Amerika

• Multiple Fatalities in Shooting at Jacksonville, Florida, Gaming Tournament, Police Say

  There was one gunman in the shooting and he was dead at the scene, Sheriff Mike Williams of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said at a news conference. He described him as a white man and said authorities were waiting to confirm his identity.

  Glad we are back to announcing races at the first press conference about a mass shooting. Or are we?

• Only 1 in 3 Publishers Sees a Clear Traffic Boost From Google’s AMP

  Our overarching finding is that AMP boosts traffic for publishers on average, but most publishers are not average. Only 1 in 3 we analyzed could see clear statistical evidence of a traffic increase. Though it may be possible to optimize AMP implementation to improve monetization, publishers seeing lower revenue on the platform will have a hard time making the case that a traffic boost will make up for it.

  Google took over the web with its PageRank algorithm which, because Google became a monopoly, quickly standardized the internet to the requirements of a single company, Google. This led to what became the social media revolution, or everyone gathered in a few “safe spaces” instead of a Wild West of free-flowing, independently-produced information.

• Kushner reportedly worked to strip Jordan’s two million Palestinians of refugee status

  Kushner, who has been toiling on a peace plan that Washington is slated to present to Israel and the Palestinians in the near future, was trying to disrupt the UN agency’s work as part of a bigger move, which American and Palestinian officials say is an attempt to completely remove the Palestinian refugee issue from the negotiations table.

  He is laying the groundwork for future decisions to ignore or remove refugee status to those who simply do not belong in a place, like Middle Eastern people in Europe. Soon this will be used to remove the presumed legitimacy of migrants, which will leave them being seen as they are, invaders.

• Small-Town Ingenuity Is Making Gigabit Broadband a Reality

  Twenty-one states currently have laws—largely manufactured by telecom industry lobbyists—that impede independent ISPs trying to deploy fiber. Wilson, North Carolina, for example, was one of the first municipalities to build out a network and show that fiber to the home was possible in a rural town. But in response, lobbyists forced through legislation to restrict municipal networks in North Carolina. The absurd result of this was that the Wilson fiber network has actually had to shutter service for some of its customers.

  Voters, who are apparently congenital idiots, view regulation as a form of protection for the consumer. In reality, it raises costs for smaller firms, and that means fewer options for consumers, because the entrenched monopolies that they deal with will never face any actual competition from alternatives.

• Chicago Plans to Take on $10 Billion More Debt to Make Up for $28 Billon Pension Hole

  The Democrat-led city of Chicago has a new plan to try and make up the difference of a $28 billion pension deficit: take on another $10 billion in debt.

  Even as Chicago’s bonds have already been rated at junk status, Mayor Emanuel imagines that the new round of bonds could be sold to willing buyers and will earn enough to surpass the city’s interest obligations on the debt.

  If the plan is passed, it will become the biggest pension obligation bond ever issued by an American city.

  All of our diverse Leftist-run cities and states appear to be going into deep debt. We never could afford the entitlements state, and the luxurious pensions offered by these cities have put them deep in the red. They have no choice now but to borrow until a default becomes necessary, at which point everyone loses their pensions.

• Houston-area voters overwhelmingly back flood-control bond

  Voters in Houston and its surrounding county marked the anniversary of Hurricane Harvey coming ashore by approving the issuance of $2.5 billion in bonds to fund flood-control projects that might mitigate the damage caused by future storms.

  Another bankrupt minority-majority city offers more bonds because it cannot manage its money. Houston has had thirty years to address this problem, but during that time became minority-majority, and so political activity focused on entitlements instead of infrastructure. Now, $2.5bn will not be enough, and much of the money will be stolen like the last few budget initiatives approved to deal with problems that persist to this day.

• It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs

  [A]nother revolution in work occurred in the 18th century, which historians call the “industrious revolution.” Before this revolution, people worked where they lived, perhaps at a farm or a shop. The manufacturing of textiles, for example, relied on networks of independent farmers who spun fibers and wove cloth. They worked on their own; they were not employees.

  In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today’s digital revolution.

  This should be a horror movie entitled “rise of The Job.” Jobs are jails: you exist to satisfy measurements of others, not actually produce, and so most of the activity becomes make-work and politics becomes more important than competence. We were better off as a network of independent contractors, paying for our own benefits and managing our own time, so that the most competent were rewarded with more money and free time. Instead, we have egalitarian jobs where everyone must waste at minimum the same amount of time playing Fisher-Price Office.

• Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend

  Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn’t the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.

  The elites have come up with a new argument for socialism: once we create something, the first one is expensive, and the rest are just about free. They will quickly morph this into having government pay for the first one, and then everyone else have subsidized versions of it, sort of like how they are calling to make healthcare a human right or internet a publicly-funded utility. The real zero-sum game in life is choice, and since each piece of software represents choices which are the product of assembled talent and wisdom, the end result of this new socialism will be to remove the incentive to get that choice correct, and soon every operating system will be as bad as Windows 10.

• How Donald Trump can survive the onslaught against his presidency

  In the long slog to unseat the president, the official merger of the anti-Trump forces marks a dramatic turning point. For one thing, it shows beyond doubt that the Mueller probe is fundamentally tainted by partisan politics, with the latest example involving Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. Inexplicably, Cohen’s case remains in control of Manhattan federal prosecutors.

  …With Davis serving as Cohen’s lawyer, the Clinton machine is effectively directing much of the assault on the president. After brokering Cohen’s deal with prosecutors, Davis began a televised barnstorming tour where he declared that because Cohen said Trump “directed” him to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels and another woman during the 2016 campaign, it is certain the president broke campaign-finance laws.

  The assault on Donald Trump has validated his comments about draining the swamp and has shown just how much corruption has seized this country during the Clinton and Obama years.

• Native Brits ethnically cleansed from Britain’s second biggest city

  By the time of the next census in 2021, indigenous Brits will be less than 50% of the population of their city of Birmingham.

  In 2013, an official report declared that even then, less than a third of schoolchildren in the city were White.

  To win at the social game of being a white person now, you have to adore the minority pets, because they are essential for the Leftist agenda which seems to replace indigenous groups with raceless people dependent on government for guidance.

• 11 suspects identified in arrests from UNC ‘Silent Sam’ toppling and protests

  UNC-Chapel Hill officials Saturday night released the names of 11 people arrested this week in connection with the toppling and subsequent protests of a Confederate monument on campus known as “Silent Sam.”

  Another day, and more Antifa in the streets destroying things while Leftists sit at home and cheer. More censorship from social media, and more local judges and politicians revealing their bias. In Europe, migrants destroy more once-impressive cities and assault more citizens. The remaining quasi-functional people in the West are seeing their future under Leftism: total destruction.

• Massive Pyramid, Lost City and Ancient Human Sacrifices Unearthed in China

  A 4,300-year-old city, which has a massive step pyramid that is at least 230 feet (70 meters) high and spans 59 acres (24 hectares) at its base, has been excavated in China, archaeologists reported in the August issue of the journal Antiquity.

  …The pyramid contains 11 steps, each of which was lined with stone. On the topmost step, there “were extensive palaces built of rammed earth, with wooden pillars and roofing tiles, a gigantic water reservoir, and domestic remains related to daily life,” the researchers wrote.

  …The remains of numerous human sacrifices have been discovered at Shimao. “In the outer gateway of the eastern gate on the outer rampart alone, six pits containing decapitated human heads have been found,” the archaeologists wrote.

  Ancient civilizations across the world followed mostly similar practices. Compare this to Cahokia, Tenochtitlan, Chichen Itza, and Egypt.

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