The oligarchs have managed to unite both the progressive left and the conservative right against them. The left objects that the tech industry remains almost totally un-unionized and seems to seek to eliminate gainful work for all but a handful. The right sees a threat to their political expression as they strengthen their hold on the means of communications, generally wiping non-progressive views from the screens of their customers.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on America’s Oligarchs Face Left-Wing, Right-Wing Backlash
On Google, I just typed in “top races Republican,” and the word “races” got a squiggly underline suggesting I had misspelled the word. Beneath it ran Google’s helpful correction: “top racist Republican.” With “top races Democrat,” no such veering into the gutter. No squiggly line. The word “racist” did not insinuate itself into my field of vision. Oh, and before I completed the phrase, with just “top races Democra,” two lines below ran the following little hint: “best Democratic races to donate to.” Huh? Who said anything about donating? I’ve never donated to a political candidate in my life, and if I did, I wouldn’t donate to Democrats. Again, no parallel on the Republican side. No steering me to fundraisers.
How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Google, Facebook, and the ‘Creepy Line’
For the same reason it’s oppressing its Tibetans. They aren’t Han.
An additional reason is that Islam, like Communism, is an oppressive totalitarian ideology. Two such cannot co-exist. The Chinese recognize this and are taking the appropriate steps to extinguish Islam in their territory.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Map Shows Trillion-Dollar Reason Why China Is Oppressing Its Muslims
Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago.
These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal.
The regression to tribal attitudes in American politics can only be a bad thing. A simple glance at what tribal politics has done to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa ought to be sufficient proof of that.
The fact that the mainstream news media constitute a tribe of their own, and seem to be the tail wagging the dog of the Democrat party, means that their collapse due to the failure of their various business models can’t come a moment too soon.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Media’s Tribal War on Americans
New York has some of the most strict gun control laws in the nation. Yet it has a ‘growing number of murders’.
The victim was apparently specifically targeted. There has evidently been no investigation of why.
The streets were full of people going about their business, and yet (a) nobody intervened, (b) nobody tried to stop or apprehend the shooter or his companion, (c) everybody just stood by passively and hoped not to be noticed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Hooded Gunman Shoots 15-Year-Old Boy Dead in Front of Sister in New York
Gee, when Trump says that, they call him the New Hitler.
I certainly hope that she survives the experience of finding out that she is not, in fact, the boss of anything.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Delivers Impassioned Response to Critics: ‘I’m the boss. How about that?’
There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “anti-science.” The problem is, a lot of people making those claims either are a bit unclear on the idea of what science is or know full well what it is but are hoping you don’t. Just because someone calls something science doesn’t mean that it actually is.
First off, science is not a collection of “facts”. It’s not a set of conclusions. And it most certainly is not ultimate Truth, forever and ever, amen.
Science is a method. And the core of that method can be summed up in one simple question:
“How would we know if we were wrong?”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on When Is it Science?
Because I am not insane, I assumed the Jusse Smollett caper was a hoax as soon as it made the news. It ticked all the boxes of a hoax. The alleged victim was a black Jewish homosexual, who makes a living as a drama queen. The alleged incident happened in Chicago, where the last racist redneck was last seen in the 19th century. The incident happened in a part of town that caters to deviants like Smollett, not MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters. Again, only a nut would accept the story at face value.
…
… the general explanation is that these people need to be reinforced in their beliefs and they need to reinforce one another in their beliefs. Progressivism is a social system, as well as a set of beliefs. The believer is not just defined by his beliefs, but by his association with others. Much of the signaling we see from them is not intended for us. Like fireflies blinking in the dusk, they are signaling to one another. These hoaxes provide the opportunity for it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Smollett Thoughts
You mean you haven’t heard of the Men’s and Women’s March? You must have been living in a cave! Or you suddenly realize that no one has ever thought to organize such an exciting and significant event. And that it’s long overdue.
Ain’t gonna happen, of course, but it’s an entertaining thought.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Men’s and Women’s March
Steve Sailer reads April Glaser so that you don’t have to.
Even if a meme you see that disparages a Democratic candidate is based on truth, it’s important to remember that its goal might be to simply weaken Democrats by making candidates toxic for swaths of the left, and ultimately make 2020 a repeat of 2016.
The swine — telling the truth about a Democrat candidate.
The application claims that a room-temperature superconductor can be built using a wire with an insulator core and an aluminum PZT (lead zirconate titanate) coating deposited by vacuum evaporation with a thickness of the London penetration depth and polarized after deposition.
An electromagnetic coil is circumferentially positioned around the coating such that when the coil is activated with a pulsed current, a non-linear vibration is induced, enabling room temperature superconductivity.
Nobody questions the 0.7%, what we question is the ‘due to’ clause. I got a 698 on the Math SAT and never deluded myself that I had the talent to be a Mathematics Professor.
The silliest idea peddled by proglodytes is the concept of ‘underrepresented’, which apparently proceeds from their assumption that every category of person is exactly equal to every other category of person, without any allowance for personal differences, and so if group A is X percent of the population then group A must be X percent of whatever (math professors, hockey players, bricklayers, whatever). By that metric, white people are ‘underrepresented’ on basketball and football teams, and women are ‘underrepresented’ in our prison population.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Amy Harmon: Only 0.7% of Math Professors Are Black Due to Microaggressions! Reader: Coincidentally, Only 0.7% of Kids Who Score >=750 on Math SAT Are Black.
Megan McArdle, in addition to being an ace political writer, has for years done an annual Christmas article on what new stuff she’s found for kitchen use. I’ve followed it for years, to my profit.
Well, it looks as if she’s decided to get serious and start a cooking blog, which I intend to follow.
Two state policy groups, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Civic Federation, have come out in favor of ending an exclusion in the state’s income tax for pension income and federally taxable Social Security income. Doing so, the organizations argue, would raise $2.5 billion in revenue, equivalent to a 0.5 percent income tax rate hike and a 0.85 percent corporate tax rate increase.
The problem, of course, is that Illinois does not have a revenue problem. Spending on pensions grew 663 percent between 2000 and 2018, and is projected to continue to grow. This isn’t surprising, given that 60 percent of state pensioners retire in their 50s and pensioners’ direct employee contributions equal only about 6 percent of the benefits they receive. The state is like a teenager with its first credit card, except it never grows up and stops thinking of its credit limit as its bank account.
Ideological government, either the hard type like the Soviets or the soft sort like we have in America, needs enemies. More specifically, it needs examples. In order to reinforce the rightness of the civic religion, they need to demonstrate the wrongness of heresy. That means the demand for heretics is constant. Finding heretics one at a time is expensive, so it soon becomes a bulk operation. They cast the net, pull in some trouble makers, throw away the small ones and keep the useful ones.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Plague of Nonsense
Benner’s team, which includes researchers from various US companies and institutions, created the synthetic letters by tweaking the molecular structure of the regular bases. The letters of DNA pair up because they form hydrogen bonds: each contains hydrogen atoms, which are attracted to nitrogen or oxygen atoms in their partner. Benner explains that it’s a bit like Lego bricks that snap together when the holes and prongs line up.
By adjusting these holes and prongs, the team has come up with several new pairs of bases, including a pair named S and B, and another called P and Z. In the latest paper, they describe how they combine these four synthetic bases with the natural ones. The researchers call the resulting eight-letter language ‘hachimoji’ after the Japanese words for ‘eight’ and ‘letter’. The additional bases are each similar in shape to one of the natural four, but have variations in their bonding patterns.
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Jose Reyes, a nuclear engineer and cofounder of NuScale Power, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, says he and his colleagues can revive nuclear by thinking small. Reyes and NuScale’s 350 employees have designed a small modular reactor (SMR) that would take up 1% of the space of a conventional reactor. Whereas a typical commercial reactor cranks out a gigawatt of power, each NuScale SMR would generate just 60 megawatts. For about $3 billion, NuScale would stack up to 12 SMRs side by side, like beer cans in a six-pack, to form a power plant.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Smaller, Safer, Cheaper: One Company Aims to Reinvent the Nuclear Reactor and Save a Warming Planet
William Nordhaus was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change. On the day of the Nobel announcement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) released a special report advising the governments of the world on various steps necessary to limit cumulative global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The major media coverage treated the two events as complementary. In fact, they are incompatible. Although Nordhaus favors a carbon tax to slow climate change, his own model shows that the UN’s target would make humanity poorer than doing nothing at all about climate change.
Indeed, we can use Nordhaus’s and other standard models to show that the now-championed 1.5°C target is ludicrously expensive, far more costly than the public has been led to believe. This is presumably why the new IPCC special report does not even attempt to justify its policy goals in a cost/benefit framework. Rather, it takes the 1.5°C target as a politically “given” constraint and then discusses the pros and cons of various mechanisms to achieve it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on William Nordhaus versus the United Nations on Climate Change Economics
Apparently socialism is on its way, hence the partying as the Titanic begins to tilt. Let’s face it: There were millions of educated people who fell for communism even after the gulag and the show trials had become public knowledge. So why should they not fall for the lesser evil of socialism? As Orwell once observed, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” There is a new congresswoman in that place west from here who wants to abolish flying in order to save the planet. I’m all for it. First-class passage on a liner is much more fun than being squeezed inside a steel tube and being in close proximity with smelly but rich proles up front. Possibilities of shipboard romance flicker through my memory. Let’s get rid of airplanes, save the planet, and all find romance on the high seas.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Tell It to the Saudis
More than 20 years ago, Professor David Labaree wrote in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning that our education system had turned into a costly race for educational credentials where people are pushed to get higher degrees “to stay a step ahead of the pack.”
In short, educational degrees are positional goods. Now that just about everyone gets a bachelor’s degree, you need a master’s degree to outshine the masses
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Upward Degree Race: Is a Master’s Worth It?
The left would have you believe that America is a sea of hate from deplorable Trump voters, and on campus especially we hear endlessly that dissent from the party line is “literal” violence to vulnerable peoples. Strangely, actual violence on campuses (and elsewhere) seems to be the monopoly of the left. Such as this incident at Berkeley today, where a student with a table on Sproul Plaza promoting Turning Point USA was assaulted. Notice that the leftist thug says the Turning Point person is “promoting violence,” while he is the only one throwing punches.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Leftist Hate Projection
This video of Bernie Sanders in 1985, celebrating the 7th anniversary of the Communist takeover of Nicaragua, is a classic. I knew people who talked like this, but that was in the 1960s and early 1970s. By 1985, almost everyone knew better. But not Bernie Sanders.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Is Bernie Sanders a Communist?
Pelosi Urges Congress To Block Trump Emergency Declaration Which, of course, it cannot do. Any bill or joint resolution would have to be signed by Trump, and that ain’t gonna happen. And the Democrats don’t have the necessary supermajority in the Senate to override such a veto. This is virtue-signaling straight up.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Tuesday that work has started on replacing 14 miles of a steel-mesh fence along the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego, The Associated Press reported. The fence is being replaced with 30-foot high steel bollards. It is actually the second layer of barrier to be put up in the area, with the first layer nearly complete.
This is not new wall, but replacing old wall. Still, its a thumb in the eye for the ‘invite the world’ crowd.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on 30-Foot Border Wall Begins Construction In California
The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”
Perfectly normal activity can become CrimeThink: ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, etc.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Changing Reality With Words
The Brexit controversy seems to be sparking a re-alignment of British politics, similar to the re-alignment that occurred over Irish Home Rule in the late 1900s. It will be interesting to see what shakes out.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Data Breach Rumours Abound as UK Labour Party Locks Down Access to Member Databases
