even Chicago’s most liberal citizens were fed up with the teachers’ union, one of the key players in forcing school closures during the pandemic. These closures have demonstrably harmed students, with low-income and minority children suffering the greatest learning losses. But Pritzker and the state legislature then turned around and rewarded the unions further. The Chicago teachers’ union has won the right to bargain on non-wage matters, giving it even more say in shaping education in accordance with its interests.

  It’s impossible to overstate how much the Democratic Party in Illinois is beholden to public-sector unions—or how much more power it wants to give them. Last year, even Chicago’s most liberal citizens were fed up with the teachers’ union, one of the key players in forcing school closures during the pandemic. These closures have demonstrably harmed students, with low-income and minority children suffering the greatest learning losses. But Pritzker and the state legislature then turned around and rewarded the unions further. The Chicago teachers’ union has won the right to bargain on non-wage matters, giving it even more say in shaping education in accordance with its interests.

  Unions are Communism; both are collective reward schemes which means that their morality is to reward both good and bad instead of reward good and remove bad as is the rule in nature and any honest religion. Much of the problem involves the city originally run on the back of the votes of Irish immigrants and eventually manipulated by an Irish political machine for several generations, the debt city of Chicago:

  The report found Chicago’s net debt – or the amount of money needed to pay its bills after accounting for everything the city owns – was $36.4 billion. That represents a per-taxpayer burden of $41,100, meaning each taxpayer would need to send that amount to the city in order for Chicago to eliminate its debt, earning the city an F for fiscal health. Chicago’s debt per taxpayer increased by $4,000 from the previous year and is 5.5 times the average burden of $7,355 per taxpayer across all 75 cities.

  Only New York was in worse shape, with a whopping $68,200 taxpayer burden on $186.7 billion in net debt.

  More than 68% of the city’s total debt burden stems from unfunded pension liabilities and nearly 2% comes from unfunded liabilities for retiree health insurance, meaning fully 70% of the city’s debt is related to retirement benefits.

  How do cities spend themselves into such debt? The same way the Soviet Union did: entitlements, or direct payments to citizens (including in-kind services like public schooling, which is effectively a wealth transfer apparatus). If you lose direction and start polling the population for what it wants, the vast majority will turn out to be mentally disordered and demand free stuff with no responsibility, at which point the society consumes itself but the wailing about oppression and poverty never ends.

  Note that this burden ensures the impending financial default of Illinois which is worsened by the Chicago griftopolis:

  Fiscal watchdog Truth in Accounting crunched the numbers for Illinois and gave the state an F grade in its latest Financial State of the States report. The report showed Illinois had just over $36 billion in assets available to pay bills totaling more than $272 billion, leaving the state needing $236 billion in additional assets to pay its bills.

  Each Illinois taxpayer now owes a $57,000 share of that mounting debt, nearly double what it was just a dozen years ago in 2009. That means every Illinois taxpayer would have to send that much money to Springfield to eliminate the state’s debt burden on top of what he or she already pays just so the state could pay its bills. That amount represents a $5,000 increase from the fiscal year 2019 report despite Illinois receiving billions in federal relief money due to the coronavirus pandemic.

  Democracies always end this way. Someone finds a pity object, and this justifies loosening up the purse-strings, at which point the Money Boat of taxpayer-government largesse becomes the only gain in town. Eventually you reach Chicago or Moscow levels of debt and then you become Mexico.

• As autocrats ascend, gloomy data on democracies’ decline
  

  Brazil is one of 12 countries where domestic democratic systems are tilting toward autocracy, according to data published by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), an independent research institute based at the University of Gothenburg. The other 11 countries span the globe: Poland, Niger, Indonesia, Botswana, Guatemala, Tunisia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Guyana, Mauritius and Slovenia.

  In addition to these 12 countries where crises of democracy are still unfolding, another 17 have lost the fight in the past decade alone — including Turkey, the Philippines and Hungary.

  Rich countries are still sneering at poor countries for being unable to afford the opulent dysfunction of democracy. Most likely, no one can afford it, and rich countries are just a few decades away from having burned through their wealth, being unable to create more with their diversity-and-soy populations, and then fading away. Those societies which avoid the horrors of democracy, inclusion, equality, diversity, and socialism will become self-sufficient and have the best chance of survival as anything but third-world ruins. Some even in the overcivilized (as opposed to uncivilized and normal levels of civilization) West have started to realize populism means decrease in government because government supports the weak who then parasitize the strong:

  It has also been suggested that Mr Kwarteng could bring forward a 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax, which his predecessor Rishi Sunak had planned for 2024.

  In addition, according to the Sun on Sunday, Ms Truss’s and Mr Kwarteng’s fiscal stimulus will see the announcement of new ‘investment zones’.

  The newspaper reported these ultra low tax and low regulation parts of Britain could also see personal taxes – such as National Insurance or income tax – cut for those who live and work in these areas.

  Could our solution be as simple as eliminating taxes, slashing red tape, deporting the diversity, and ending the free stuff from government? Yes, it could, but then we have to deal with the prospect of prole revolt, which is why people tend to want authoritarian governments, when really all they need is social hierarchy that keeps the lower mentalities at lower levels of society. Some are starting to see the light but not think outside convention on the issue of equality and the suicidal pursuit of it through wealth redistribution:

  Where would you rather live? A society where the rich are extraordinarily rich and the poor are very poor, or one where the rich are merely very well off but even those on the lowest incomes also enjoy a decent standard of living?

  For Norway, it’s a consistently rosy picture. The top 10 per cent rank second for living standards among the top deciles in all countries; the median Norwegian household ranks second among all national averages, and all the way down at the other end, Norway’s poorest 5 per cent are the most prosperous bottom 5 per cent in the world. Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor.

  Britain is a different story. While the top earners rank fifth, the average household ranks 12th and the poorest 5 per cent rank 15th. Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

  Norway is floating on free oil money and being a tiny mostly rural country. You can get away with a little bit of Communism then although it steadily weakens your people until they reach some point where they are helpless little fetuses screaming for more government even as it fails them. If you slash taxes, the cost of living goes down, and the poor can live well on what they have.

• Supreme Court reverses course, Jewish university forced to recognize LGBTQ student group
  

  The Jewish university must first seek an appeal from the state appellate or district courts before the Supreme Court, according to the majority opinion of the Court.

  Alito raised concern that the Court’s current decision to grant a stay during the future duration of the lawsuit would force the university to “instruct its students in accordance with what it regards as an incorrect interpretation of Torah and Jewish law.”

  “The First Amendment guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion, and if that provision means anything, it prohibits a State from enforcing its own preferred interpretation of Holy Scripture,” Alito wrote.

  The 14A will be a problem here. When the State is tasked with ensuring the “equal protection of its laws” for all citizens, that means that the choices of the citizen select what is enforced on the group. If someone wants to be a vegisexual, the group must then accommodate that; in other words, the group can have no standards, therefore you cannot have culture or religion, only different flavors of egalitarian government dogma. The 14A was used to destroy the former Confederacy and then expanded into postwar propaganda that became the Civil Rights movement, giving Leftists their permanent voting bloc in the diversity majority. That is how easy it is to destroy a nation.

• Expert warns Biden’s deal to give rail workers a 24% pay rise will lead to more huge settlements
  

  The Biden administration reached a tentative deal on Thursday to raise rail employees’ salaries by 24 percent, but labor experts say the deal could embolden future strikers.

  According to the ILR, there were roughly 180 strikes in the first-half of 2022 compared to 102 in the same time last year, which saw only 26,500 workers join stoppages.

  By the end of 2021, the US saw a total of 265 strikes, with about 62,000 workers involved.

  Unions are parasites and nothing else. They extract money from the consumers and give it to small groups of workers, creating a protected class of people who do very little work for a lot of money. The Biden plan is the Leftist plan as it always is: give out lots of free money, then tax the “growth” that results, basically raising costs so that only those who obey the system will have enough money to live outside the ghetto or trailer park.

• The emotional labor of staying cheerful at work can lead to employee burnout
  

  The more people adjust their moods to be happy, the fewer emotional resources they have at the end of the day. That means they are less able to handle challenging tasks and interactions and have a harder time staying on task. Their tank is empty despite being in a good mood, Frank explained.

  In other words, the job of being “happy” replaces the job of getting the job done, and since not the job itself but interacting with diverse unstable neurotic proles is unpleasant, people are exhausted simply by trying to have a better mood. Why not fix the jobs themselves? This would require ending Civil Rights and Human Rights, but we would all live better, so in actual reality it is a better choice.

• Court upholds Texas’ anti-censorship social media law
  

  Critics of the law argued that it violates the First Amendment rights of social media companies by forcing private companies to publish content they don’t want to. The First Amendment protects both people and companies from censorship by the government intervention in speech.

  Writing the ruling on behalf of a three-judge panel, Judge Andrew Oldham said the court “rejects the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”

  “The Platforms are not newspapers,” he continued. “Their censorship is not speech.”

  In other words, as predicted here, common carrier law was better than Clinton-era DMCA thinking.

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