Amerika

• Black Americans deeply pessimistic about country under president who more than 8 in 10 describe as ‘a racist,’ Post-Ipsos poll finds

  Looks like bring a good economy and safety from obliteration by Hispanics did not sway the minority vote. This will have the Left very excited.

• Cases of bottled water found inside another vacant building in Flint

  People do not understand how the shakedown operates. A community elects corrupt officials who decide they want more money. They discover something terrible, like dirty water coming out of a tap. A few experts weigh in because this is their chance at their fifteen minutes of fame. They the local warlords invite the journalists in for a press event, and take them to whatever part of town has dirty water. The press gets pictures and lots of juicy human interest stuff, like the story of young kids who have to bathe in the nearby river because the water at home is too scary. Then they run off to their keyboards and blast out lots of moaning, mournful, and dramatic pieces. This makes all the people out there feel important for feeling the same things that people are in those pieces, so attention rises. This brings in others. However, they are addressing a false crisis; the water is not actually needed, since few people are as afflicted as portrayed in the story, if at all. In fact, the whole thing is a manufactured crisis, but no one will believe that because it seems so real and scary. Billions of dollars of aid flow in to address the “problem,” and all of it is immediately spent on hiring the firms of friends, relatives, and business associates of the local warlords, who receive kickbacks over the next few years so that the taxman never knows. In the end, a billion dollars of aid may translate to a hundred million dollars in the pockets of the local authorities, but for them, it is worthwhile. The rest of us pay. Five years later, the problem repeats, because it never was real and no money was spent on actual structural fixes. This is why, despite billions in aid, places like Appalachia, Detroit, Mexico, the Congo, and the ghettos of California still have the same problems that they did in the 1920s. The people will not help themselves and the aid goes to the local officials. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.

• Anti-Trump protests have shrunk. What’s it mean for 2020?

  The Anti-Trump protests worked because they were based on fear of what he would do, but now we have seen what he has done, and it does not match up at all to the fears. The early hype was based on our ignorance, not wisdom. Since the promised genocides, totalitarianism, and other horrors have not materialized, many people have simply gone back home, because Trump represents more a tough but benevolent guardian than the Hitler-Mao crossover we were promised. For 2020, this means that many people are going to sit it out at home or vote for Trump, but they face a minority, single woman, and soyboy vote stacked against them.

• ‘Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959′: Why I became a #TradWife

  No one wants to face this, but the grim fact is that the less modernity/progress we have in our lives, the better the quality of those lives and therefore the more happiness we have, even though we have to accept our unequal place in a hierarchy. However, hierarchy is fundamental to order, and lack of order makes us miserable, so more people are giving up on the individualistic dream of being first in line in an order of themselves, and are turning toward traditional ways of life.

• Left wing? You may be on police extremism list

  Government has come out and admitted that it wants to get rid of anyone who is a threat to the Narrative. Why, then, are Left-wingers included? The answer is that they take the mask off: they reveal that the actual end goal is Communism, so it benefits government if these groups go away since ordinary, mainstream Leftism has gone so far Left that it is a kiss and a sneeze away from Full Communism anyway. Right-wingers need to be removed anyway, and jihadis just make diversity look bad. No sane government would attempt a list of this sort, but for democracy, the insane is the normal.

• New Chinese virus ‘will have infected hundreds’

  We’re all cheering for you, Wuhan Flu!

  There have been 41 laboratory-confirmed cases of the new virus, but UK experts estimate the figure is closer to 1,700.

  Two people are known to have died from the virus, which appeared in Wuhan city in December.

  While the outbreak is centred on Wuhan, there have been two cases in Thailand and one in Japan.

  Nature keeps trying to thin the herd. A disease that killed off the weak while sparing the strong would be ideal, and flus tend to spare those who are physically healthy and have enough forethought to do things like stockpile fluids and medicines that can alleviate symptoms, since as with most diseases, it is the symptoms — the reactions of the body to the infection — that kill you more than the initiating pathogen itself directly.

• Amsterdam to Buy Debts of Young Adults In Order to Help Them Get Jobs and Pursue Higher Education

  Democracy basically sets the stage for Communism. This semi-freebie (students still must repay the debt, just at a rate pegged to their income level) seems popular until people realize that it means that schools can continue to raise costs, since a pressure escape valve has been created, and that now, employers can pay less. As always, the free stuff is just a highly inefficient loan, even worse than insurance. How can anything be more of a ripoff than insurance? Market socialist liberal democracy: Hold my beer.

• Michelle Obama’s school lunch program faces new cuts on former first lady’s birthday

  Trump trolls the Left yet again by removing an ideological program, or one designed for symbolic social success instead of real-world positive effects, and replacing it with a functional idea based on what has worked in the past. This defeats the Leftist.

• Students Assigned to Pack Bags and Pretend They Are Refugees in Trump’s America

  Can we admit yet that Leftist education is pure propaganda for the Leftists supported by the union and the typical neurotic people who are hired as bureaucrats and teachers? For kicks, they should just deport these kids. Whatever “schoolwork” this activity represents is not only propaganda, but useless make-work. Leave the kids at home to learn about life on their own instead of enslaving them to this glorified daycare and struggle session.

• ‘Only eyes’: Auschwitz liberator recalls death camp inmates 75 years on

  This article is hilarious propaganda, but the bigger point is that there are giant holes in the Holocaust narrative and it does not matter. The basic fact of the Holocaust — under the shift in control to the Nazis, some amount of Jews died through the result of that shift — remains true, and we should not worry about the details. We know that the Nazis wanted to use Jews as slave labor, and Jews were both bad workers and saboteurs, leading us to question the sanity of anyone who wanted to use them as labor in the first place. Future generations will remember the lesson of the Holocaust as “deport, so that harm does not occur” much in line with what Theodor Herzl suggested, and will recognize the bigger point is that you cannot use people as tools. You cannot “assimilate” them and indoctrinate them in your laws and expect that they will faithfully carry on your society, since they are different. All groups have an inherent worth as the Left argues, but they also have inherently different paths, as the Right acknowledges. A Jew can never do what a German can do, just like an Irishman or Hispanic can never do what ethnic Western Europeans did in America.

• Since the Industrial Revolution, “normal” body temperature has changed

  This story presents a cautionary tale about the use of averages. “Normal” body temperature was set by measuring the average of thousands of mostly German-descended people; it turns out that some of them had chronic infections, driving up the average. Now that people have fewer constant infections and are from different heritage lines, the average is in flux, and we see that normal body temperature in fact is something that can only be assigned on an individual level.

• Around 75% of Japanese see need to make nation more hospitable for foreign residents, government survey shows

  Neurotic Leftists keep chipping away on Japan in order to bring diversity there, too. When diversity occurs, culture goes away, and it can be replaced by Leftism, producing more zombies to carry out the ideological dream of having symbols win over reality. This is a primal human superstition, and it reflects our desire as individuals to have our beliefs about what is “good” replace any prior structures in nature. In the meantime, we see how democracy is manipulated: slow steady pressure telling people what they should believe, then that most others believe the same, causes them to adjust their opinion to reflect what they think is the norm and then defend that opinion as if it were their own. Like herding sheep.

• A Sense of Climate Urgency Takes Hold in Davos

  Dealing with “climate urgency” proves far easier than addressing the whole of human problems: ecocide, existential misery, lack of purpose, boredom, neurosis, superstition, narcissism, and most of all, our solipsistic outlook from which we are trying to evolve. We have big problems, but we prefer symbolic ones because we feel as if we can control them like something we hold in our hands. Despite the mass hype, “climate urgency” will involve little lifestyle change for the average citizen; they will buy Green™ products and make sure their electricity comes from solar, wind, thorium reactors, and natural gas. But actually change, which requires changing ourselves to adapt not to a physical world but to its implications, both material and existential? Never.

• Brazil removes culture secretary after video echoes Goebbels

  “Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and it will be national … and imperative because it will be rooted in the urgent aspirations of our people, or it will be nothing,” he said in the video.

  Goebbels, Hitler’s notorious ideologue, told theater directors during the Nazi regime that: “German art of the next decade will be heroic, will be wildly romantic, will be objective and free of sentimentality, will be national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or else it will be nothing.”

  Not much similarity. More media blitz used to remove promising people.

• America’s most widely consumed oil causes genetic changes in the brain

  Soybean oil provides part of the modern dream of making cheap food for the masses, but it disturbs the ability of the brain to regulate weight as well as undertake normal thought process, at least in mice. If we have to go back to making real food, we are going to be able to support a far smaller group of humans. In the meantime, the people who eat real food can get it today, but they spend a few thousand dollars a month on it.

• Russia’s foreign minister slams ‘aggressive’ US policies

  Aggressive is good. It means attention to both the perpetually elusive big picture and aligning all of the details behind it. It means intolerance of sloppiness, laziness, obliviousness, blithe pacifism and blind optimism, solipsism, individualism, narcissism, and other human failings. Only an egalitarian society could get so pacifistic — that way, no individuals will be sacrificed! — that it would consider aggression to be “bad.”

• Old fishing hooks are severe hazards for sharks

  Do we want to be jerks, or be able to respect ourselves? Humanity wrecks good things in pursuit of recreation and then ignores the problem since it does not cost individuals personally. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the commons may be the environment itself, and the solution might be ensuring no access for people who do not own huge amounts of it and therefore suffer if it is damaged.

• UK pub numbers rise for the first time in a decade

  Under onslaught from anti-alcohol and anti-smoking legislation, pubs have reinvented themselves as restaurants. This is too bad because the original idea of the pub was that everyone could meet there and enjoy themselves. Our moralism over alcohol and tobacco reflects our denial of the things actually killing us, like cheap industrial food, car and truck exhaust, factory pollution, and existential misery.

• France’s central bank says historic pension reform strike has stunted growth

  “Give us free stuff or we will destroy your economy.” Unions may be the oldest shakedown, and humanity will either learn to defeat them or slowly consume itself out of guilt for “the workers” who are actually parasites.

• Too little sleep tied to increased heart disease risk

  No one gets enough sleep because they spent too long at work and come home miserable, so they stay up late just trying to have lives. Then, their sleep quality is terrible because their fellow citizens are out there honking horns, starting fires, robbing and beating each other, gunning their engines, crashing into things, and otherwise behaving like stupid Simians. Cut work hours and crack down on noise and people will be a lot healthier and saner.

Tags: linkpost, periscope