Amerika

• COVID-19 crisis causes 17% drop in global carbon emissions
  

  The study published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that daily emissions decreased by 17% – or 17 million tonnes of carbon dioxide—globally during the peak of the confinement measures in early April compared to mean daily levels in 2019, dropping to levels last observed in 2006.

  In fourteen years, we have added a lot of people and a great deal of industry. One interesting tidbit:

  Aviation is the economic sector most impacted by the lockdown, but it only accounts for 3% of global emissions, or 10% of the decrease in emissions during the pandemic.

  The relentless pursuit of selling junk to each other and creating jobs for everyone has created an environmental holocaust. While “climate change” is woo, worldwide pollution and toxicity are not.

• US births fall, and virus could drive them down more
  

  U.S. births continued to fall last year, leading to the fewest number of newborns in 35 years.

  The decline is the latest sign of a prolonged national “baby bust” that’s been going on for more than a decade.

  Same reason we have school shootings: people are miserable. No one wants to have a huge family just so they can go out there and be tax slaves to fund the diversity underclass that wants to kill us. Democracy has self-destructed as it always does.

• Scientists find evidence of link between diesel exhaust, risk of Parkinson’s
  

  Published in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicological Sciences, the findings show that chemicals in diesel exhaust can trigger the toxic buildup of a protein in the brain called alpha-synuclein, which is commonly seen in people with the disease.

  We are going to find out that we did everything wrong for the past century of so. Office spaces make us weak, cars deprive us of exercise, processed foods cause our bodies to degenerate, electromagnetic emissions disrupt us, pesticides and other chemical helpers are sterilizing us and giving us cancer, and living without a purpose makes our souls dark and hateful. Add to this exhaust, which is probably responsible for many of our diseases, and we have a formula for a society killing itself.

• VW pulls car ad after outcry, apologizes for racist overtone
  

  The ten-second spot posted on Instagram and Twitter shows a massive white hand pushing a black man away from beside a new yellow Volkswagen Golf parked on the street, then moving him to an open doorway and flicking him inside a French cafe.

  Commentators on social media also noted that as the German-language slogan “Der Neue Golf” – “The New Golf” – fades into view, the jumble of letters can be read as a racial slur for a brief moment.

  And the cafe’s name is Petit Colon, which in French literally means the “Little Colonist.”

  More imagined outrage, another shakedown. VW thought they were doing the right thing by using Black actors in some of their commercials. It turns out that no matter what you do, some group will be offended. Diversity does not work.

• Author of infamous Google diversity manifesto drops lawsuit against web giant
  

  Details of whatever agreement Damore and co and Google forged between themselves were not disclosed.

  Hope they paid out at least as much as their average sexual harassment or racial discrimination suit. In the meantime, science has shown that men and women perform differently in tech and people are questioning diversity, which means that affirmation action and other quota-style programs are on their way out; it just takes the Rest of Humanity™ a long time to realize these things. Talking monkey with car keys move slowly.

• Germany approves new powers to block foreign takeovers in healthcare
  

  The regulation, approved by the cabinet, will allow the government to block takeovers of makers of vaccines, precursor chemicals, medicines, protective equipment or medical machinery such as ventilators.

  Conscious decoupling.

• Weekly mortgage applications point to a remarkable recovery in homebuying
  

  Mortgage applications to purchase a home rose 6% last week from the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Purchase volume was just 1.5% lower than a year ago, a rather stunning recovery from just six weeks ago, when purchase volume was down 35% annually.

  We see this after every disaster; it is people speculating or moving up using savings they already have. During a crisis is also a good time to acquire a few rent homes.

• The evidence behind putting money directly in the pockets of the poor
  

  In most situations, there is strong evidence that money, not food, is the most efficient and effective way to distribute emergency aid and social programmes. This particular question, on how poor people use cash transfers, is one of the most studied in development economics.

  Distributing food is inefficient if an infrastructure for food distribution already exists. This is why government cheese gave way to SNAP cards.

• Belgium confirms inquiry into Malta-China spy threat
  

  It was claimed that an investigation had been launched by the Belgian intelligence services after a tip-off from British agents that the Chinese were using Malta’s embassy as a “spy tower” to eavesdrop on EU institutions.

  The claim centred on a “cooperation agreement” made in 2006 worth €300,000 to the Maltese government through which Beijing had donated furniture to the country’s newly purchased 13-storey embassy in Brussels.

  In a diverse society, “every man for himself” rules, so it is easy to buy out individual bureaucrats.

• Massive block party in Florida ended in multiple arrests and accusations of racial profiling
  

  Shortly after midnight, police say deputies walking through the block party witnessed a firearm exchange between two men. A deputy approached the men commanding them to drop the gun, and one of the men ran away, according to VCSO’s statement. The deputy ran after the man. The suspect allegedly threw the gun and kept running, but he was taken to the ground nearby, the statement reads.

  Our block parties were never that cool.

~~~

• How social media platforms can contribute to dehumanizing people
  

  “We found that the language used in these Facebook interactions hewed very closely to three stages we see in Terrell Northrup’s theory of intractable conflict,” says Jameson. “One stage is the threat—meaning that the people in one group perceive another group as a threat to their identity. For example, one representative comment we found was that ‘The leftists are our devil, because of their existence the country is being destroyed and the army weakened.’

  “A second stage is distortion. This basically means that the first group will not engage with new information regarding the other group—instead distorting it or dismissing it as irrelevant for some reason. For example, ‘I don’t know if I really want to know the answer to the question of whether the thinking of the left is due to infinite stupidity or infinite naivete.’

  “A third stage is rigidification—where people become locked into their positions, making it difficult or impossible to change their views of the other group,” Jameson says. “This is where dehumanization occurs, and we see people referring to the political left as ‘cockroaches,’ ‘vermin,’ or ‘stinking dogs.’ And when people stop seeing members of a group as human—that’s dangerous.

  Good gameplan: identify, tokenize, and exclude the enemy.

  War is good
  Hate is good
  Mass murder is good
  Gang violence is good
  Crack cocaine is good
  Anything that contributes to depopulating the Earth is good

• The evolution of biodiversity: ever-increasing or did it hit a ceiling?
  

  The findings imply that diversity is capped at a certain limit and that species numbers are ultimately limited by factors such as the availability of resources like water and space, says Prof. Butler. Various researchers have been moving towards this view for some time, he says, but new approaches like those adopted in the TERRA project have helped bolster the evidence.

  Not the magic bullet that the Left wants.

• ‘Pushes Hungary back to dark ages’: Far-right-led parliament bans people from changing gender
  

  On Tuesday the legislature voted 133 to 57 to define individuals’ gender by their “sex at birth” on all birth, marriage and death certificates – a move which could expose trans people to harassment if their documents do not match their appearance.

  Conservatism strongly signals the importance of biology, while Leftism bases itself upon the denial of biology, especially biological differences; that is what “equal” means, interchangeable parts. Consequently, choosing this as a battlefield by the Left meant that the Right would eventually get around to squashing it.

• Coronavirus: What’s going wrong in Sweden’s care homes?
  

  Sweden did ban visits to care homes on 31 March. But as in many European countries, relatives, staff and union officials have shared concerns that protective clothing arrived too late, and that some staff may have gone to work at the start of the crisis despite showing symptoms of Covid-19.

  Which staff? Indigenous Swedes or diversity people? As in the US and UK, we are going to find that the non-natives brought the disease in to work, in part because they do not really care about whether their patients live or die. To them it is just a job, in a foreign land, among people who distrust or hate them.

• Apple whistleblower goes public over ‘lack of action’
  

  “I listened to hundreds of recordings every day, from various Apple devices (eg. iPhones, Apple Watches, or iPads). These recordings were often taken outside of any activation of Siri, eg in the context of an actual intention from the user to activate it for a request. These processings were made without users being aware of it, and were gathered into datasets to correct the transcription of the recording made by the device,” he said.

  “The recordings were not limited to the users of Apple devices, but also involved relatives, children, friends, colleagues, and whoever could be recorded by the device. The system recorded everything: names, addresses, messages, searches, arguments, background noises, films, and conversations. I heard people talking about their cancer, referring to dead relatives, religion, sexuality, pornography, politics, school, relationships, or drugs with no intention to activate Siri whatsoever.

  Big Tech no longer has a working profit model, so they are depending on increasingly intrusive advertising.

• Oldest connection with [Amerinds] identified near Lake Baikal in Siberia
  

  Past studies have indicated a connection between Siberian and American populations, but a 14,000-year-old individual analysed in this study is the oldest to carry the mixed ancestry present in Native Americans. Using an extremely fragmented tooth excavated in 1962 at the Ust-Kyahta-3 site, researchers generated a shotgun-sequenced genome enabled by cutting edge techniques in molecular biology.

  This individual from southern Siberia, along with a younger Mesolithic one from northeastern Sibe-ria, shares the same genetic mixture of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) and Northeast Asian (NEA) ancestry found in Native Americans, and suggests that the ancestry which later gave rise to Native Americans in North- and South America was much more widely distributed than previously assumed.

  Mixed-race people from Siberia, basically Mongolians. No wonder their civilizations were so short-lived.

• College admissions scandal: Mom who paid $400,000 to get son into UCLA is sentenced
  

  Xiaoning Sui, 48, of Surrey, British Columbia, was sentenced to time served, which amounts to about five months and was also ordered to pay a $250,000 fine for bribing her son’s way into UCLA as a soccer recruit, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in a statement Monday.

  Education is a house of cards based on foreign money paid so immigrants could get a leg up on American jobs.

• Here are the grocery store products that have gotten more expensive during the coronavirus pandemic
  

  Egg prices rose 16.1% last month. Overall, meat prices rose 3.3%. Chicken prices shot up 5.8%, the biggest spike ever. Beef prices rose 3.7%, pork cost 3% more, and fresh fish prices also rose 4.2%.

  Baked good prices also raised. Bread was 3.7% more expensive, its largest price jump ever. Cookies, sweet rolls, coffeecakes and doughnuts all became about 5% more expensive. Fresh biscuits, rolls and muffins also had a 4.7% price increase.

  In produce, fruit and vegetable prices rose by 1.5% and canned vegetable prices soared 3.6%.

  So much for the modern miracle. The future involves living in a small hovel in a high-rise apartment and eating Ramen made from waste grain and petroleum products.

• Canadians strongly opposed to calling COVID-19 ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Chinese flu,’ poll finds
  

  Research Co. polled people across the country and found only 20 per cent believe it’s OK to use those labels, which link the novel coronavirus to the country where it was first discovered back in December 2019.

  Similar terms have been spray painted onto bus stops and other locations in Vancouver, which has seen an alarming increase in racist incidents targeting people of Asian descent since the pandemic began.

  Just call it the Wuhan Flu. Gets close enough. In other news: Canada sits to pee.

~~~

• USS Theodore Roosevelt returning to sea as China steps up coronavirus-era ‘harassment’ of US spy planes, ships
  

  The recent confrontations between the Chinese and American militaries have not been previously reported.

  Ceramicizes soil, turns flesh into vapor, and pulverizes bones into dust.

• Planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres could harbor life
  

  After all, there are microbes living in hydrogen-rich environments on Earth, such as niches in mines where calcium decay can create air pockets with 33 to 88 percent hydrogen by volume.

  If you can modify them to output oxyen, terraforming should be a snap.

• Biden, Ukraine call stirs 2020 election flap
  

  A newly released tape of a phone call between then Vice President Biden and former Ukranian leader Petro Poroshenko has Biden appearing to release $1 billion in aid in exchange for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma and the vice president’s son Hunter Biden.

  But the recordings prove what Trump supporters and conservatives have been hammering Biden on — an apparent “quid pro quo” deal to get rid of Ukraine’s top prosecutor.

  Typical Leftist Behavior (TLB). Whatever they accuse you of doing, they are doing.

• Feds slap solar and wind operators with retroactive rent bills
  

  The Trump administration has ended a two-year rent holiday for solar and wind projects operating on federal lands, handing them huge retroactive bills at a time the industry is struggling with the fallout of the coronavirus outbreak.

  After the COVID-19 freakout and bailout, government is out of free money for benefits, freebies, and pork. This could be a wonderful thing as it kills off all of the excess and legalized parasitism that democracy, in its manic slumber that quests for illusion, has created over the past century. We can live without the Great Society, New Deal, and Obama-era programs. We do not need a welfare state, nor foreign aid, nor a government that seems designed as an affirmative action program.

• Deadly attack at Toronto erotic spa was incel terrorism, police allege
  

  In a joint statement, the RCMP and Toronto Police Service said their investigation had determined the attack “was inspired by the Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) movement commonly known as INCEL.”

  This has in turn inspired the Left to declare other non-Leftist philosophies to be terrorism.

• Albania becomes third European country to ban gay ‘conversion therapy’
  

  Albania’s psychologists have banned so-called “conversion therapy”, which tries to change the sexual orientation of young LGBT people, a move hailed on Saturday by the country’s rights groups.

  Many idiots love conversion therapy. In their view, there is one right way to live and it comes from God. However, this makes no sense, because people are varied; at the same time, one does not want to encourage deviant behavior. The right thing to do is leave homosexuals alone if they leave the majority culture alone, which means they keep it quiet as if they were swingers, scat devotees, or BDSM fans. No gay marriage, but also, none of this interfering religious madness.

• Puglia crimewave points to emergence of ‘fifth’ Italian mafia
  

  Alongside Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita, investigators have identified an emerging Puglia-based crime organisation that has remained under their radar for several years.

  “The Foggia mafia is relatively young,” the head prosecutor for the city, Ludovico Vaccaro, said. “The clans that make up this organisation have been embedded in this territory for at least 30 years. We cannot compare them to the historical Italian mafia groups like Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta, but it is a mafia characterised by a high degree of aggression and violence. It is what I call a primitive mafia, one that feeds cadavers to pigs so as not to leave a trace. An unrefined mafia in its actions, and for this reason dangerous.”

  Italy lost many of its best and brightest to America. Repatriation could solve many problems.

• COVID-19: Shifting attitudes to migration?
  

  It may thus be that the political impacts of the crisis — how it affects attitudes towards migrant workers and their contributions to society and the economy — will in the long run be more important than any change to policymakers’ understanding of how the crisis affects the economics of migration.

  Public opinion has turned against immigration. Our bureaucratic warlords are trying to get people back onboard with it.

• EU pledges to raise €20bn a year to boost biodiversity
  

  The European Commission has committed to protecting 30% of the EU’s land and oceans by 2030 as part of the European Green Deal, in a plan tentatively welcomed by environment groups who warned far-reaching ambitions must not only exist “on paper”.

  Getting closer to sanity. It might help to downsize the cities, since they breed people in excess.

• Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita

  Over time this will even out, but right now, the world needs to believe that lockdown was necessary. Read between the lies:

  However, Sweden has only had the highest death rate over the past week, with Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and France, still ahead over the entire course of the pandemic.

~~~

• Chinese media estimates 500,000 coronavirus cases in Wuhan, quickly deletes news
  

  Last week, Caixin published the results of a seroepidemiological study carried out in April on 11,000 Wuhan residents, which found that five to six percent of those tested had antibodies for COVID-19. If extrapolated to the city’s entire population, this would mean approximately 500,000 of the city’s residents have been infected with the disease.

  Given that the Chinese government has only reported 50,000 cases in Wuhan, it would mean that 90 percent of cases have not been detected. On May 15, Sina reprinted the article, but it was quickly taken offline along with the Caixin piece

  This is consistent with other data: 50-85 times the number of people who present with symptoms have had it and had minor symptoms.

• How Stealing and Selling Children Became a Business in South Sudan

  Most of humanity lives in self-inflicted misery.

• ‘We stand with Australia’: Mike Pompeo hits out at China threats

  How the USA makes a point.

• Flights From Countries Hard Hit By Coronavirus Still Coming, So Are Precautions In Place?

  People seem averse to learning. If you have a pandemic, stop travel.

• Study Shows 70% of Consumers Would Rather Watch New Movies at Home
  

  A whopping 70% say they are more likely to watch from their couch, while just 13% say they are more likely to watch at a local cinema (with 17% not sure).

  Why go out into the world at all? Diversity and COVID-19 have finished off what consumerism and Big Government made ugly.

  We sit glued to the TV set all night
  And every night
  Why go into the outside world at all
  It’s such a fright

• Amid the coronavirus, a monthly paycheck from the feds doesn’t seem crazy
  

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said last month on MSNBC that a “guaranteed income” may be “worthy of attention now.”

  Yang described the recent cash infusions as a common-sense solution when the nation’s economy is experiencing “10 years’ worth of change in 10 weeks.” These payments, he said, are laying the groundwork for broader, more ambitious programs.

  “Millions of Americans have already got that $1,200 stimulus check in their bank account and they felt this sense of relief and security,” he said. “We’re going to remember this feeling, and I think universal basic income is going to become a huge part of the solutions we implement not just to get through this crisis but also to help rebuild our economy and country as we start to emerge.”

  Equality makes no sense until you see it for what it is, which is insurance against bad outcomes. When good and bad are equal, performance does not matter, and people feel less existential stress. We could eliminate this existential stress with less social and geographic mobility; if you are the shoemaker in your small town, you will always have work unless you are grossly incompetent, insane, criminal, or otherwise prone to getting removed. Instead, we are going to go where equality naturally points… to full Communism. Luckily, this will further divide the Balkanized nation and bring it into financial default, at which point something new will take over the power vaccuum created by the failure of liberal democracy.

• Doctors raise alarm about health effects of continued coronavirus shutdown
  

  The letter outlines a variety of consequences that the doctors have observed resulting from the coronavirus shutdowns, including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to “[p]overty and financial uncertainty,” which “is closely linked to poor health.”

  After Memorial Day, everything is going back to normal because it must. There will be an uptick in cases at about the same time that we find our reporting is wonky. First of all, we report the presence of antibodies as an infection if detected in dead people, even if they recovered from it weeks earlier and then died of something else. Next, many people who have died of the regular flu will be lumped in with the more exotic victims. Finally, figures are always wrong, initially. Corrections are coming. Life will return, which infuriates the Left which wanted to destroy the economy, drive Trump from office, resume mass immigration, and take over forever.

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