Archive for May, 2020
27th May 2020
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I haven’t tried any of these so I have no idea how well they work, or even if they work at all. I have an innate distrust of claims by Professors.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Professors Create Free Research-Backed Games to Train Your Brain
27th May 2020
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German startup Sinn Power has developed a modular maritime platform able to generate renewable energy from waves, wind and solar sources. Starting later this summer, it hopes to offer solar panel manufacturers the chance to test and demonstrate photovoltaic arrays on a floating platform off the Greek coast as part of an off-grid energy solution.
Apparently these are designed to be used around islands.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on First Floating Ocean Hybrid Platform Can Generate Power From Waves, Wind and Solar
27th May 2020
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And as DNA synthesis gets cheaper and cheaper, biological engineers are coming up with more and more clever ways to put DNA to good use. Some you might expect, such as in the life sciences where it can make futuristic cancer drugs and personalized medicine. Others are a little more surprising, such as how the chemical industry is turning to biology as the preferred method to manufacture high-performance bio-electronics for the phones in our pockets.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Mike Kamdar, The Future Of DNA Writing, And The Business Of Biology
27th May 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
27th May 2020
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
27th May 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
27th May 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
27th May 2020
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Thousands of Canadians who hold American citizenship will receive stimulus checks despite not living in the United States since they were sent based on recent tax filings, which citizens living abroad still have to complete.
Seems fair to me. If you have to pay U.S. taxes even if you don’t live here, then you ought to be eligible for U.S. benefits, even if you don’t live here. You can’t have it both ways.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thousands of Canadians Getting Stimulus Checks
27th May 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
27th May 2020
ZMan does Jared Diamond.
A strange thing that used to be more common a decade ago, but still persists to this day is the use of the book Guns, Germs and Steel as an escape hatch. That is, when a conversation with good whites turns to biology, they will at some point attempt to change the subject by bringing up this book. Always, it is in the form of “A great book on this is Guns, Germs and Steal. Have you read it?” After all these years, it remains the one acceptably dangerous book they have read on the subject.
In this context, dangerous means that the book sort of accepts the fact that human populations are not exactly the same everywhere. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have defined the story of man, while arguing against biological reality. For good whites, merely acknowledging that sub-Saharan Africans have little to show for their time on earth is scary. Even though Diamond is a biological denialist, the book is still a dangerous read.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Good White Bible
27th May 2020
Steve Sailer does a scan of modern journalism.
Opinion journalism in the respectable outlets has increasingly come to be dominated during the Great Awokening of the past half-dozen years by young Women of Color with soft major degrees who take whatever topic is in the news—global pandemic, Ukrainegate impeachment, a tribal elder being smirked at—and relate it to how society must learn to idolize more the beauty of women such as, to take a random example, themselves. Also, they tend to be extreme antiquarians who don’t seem to be cognizant of any history since the end of Jim Crow or even of slavery.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on The Nature of the Virus
27th May 2020
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A writer in Time magazine attempts to explain Flyover Country to the Crustians who read it.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
26th May 2020
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“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” says a top former economic adviser to Obama.
Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Prior to the pandemic imbroglio, Trump presided over the best economic performance of any President in my lifetime. It would be very easy to make the case that the existing super-strong economy is what is making the recovery very resilient — so, even if the economy is still weak at election time, Trump can point out that it would have been far worse without the prior ginormous gains.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The General Election Scenario That Democrats Are Dreading
26th May 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
26th May 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
26th May 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
26th May 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
26th May 2020
Victor Davis Hanson.
Obama’s policies are in tatters, and the worst scandals of his White House are coming to light.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Remains of an Administration
26th May 2020
Victor Davis Hanson.
As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.
Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”
That’s been my rule for a decade.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on The Doctrine of Media Untruth
26th May 2020
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany fired back at “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace over his criticism of her confrontational style.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on ‘Journalists Are Not Above Being Questioned’: Kayleigh McEnany Fires Back At Chris Wallace
26th May 2020

Like the phrase ‘new used car’.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
26th May 2020
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Most ‘sermons’ are rather pointless – somebody talking to you about what is important to them rather than what is important to you (necessarily). This one is different.
A good sermon raises questions rather than trying to answer them, although it may suggest certain answers; it never leaves you exactly where you started. And you really can’t ask for more than that.
(Well, you could, but you won’t get it. So deal.)
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
26th May 2020
ZMan does a deep dive.
he great paradox of democracy is that the system is supposed to break the chains that bind the citizen to the state, but instead it immerses the citizen in the state. If you go back 200 years in any country in the West, you would find that the people had very few dealings with the national government. They had dealings with local government, but even that was minimal. Politics, even in Britain and America where popular government was established, played a minor role in the lives of citizens.
Today, in supposedly free countries, no one can be free of politics. Everywhere you go, politics plays a part in your life. Political correctness governs the workplace and the academy. If you fall behind in the latest trends in pronouns, you could end up in a struggle session with the human resource people. Entertainment is saturated with multiculturalism and the lectures that come with it. It is nearly impossible to live in a modern western democracy without politics.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Paradox of Democracy
26th May 2020
Check it out.
Let’s hope they work better than the professor-created climate change and pandemic models.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Professors Create Free Research-Backed Games to Train Your Brain
26th May 2020
Steve Sailer.
Another effort to fool the public with an obvious super-telephoto lens shot that compresses distance. You can tell by how it constantly appears that the pedestrians are about to carom into each other, but they never do. Plus the store signs look like the Old City of Kowloon and the white streetlights appear to be set 12 inches apart.
A commenter says this video looks like it was shot with the Hubble space telescope.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on More Fun and Games With Telephoto Lenses
26th May 2020
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At least in the eyes of the Washington Post.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Military-Style Gear at Protests Rings Hollow
26th May 2020
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I guess that’s supposed to be a bad thing, at least in the eyes of the Washington Post.
(Has the Post ever used the phrase ‘tax cuts’ without adding ‘for the rich’?)
What they really mean, I suspect, is future Democrat Presidents.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Republicans’ Latest Proposed Tax Cut for the Rich Could Permanently Hobble Future Presidents
26th May 2020
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Didn’t know that was a contest.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Dallas Suburb Packs Up Title as America’s Best City for a Staycation
26th May 2020
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Tbank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, or the place would be like Texas.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Chicago’s Deadliest Memorial Day Weekend Since 2015: 10 Shot Dead, 32 Wounded
25th May 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
25th May 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
25th May 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
25th May 2020
If Joe Biden Nominates Stacey Abrams for Veep …, by Steve Sailer
Great Moments in Color Coding Diversity Graphs
New York Times Editorial on Memorial Day: “Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?”
CNN Averaged 4 Minutes Per Day on Biden’s Gaffe, Then Stopped Covering it If the media don’t mention it, did it really happen?
Charlamagne tha God: Biden’s VP Pick May Cause Black ‘Voter Depression’
Joe Biden’s ‘you ain’t black’ hole just gets deeper
Arbery Family Lawyer: DOJ ‘Very Professional, Very Responsive’ In other words, very anti-white.
US DoD Slams NYT Article Claiming Military Is ‘Celebrating White Supremacy’ I imagine that somewhere in the Pentagon is an office dedicated to keeping track of, and responding to, lies in the press.
If Kamala Gets to be VP Nominee, I Get to Use Old Willie Brown Stories, by Steve Sailer And that will be amusing.
National News vs. Non-News, by Steve Sailer
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
25th May 2020
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A former Florida Department of Health data manager has received ample media coverage over her claims that she was fired after she objected to the removal of certain data from the state’s public-facing coronavirus dashboard.
But the data in question has been available to the public since early May, and documents reported by The Associated Press Sunday show that Rebekah Jones was fired after she repeatedly overstepped her duties as a data manager despite being warned multiple times about her behavior.
One’s status as a ‘whistleblower’ tends to depend these days on whose whistle is being blown.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Former Florida Data Manager Hailed by Media Was Fired for Insubordination: Report
25th May 2020
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With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize individuality.”
Much more interesting than anything I’m accustomed to seeing in the New York Times.
Cameo is blowing up in this strange season because “every celebrity is really a gig economy worker,” says Steven Galanis, the company’s chief executive. They’re stuck at home, bored and sometimes hard up for cash as performances, productions and sporting events dry up. The company’s weekly bookings have grown to 70,000 from about 9,000 in early January, it says, and Mr. Galanis said he anticipated bringing in more than $100 million in bookings this year, of which the company keeps 25 percent. The company expects to sell its millionth video this week.
Cameo is, on its face, a service that allows housebound idiots to blow money on silly shout-outs. Seen another way, however, it’s a new model media company, sitting at the intersection of a set of powerful trends that are accelerating in the present crisis. There’s the rise of simple, digital direct payments, which are replacing advertising as the major source of media revenue. There’s the growing power of talent, trickling down from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even working journalists. And there’s the old promise of the earlier internet that you could make a living if you just had “1,000 true fans” — a promise that advertising-based businesses from blogs to YouTube channels failed to deliver.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The New Model Media Star Is Famous Only to You
25th May 2020
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You need to get 500 tons of supplies from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Arctic Ocean—a journey of about 400 miles through pure wilderness. There are no roads, very few airstrips, and the ocean is a solid sheet of ice. You’re going to have to withstand minus 68 degree temperatures. Also, nuclear armageddon is on the menu if you’re not quick about it.
You, my friend, need a LeTourneau land train.
The noise you hear is my Y-chromosome sitting up and barking like a dog.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Incredible Story of the US Army’s Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains
25th May 2020
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A new survey done by a group of researchers at the University of Oxford found that one in five English people think coronavirus was constructed by Jews to topple the economy for financial benefits.
I think this is more likely handwaving by this ‘group of researchers’ in a bid to attain notoriety than any pernicious tendency in British public opinion. A look at their methodology (which few writers of headlines bother to do) reveals why.
The study surveyed 2,500 adults that were “representative of the English population according to age, gender, region and income, on their attitudes toward the government narrative on coronavirus and related conspiracy theories between May 4 and May 11,” according to the Jerusalem Post.
I don’t believe that such a small sample size is in any meaningful respect ‘representative of the English population’ any more than I believe the predictive power of climate change models. That the Jerusalem Post might have a vested interest in raising the alarm about anti-Jewish sentiment rather detracts from its persuasiveness as well.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Survey: One in Five English People Think Coronavirus Is a Jewish Conspiracy
25th May 2020
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The heavily footnoted “primer” is several books in one handy cover. It is a history of the Chinese Communist Party origins of 21st-century Chinese intelligence organs. The history entwines with careful, clear analysis of China’s shifting intelligence objectives during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), the civil war, the Cold War (including the Korean War and Taiwan) and Deng Xiaoping’s economic transformation. A major theme: Whether serving as regime-protection units, domestic secret police spying on Chinese citizens or spies targeting foreign entities, the intelligence services’ first loyalty is to the senior CCP leaders.
While it doesn’t appear that anything in this work will come as a surprise to those of us who are paying attention, I am curious as to why this has been embodied into a published book. It is no doubt of value to those whose business it is to detect and counter Chinese intelligence operations, but that is surely a fairly small audience; and while there are certainly a large number of people who would be curious about the details of Chinese intelligence operations, it isn’t clear to me that many are going to be willing to shell out as much money as these guys are asking ($27 for a Kindle edition? Seriously?) to scratch that particular itch. Certainly that price point quiets any curiosity I might have had on the subject.
Perhaps this is yet another instance of Tenure Doesn’t Grow On Trees. It certainly suggests that such books are why God gave us InterLibrary Loan.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Book Review: Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer
25th May 2020
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In a follow-up piece to “NYC’s Rat Population Hit With Hunger Crisis During Lockdowns,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published a new warning that rats across the country are becoming hangry as they scavenge for food amid the closure of restaurants triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Why is this a problem? When rats come out, they expose themselves to extermination. This seems like an excellent opportunity to get rid of something universally recognized as a pest and a danger to public health. Presumably rat traps and poison are freely available; if those don’t suit, get a cat or two.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on CDC Warns of “Unusual or Aggressive Rodent Behavior” Due COVID Lockdowns
25th May 2020
I am getting very tired of all of the pretended ‘fact checks’ that occupy what is available to read on the Internet these days. Most of them aren’t ‘fact checks’ at all, but merely an excuse to assert the writer’s opinion as superior to that of whomever is being ‘fact checked’.
The ‘fact check’ originated in journalism as a way of verifying that something asserted as fact in an article was, in truth, a ‘fact’, i.e. something that actually existed in reality, presumably as opposed to an opinion, upon which rational minds might disagree. Fact checks were undertaken by people hired by a publican for that purpose, much like the similar assistants who were assigned to verify the origin of quotations and those who edited copy to make sure it conformed to correct spelling, grammar, and style.
That notion has in recent times been weaponized and is now wielded by people who are most accurately characterized as busy-body know-it-alls, people who mistake their own opinions for Truth and aren’t shy about sharing that supposition with the rest of us.
Feh.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Fact Check Fever
25th May 2020
Viscount Ridley explains it all to you.
When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and social media and DNA sequences. We gave ourselves a perpetual motion machine called innovation. The more we innovated, the more innovation became possible.
It’s by far the biggest story of the last three centuries—the main cause of the decline of extreme poverty to unprecedented levels—yet we know curiously little about why it happened, let alone when and where and how it can be made to continue. It certainly did not start as a result of deliberate policy. Even today, beyond throwing money at scientists in the hope they might start businesses, and subsidies at businesses in the hope they might deliver products, we don’t have much of an idea how to encourage innovation at the political level.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Solution to the Current Crises
25th May 2020
Babylon Bee.
A local state governor brought the house down this week with a rousing press conference that left everyone in tears. As people around the state watched, intently waiting for the governor to give them hope, or at least permission to get a haircut, the governor gave a speech to remind his citizens where their hope truly came from.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on At Moving Press Conference, Governor Invites Citizens to Come Forward And Accept Government Into Their Hearts
25th May 2020
Babylon Bee.
The Bible tells us to work smarter, not harder. Or, better yet, don’t work at all if you can help it. You can look it up. It’s in the Proverbs somewhere.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim
25th May 2020
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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on “Like It Was Designed to Infect Humans”: COVID-19 ‘Cell Culture’ Theory Gains Steam
25th May 2020

Or spend half an hour painfully writing out a paper check.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
25th May 2020
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On the Left, mask wearing has become a basic marker of good citizenship, no matter how silly it may be in a particular case. So naturally, the fact that President Trump, who is tested regularly, I believe, for coronavirus, generally prefers not to wear a mask, has become a political issue on the Left. Not surprisingly, CNN has embarked on a crazed campaign to “catch” President Trump maskless.
Well, it keeps them off the streets.
One imagines the CNN “photojournalist,” whose name is Khalil Abdallah, skulking behind bushes with a telephoto lens, hoping to catch an incriminating shot of the president and the rest of his foursome. Of course, only a lunatic would wear a face mask while riding a golf cart around a course, all by himself. But that means nothing to CNN: “None of the men are wearing masks.” The horror!
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Mask Mania
24th May 2020
Jim Goad rips the mask off of a seething cultural problem.
According to authorities, 20-year-old Armando Hernandez, Jr. walked into a shopping center in Glendale, AZ last Thursday and started randomly firing his semi-automatic rifle at people because he suffered from the “feeling that women don’t want him.”
Ed Leiter of Maricopa County Attorney’s Office told a judge on Thursday that Hernandez was a self-admitted “incel” (involuntary celibate) who was “deeply angered” by the fact that women rejected him and wished to make them “feel the pain he feels on a daily basis.” He said that Hernandez had been plotting a mass shooting for three or four years and wanted to shoot at least 10 people—primarily couples who appeared to have been engaged in happy sexual relationships. Hernandez only managed to critically injure one person before authorities subdued him.
The day before Hernandez’s rampage, Canadian authorities lodged terrorism charges against unnamed 17-year-old boy who is accused of walking into a Toronto “erotic massage parlor” on February 24 and stabbing one women to death before another woman wrestled his machete from him and stabbed him in the back, allowing police to arrest him at the scene.
Can calls for reparations be far behind?
For all you hear about an alleged wave of white-supremacist terrorist killings in North America, it appears that the incels are currently stacking up more bodies than all the Nazis combined. Some estimate that since 2014, self-admitted incels and people whose social-media histories reveal extensive activity on incel forums have committed a minimum of seven mass murders that left 54 people dead.
Sensitivity and soy only get you so far….
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Affirmative Action for Men Who Can’t Get Laid
24th May 2020
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
24th May 2020
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
24th May 2020
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome