Amerika

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• Charleston sues 24 fossil fuel companies, seeks money for climate change damages
  

  Charleston officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against 24 fossil fuel companies, claiming that because they contributed to climate change — and misled the public about the danger its products posed to the environment —they should have to bear the cost of repairing the damages caused by flooding in the city.

  Increasingly, Leftism looks simply like projection: humans do not want to accept their errors and look for someone to blame instead. This explains its vindictive and doctrinaire nature, at least. In reality, Charleston floods for the same reason that every other place floods, namely that it urbanized and covered too much of the land in concrete, which means that rainwaters are not absorbed and instead rush toward whatever points will contain them.

• The Psychology of Denying Overpopulation
  

  As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without roofs over their heads, but no one wishes for a world with more homeless people. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy—to light their homes and cook their food, and when that is achieved—to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At higher levels of economic development, people desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and automobiles. At the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, reached by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

  The predictable result of all those extra people satisfying all their increasing energy needs is water and air pollution, garbage floating in the oceans, forests being cut down, longer and longer traffic jams, and increasing urban sprawl. Easy math there, too.

  Homer-Dixon made the case in Scientific American in 1992, when the world population was just over 5 billion. It’s now around 7.5 billion and, perhaps predictably, there are now 150 million homeless people in the world, and an estimated 1.5 billion more (that’s billion) living in “inadequate shelter.” The equation works against people living in countries with the least resources, which are growing at faster rates, so there’s less to go around but more people needing it.

  The big shadow issue of the twenty-first century emerges with the question of population. Some want us to go to one billion people in the USA so that we have enough warm bodies to compete with China, forgetting that unless we are trying to invade China, it will be able to mobilize only a small percentage of that population; the costs of arming and training them, not to mention transporting them, will be the limiting factor. In the meantime, the equation of a finite Earth plus infinitely expanding human population means that we will hit hard limits after consuming lots of things that we would rather preserve, like nature. The West has already limited its population, but the rest of the world keeps growing. This lays the foundation for sledge wars, or millions of people rushing at each other with hammers and machetes, fighting over dwindling resources. Climate change? Try world urbanization and resource overuse, meaning that we have less forest than ever before to regulate local temperatures, which are conveniently raised by heat-reflective concrete everywhere.

• J.K. Rowling’s new novel set to be a bestseller despite ‘transphobic’ claims
  

  She has become a key figure in the culture wars, aligned with feminists critical of fluid views of gender and social conservatives critical of identity politics.

  Critics have been quick to decry a plotline in the novel, the fifth in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, in which a cross-dressing serial killer is a key suspect in a decades-old murder case. In one passage the character is described as “dark and stocky”, wearing a wig and “padded out in a woman’s coat”.

  A Hachette spokeswoman said more than 35,000 copies of Troubled Blood had been sent to local bookshops, making it the biggest Robert Galbraith release for Australia on record. Hachette’s in-house projections suggest it is set to become Rowling’s bestselling crime novel since her second foray into the genre, The Silkworm, in 2014.

  People are tired of the Leftist Regime and its endless demand for thought-conformity lest we see how across the board its policies are failing, leaving our countries internally divided and bankrupt. Rowling picked a good time to jump into the fray with a moderate opinion that will first be attacked then recognized as part of mass culture just like Silence of the Lambs. It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again… or at least, canceled and demonized by blue-haired life failures on Twitter.

• Wikipedia edits have massive impact on tourism, say economists
  

  An experiment by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra £100,000 a year in tourism revenue for a small city, underscoring the power of the free online encyclopaedia.

  Wikipedia shows us the face of the nü-internet: anyone can contribute content, but non-conforming content gets deleted, and this creates a fake public opinion much as on social media. Google extensively funded Wikipedia so that there would be answers to questions that its search engine does not understand, and its algorithm that rewards sites with lots of links quickly displaced all smaller content in favor of social media, Wikipedia, and big media sites. This killed the internet.

• Trump admin shuts down CDC training that purportedly flouted executive order on critical race theory
  

  Rufo noted on Monday that the CDC was hosting a training focused on “systems of structured inequality,” blaming systemic racism for deaths from COVID-19 and at the hands of police. It admonishes the “myth of meritocracy” and “myth of american exceptionalism,” among other objectives that Rufo said represented “textbook critical race theory.”

  Under the Obama administration, American government became a mouthpiece for Communist theory. Somehow Trump stopping this practice only thirty years past the end of the Cold War offends the various people who contribute nothing and therefore, depend on socialism for compelled acceptance in American society.

• Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is growing fast
  

  DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues.

  No one trusts Big Tech because we realize that their advertising model does not work without intrusively prying into every detail of our lives.

• What the Old Establishment Can Teach the New Tech Elite
  

  Unlike the dead aristocrats in the churchyards, the geeks who run Google and Facebook have no sense of guilt to give them pause and few ties of blood and soil to connect them to a particular patch of land. They believe that their fortunes are the product of nothing but their own innate genius. They owe the rest of us nothing.

  People are slowly learning that diversity is suicide, but homogeneity leads to people caring about their countries and not seeing people as simply economic and political units.

• Momentum for Basic Income Builds as Pandemic Drags On
  

  At their most targeted, such programs essentially function as a type of cash welfare, providing a flexible, fungible benefit to low-income Americans. In broader and more ambitious proposals, so-called universal basic-income programs would send cash to everyone regardless of income level — a feature intended, advocates say, to promote consumer spending, lessen the stigma of welfare and protect all workers against future economic upheaval.

  It helps in understanding Leftism to avoid taking it at face value. Altruism it is not; instead, it shows what happens when a group of individualists demand that society not punish them for placing their interests first. They achieve this through equality, and when that fails to manifest, demand it be subsidized. Since that is unstable, they seek total control, which they visualize as a strong central government distributing resources — as they exist in a capitalist society — without realizing that this in turn influences the production of resources, since if you reward competence and incompetence the same (equality) you end up with more incompetence because competence takes more effort and, if unrewarded and risky, will be undertaken far less.

• FBI’s Wray: Russia using ‘drumbeat of misinformation’ to undermine Biden campaign
  

  Wray’s testimony follows an Aug. 7 warning by the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center that Russia, China and Iran were all trying to interfere in the Nov. 3 election.

  Leftist woo ignores the fact that these countries have interfered in all recent elections by trying to sow as much chaos as possible, and that China has been funding the Democrats since at least the 1990s.

• Canada’s wealthiest one per cent hold 25.6 per cent of riches, new PBO report says
  

  The top one per cent of Canada’s families hold about 25.6 per cent of the wealth — roughly $3 trillion — up from 13.7 per cent estimated under previous methodology, says the report from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

  Funny how wealth redistribution programs make the rich richer and the middle class poorer, as if the rich were trying to eliminate their competition. Even more, this ignores the fact that while ordinary people rely on paychecks, the rich stay rich by owning things, like companies, which produce things that the rest of us buy. If you want closer to “equality,” try having every household be a farm. In the meantime, payments to “the poor” just give them money to spend on more products to make the rich richer, which is why Leftists always seem to be wealthy. At some point, they tire of quasi-monopoly and go for the full deal through government power, which is why socialist states inevitably end up at totalitarianism.

• Racial/Ethnic Variation in Nasal Gene Expression of Transmembrane Serine Protease 2 (TMPRSS2)
  

  Among the racial/ethnic groups, nasal gene expression of TMPRSS2 was highest in Black individuals (n = 47; mean, 8.64 [95% CI, 8.41-8.86] log2 counts per million) compared with Asian individuals (n = 25; mean, 8.07 [95% CI, 7.74-8.40] log2 counts per million), Latino individuals (n = 81; mean, 8.02 [95% CI, 7.90-8.14] log2 counts per million), individuals of mixed race/ethnicity (n = 29; mean, 7.97 [95% CI, 7.77-8.16] log2 counts per million), and White individuals (n = 123; mean, 8.04 [95% CI, 7.94-8.15] log2 counts per million)

  Now we know why minorities make up most of the COVID-19 cases and deaths.

• Facebook issues new rules on internal employee communication
  

  “We deeply value expression and open discussion. What we’ve heard from our employees is that they want the option to join debates on social and political issues rather than see them unexpectedly in their work feed,” Osborne said in a statement. “We’re updating our employee policies and work tools to ensure our culture remains respectful and inclusive.”

  In the 1990s our new near-White masters (Southern, Irish, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europeans) decided that work/life balance was a threat, so they created the idea of the office as a fun place to spend all of your time, with free sodas, meals, gyms, daycare, and other perks. That meant that now people try to live their lives at the office, when in reality, no one should be indulging in any political debates at the office. Business should be function, and politics, sex, religion, and other personal topics belong elsewhere.

• Xinjiang: China defends ‘education’ camps
  

  The Chinese report said that 1.3 million people had been through Xinjiang’s “vocational training” scheme annually for six years. It’s not clear how many of those “retrained” were sent to the specially built camps or if any of them went through the programme twice.

  But in total nearly eight million people out of a population of 22 million could have been through the programme, the new figures suggest.

  The US does the same thing through decentralized methods, sending everyone through public school where they are taught Leftist theory. China recognizes that diversity is a threat to stability and prosperity, and are trying to fix it using the old Leftist method of mandatory dogma taught through propaganda, with the aim of making uniform, obedient, and fearful cities who cling to the Party as their only salvation. American and European Leftists will do the same thing if given a chance, probably as a condition of you receiving healthcare or retirement funds. Diversity seminars for everyone!

• Up to 48 species saved from extinction by conservation efforts, study finds
  

  The Iberian lynx, California condor and pygmy hog are among animals that would have disappeared without reintroduction programmes, zoo-based conservation and formal legal protections since 1993, research led by scientists at Newcastle University and BirdLife International found.

  Think of how many more we can save by leaving half of the land in its natural state without human traffic or intervention.

• AT&T considers cellphone plans subsidized by ads
  

  Various companies including Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O, Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint’s Boost Mobile have tested advertising supported phone services since the early 2000s but they have not caught on. AT&T is hoping that better advertising targeting could revive the idea.

  As technologies mature, people expect them to cost less and work constantly. Our history with technology shows that as the bugs are eliminated and competition drives down prices through greater availability, this pattern remains consistent unless you have some bloated industry full of unnecessary employees that maintains dominance through sheer inertia. When the smartphones and internet are expected to cost fifty bucks a month total, much of the fat in Big Tech is going to go away, so they are hoping to move toward a more “utility-style” model in the hopes of retaining their monopoly. This shows us that their advertising model has worn thin because there is no longer a majority of people who share the same culture or background in Europe or the USA, only random people for whom advertisements do not really work because they do not take into account their niches, or innate culture (race, ethnicity, caste) and elective culture (fandom, lifestyle, location). Instead, Big Tech hopes to find Big Data information about us that it can use to make profiles and then shout advertisements at us that people with similar data have liked, even though this model is waning because it turns out that if people have little in common, predicting their behavior produces nothing but generalized results.

• Bail Set for Woman’s Racist Note Offense
  

  [Name redacted by Amerika] is charged with making a terrorist threat with a Hate Crime Enhancer-two felony counts of Bail Jumping and one count of Misdemeanor Bail Jumping. MPD was called to the Walmart parking lot Friday afternoon for a report of a racist note placed on a car. The note was a “mock hunting” license for black people which used the “derogatory term.” Yauch left the scene and was located by authorities Sunday confessing to them she committed the crime.

  You have “freedom.” You can think or say anything, so long as it promotes “freedom.” If you object to any Other group, that will be considered a hate crime and you will have your life destroyed and a permanent record made on search engines so that you will live in poverty for the rest of your days.

• Melinda Gates warns social media platforms are due a “reckoning” for not censoring enough
  

  Her dissatisfaction with what’s allowed on the internet these days in terms of speech is driven by personal reasons, as Bill Gates, although a darling of corporate media, often comes under fire on social media for his policies and ideas around the coronavirus pandemic.

  Melinda Gates suggests that this criticism qualifies for disinformation and conspiracy theories, while those platforms who are not agile enough in censoring such unwanted content should be held accountable “by society.”

  Translation: your prole-kings define official “truth” and destroy everything else. This is how our nü-elites think; they know better, and we should be punished from saying that we or others know better, since the agenda of egalitarian society is more important than reality or our personal objections.

• Muslims seek to amend Swedish constitution to ban mockery of religion
  

  After Danish politician Rasmus Paludan’s Hard Line party launched a Quran-burning tour across Sweden, 15 Muslim congregations have voiced their desire to change Sweden’s laws to ban the mockery of religion. They’ve indicated that this should specifically include the burning of holy scriptures.

  In a diverse society, criticism of any group threatens their membership in that society, so we must go down the death spiral of censorship, playing “whack-a-mole” with whatever is offensive this week in order to someday achieve equality Utopia.

• The power of Falun Gong
  

  “Part of the whole premise of the practice is getting rid of your human attachments in order to attain salvation,” says Anna. “I think a lot of parents conflate human attachment with basic parental love and emotional presence with your children.”

  China hates Falun Gong, so it is interesting to see this screed show up in Western media. In the Buddhist tradition, non-attachment means that you give up on what you cannot influence, notably the tendency of other people to encounter bad results from their silly activities. It is equal parts disinterest and natural selection.

• Plastic pollution: Washed clothing’s synthetic mountain of ‘fluff’
  

  When you add it up, the total amount of synthetic microfibres going into the wider environment as we wash our clothes is an astonishing number.

  US scientists estimate it to be 5.6 million tonnes since we first started wearing those polyester and nylon garments in a big way in the 1950s.

  Just over half this mass – 2.9 million tonnes – has likely ended up in our rivers and seas.

  Another modern miracle dies. Synthetic fabrics mean synthetic fibers entering the environment in huge amounts. We are going to have to go back to wearing cotton. All of our modern miracles — more food, energy, globalism, technology — seem to be failing at the same time, leaving behind a polluted planet of starving and thirsty people who hate each other.

• Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets
  

  The top five billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison – saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7bn, or 26 per cent over the same spring period. That’s roughly the GDP of Puerto Rico.

  Send everyone home, shut small businesses, then hand out stimulus, and people have no choice but to find a large corporation to order necessities from. Does Sweden have this problem?

• NYU Prof Says More Than 20 Percent of Universities Could Fail Because of the Lockdowns
  

  Making matters worse, foreign students are staying home in droves because of both the virus and US policy. This might not sound like much, but universities obtain more than twice the revenue from the typical foreign student than from the typical American student. Foreign students have been subsidizing American students for years. And now they aren’t.

  When government created education grants, it made higher education into an industry, and now it runs on a for-profit basis. Seeing it get cut back a little will be positive, since that means that the least performing departments like diversity, feminism, and underwater basket-weaving get cut first.

• Dangerous “forever chemicals” found in at least 500 drinking water wells across California
  

  The chemicals, identified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are a group of man-made chemicals manufactured to produce things like non-stick pans, grease-resistant paper and water-resistant clothing.

  These chemicals are also notorious for their strong resistance to degradation, so much so that scientists estimate it could take millennia for these chemicals to break down, hence the moniker “forever chemicals.”

  We make chemical compounds designed to deny mortality, and then they hang around and accumulate, eventually poisoning us. Another modern miracle bites the dust.

• College professor who wished Trump voters would get coronavirus and die suspended by university
  

  “Yesterday, [Trump] held [a rally] inside,” Biology professor Jennifer Mosher said in a video posted by one of her students, according to 13 WOWK News. “Nobody wore a mask. And I’ve become the type of person where I hope they all get it and die.”

  Mosher continued: “I’m sorry, but that’s so frustrating, just, I don’t know what else to do. You can’t argue with them. You can’t talk sense with them. … I said to somebody yesterday, I hope they all die before the election.”

  While this woman wants me dead, and seems to be unlikable, we have to look at the bigger principle here: quit firing people for their opinions. Bring back open discussion. Maybe what she says really should not be tolerated in polite society, but the way to do it is to bring out the opinion — similar to chemtrails, flat Earth, Holocaust revisionism, anti-vax, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and paranoia of the rich — and subject it to analysis, criticism, and eventually, reach some kind of balance that way. Few debates end up with a clear winner and loser. Instead, the good ones get to the core of an issue and reveal it, at which point the truth is obvious to those who can perceive it. If too much of your population is truth-agnostic, they should not have the vote, we might opine.

• ‘Total failure’ on English river water quality
  

  In 2016, when figures were last published, 16% of waters were classed as good.

  In fact, water quality hasn’t deteriorated since then – but it hasn’t improved as promised.

  The figures appear to have got worse because stricter tests brought in by the EU have shown up levels of long-banned pollutants such as PCB in the tissues of living organisms.

  Having fewer people would limit pollution; having fewer people but living at a 1950s technology level might allow both humanity and nature to survive.

• Most Want ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Laws to Protect Police, Fear for Public Safety
  

  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters think there is a war on police going on. That’s up from 43% two years ago and up from a previous high of 58% in 2015. Just 29% disagree, while 12% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

  Fifty-nine percent (59%) also support the adoption of a Blue Lives Matter law in their state that would make attacks on police and first responders a hate crime and increase the penalties for such attacks. That’s unchanged from 2016 when Louisiana became the first of more than a dozen states to adopt such a law. Only 25% oppose a Blue Lives Matter law where they live.

  Those riots backfired, mainly because the narratives behind them slowly collapsed. Breonna Taylor was fired for what many believe was theft of drugs:

  She was promoted to become an EMT in June of that year, and worked in that capacity for five months. It was a career her family has said she was proud of.

  The documents show she’d called that November and resigned. A termination form also has a box checked stating do not rehire. But, it does not state a reason why that box was checked.

  The city said it could not share that information because it’s a personnel matter.

  George Floyd ate his stash and died. Rayshard Brooks was drunk when he attacked police officers. We did not have a police brutality and systemic racism issue in the incidents chosen to make a touchstone point, much as we did not with Rodney King before the LA Riots. Public opinion first favored the protests, then turned against them as more documents saw the light of day.

• Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter
  

  ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him.

  Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators’ identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators’ affiliation.

  Early estimates from insurance agencies say the cost of this summer’s rioting will set a record surpassing that of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which cost an inflation-adjusted $1.2 billion. Much of that will be paid by taxpayers in the form of overtime and hazard pay for police and EMTs, emergency room visits, destruction of public property, and more.

  So much for the “White Nationalists are burning down our cities” narrative that the Leftist media tried to advance. Just like Tass, Western Media lies in order to support the Party.

• Survey: The average worker experiences career burnout — by the age of 32!
  

  Why are so many modern workers perpetually burnt out? Many (52%) say they try to do too much, while others (58%) believe their typical working hours are too long.

  Other popular responses to that question include not taking enough days off (39%) and feeling like one must always be “on” while at work (47%). Nearly two in five workers (37%) feel like there’s pressure to constantly put in extra work.

  One would think that younger employees are faring better these days. Yet close to 60% of surveyed Gen Z workers say they’ve already been worn down by the current “always on” work culture.

  Just like with school shootings and drug epidemics, we look to proximate causes and not originating cause. Jobs are jails because of government regulations, affirmative action, women in the workforce, diversity, immigration, political correctness, a lack of smoking and drinking, constant communication, and the divisions expected between people who do not share a culture in common. If we removed those, jobs might not be unbearable, but as they are now, they promote the idiotic and suppress the competent because the competent find them awful. Everyone else muddles through, then complains about “burnout” and goes on a shopping spree.

• World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam
  

  Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half.

  The report, compiled by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, warned that rampant overconsumption and the rich world’s addiction to high-carbon transport are exhausting the world’s “carbon budget”.

  They mean wealthier societies, which are now full of third world people. The last flight I was on had mostly minority passengers.

  He pointed to transport as one of the key drivers of growth in emissions, with people in rich countries showing an increasing tendency to drive high-emitting cars, such as SUVs, and take more flights. Oxfam wants more taxes on high-carbon luxuries, such as a frequent-flyer levy, to funnel investment into low-carbon alternatives and improving the lot of the poor.

  In other words, this has nothing to do with the environment; it is a shakedown for more wealth transfer to the impoverished. Cutting flights would be a good thing, but raising the cost above $5,000 per flight would do wonders that wealth transfer cannot.

• Humans Wiped Out Two-Thirds of the World’s Wildlife in 50 Years
  

  The study analyzed population sizes of 4,392 monitored species of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians from 1970 to 2016, reports Karin Brulliard for the Washington Post. It found that populations in Latin America and the Caribbean fared the worst, with a staggering 94 percent decline in population. All told, the drastic species decline tracked in this study “signal a fundamentally broken relationship between humans and the natural world,” the WWF notes in a release.

  However, as Rott notes, the report indicates that the ever-growing population of humans has led to an “ecological imbalance,” where society requires more resources to survive than can be produced. According to their models, the researchers conclude: “The human enterprise currently demands 1.56 times more than the amount that Earth can regenerate.”

  In other words, we have too many people. More people = less wildlife. The solution is fewer people, which we can kick off gracefully by ceasing to send our money to the third world, ending foreign aid and anti-poverty NGOs, and discontinuing the subsidies for our own citizens. Democracy + technology = ecocide.

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