Amerika

• Foie gras producers blast attack on French ‘art of living’ as US court clears ban

  This is bigger than it seems. Check it out:

  “It is unacceptable that such a decision, taken under the influence of the lobbying of some activists orchestrating regular misinformation on our products to advocate dogmatic vegetarianism, could endanger the image of an emblematic dish of the French art of living,” Michel Fruchet, head of French foie gras producers group Cifog, said in a statement on Tuesday.

  In other words, our national culture is more important than your objective/universal international standards, ideology, and commerce. The “art of living” means living well according to a folkway, or way of living that is tied to culture, heritage, faith, and values. It matters more than human morality, even, because without a belief in life as good and full of the potential of greatness, we have nothing but materialism, obedience, and of course the endless droning ideology about equality.

• Waste reduction law could force manufacturers to repair broken goods

  Another well-intentioned but stupid law, the “right to repair” is the EnergyStar of the current decade. The original idea of “right to repair” was that manufacturers would not be enabled by the courts to prevent you from repairing technological objects that you purchased from them because of intellectual property concerns. This was a parallel to natural rights: government cannot restrict you from doing something that you would do in nature, such as acquire an object and manipulate it. However, courts were stepping in to protect businesses from the needs of their clients. Instead of addressing that, government implemented another expensive regulatory scheme which will make the lawyers rich and make exports even less competitive. When do we admit that democracy fails us unless we go into a panic and dedicate ourselves to undoing the results of democracy?

• Dog breeds really do have distinct personalities—and they’re rooted in DNA

  It turns out that life is exactly as you would expect: the blueprint (genetics) determines more than the indoctrination (education, peer pressure, propaganda). This offends human beings, who want to believe that they are in control of the world. We know the world only through our minds, so our eternal error is confusing the world with our minds and assuming that we control it instead of the other way around (a condition called individualism, narcissism, solipsism, and hubris). In reality, we are what we are, and any attempt to rise above that state is mere fakery which ultimately will be revealed, even if only to us, making us miserable and destructive but not changing the state of things. Human personalities are just as hard-wired as those of dogs, and also are specific to sub-species such as ethnic and racial groups. They vary with social class also and family, and individuals are born highly different. It is our job to put them in the right hierarchical order so that they can perform what their talents dictate for the benefit of themselves, others, and the intangibles like civilization, culture, heritage, faith, and values.

• Why Single Women Are (Way) More Likely to Own a Home Than Single Men

  Unmarried women earn more than unmarried men. They also seem to excel more at the narrow and procedural environments of school, work, and committees. This means that we are slowly shifting to a matriarchy through the magic of bureaucracy, which pervades the private sector as much as the public at this point. In turn, this means that women are focused on being independent instead of having families, which partially explains our demographic decline. The rest involves the misery of jobs, the tedium of modern life, the feeling of being trapped, and the alienation caused by having little if anything in common with the anonymous crowd around you. Societies cannot be markets alone. The markets, governments, and institutions that they have must serve the organic civilization, formed of the mosaic of culture, heritage, faith, traditions, customs, and values.

• Elizabeth Warren: slurs against her reveal confused US attitudes to Native American ancestry

  No one really wants to face this, but Amerinds (“Native Americans” or “First Nations”) are not really a desired population. Amerinds are Mongolian immigrants to the new world, and the right way to restore world order is to repatriate them all to their ancestral homeland.

• Democracy in Europe ‘has declined more than any other region’

  Especially in Western Europe, democracy is in decline. Europeans have finally figured out that democracy has wrecked us, turning us from people of dignity and promise to a bunch of equal consumers crowded into ugly cities to earn money and buy stuff that does even particularly matter to us. We have fallen, and as a result, faith in democracy has collapsed not just in Europe but in the USA as people see just how devastating it has been. Not just in terms of bad politics, but in what it has done to us, making us self-centered and myopic people who are the opposite of our heroic ancestors. However, we are really good at selling things, talking the opposite sex into bed, praising diversity, and filling out TPS reports.

• Starbucks to install safe needle disposal boxes after employees sign petition

  One Starbucks location threw out a couple black fellows who asked to use the restroom. This was denounced in an official struggle session, Starbucks forced to apologize and grovel, and the CEO announced that restrooms were open to all people at all Starbucks locations in order to avoid the one sin of our time, inequality in the form of “racism.” Fast forward a few months: now that the general public is using Starbucks restrooms, they are about the same as McDonald’s restrooms, namely full of junkies shooting up and people having dubious sex in the stalls. Now needle disposal boxes are needed. Chalk this one up to the invisible high cost of diversity that somehow remains widely denied by most of our fellow citizens.

• Birds dying in New Zealand due to trend of attaching Christmas decorations to them

  Can we just for a moment admit that modernity is the most thoughtless era of humanity? When The Renaissance,™ The Enlightenment,™ and finally Democracy Incorporated come to power and tell you that individuality is the most important trait of humanity and that you are equal no matter what choices you make, you essentially turn people into little worlds of themselves. They become obsessed with who they are, what they want, and how important they are in the eyes of others, but in order to do this, they entirely displace reality from their thinking, including consequences of actions. As a result, if it is funny to put a decoration on a bird, throw litter out of the car, spray graffiti across the city, buy garish products and gadgets that end up in the landfill, engage in casual sex and drug abuse, or other self-centered actions, they just go ahead and do it. Someone else pays the price. That is the essence of modernity: externalizing the costs of your actions to the rest of society. Even if it turns out that humans were not deliberately attaching these decorations to birds, we should consider the great heap of plastic waste that we generate each holiday season and how it is obvious that it will have a negative effect on wildlife.

• Rare blue pigment found in medieval woman’s teeth rewrites history

  Anatomy of a Leftist smear: “We found one woman with rare paint on her teeth that was used to paint manuscripts, therefore women were equally represented in the painting of manuscripts but forgotten by history because of discrimination!” Does anyone even believe the bleat anymore?

• India likely to surpass U.S to be world’s second largest economy by 2030

  One firm reports that by 2030, seven of the ten top economies will be in the developing world. Maybe so, maybe not. We should ask whether the spread of technology to another six billion people has been an intelligent thing. We should also ask whether these developing economies are in fact dependent on the West, and what that means for such predictions as the West becomes self-sufficient. After all, the leader on this list, China, seems to believe that its economic growth spurt has ended and so war is inevitable. If they cannot clash with the US, who else will they fight? Most likely the nearest population that can counter theirs, which is India with another billion and a half people.

• U.S. Fertility Rate Declines for Seventh Year Running

  In actuality, the US grew too fast and too big, and now it is declining in size as people realize that while it is the most comfortable place in the world to live, it comes with Soviet-like requires to work endless hours doing make-work, engage in submissive social interactions, commute through urban wastelands, and deal with the consequences of an ideological government and consumer paradise in which every person is entirely self-centered. Future historians will record that this wealthy lifestyle rather than making people happy made them sad, but did so in such a way that they could not admit it without appearing defective, so instead they simply isolated themselves instead, living in their apartments for their own pleasures, never forming a connection to anyone else that was not transient, materialistic, and insincere.

• The government shutdown spotlights a bigger issue: 78% of US workers live paycheck to paycheck

  In a pioneer society, everyone supports themselves; a small minority die out from bad luck or ineptitude. As soon as humans gain power, however, they start wanting to control for that risk because each individual feels that he will face it next, and therefore when in groups, human individuals demand protection for the collective, both through increased safety and some kind of economic “safety net” so that no one will die out. The problem with these “safe” societies is that they remove us from a consideration of reality and move us into a world of considering human judgments, desires, laws, economics, and politics. With safety, society becomes bureaucratic; with bureaucracy, it becomes self-referential. The more we try to make life safe, the more complex with make our society, and yet the more unstable it becomes, because instead of individuals to live and appreciate the results of their activity, we are funneling all of that through a central command-and-control structure which then makes broad rules which tend to “leak” because they become imprecise at the local level. US workers are in trouble because their money buys less, their costs are higher, and their taxes are massive, all in the name of paying for safety and the safety net. Abolish those and workers will be rewarded for performance, which means that the good ones will thrive and the bad ones will die out, as is the way of nature. Defending incompetence merely makes us incompetent, and then everyone suffers.

• Trump’s border wall isn’t about national security. It’s about stoking racial resentment.

  How is it “racial resentment” to refuse to be genocided? Our Leftist government has been importing the third world to replace us since 1965, and during that time, our society has fallen apart because diversity destroys unity. Instead of a population working together, you have many clashing special interest groups, each vying for power. Imagine an RV hurtling down the freeway in which a dozen people are fighting for control of the steering wheel. Diversity is toxic, and it is not bigoted to say that, because the argument is an attack on diversity itself, not the groups we bring in. We have to escape diversity or it will end us, and that will bring about worse results for all of the groups involved.

• These are the animals that went extinct in 2018

  If we consider human need as inflexible — “there is a person here, and he has needs, so we cannot stop him from fulfilling those” — we become a species without a stop button. We grow until we use up every resource and take over every piece of land. Then what happens? The species in those places die out, for starters. Then the ecosystems collapse. Soon we have a world of farm fields with a few parks. Alarming, it does not take us using absolutely all of the land for this to happen, only using most of it. Natural species require more space than we anticipate, and our activities destroy too many of them. In particular, at least one species here is being hunted to extinction for a body part used in folk medicine in China.

• Congressman Introduces ‘420’ Marijuana Legalization Bill to Regulate Weed Like Alcohol Throughout U.S.

  Back in the hazy days, I opined that legalization was a bad option but decriminalization was a good one. In my experience, all but a few percentage points of stoners are lazy creatures borne of an ethic of convenience. They buy weed because they like to feel good and it is socially important for them to have some edgy habit that makes them seem unique or have a place in their friend group. If we decriminalize, the non-lazy stoners can grow as much weed as they want and their friends can come over to smoke it. If we are wise, we will make it illegal to sell. This restricts usage to those who can handle it. As I warned back in the day, if we legalize, it will become just another product and it will be sold by the large corporations whose treatment of alcohol and tobacco is already suspect. America wants to legalize weed in part to cement its status as a falling second incarnation of Rome, and partially just to tax it and keep the money rolling to government, which will waste most of it in order to enrich a few bureaucrats and politicians. Amazingly, the voters fall for this, over and over again.

• Right wing pensioners are SEVEN TIMES more likely to spread fake news than millennials, claim scientists

  Let us debunk some academic spin: only ten percent of people shared fake news, and among those, Right-wing people over sixty-five were only a quarter of the number. Even more, let us be honest: the media leans Left, so Leftists have no need to share news from edgy sites, because the large news outlets are already spewing what the Leftists want to hear!

• Evangelical group wants gays removed from anti-lynching bill

  It sounds really, really bad if you oppose an anti-lynching bill, but to a realist, this is simply political theater. No one is getting lynched. If someone does get lynched, we have a maze of hate crime laws under which we can charge the malefactors responsible and destroy their lives. However, it makes good headlines. The women squirm and sigh. The angry youth, righteously disturbed at what a modern Hell they live in but unable to understand how it got this way, misdirect their anger at people who are not nice and figure that this way, by removing evil, they will leave only good, not realizing that you cannot remove evil and that you leave only people who hide their evil. When you make one type of evil a target, you let the other types off the hook, which is what the Left has always wanted us to do: legalize evil that the Left likes, and criminalize any type of evil that might impede the Left. That means that this bill is a public relations exercise designed to produce a photo opportunity, not an exercise in leadership.

• Trump’s crackdown on the H-1B visa is eating into Indian IT’s profits

  The Trump crackdown on H-1B visas has forced Indian outsourcing companies to hire American talent. This article argues strongly that there is a skills gap in America, but based on my years in the workforce, that is utter nonsense. We have more than enough skilled people, but most of them want to avoid the soulless wasteland of political manipulation and make-work that is the modern office. Even among those who do participate, the good ones are inevitably pushed down by the compliant ones, including lots of useless slackers. This means that we are promoting the bad at the expense of the good, and so naturally, most of the real talent gets the heck out of dodge.

• Intelligent males may make female birds swoon: study

  “Science” discovers what common sense knew long ago: intelligence is a desired trait in a mate, since it means that the individual is likely to be more competent in dealing with reality.

• America’s Electric Grid Has a Vulnerable Back Door—and Russia Walked Through It (non-paywall)

  The Russian hacks turn out to be much of what we saw with the DNC: use phishing, or sending messages that look official to people who then click on them and surrender their credentials, to infiltrate the people surrounding your actual target. The bigger question is whether we treat this as an act of war or not. Setting aside the Left’s new paranoia about Russia, and the cold war era bluster of neoconservatives, we have to expect that every nation and group on Earth acts in its own self-interest alone. This means that if Russia can conquer us, they will. They are neither friend nor foe, although as Donald Trump intuited, the correct strategy is to be friendly on the surface and then let the evidence pile up, at which point you have some bargaining chips.

• Excessive social media users demonstrate impaired decision making in the Iowa Gambling Task

  If you use social media a lot, your brain experience symptoms similar to those of drug withdrawal when you stop using the internet so much. This follows up on an earlier study about internet addiction which found changes to the brain brought on by heavy internet use.

• Chinese envoy Lu Shaye accuses Canada of ‘white supremacy’ for demanding release of detained citizens

  You might not think that China would respond exactly like Black Lives Matter to any actions against members of its tribe, but this would not be the case: every minority group — religious, ethnic, cultural, racial — responds like this because they view it as an attack on the group. Your standards are not their standards, and they want to assert their standards, starting with self-interest which states that whatever benefits their group is good. If what you do benefits your group and has zero impact on them, it is neutral, unless you are growing stronger to the point where you might challenge them. Diversity does not work because of what diversity is, which is basically a cage match between different tribes under the guise of universal law and morality, and has nothing to do with which groups are involved. Even at an international level (globalism) diversity causes nothing but pain and destruction. You are never free of the section of your life, wealth, and well-being that diversity steals every day.

• Brain scans show social exclusion creates jihadists, say researchers

  Leftists claim that social exclusion radicalizes people into defending their own tribe. A saner interpretation might suggest that diversity, because it necessarily causes social exclusion since there is not a single standard uniting all of society at a social level (only ideological, legal, and economic), leads to such radicalization. In other words, the more diversity you have, the more jihadis and crazed white nationalists you will have. End diversity and end the problem.

• Parents in Essex removing pupils from RE lessons about Islam, report finds

  Parents do not particularly feel like having their children indoctrinated in foreign faiths and ideologies. In addition, many of them realize that there is great risk there: if the child, being innocent of the ways of adult politics, accidentally says something which could be interpreted as opposing Islam or diversity, the parents will get punished and the child possibly taken away. In other words, for the family, the state presents nothing but risk when it decides to teach tolerance.

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