Amerika

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• Russian hack brings changes, uncertainty to US court system
  

  Hackers probably gained access to the vast trove of confidential information hidden in sealed documents, including trade secrets, espionage targets, whistleblower reports and arrest warrants. It could take years to learn what information was obtained and what hackers are doing with it.

  It’s also not clear that the intrusion has been stopped, prompting the rules on paper filings. Those documents are now uploaded to a stand-alone computer at the courthouse — one not connected to the network or Internet. That means lawyers cannot access the documents from outside the courthouse.

  They assume that these hackers are Russian because they used some Russian tools; however, their methods deviated from the usual Russian model and showed the sophistication we are familiar with from agencies like the NSA. This suggests that more than the usual half-hearted Russian vandalism, this was a sophisticated state actor attack by someone who wanted total control of America. History hints that we should look for an insider.

• China gene firm providing worldwide COVID tests worked with Chinese military
  

  The review, of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in Chinese and English, shows BGI’s links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) include research with China’s top military supercomputing experts. The extent of those links has not previously been reported.

  BGI has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia and the United States.

  In AD 2021 Western Civilization, or the remnants thereof, we should ask what has not been compromised. Open societies are Swiss cheese by their nature, but our bureaucrats have gladly sold us out to China in exchange for more power, wealth, and social importance.

• Disneyland to reimagine Jungle Cruise ride following years of criticism
  

  Although the ride was inspired by nature documentaries, one of the sights along the river route is a scene of “natives,” which depicts them as wild, primitive and threatening.

  Diverse societies simply amplify the number of cultural pretenses and taboos that one must avoid, making reality entirely foreign to us. The natives were wild, primitive, and threatening. Stereotypes exist for a reason, in this case in part as a warning:

  Aware of the untouched world of Asmat in Dutch New Guinea, a place known for its intricate woodcarving, Michael made plans to scout out a location there to do some art-hunting.

  According to documentation on the Asmat headhunting ritual, they would first remove Michael’s head, then slit him from the neck down his back. Entrails would be removed. Legs and arms would go into the fire while the group chanted. His charred body parts would be passed around for everyone to taste.

  Perhaps we just need to go our own way. So much is broken in this society, so much built on lies, that we need no modifications to our existing system, but to replace it entirely, possibly with something resilient like organic culture. This would mean driving out the bureaucrats and repatriating the diversity. Who dares have hope that we could do something so audacious, sane, and healthy? No one has hope like that. They just want to keep the sad show afloat for another generation so that they can die in peace.

• Biden Team Rushes to Take Over Government, and Oust Trump Loyalists
  

  In fact, Mr. Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.

  At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.

  Biden rebuilds the Deep State the same way Obama and Clinton made it. Fire anyone who is a realist, replace them with denialists, and soon you have a government which will refuse to obey any order except one that is approved by the cabal of Leftists, organized crime, and Chinese agents running it.

• Suspected Russian Hack Extends Far Beyond SolarWinds Software, Investigators Say
  

  Close to a third of the victims didn’t run the SolarWinds Corp. SWI 0.24%▲ software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the hackers, according to investigators and the government agency digging into the incident. The revelation is fueling concern that the episode exploited vulnerabilities in business software used daily by millions.

  SolarWinds was the entry point. At that point, they could look into source code for many other software providers, and figure out how to get into those. The whole system is compromised and needs to be rebuilt. This echoes the OPM hack of 2015:

  But in this case, the engineers noticed two unusually frightening details. First, opmsecurity.org had been registered on April 25, 2014, which meant the malware had probably been on OPM’s network for almost a year. Even worse, the domain’s owner was listed as “Steve Rogers”—the scrawny patriot who, according to Marvel Comics lore, used a vial of Super-Soldier Serum to transform himself into Captain America, a member of the Avengers.

  Registering sites in Avengers-themed names is a trademark of a shadowy hacker group believed to have orchestrated some of the most devastating attacks in recent memory. Among them was the infiltration of health insurer Anthem, which resulted in the theft of personal data belonging to nearly 80 million Americans. And though diplomatic sensitivities make US officials reluctant to point fingers, a wealth of evidence ranging from IP addresses to telltale email accounts indicates that these hackers are tied to China, whose military allegedly has a 100,000-strong cyber­espionage division.

  Someone has made a habit of systematically conquering American networks. With OPM, they realized that take over their targets directly was inefficient; they needed to get into the system that managed the systems, then look into the types of systems, and by compromising them, open the doors to everything. Naturally America blames Russia, because this is easier than admitting that our enemies have compromised all of our networks.

• Clashes at French rallies over lesbian couples conceiving children
  

  Several thousand people demonstrated on Saturday, and sporadic clashes broke out during rallies for and against a draft law that would allow lesbian couples to conceive children in France.

  People worldwide are tiring of the great social liberalization, since it has been ongoing for decades and has brought about bad results in every case.

• Revealed: study exposes racial disparity as whites vaccinated at higher rates than Black Americans
  • Fueled by a History of Mistreatment, Black Americans Distrust the New COVID-19 Vaccines
  • ‘Why won’t Black folks trust us’ on COVID-19? These doctors and nurses have answers
  • Black Americans don’t trust a COVID-19 vaccine — they have valid reasons why
  • Black Americans Don’t Trust the COVID Vaccine. It’s Up to Doctors to Change That
  • Why Black Americans don’t trust a coronavirus vaccine

  Who can blame them? You should never trust another group to give you a vaccine. They want to conquer you.

• Flu is ‘almost wiped out’ and at lowest level in 130 YEARS as seasonal virus plummets by 95%
  

  The second week of January, normally the worst time for the seasonal virus, saw the number of flu-like symptoms reported to GPs at 1.1 per 100,000 people – compared with a five-year average of 27.

  A few possibilities manifest themselves: first, it is possible that lots of flu cases simply got reported at COVID-19, with the patients who did not have it upon entering the hospital getting it rapidly afterwards; second, this tells us that our current methods have stopped the flu, but not COVID-19, which means that COVID-19 spreads through some different methods. It’s the feces.

• France’s Le Pen, at record high in polls, proposes hijab ban
  

  French far-right leader Marine Le Pen Friday proposed a ban on Muslim headscarves in all public places on Friday, seeking to build on a record recent poll putting her almost neck-and-neck with President Emmanuel Macron.

  Quit screwing around. Talk about repatriation. Diversity does not work, and the last year or so has showed us that even our endless tribute payments have done nothing to make things work better. We need to end diversity. Banning burkas is discriminatory; repatriating Muslims avoids mutual destruction.

• All work and low pay: are we too devoted to our jobs?
  

  Through a series of detailed case studies of modern “labourers of love” – the unpaid intern, the overburdened teacher, the 24/7 domestic help, the NGO employee, the fixed-term academic, the discarded Toys R Us worker, the working single mother – Jaffe, a New York-based journalist, examines two of the most damaging philosophies of our times. The first is the idea that we need to get used to a “disrupted” world in which job security and regular hours and living wages are necessarily a thing of the past, quaint, pre-internet relics such as affordable housing and three TV channels; the second, perversely, that work is supposed, more than ever, to bring us pleasure, meaning, fulfilment, that we should be grateful for it and happy in it and if we are not, we are simply not trying hard enough or being “smart” enough.

  Maybe jobs are awful simply because we are doing lots of unnecessary stuff in order to keep those taxes paid so the government can keep borrowing.

• Turkey LGBT: Four students arrested over artwork
  

  While homosexuality has been legal throughout modern Turkey’s history, official opposition to the LGBT community has grown in recent years. The Istanbul Pride march was banned for five years in a row up to 2019.

  Leftism has been using LGBT to widen the window of tolerance so that it can abolish organic culture and replace it with bureaucracy. Consequently, people are starting to oppose it, after years of increasing tolerance.

• Dutch police clash with anti-lockdown protesters in 2 cities
  

  The crowd of hundreds of demonstrators also was believed to include supporters of the anti-immigrant group PEGIDA, which had sought to demonstrate in the city.

  People are tiring of the politically-motivated lockdowns, instead of the commonsense approach of isolating the infected and letting everyone else keep normal life going.

• TGI Fridays CEO says ending the tipped minimum wage would result in higher prices, fewer hours for waitstaff
  

  Biden has proposed raising the federal hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 and eliminating tip credits, a change that would primarily affect the restaurant industry. The changes would mean that employers would have to pay every worker at least $15 an hour, even if they receive tips.

  All this does is to create further inflation. A better policy would have no minimum wages, and let people compete for the better jobs, instead of trying to make every job pay well, like a union would, irrespective of performance. Socialism works by reward-before-performance, but capitalism relies on reward-after-performance, since the latter improves quality and reduces costs, while the former increases costs and reduces quality.

• Low cholesterol levels are associated with a high mortality risk in older adults without statins therapy
  

  The association between low TC levels and a high risk of all-cause mortality was confirmed in a Belgian cohort of adults 80 years and older.

  It turns out that most of the “scientific” truth preached to us by the media and industry will simply kill you. They want to reduce traditional diets so that they can sell you cheaper food, possibly to pack more consumers on planet Earth, but this makes everyone sicker and more dependent on the system.

• Sen. Paul clashes with George Stephanopoulos over 2020 election results
  

  “What I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court where we actually looked at the evidence. Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, which is a procedural way of not actually hearing the question,” the Kentucky lawmaker responded, adding that he thinks some of the cases may “work their way up to the Supreme Court.”

  Back to Bush v. Gore. If that happens, Trump can then fire the laggards and get someone to do the criminal investigation. It seems like a longshot at this point, but so do most things that are truly moving against the grain.

• ‘Dark Money’ Helped Pave Joe Biden’s Path to the White House
  

  Biden’s winning campaign was backed by $145 million in so-called dark money donations, a type of fundraising Democrats have decried for years. Those fundraising streams augmented Biden’s $1.5 billion haul, in itself a record for a challenger to an incumbent president.

  Leftists create general pro-Leftist organizations, and those rally behind candidates. Conservatives do not do this as much, so they create organizations which support specific candidates, and they were limited in the funding they could accumulate, leading to the Citizens United decision. Now the Left has found new ways of funneling money into their candidates.

• It’s a secret: California keeps key virus data from public
  

  Rather than a county-by-county approach, he created five regions and established a single measurement — ICU capacity — as the determination for whether a region was placed under a stay-at-home order.

  In short order, four regions — about 98% of the state’s population — were under the restrictions after their capacity fell below the 15% threshold. A map updated daily tracks each region’s capacity.

  They needed this virus for Leftists to seize power across the world. No wonder they want to measure ICU capacity only, because that number can be influenced by many things.

• Classic bands accused of crowding out new music on streaming services
  

  Last year, three of the UK’s top 10 best-selling albums were Greatest Hits collections from artists whose career peak came in the 1970s – Queen, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac.

  At the same time, only one British debut album – KSI’s Dissimulation – sold the 60,000 copies required to be awarded a silver disc.

  Older music seems to be more popular, probably because it is not dumbed down by hip-hop, and that is inequality.

• Spain set to pilot four-day week as response to coronavirus pandemic
  

  Under plans backed by the country’s finance ministry, financial aid would be provided to companies that cut the working week to 32 hours with no loss of pay.

  With all of our technology, we should be working just a few hours a week. Instead, we generate lots of unnecessary activity so that we can keep government, anti-poverty, and anti-racism programs afloat.

• Thousands protest in Vienna as far-right march on COVID measures banned
  

  Vienna police banned numerous protests planned for this weekend, including one by the far-right Freedom Party on Sunday, on the grounds that protesters have generally failed to observe rules on social distancing and often not worn face masks.

  The perfect control mechanism: you must stay home, watch the official™ media, ignore the conspiracy theories, and get your income from government, making you unlikely to revolt. We are experiencing the Revolution Against The Revolution, since the situation in which we live is the result of all those revolutions for freedom, equality, and democracy.

• More evidence of ‘suspicious activity’ at the Wuhan Institute of Virology emerges
  

  “Some of this evidence points to the fact that this laboratory had workers who fell ill … around August of 2019”.

  Ms Markson said the US State Department has released a fact sheet which says for more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the origin of the pandemic.

  Narrative collapse.

• Will the Tech ‘Wokeforce’ Be With Us If We Go to War?
  

  If the titans of tech can pull the plug on public communications tools people have come to rely on, some observers fear, they might do the same to the Pentagon in response to a military action deemed unacceptable by San Franciscans.

  Yet another revolution: the people want their entertainment, so now we get new Mao and Stalin type leaders to tell us what is acceptable. Their allegiance is to liberalism and the diverse audience, not America or Western Civilization.

• Foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond May deadline
  

  “Conditions have not been met,” he said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “And with the new U.S. administration, there will be tweaks in the policy, the sense of hasty withdrawal which was prevalent will be addressed and we could see a much more calculated exit strategy.”

  Trump hailed the accord – which did not include the Afghan government – as the end of two decades of war. He reduced U.S. troops to 2,500 by this month, the fewest since 2001.

  Trump wanted an end to the endless wars; dying empires, like China-compromised Late Stage Democracy USA, require such wars to keep their population mobilized and distracted from the collapse of the late empire societies.

• The Echo Chamber Era
  

  If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”

  In other words, they need to stand with the Crowd, which is taking the rationalization approach to the end of empire and demanding that we re-affirm our failing policies so that we do not have to notice that the empire is failing.

• Billionaire wealth soars as 255 million of world’s jobs lost in pandemic
  

  Almost 9% of total working hours were lost last year when compared with the levels of employment at the end of 2019, before the pandemic shuttered the economy, according to a separate report from the International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency. That’s the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs lost across the globe, or about four times greater than the impact from the Great Recession of 2009, the analysis found.

  We are facing an unprecedented crisis. If it turns out that China and the Left colluded to promote this virus and these lockdowns, so that they could steal an election, and then stole that election while receiving orders from China, heads are going to roll.

• Right on: does standup comedy have a leftwing bias?
  

  But you could equally argue that standup is the apotheosis of Thatcherite individualism, or that (in the words of rightwing comic Simon Evans) “the vast majority of comedians are apolitical, borderline-sociopathic narcissists”. It’s certainly a stretch to claim that lefties dominate the airwaves.

  Typically Leftist claim: “you could argue” even though there is no proof. Then you could claim that Leftists are not really Leftists. We’re going to have to deport these people to Venezuela.

• Dr Martens senior staff are set for £350m windfall as staple of ’70s skinhead scene launches £3.5bn stock
  

  The firm has flourished under private equity firm Permira, which bought it from the Griggs family in 2013 and multiplied sales six-fold to £672m.

  MBAs take companies like this, outsource production to China, cut costs and staff, and then spend the money on advertising, building a hip brand that sells (what is now) disposable junk to credulous proles. In ten years, someone will figure out that these shoes are no longer all that good or reliable, and people will move on, but the MBAs will have long ago taken their promotions and skipped off to a new company to cannibalize.

• New Evidence Implicates FBI Higher-Ups in Dishonesty of Anti-Trump Lawyer
  

  It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to wiretap him as a suspected Russian agent.

  But such explanations are challenged by new revelations from court papers filed in the case, which some civil libertarians call the most egregious violation and abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) since it was enacted more than 40 years ago.

  The little-noticed documents, which include never-before-seen exhibits, were submitted by Special Counsel John Durham and lawyers for Page, who has been granted time to address the court as a victim when it sentences Clinesmith Jan. 29 as part of a plea agreement. Page and his attorneys argue that the FBI obtained his electronic communications, both written and oral, based on fraudulent warrants in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.

  Leftists held on for long enough to get inaugurated, but this is not over. Behind the scenes, the wheels of the machine keep turning, and as this drives an already-paranoid Left to take new levels of risk, the mood in this country is switching from believing that Biden would bring us back to “normal” to realizing that his “normal” was the problem all along.

• Mar-a-Lago Florida: Everything we know about Trump’s new home
  

  Mr Trump first offered the Post family $15m for the property having heard about it following an unsuccessful property purchase nearby. The family rejected the offer and so Mr Trump, in a move characteristic of his reputation as a property magnate, bought the land between the house and the ocean for $2m from the former owner of KFC, Jack Massey. He then threatened to build on it to block Mar-a-Lago’s view.

  Interest in the property declined further due to the threat and eventually Mr Trump closed the purchase in 1985 for between $7m and $10m — there are differing reports of the final amount.

  A quick study on the Trump method: you make a fair offer, then make their other options untenable, at which point you make a far lower offer and close on it, since at this point your quarry is in a defensive posture and seeking to avoid looking stupid.

• Watchdog probes if DOJ officials tried to overturn election
  

  The Justice Department’s inspector general is launching an investigation to examine whether any former or current department officials “engaged in an improper attempt” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

  America has spent more time and money investigating the people alleging a stolen election than investigating the dubious late-night-vote-dump election itself.

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• Biden administration tells Russia to free Navalny and protesters in stark departure from Trump era
  

  The new president’s forceful denunciation of Russia’s newest manifestation of political repression marks a sharp departure from his predecessor, who would not say last September that Mr Navalny had been poisoned by Russian government agents, as had been widely reported and speculated.

  The Trump method of dealing with Russia involved treating them like any other nation while isolating them economically from the West, basically forcing them to look inward to solve their problems. The Biden administration takes the Obama approach, which is to let them become powerful, and then make impotent threats. What will Biden do, send a carrier group to attack? He will not, and so he just lost real power through this “low energy” approach.

• UN chief: World faces ‘existential threats,’ fragilities
  

  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned global leaders Monday that the world is not only facing a COVID-19 emergency and the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, but also “existential threats” to the climate and biodiversity — and the possibility of the largest economies, the United States and China, splitting the world in two.

  Incompetent bureaucrat warns us of the threats that his own short-sighted policies produced. All of our problems come down to overpopulation and bad leadership. The UN encourages both with its egalitarian demands for first world wealth transfer to the third world.

• Woman fights Harvard over rights to nude SC images of her enslaved ancestors
  

  Agassiz, a minister’s son, believed God had created different plants and animals specifically to live in their “zoological provinces,” or areas of the world.

  But to say that human beings had different origins?

  When Agassiz uttered the idea, Boston clergy attacked him. The Bible describes one Adam and Eve who gave rise to all people. Polygenesis rang sacrilegious.

  Symbolic religions like Christianity use categories to rule us, since the power of the symbol is that it implies a uniformity to all members of a category which we impose upon them. This causes it to frequently deny reality, when left in the hands of lesser men.

• Portland college offers free tuition to Black and Native American students
  

  For example, of students who started at an Oregon public university as freshmen and earned bachelor’s degrees in the 2018-19 academic year — Black students graduated with an average of $29,000 of loan debt and Native American students graduated with an average of $28,000 of such debt. That’s compared to approximately $26,000 for white students, according to the HECC.

  Here we see another non-crisis and an over-reaction which will be used to make lots of diversity jobs to hire the diversity that went through education in the first place.

• Tibetan Monk Dies After Beatings, Torture in Chinese Prison
  

  A 19 year-old Tibetan monk has died of injuries sustained from beatings and torture in a Chinese prison in Sichuan’s Kardze prefecture after being released in a comatose state by his jailers, Tibetan sources say.

  These are the people who want to occupy America and rule the world. The same can happen here, much as it did when Mexican forces occupied Texas. We have to get our economy clear of China so that we are not dragged down with them into the horror of an unstable, dogmatic regime.

• Apollo Global CEO Leon Black paid sex predator Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for financial advice after conviction
  

  Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black paid child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for financial advice from 2012 through 2017, despite knowing Epstein pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an underage girl in 2008, a probe by a law firm retained by Apollo has found.

  Wonder who leaked this information.

• The baby boom that never was: France sees sharp decline in ‘lockdown babies’
  

  The time many French couples would finally be able to spend together by being restricted to their homes seemed to offer up endless opportunities to reproduce. The fact that the sale of pregnancy tests shot up by 37 percent just four weeks into the first lockdown, and contraception sales plunged 26 percent in the same period, appeared to – at least in part – support that theory.

  On Tuesday, some nine months later, the first nationwide results were made public. But instead of confirming a baby boom, the numbers gathered by national statistics institute Insee revealed a 2 percent decline in France’s birthrate.

  No one in the West really wants to be a wage-tax slave. They do not want their children to do the same, either. This means that they have fewer children if any at all.

• More Houston officers indicted in wake of deadly drug raid
  

  In all, a dozen officers tied to the narcotics unit have been indicted after their work came under scrutiny following the January 2019 drug raid in which Dennis Tuttle, 59, and his wife, Rhogena Nicholas, 58, were killed.

  “The consequences of corruption are two innocent ordinary people were killed in their homes, four police officers were shot, one of them paralyzed and now all of them will face Harris County jurors who will decide their fate,” said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg.

  Corruption follows diversity wherever it goes. Each group acts for itself, which means against the majority and all other groups. This means that they abuse their authority when in power, and steal whatever they can. Not surprisingly, minority-majority Houston is vastly in debt as well.

• Scientists address myths over large-scale tree planting
  

  “If you plant the wrong trees in the wrong place you could be doing more harm than good,” said lead researcher Dr Kate Hardwick of RBG Kew.

  All too often natural forests teeming with plants, animals and fungi are replaced by commercial plantations with row upon row of timber trees, which will be harvested after a few decades, she told BBC News.

  “What we’re trying to do is to encourage people, wherever possible, to try and recreate forests which are similar to the natural forests and which provide multiple benefits to people, the environment and to nature as well as capturing carbon.”

  Nature does it better. An even better idea would be to stop immigration and subsidies, then let the human population fall, so that we can have more forest land that would otherwise be displaced by roads, parking lots, housing, factories, schools, hospitals, offices, and restaurants.

• U.S.-China investments dwarf official figures: study
  

  The report estimates U.S. investors held $1.2 trillion in equity and debt securities issued by Chinese entities at the end of 2020, five times the levels shown in official data from the U.S. Treasury Department. Most of the difference was due to Chinese firms “using complex legal structures to issue shares out of tax havens that trade on U.S. exchanges,” according to the report.

  A takeover hiding in plain sight, this silk glove invasion involved compromising our business world and using them to buy into our political class. Lobbying, as it turns out, can be fatal for a nation.

• Air pollution linked to higher risk of irreversible sight loss
  

  Previous work had already found a link between dirty air and glaucoma and a link to cataracts is suspected. The scientists said the eyes have a particularly high flow of blood, potentially making them very vulnerable to the damage caused by tiny particles that are breathed in and then flow around the body.

  All of those modern miracles turn out to be disasters in the long term. The aristocrats may have been onto something when they encouraged a slow roll-out of technology instead of reckless expansion.

• Energy spent avoiding humans associated with smaller home ranges for male pumas
  

  This analysis showed that, in areas with higher housing densities, pumas were engaging in more energetically demanding movements, like stopping less and moving more quickly. Their movements were also much less efficient: instead of taking the shortest path to their destination, they took longer, meandering paths to navigate around perceived risks.

  Both males and females reduced the size of their home ranges in response to overall increased energy costs of navigating the landscape, but males, in particular, were especially affected by housing density. Male pumas in habitats most dominated by humans had 78.8 percent smaller home ranges compared to those with the most remote habitats.

  “It constrains their space use, which could then affect other aspects of their ecology, like finding mates, finding food, competing with other males, or other natural interactions,” Nickel said.

  If we want to keep nature, we need to keep huge amounts of land natural so that species can live on them. Just as we cannot dwell entirely in apartments, they cannot live in little lots which are divided and surrounded by roads and other human constructions.

• Merkel sides with Xi on avoiding Cold War blocs
  

  While the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is looking to group together democracies to contain China, Merkel was pointedly wary about the formation of factions.

  “I would very much wish to avoid the building of blocs,” Merkel told the Davos World Economic Forum. “I don’t think it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought to be.”

  This typical bureaucrat response from Merkel shows an avoidance of looking at goals, such as representing Western Civilization, in preference to a method of pacifism and doing business. Like all of them, she has given her soul over to the process, procedure, and spreadsheets of deathlike modernity.

• Asset manager BlackRock threatens to sell shares in worst climate polluters
  

  Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, said the investor would ask companies whose shares it holds to disclose their plans to achieve net zero emissions. The new approach is set out in Fink’s annual letter to CEOs around the world. BlackRock could then divest from polluting companies in its actively managed funds – which represent about a tenth of its assets – if they did not improve.

  The 1960s revolutionaries sought to make business ethical. They transformed it into an agent of Leftism, which meant that it became as power-hungry as the Communists.

• Residents Protest As China Demolishes Some Of Beijing’s Wealthy Suburbs
  

  Beijing is now demolishing large swaths of its wealthy suburbs, whose well-connected residents are protesting. It’s the latest sign of rising dissatisfaction with China’s government from unlikely sources.

  The Crowd rules through guilt and shame. If you have something, you should give it to the rest of them, they say. This way, each of them gets something for free, and nothing excites the humonkey quite like taking from someone more successful than him, even if the actual reward to him is lower than what he would have gotten by not taking it.

• WHO advisor: COVID-19 pandemic likely started via lab leak
  

  “There’s no irrefutable evidence,” said Metzl, who was appointed to the WHO’s expert advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019 and is also the author of Hacking Darwin.

  “There’s just more evidence and as more evidence arrives, the case for accidental lab leak, in my view, increases.”

  Looks like Trump was right, but got there ahead of everyone else, so they are taking time to catch up.

• Trump may have permanently damaged democracy, says EU chief Von der Leyen
  

  “A year ago, my bilateral talks revolved primarily around the question: Would the US government impose punitive tariffs on European carmakers? Today, a year later, we are worrying about whether democracy itself might have been permanently damaged in the last four years,” Ms von der Leyen said during her virtual address.

  To people like this, “democracy” means that everyone unites behind the egalitarian agenda and smashes anyone who refuses. As a bureaucrat, she wants the rule of bureaucracy, and it depends on the type of atomized, cultureless, soulless, and obedient person which is achieved through globalism, sexual liberation, meritocracy, and high-cost living.

• ‘There will be things people will say we did extremely well’ – minister defends handling of pandemic
  

  Speaking the day after the UK exceeded 100,000 COVID-19-related deaths, Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said “there is no textbook as to how to respond to a pandemic like this”.

  This shows us a typical Late Stage Civilization problem, which is that the meritocracy promotes people who know the textbook, but the textbook does not and cannot cover all problems. Over the generations, you get people who are good at textbooks but bad at thinking, at which point incompetence grows because the people who are only good at school are frequently bad at life, even if they make diligent bureaucrats.

• Oceanic shark populations dropped 71% since 1970
  

  Globally, the abundance of oceanic sharks and rays dropped more than 70% between 1970 and 2018, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

  And 24 of the 31 species of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction, while three species—oceanic whitetip sharks, scalloped hammerhead sharks and great hammerhead sharks—are considered critically endangered.

  Imagine that Earth is a pizza. The more slices we take for humanity, the fewer remain for nature. At some point, we find out that nature needed half of the pizza to survive, and that makes the slices that the humans took less valuable. It also makes us into killers who hate ourselves and will unconsciously bring about our own destruction.

• UK aid cuts of up to 70% a ‘gut punch’ to world’s poorest, experts say
  

  Reacting to the news that diplomats had been ordered to cut billions in aid over the next six weeks, experts warned that many lives would be lost and the UK stood to lose its reputation as a global “force for good”.

  Why are we subsidizing the doomed? That makes more of them. This never ends, and there will never be enough, even if we cook ourselves and ship them the meat. Even more, they are creating an overpopulation problem and political instability wherever they go. Just cut all subsidies of all sorts.

• Light pollution linked to preterm birth increase
  

  Specifically, the likelihood of a preterm birth could increase by approximately 1.48 percentage points (or 12.9%), according to the researchers, as a result of increased nighttime brightness. Nighttime brightness is characterized by being able to see only one-fourth to one-third of the stars that are visible in the natural unpolluted night sky.

  Humans tend toward herding behavior. That draws them into cities, closer to the wealth and farther from those dangerous bears and wolves. It also creates a toxic environment that slowly kills them off, leaving only the ones who breed so recklessly that they produce lots of dumb but selfish people.

• Gynaecologist suspended over ‘suicide’ tweet boast
  

  The suspension comes just hours after Dhlamini took to Twitter on Tuesday night where he claimed that he pushed an unidentified individual to commit suicide following comments made on Facebook.

  In the tweet, Dhlamini further claims to have got the unknown individual blacklisted from SA tertiary institutions.

  “I’ve told you about the story of how I got someone blacklisted from ever registering at any university in SA until he killed himself? All because he wrote a homophobic Facebook status. I’d do it all over again without flinching,” the now deleted tweet read.

  Leftism is a symbolic cult. They believe only in equality. Whatever they have to do for equality is good, and in their view, anyone who is not pro-equality is evil, so destroying them is good.

• Toxic chemicals in single-use plastics are harming human health
  

  A recent report compiled a summary of international research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals used to make plastic — including 144 chemicals/chemical groups known to be hazardous to human health — intended to give plastics attributes like antimicrobial properties, colorants, flame retardants, solvents, UV-stabilizers, and plasticizers.

  The aforementioned report focuses on a specific kind of health effect seen in plastics and the chemicals they can leach, called endocrine or hormone disruption. Our hormones play crucial roles in many of our bodily systems and are vital to our reproductive development and growth. This means children are especially susceptible to the health risks of harmful chemicals found in plastic.

  The chemicals found in plastic products can linger in our environment even after the plastic has been cleaned up. A recent study found that when scientists introduced and then removed plastic from an aquatic environment, sea urchins still developed abnormal skeletons and nervous systems because of the chemicals left behind. To make matters worse, plastics have the unique ability to bind together chemicals that are otherwise more diluted in the environment, meaning they become carriers of all sorts of concentrated toxins.

  For health, we should go back to 1950s packaging, namely paper and glass. That is, however, expensive, and therefore not egalitarian, so we would rather die all together slowly than do the right thing.

• Humanity is still closer to apocalypse than ever, experts say
  

  The decision was made largely in the context of the coronavirus outbreak, the scientists said. It noted that the pandemic had not only killed and sickened vast numbers of people, but also “revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly”.

  COVID-19 revealed the incompetence of the bureaucracy intrinsic to democracy. Yet another modern miracle turns out to be a major threat.

• Pandemic a wake-up to world leaders on food frailties, WFP says
  

  The crisis has disrupted supply chains across the globe, pushing 270 million people to the brink of starvation, David Beasley, the WFP’s Executive Director, said at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

  It turns out that our enlightened “scientific” systems rely on certain things being true without noting that these are assumptions. That means that they are fragile, and will collapse like a house of cards in a crisis.

• Biomarkers in mother’s plasma could aid in early autism diagnosis and intervention
  

  Autoantibodies are immune proteins that attack a person’s own tissues. Previously, Van de Water found that a pregnant mother’s autoantibodies can react with her growing fetus’ brain and alter its development.

  When the environment is toxic, the body attacks itself. Autism probably arises from too many working mothers.

• One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
  

  Apparently, they’re not among the 31% of professionals from 42 tech companies who weighed in on the question on Blind’s survey and said they’re only putting in between three and four hours a day. Additionally, the survey found, 27% of tech professionals said they work five to six hours a day, and 11% reported only working one to two hours per day. In contrast, 30% said they work between seven and 10 hours per day.

  Jobs are mostly a farce consisting of doing useless things so your manager can pad his reports, his higher-ups can pad theirs, and the stock can shoot higher on broad claims of “productivity.” This allows the GDP to grow, government to borrow more and tax more, and then enables the out-of-control society to spend more on its poorest, creating a cycle of consumer demand that in theory represents a healthy economy.

• San Francisco to strip Washington, Lincoln from school names
  

  The decision by the San Francisco Board of Education in a 6-1 vote Tuesday night affects one-third of the city’s schools and came nearly three years after the board started considering the idea. The approved resolution calls for removing names that honored historical figures with direct or broad ties to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation” of human beings.

  Diversity began as the idea that others could move here to take advantage of the functioning society we created. It ends with those others dismantling our society and remaking the type of dysfunction they had in their countries of origin. Genetics rules over “education,” politics, propaganda, and everything else. You cannot beat Mother Nature.

• ‘The end of our civilisation’: Putin raises prospect of global conflict
  

  Speaking to the World Economic Forum, Putin warned the coronavirus pandemic and widening economic inequality had created parallels to the 1930s and said a failure to deal with those tensions helped spark World War II.

  More likely, Leftism took over and made an incompetent society, at which point COVID-19 revealed that incompetence and has destabilized the whole mess to the edge of world conflict.

• Man pleads guilty to deaths of 36 people in San Francisco warehouse fire
  

  Prosecutors say Almena was criminally negligent when he illegally converted the industrial Oakland warehouse into a residence and event space for artists dubbed the Ghost Ship, filling the two-story building with flammable materials and extension cables.

  But what about the landlords?

  Briggs also asked Kai Ng if he had paid a well-known public relations firm a “large sum of money” or used “political influence” to help ensure members of his family wouldn’t be charged in the case. The Ngs’ law firm hired crisis manager Sam Singer, who has a public relations/public affairs firm in San Francisco. Singer has told this news organization he was hired by the attorneys to represent the family to assist in communication on issues surrounding the tragedy.

  Under diversity, America has become irretrievably corrupt. We need System change as well as regime change, starting over with the idea of a non-diverse, non-socialist, and non-egalitarian society.

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