Amerika

• 41 million have lost jobs since virus hit, but layoffs slow
  

  States are gradually restarting their economies by letting some businesses — from gyms, retail shops and restaurants to hair and nail salons — reopen with some restrictions. As some of these employers, including automakers, have recalled a portion of their laid-off employees, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits has fallen.

  First-time applications for unemployment aid, though still high by historical standards, have now fallen for eight straight weeks.

  Looks like re-opening and playing international political games has helped the economy. When times are bad, you can at least count on speculators to drive up value.

• Americans, It Turns Out, Would Rather Visit a Store Than Buy Food Online
  

  In the pandemic’s early days it seemed as though buying online groceries would become routine — or at least pick up a sizable number of converts. […] But even in cities hardest hit by the pandemic, more than 7 in 10 people have continued to visit stores for groceries and other essentials, according to surveys by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. In states with more relaxed restrictions, the figure is more than 8 in 10. Over one-third of shoppers say they’ll decrease their use of web groceries or stop ordering food online altogether when shelter-in-place restrictions ease in their area, according to a survey conducted for Bloomberg by Civic Science. Among those who use online grocery pickup services, only half include produce in their orders primarily due to concerns over quality, according to Field Agent, an industry researcher. Fresh food is the thing that consumers are most likely to buy in physical stores exclusively once the pandemic subsides, according to research from Evercore ISI. Items like bottled water, pet food and other bulky, non-perishable household staples have better prospects online, due to the hassle of lugging them out of stores.

  Turns out that we need functional local communities after all. Another nail in the coffin of diversity.

• German police raid homes of far-right Reichsbürger suspects
  

  Regional public broadcaster SWR reported that the weaponry included machetes, hunting slingshots with metal pellets, handguns, firearm ammunition and a crossbow with a telescopic sight.

  In other words: not military gear for terrorism, but personal weapons.

• U.S. senators weigh additional sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2
  

  The pipeline, aimed at bypassing Ukraine, could be launched by the end of 2020 or early next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

  The Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, opposes the project on the grounds it would strengthen Putin’s economic and political grip over Europe.

  It is even older than that: the Soviets wanted to create a similar pipeline for the same reason, which is that a Western Europe dependent on Russian energy would fall into the Eurasian arc and not the European one. This old Cold War project was reborn as Nord Stream 2 with the same goal of dominating Europe:

  The Soviets had a critical venture in the works: a nearly 3,000-mile-long oil and natural gas pipeline running from northern Siberia to the Soviet-Czech border, where it would link up to a western European gas grid. The pipeline would provide the Soviets with roughly $30 billion in hard currency annually, Robinson estimated, and would free West Germany, France, and Italy from a dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Herb Meyer told me, “Once you understood how much trouble the Soviet economy was in, you understood how crucial the pipeline was to their survival. It became the target. Shutting it down became the focus in every way.”

• Dudu Myeni ‘failed abysmally’, declared delinquent director for life
  

  She was a director gone rogue – she did not have the slightest consideration for her fiduciary duty to SAA. She was not a credible witness … she changed her versions, contradicted herself, blamed others and played the victim. Her actions did not constitute mere negligence but were reckless and wilful.

  Diversity always fails. Diverse states always implode. Mixed-race groups always revert to a lower level of function.

• Up to 80% of COVID-19 Infections Are Asymptomatic, a New Case Report Says
  

  In one cruise-ship coronavirus outbreak, more than 80% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 did not show any symptoms of the disease, according to a new paper published in the journal Thorax.

  Consistent with what we have seen from SF, Germany, and Japan: people who present symptoms are a small slice of the infected group. Additionally, it seems that 96% of those who die were suffering other illnesses:

  Almost 96% of the country’s virus fatalities had previous medical conditions, data from Italy’s ISS health institute show. The ISS, which publishes a range of studies on the outbreak including a detailed weekly report, confirms a trend seen since the beginning of the emergency, with the average age of Italians who’ve died from the virus at around 80.

• Twitter Lets Verified Users Spread Fake Photo Linking MN Cop to ‘Make Whites Great Again’ Hat
  

  On Twitter, users upset with Officer Chauvin began sharing a photo collage which falsely suggests [Chauvin] is wearing a red baseball hat that reads “Make Whites Great Again,” a reference to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election slogan “Make America Great Again.”

  However, the man on the right is not Chauvin but appears to resemble former federal prisoner Jonathan Lee Riches, who has reportedly claimed to have filed over 4,000 lawsuits.

  The blue checkmarks up to their usual tricks, and Twitter turns a blind eye because they are fellow travelers. This is the real context of the Trump-vs-Twitter conflict: Twitter has become Leftist propaganda. In my view, the right thing to do is remove the Right-wing entirely so that Twitter fully becomes an echo chamber and people abandon it because of its decreased utility as a(n actual) news source.

• Mississippi mayor criticized for comments following death of George Floyd
  

  If you can say you can’t breathe, you’re breathing. More likely that man died of an overdose or heart attack. Video doesn’t show his resistance that got him into that position. Police being crucified.

  Again with the similarities to Eric Garner: a suspect who would have died of COVID-19, while resisting arrest, triggers an underlying condition and dies. Sad but not murder. Bigger picture: diversity is a total failure and not fair to Blacks, whites, or any other group.

• 1 dead, 1 in custody after deadly shooting near George Floyd protests Wednesday night
  

  According to Minneapolis Police, officers responded to the area of Bloomington and Lake Street at 9:25 p.m. Wednesday night on a possible stabbing victim. Officers found a man in grave condition on the sidewalk and began CPR. Police learned the man was suffering instead from a gunshot wound.

  Minneapolis is on fire. Just like the Rodney King riots, this shows us diversity holding the rest of the country hostage, sort of like unions do, or even the Nancy Pelosis of the world do when they threaten to wreck everything just to get the Right out of power. We are going to have to end diversity through reparations-with-repatriation, and then exile all the Leftists to Venezuela. We could use the space.

• Why your Social Security could feel like a lot less next year
  

  Between 2015 and 2019, Fidelity’s estimate for a 65-year old couple retiring that year rose $40,000—an increase of 16%.

  The cumulative Social Security increase over that period? Just 6.8%, according to the Social Security Administration itself.

  We could never afford these programs, but the Free Stuff Army 1.0 comprised of Southern/Irish and Eastern/Mediterranean European mixes loved the idea, so now they are permanent as we head toward default.

~~~

• Monash Freeway shooting: Man shot dead by police in Melbourne
  

  Police were called to the Monash Freeway near the Eastlink interchange on-ramp at Dandenong North about 9.30am, following reports a man was armed with a weapon.

  A 53-year-old man from Narre Warren died at the scene after being shot in the chest when two gunshots were allegedly fired by officers.

  Riots? Protests?

• What we can learn from conspiracy theories
  

  The latest thinking suggests that conspiracy theories are filtered by a kind of natural selection, which allows those that fit certain requirements to spread rapidly through our societies – while others are confined to the darkest corners of the internet.

  Meanwhile, in the modern world, it’s no accident that popular conspiracies tend to concern themes such as alien life, religious minorities, powerful elites, rival nations, mysterious technologies and the destruction of the environment. “Across the world, people generally believe in theories that are related to the cultural and historical events that have happened in particular places,” says Karen Douglas, a social psychologist at the University of Kent.

  In other words, as long said around here: they are metaphors for problems that are not easily grasped or proven.

• The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals
  

  While the UK government has defended its handling of the issue, care home staff and experts placed at least some of the blame for Europe’s highest death toll on the prioritization of hospitals over these facilities.

  Deflection from the obvious: care homes in the US, Italy, UK, Sweden, and France all turned into death traps. Ask yourself who works in such places, and it becomes obvious. Immigrants care less about the potential deaths of those from other groups. We have thought this about white people for years, so now it is time to upgrade our thinking and apply it to all groups.

  How else do we explain the widespread nature of this problem?

  Nursing homes have become a flashpoint in the global pandemic, with more than a third of the U.S.’s 100,00 deaths in such facilities, and higher proportions reported in such countries as Canada, Ireland and France. Spain’s more than 19,000 nursing home deaths is out of an official overall death toll of about 27,000, but that is likely an undercount because it includes only those who tested positive. Some estimates put the actual toll as high as 43,000.

  Even in hippie hugbox Canada nursing homes are horrors:

  The Canadian Armed Forces submitted a blistering report on the conditions of Ontario-based nursing homes, which included dispensing expired medication, a “culture of fear” of using personal protective equipment (PPE) “because they cost money,” and patients with soiled diapers being left in their beds.

  Glad they saved a ton of money on labor by using immigrants.

• Pulitzer confirms: there is “no such thing as good white people”
  

  So because there is “no such thing as good white people,” the well-trained white interviewer asks Jericho Brown about how he felt when yet another “flower” (not her words) – Ahmaud Arbery, a peaceful African American – was shot dead in February by – as some of the mainstream media reported – a white European American supremacist and generally what he thought about whiteness.

  Diversity failed. They have spent the past fifty years propping it up at the expense of native populations. Now the natives — ethnic Western Europeans in America — are tired of the constant drain, especially as we must rebuild the economy savaged by a century of socialist-style entitlements and a few months of COVID-19. We want to cut ourselves free from the diversity and its endless obligations, costs, riots, conflicts, and tensions. This is what diversity exhaustion looks like.

• Japan enacts high-tech ‘super city’ bill
  

  The government hopes to utilize cutting-edge technologies to address issues such as depopulation and the aging of society.

  Populations are dying from deaths of despair brought on by the meaninglessness, futility, and frustration of modern life. More technology is not a solution; less Leftism is.

• “Everyone Is Shocked”: CBS News Hit Hard by Layoffs
  

  CBS News was hit hard by a round of corporate cost-cutting that saw “a single-digit percentage” of the network’s news staffers laid off, according to an estimate given by network president Susan Zirinsky during a Wednesday afternoon all-hands conference.

  Media had utility as a product when it reported the news. As we entered peak media consumption in the 1990s — televisions became cheap and good, and the internet rose — media overbuilt itself. It then pursued its most fanatical audience, making the mistake that every group makes of addressing the loudest voices instead of the broadest group, and became highly politicized and emotional. People put up with that for awhile, but the internet gave us more media options, and we realized that in most cases reading the headline was as good as reading the story. Then, media completely failed us, and we realized that “fake news” was not a slur but a description of these heavily editorialized stories that carefully glossed over or left out key facts in order to slant the narrative. With the rise of “spin,” media began its death because it lost its utility as a product. Now the market will correct.

• Ex-aide to L.A. council member confesses to massive bribery plot, implicates official
  

  The alleged bribery included payments from a Chinese firm seeking to construct a 77-story building slated to be the tallest west of the Mississippi.

  George Esparza, 33 of East Los Angeles, served as a “special assistant” to council member Jose Huizar until 2017 and admitted to his role in a criminal enterprise from early 2013 through November 2018.

• Bethel School District investigates wrestling coach’s George Floyd post
  

  The Bethel School District said it’s investigating a social media post by a first-year high school wrestling coach that showed him on the ground with a knee on the back of his neck as he smiles and gives a thumbs-up.

  “This is for all the race baiters and people that don’t What (sic) they’re talking about when they’re saying that this could kill you,” reads the Facebook post, which appears to have since been deleted from the coach Dave Hollenbeck’s page.

  Contradicts the Leftist narrative. Wait until the autopsy.

• After her toaster oven caught fire, Ontario woman was told by Whirlpool to take it up with a company in China
  

  But things got complicated when she asked for $600 to cover the smoke and fire damage. Whirlpool refused, telling Hammond she’d have to go after a third-party company she’d never heard of — located in China — that owns the factory that manufactured the appliance.

  No one is happy with globalism.

• Questions raised over hydroxychloroquine study which caused WHO to halt trials for Covid-19
  

  The study, led by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Advanced Heart Disease in Boston, examined patients in hospitals around the world, including in Australia. It said researchers gained access to data from five hospitals recording 600 Australian Covid-19 patients and 73 Australian deaths as of 21 April.

  But data from Johns Hopkins University shows only 67 deaths from Covid-19 had been recorded in Australia by 21 April. The number did not rise to 73 until 23 April. The data relied upon by researchers to draw their conclusions in the Lancet is not readily available in Australian clinical databases, leading many to ask where it came from.

  The Left specializes in passive aggressive provocation: they do something destructive, then act like victims, and use the ensuing social panic to legitimize whatever they did in the first place and, correspondingly, demonize any alternative to it. As part of this method, they like to get in big bold headlines early on stating what they want to be true, and later when their assertion is proven wrong, ignore or minimize it in later, much less emotional and interesting reporting.

~~~

~~~

• Twitter fact-checks China amid bias row
  

  Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, has been blamed by many Conservatives as the man behind the effort to fact-check the president. Many prominent Republican voices on Twitter pointed to old tweets by Mr Roth which refer to “Nazis in the White House” and other insults about the president and his allies.

  In other words, this is a token effort to distract from their constant censorship of conservatives.

• Air Force punished black airmen more, report says — and covered it up
  

  “Despite the Air Force’s internal findings in 2016 that it has a ‘consistent’ and ‘persistent’ racial disparity in prosecutions of black service members, it appears the Air Force has done nothing in the last four years to solve the problem.”

  It depends on the cause of those prosecutions. Different groups have different behaviors, and trying to force Blacks to act white is not only dumb but condescending.

• Anti-porn filters stop Dominic Cummings trending on Twitter
  

  This sort of accidental filtering has gained a name in computer science: the Scunthorpe problem, so-called because of the Lincolnshire town’s regular issues with such censorship.

  The Wild West internet worked because it had no viewpoint discrimination but tended to exclude low-skilled users and low-quality material, sort of like eugenics, morality, and natural selection. We should go back to the Wild West and stop trying to make the internet safe for normies, who will just use it to post the same banal gibberish that caused us to run to the internet in the first place to get away from them.

• IKEA manager charged for firing Pole over anti-gay remarks
  

  A Polish prosecutor has charged an IKEA manager with violating the religious rights of an employee sacked for voicing strong objections, within the company, to a corporate event supporting tolerance for LGBT people last year.

  The Catholic employee at a Polish branch of the Swedish furniture and home goods retailer had allegedly cited Biblical passages suggesting that homosexuals deserve death.

  You can have tolerance, or you can have standards, but you cannot have both. Successful nations impose relatively strict standards in order to weed out deleterious mutations and destructive people. These work when they are eugenic, meaning that people are removed from the population, but fail when they are control-oriented, or trying to force everyone to behave the same way. In the case of homosexuals, it is ridiculous to do anything but demand they keep their private lives private, just like we do with swingers, nudists, scat fetishists, and the like. This minimizes the harm they do and allows the majority to clearly present its standards of behavior. However, we should heed this: if your society starts producing a great number of homosexuals, it is likely that you have a breeding quality issue introducing many deleterious mutations.

• Hong Kong security legislation backed by China’s parliament
  

  China’s parliament has backed security legislation for Hong Kong which would make it a crime to undermine Beijing’s authority in the territory.

  The resolution – which now passes to China’s senior leadership – has caused deep concern among those who say it could end Hong Kong’s unique status.

  It could also see China installing its own security agencies in the region for the first time.

  China takes over Hong Kong. This tells us that the Chinese have been faking their economic statistics for a decade and are in much worse shape than we thought. The West is going to remove any favoritism toward Hong Kong, and a bankrupt China is going to go to war.

• German far right’s complaint over extremism report rejected
  

  The administrative court ruled there was sufficient evidence to show that AfD’s youth branch and The Wing, which was recently disbanded, seek to create an ethnically homogeneous population in Germany that would exclude people deemed to be “foreigners.”

  It is terrible and wrong to want to stop genocide of your people.

• Oldest ‘nearly complete’ HIV genome found in forgotten tissue sample from 1966
  

  The tissue sample was taken and preserved in 1966, making this HIV sequence 10 years older than the previous oldest genome, which came from a blood sample taken in 1976 in the DRC. Gene sequences like these – which come from before the virus that causes AIDS was discovered in 1983 – help pinpoint the timing of genetic mutations in the virus.

  Everything bad came from the 1960s. We relaxed standards in the late 1950s with our civil rights crusade, and shortly afterward, everything collapsed. Another strikingly unintelligent move by democracy.

• Bezos defends Amazon firing of activist employees
  

  Amazon had often said these workers were fired for violations of different internal protocols and not for their activism. Smalls, for instance, was fired for violating a company-mandated quarantine. Costa was fired for using company resources to solicit fellow employees after she invited other workers to a virtual meeting about warehouse conditions.

  Unions ruin everything. Organizing employees leads to unions. Amazon is just stalling until it can get robots to do all the work and then fire everyone, which is exactly what you should do in any country where unions are legally protected.

• Jewish-founded golf club sprayed with swastikas
  

  Backward swat = insurance shakedown, not hate crime. Check out how our “meritocracy” produces people who vomit buzzwords and call for totalitarianism:

  Caulfield MP and shadow minister for police and community safety David Southwick said, “Victoria is a proudly multicultural and tolerant community and the use of this imagery in targeted attacks must never be accepted.

  “The Nazi swastika is a symbol of hate and this incident reinforces the need for the Andrews government to work with the Liberal Nationals and pass bipartisan legislation banning its use.”

• Canadian court rules against Huawei exec fighting extradition
  

  Prosecutors accused Meng of committing fraud by lying to a bank, in this case an American one. That is a crime in both Canada and the United States.

  Outside the courthouse, protestors held placards that read “Extradite Meng Wanzhou,” “No Huawei in Canada” and “Canada don’t let China bully us.”

  People are sick of internationalism (globalism, diversity, immigration) and want nationalism instead.

~~~

• Digital strategies key for retail to survive a shifting consumer landscape
  

  Larger retailers are going to need to re-look at their digital strategies as it becomes clear that digital transformation is no longer just a buzzword, but a fundamental path for business survival.

  More trend-chasing. Back to reality: most people want local stores, but the high costs imposed by property taxes are driving them to buy online. Revoke those taxes, problem solved.

• Trump to sign executive order on social media on Thursday: White House
  

  The officials gave no further details. It was unclear how Trump could follow through on the threat of shutting down privately owned companies including Twitter Inc.

  He can always pull all government agencies and employees off of them, sabotaging their utility. This would be a good start.

• EU’s diplomatic service launches probe over China disinformation leak
  

  The EU’s diplomatic service has launched an investigation into the leaking of an internal email criticizing how a report on Chinese disinformation was edited.

  Whistleblowers are only good when they are Leftists.

• Merkel Says EU Has ‘Strategic Interest’ in Working With China
  

  “We Europeans will need to recognize the decisiveness with which China will claim a leading position in the existing structures of the international architecture,” Merkel said in a video speech to the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a think tank with ties to her Christian Democratic Union.

  Merkel stays in office because Germany is making a mint selling BMWs to China. Right now, the Chinese economy is dying, but that has not yet trickled down to savage salaries. When it does so, the Merkel miracle™ will go away, and so will this odious neo-Communist hag.

• Hammer-wielding woman arrested after going on racist tirade, couple says
  

  And we go what do you want?” Dr. Franco said. “And she said screamed ‘You Mexicans, get out of my F**ing country. Go back to your F**ing country.’”

  The woman got out of her car, with a hammer and seemed to be threatening them with it. Before the situation escalated further, the police arrived and took her into custody.

  Bono is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony with a punishment range of up to 20 years in prison. But if prosecutors believe racism was the motive, the charge could be enhanced to a first-degree felony, with a punishment range of up to life in prison.

  People are tired of diversity. I should say: normal people are now tired of diversity.

• Louisiana cop fired for saying ‘unfortunate’ more black people didn’t die of coronavirus
  

  CBS affiliate KLFY in Lafayette, Louisiana, reported that Aucoin’s post was made on its Facebook page in response to another commenter who wrote,”virus that was created to kill all the BLACKS is death.”

  “Well it didn’t work,” Aucoin wrote, “how unfortunate,” according to screenshots shown by KLFY.

  Instead of being cruel to Blacks, just be cruel to diversity and the white idiots who support it. If all white Leftists died tomorrow, everything would be better. Breivik, McVeigh, and Kaczynski had the right idea: go after the decision-makers and their lackeys, not the symptoms. Tarrant, Bowers, and Roof got it wrong.

• Investigation launched into Central Park incident involving white woman and black man
  

  The commission said it learned of the incident from the video recorded by Christian Cooper, an African American bird-watcher, who asked Amy Cooper, who is white, to put a leash on her dog. She responded by threatening to call the police.

  “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she is heard on video saying.

  Her lawyers need to prove that this guy was threatening in appearance to her. In the meantime, lots of overtime for bureaucrats and police to work out this silly mess.

• Man killed in officer-involved shooting after allegedly stabbing police dog in Fullerton
  

  After refusing “numerous” commands to drop the knife, the suspect tried to re-enter the home and a police K-9 was sent in.

  Police said the suspect then stabbed the police dog and an officer-involved shooting occurred.

  Life-saving measures were performed by officers and the suspect was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

  When riots happen, everyone loses their mind. #DogLivesMatter

• COVID-19: Half of Canadians think their governments are deliberately hiding information
  

  The most recent survey from Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found 50 per cent of respondents felt governments were deliberately withholding information about the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which has killed thousands and ground the economy to a halt.

  In my view, it is just incompetence. Our “meritocracy” selected people who say the right buzzwords, not have a clue about reality or how it works. Thanks democracy and equality!

• Zuckerberg: ‘Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online’
  

  Asked by Fox News’ Dana Perino if he thought Twitter “made the wrong decision,” Zuckerberg said his platform has “a different policy than Twitter on this.”

  “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” Zuckerberg said in the interview on Fox’s “The Daily Briefing.” “I think in general private companies probably shouldn’t be — especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

  The libertarian candidate for 2024? Either that, or as he has proved many times, a savvy businessman who knows how to read a room. People are tired of censorship; they want social media where you can pick your friends and exclude everyone else. That way, we can all live in our little bubbles and never contact the wider human experience unless we go to Walmart or something.

Tags: linkpost, periscope