Karin Louise Hermes feels aggrieved; as does Cynthia Leung,
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on VICE: It’s Racist That Nordic Dwarf Greta Thunberg Is the Face of Climate Change Activism Instead of a Woman of Color, Such As, Say, Me
Around 45% of plastic waste is recycled annually in the UK and is on the increase. However, one of the problems with current plastic recycling methods is that you end up with a lower-quality plastic with worse properties than the original.
This means that plastic drinks bottles cannot simply be recycled into new drink bottles continuously, but instead are used for other lower-grade products such as park benches and traffic cones.
Now, scientists from the Universities of Bath and Birmingham have developed a new way of chemical recycling—converting plastics back into their constituent chemical molecules—so that they can be used to make new plastics of the same quality as the original.
Will it persuade the plastic-bag nannies to shut up? Don’t bet on it.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Plant-Based Plastics Could Soon Be Recycled Hundreds of Times Thanks to New Breakthrough
Viruses are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. They’re among the world’s tiniest lifeforms, and because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living things. Now, scientists have discovered one that has no recognizable genes, making it among the strangest of all known viruses. But how many viruses do we really know? Another group has just discovered thousands of new viruses hiding out in the tissues of dozens of animals.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Scientists Discover Virus With No Recognizable Genes
Steve Sailer keeps up on this stuff so that you don’t have to.
One of my more random predictions was that Trump and the new leftist president of Mexico, AMLO, were going to get along constructively. So far, they are, and it’s driving Conquistador-American Spanish language newscaster Jorge Ramos crazy.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Jorge Ramos Berserk Over AMLO Cooperating With Trump to Block Central American Caravan at Mexico’s Southern Border
We’re often told that Illinois is not losing its highly taxed residents. For example, a Chicago Magazine article last week had a headline saying exactly that. Don’t worry about lost income from the rich leaving, we’re supposed to believe. It’s just poorer folks fleeing.
It’s simply not true. There’s recent, hard data directly refuting that claim. If you want the best evidence, the Internal Revenue Service released its latest state-to-state migration numbers last month. Wirepoints analyzed the number of people moving into and out of Illinois and their net impact by income groups.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Yes, the Rich Are Fleeing Illinois and They’re Taking Billions With Them
A week ago, we published details that raised questions about the source of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, specifically questioning the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market as a fabricated farce.
The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan’s Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China’s only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying “the world’s most dangerous pathogens.”
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on White House Asks Scientists to Investigate Whether 2019-nCoV Was Bio-Engineered
Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday that the state will file a lawsuit challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to block New Yorkers from participating “trusted traveler programs” in retribution for a new state law that could hinder federal immigration enforcement.
New York can spit in the face of DHS but they have to kiss New York’s ass in response.
Before getting into that, the Department of Labor released January’s jobs report.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Gallup: 59% of Americans Say They Are Better Off Than They Were Last Year (And Last Year Was Pretty Good Too). This Is the Highest Level Ever Recorded for This Measure.
Sen. Mitt Romney was the sole Republican to vote to impeach Donald Trump, and the New York Times front page on Thursday demonstrated its strange new respect for the Utah Republican — the same candidate it spent 2012 vilifying for standing between Barack Obama and a second term — in Mark Leibovich’s “An Act of Defiance Against a Party He’d Personified.” A text box on the jump page cast Romney as making a brave stand: “Recognizing that breaking ranks may bring ‘unimaginable’ consequences.”
Eric S Raymond continues his discussion of the Chinese coronavirus.
Yikes. Despite the withdrawal of the Indian paper arguing that the Wuhan virus showed signs of engineering, the hypothesis that that it’s an escaped bioweapon looks stronger than ever.
Why do I say this? Because it looks like my previous inclination to believe the rough correctness of the official statistics – as conveyed by the Johns Hopkins tracker – was wrong. I now think the Chinese are in way deeper shit than they’re admitting.
My willingness to believe the official line didn’t stem from any credulity about what the Chinese government would do if it believed the truth wouldn’t serve. As Communists they are lying evil scum pretty much by definition, and denial would have been politically attractive for as long as they thought they could nip the pandemic in the bud. I thought their incentives had flipped and they would now be honest as a way of assisting their own countermeasures and seeking international help.
…
The evidence that this virus likes to eat Han Chinese and almost ignores everybody else is mounting. That’s bioweapon-like selectivity.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Chinese bioweapon II: Electric Boogaloo
Trump’s comments came in a Friday tweet after Fox News host Tucker Carlson had posted:
“Lawmakers are trying to make life worse for people across America. The New Way Forward Act protects serious felons from deportation and gives previously deported criminals a ‘right to come home’ at your expense. And that’s not all.”
Trump, replying to Carlson’s tweet, wrote: “Don’t worry, it won’t happen!”
Steve Sailer keeps you up with the latest fashions.
It’s almost as if it’s fashionable to racistly insult whites for being white these days.
From ‘robber barons’ to ‘black market’ to ‘price gouging’, the first step in a hate campaign is to think up a catchy smear-name for the target. If academics pick it up and embed it in the culture, so much the better.
The audit found the reason so few taxpayers use the Free File program, a public-private partnership between the IRS and companies such as Intuit and H&R Block, is because of the confusing design and complexity of the program — and lax oversight by the IRS, Pro Publica reported.
Imagine how fine your life will be when the government is running your health care.
Thursday evening President Trump announced the death of al-Qaeda’s chief in Yemen by a US drone strike. The New York Times first reported last week the likely death of Qasim al-Rimi, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in a US airstrike, which the president has now confirmed. Days ago Saudi media also began reporting his death.
Pebble-bed high-temperature reactors get their name from the fact that the nuclear fuel is packed in tennis-ball sized spheres (“pebbles”), rather than in the conventional fuel rods. Each fuel ball consists of thousands of tiny fuel particles, each encapsulated in multiple layers of temperature-resistent ceramic material, embedded in a sphere of graphite.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Tomorrow’s Nuclear Reactors: Small But Beautiful
Long Island authorities on Wednesday implied that a man set to testify against MS-13 gang members was killed as a result of criminal-justice reforms requiring prosecutors share witnesses’ identities with defendants.
Nassau County officials, including the police commissioner and county executive, announced the death of 36-year-old Wilmer Maldonado on Wednesday — while also decrying the discovery laws that took effect Jan. 1.
Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.
Witness-murdering is a major cause of low closure rates for homicides in areas with gangs. LA Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy estimated about a dozen witnesses per year were murdered in South-Central L.A. in the first decade of this century, more than enough to discourage the other witnesses from cooperating too much with the cops.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Man Who Was Supposed to Testify Against MS-13 Gang Members Found Dead
The State of the Union address has been described as kabuki theater; an elaborate, carefully orchestrated, melodramatic spectacle heavy on showmanship and light on content. President Trump is good at this, he has built a very successful career in business and entertainment by excelling in theater, in one form or another. His production of, and performance in, yesterday’s State of the Union address was aptly masterful. Nothing that happened there was an accident. The whole show was carefully, and brilliantly, planned and executed. And I think that’s fine; play to your strengths. This is one of his strengths.
My problem was the other side of the show. The behavior of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in attendance was absurd. What makes that absurdity particularly noteworthy is that it was just as carefully planned and executed as President Trump’s address. They had months to prepare for this. They knew exactly what President Trump was going to do. And the best they could come up with was wearing white, expressing disapproval at America’s successes, and tearing up his speech after he gave it. The Democrats were essentially filming Republican campaign ads for them, making themselves look ridiculous, clueless, and meanspirited, and this was after months of careful planning. This was exactly what they intended to do. I just don’t get it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Ongoing, Bipartisan Effort to Make Democrats Look Stupid
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on New Trump Budget Includes First Ever Chapter Defining Government Waste, Targets Programs To Eliminate Entirely
An event exclusive to black queer, trans, and intersex students, staff, and faculty at the publicly-funded Claremont University Consortium has changed their event to include “allies” of these groups. The switch appears to be after a student newspaper questioned whether the previously closed event violated federal laws on discrimination.
The Queer Resource Center (QRC) funded by the Consortium — which includes liberal art colleges Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps — is hosting a “BlaQ Mixer” event Feb. 6 that had only permitted attendance by “black queer, trans, & intersex students, staff, and faculty.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on College Event That Was Exclusive To Black Queer Students Desegregates Following Student Newspaper Reporting
The New York Times is nothing if not predictable. In the age of Trump, it has become even more so. Having pioneered the “strange new respect” profile genre — i.e., the laudatory profiles of Republicans or conservatives who “get above their raisin’” to join the sanctified line of the Democratic Party — the Times owed Romney, and the Times has now delivered.
A good rule that no one anywhere follows, is to contemplate the consequences of being wrong before doing something. For example, if legislatures had to post a wrongness analysis for every bill before they could be voted on, at least some of the terrible ideas would get stopped before becoming law. Of course, that is probably why such a thing can never happen, at least in a democracy. New ideas are about hope and nothing is worse than dashing the reformer’s hope for the future.
Scott Adams calls such loserthink ‘one-sided thinking’.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What If You’re Wrong
The thing we really can’t have, the thing that does more damage than even the deliberate lying, is this sunup-to-sundown, all-year-every-year, “Omigaw this cannot stand” state of being aggrieved…about…whatever. This it’s-always-something thing. We have all these people taking to social media or to the weekday or Sunday morning talk shows, with their various trifling complaints, demanding attention for the trifling complaints over & above what’s appropriate for trifling complaints. Ocasio-Cortez objects to the President of the United States awarding a medal that, in his place, she would not have awarded…well…that’s why we have an executive in this country, who goes around doing things that wouldn’t get done if we had to wait for everyone in our shores with a heartbeat to go along & not object. Sometimes that guy is going to do things that some people don’t like, and that’s okay. I survived Obama, you’ll survive Trump.
And the democrat party has declined to become just that and little else. “Hold up there, I have a complaint.” Don’t buy that gas, don’t build that business, don’t hire that guy, don’t don’t don’t. I’m aggrieved. You have to stop everything and hear my complaint. Carbon emissions, objectifying women, not enough blacks on Seinfeld…whatevs…
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Three Glorious Days of Democrat Agony
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has written a letter to the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to tear up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address, arguing that “Her unseemly behavior certainly warrants censure.”
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Matt Gaetz Files Ethics Complaint, Criminal Referral Request Against Nancy Pelosi For Tearing Up SOTU Speech
Mitt Romney’s decision to convict President Trump on the impeachment charge of abuse of power was “motivated by bitterness and jealousy,” according to former Romney spokesman Rick Gorka, who added that President Trump has “accomplished what he [Mitt] has failed to do multiple times.”
He’s decided to fill in for John McCain.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Romney Vote Motivated By ‘Bitterness And Jealousy’ According To Former Spokesman
Impeachment must be viewed in the context of the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump that began prior to his inauguration. For more than three years, their get-Trump campaign has dominated the news. Mostly, it was the Russia hoax. The Democrats originally intended to use that as the basis for impeachment. When the Mueller report negated that plan, they switched–literally overnight–to the much weaker Ukraine theory. No matter. It was impeachment or bust, if only to continue filling up the nightly news with purported Trump “scandals.”
Now the smoke will begin to clear, and I don’t think the Democrats will like the landscape that comes into focus. Their Iowa caucuses were a laughingstock. They made fools of themselves (Nancy Pelosi, especially) during Trump’s State of the Union speech. And, most seriously, they don’t have a presidential candidate. Joe Biden is in freefall, and the party’s elders, such as they are, concede that Bernie Sanders would be a disaster. Will they turn to “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg? Will Michael Bloomberg be their savior? Or will Hillary Clinton or John Kerry come out of retirement? I think they are grasping at straws.
Californians like to complain about high taxes, and who can blame them? California may have more millionaires and billionaires, but the tax cost of living in the Golden State has always been high. The current top 13.3% rate—which is the same on ordinary income and capital gain—dates from 2012. But with the 2018 federal tax law changes, paying 13.3% in non-deductible state taxes (after a $10,000 cap) is even more painful. The tax law is causing an exodus of high-tax state residents to no tax or lower tax states. Lower tax means just about everywhere.
If you aren’t careful, though about how you do it, you could end up leaving California and yet being asked to keep paying California taxes. There’s also the fact that California has a very broad reach into other states. In some cases, California can assess taxes no matter where you live. Should this discourage you? Not hardly, but it pays to know what you are up against in a fight. If you live in California, you probably know how aggressive California’s state tax agency can be. In fact, even if you live somewhere else, you might have heard of the Golden State’s aggressive tax rules.
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.