Out of a desire to make voting “easier” and perhaps exaggerated fears of public gatherings during the pandemic, most U.S. jurisdictions permitted unrestricted mail-in balloting in 2020. What did Americans lose when ballot secrecy was attenuated or vanished altogether?
Make no mistake, ballot secrecy is incompatible with secure mail-in balloting. At the polls, we each go into a little booth and make our choices in private. By contrast, no one knows where a mail-in ballot was filled out, or if a party or union activist hovered over the voter or even filled in the circles. Nobody knows what inducements, whether cash or threats, were offered to ensure that the person voted “correctly.” And if the ballot was “harvested” — turned in to the vote-counters by activists instead of by voters themselves — our suspicions deepen.
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NY Times: Biden contributing to ‘own political woes’ by downplaying inflation, economic anxiety He has no choice – if he admitted the problem, people would expect him to do something, and he won’t.
Biden plans tax-funded legal services program for ‘Remain in Mexico’ immigrants: report
Voters sound off on ‘insane’ state of economy under Biden, say he’s ‘listening to too many liberals’
After spending recent seasons alienating parents across America with homosexual and BLM propaganda, PBS Kids’ Arthur, the longest running animated children’s series ever on television, is officially getting the ax.
For several centuries, at least since John Stuart Mill, the Left has defined itself by its commitment to freedom of speech. This was practically the sine qua non for calling oneself a liberal. Yet some time around 2019-20, in the historical blink of an eye, free speech was simply . . . dismissed. It became obligatory on the Left to support systematic control of our public discourse by a handful of massive tech companies, in cooperation with the government.
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The news currently tells us that we are on the brink of war with Russia over Ukraine and one of the best minds on the job for the Biden team is Jake Sullivan. There is nothing in his resume that says he should be running a hot dog stand, but he has been told his whole life he is fit to rule, so he believes it. Victoria Nulland is another member of the foreign policy brain trust. Her career is best described as one disaster after another, but she was born for the role in every sense.
Look around at the elected class and you see the same pattern. There are no men who went from the middle class to elected office on their own merit. In fact, it is hard to find anyone in national politics who has ever had a job. No one in the leadership of both parties has a line for “private sector” in his resume. The reason for that is they have never done productive work. Instead, like our old friend Commodus, they were groomed from birth to take up positions in the ruling class.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Commodus Americanus
When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China. But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging towards orthodoxy – a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives. Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.
Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public support and has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’.
The search for sustainable alternatives to common plastics has researchers investigating how their building blocks can be sourced from places other than petroleum, and for scientists behind a promising new study, this has led them straight to the sweet stuff. The team has produced a new form of plastic with “unprecedented” mechanical properties that are maintained throughout standard recycling processes, and managed to do so using sugar-derived materials as the starting point.
The breakthrough comes from scientists at the University of Birmingham in the UK and Duke University in the US, who in their pursuit of more sustainable plastics turned to sugar alcohols. These organic compounds carry a similar chemical structure to the sugars they’re derived from, which the scientists found can bring some unique benefits to the production of plastic.
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Sweden has deported an alleged recruiter for the Islamic State. The culture-enriching gentleman, who was allegedly active in jihad circles in Örebro, has a surfeit of Ahmeds in his name: Ahmed Abdulkarim Ahmed Ahmed. How Swedish can you get?
But rubber tires help grip the ground and cushion bumps. How could a steel tire even come close to a smooth, safe ride? Built into the mechanical wheel is a pneumatic suspension system — an air suspension system powered by a pump or compressor that floods air into flexible bellows. That will allow the steel wheel to grip the road on tight turns and keep the passengers from bouncing out of their seats.
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Although some of her wording was strange, the break itself isn’t the real story. It’s her doubling down in the face of two denials by the court, including one by the Chief Justice. She’s basically calling them liars. Worse was the Washington Democratic media’s echo chamber piling on, well documented by independent journalist Drew Holden on Twitter. Here’s how he started.
“It’s a radically different way to accelerate projectiles and launch vehicles to hypersonic speeds using a ground-based system,” Jonathan Yaney, CEO of SpinLaunch, a California-based spaceflight technology company that has been involved in the development of the system, told CNBC. According to its website, the company aims to build “the world’s lowest-cost space launch system.”
Wonder whether that would work for ICBMs…?
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And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion.
How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?
Now that I’m retired I find myself doing this — I’ll go to sleep at 10:00, what I think of as my Normal Bed Time, and wake up around 1:00 or 2:00 and have a hard time getting back to sleep. At first I put it down to a habit formed from over twenty years of production support — if a data warehouse load is going to break, it will do so around 2:30 a.m. — but maybe there’s something else going on. Hm….
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps’
It’s become clear over the past few months that one of the key strategies for hiding the deadly adverse effects of the COVID-19 “vaccines” is the use of the official definition of “unvaccinated”. A patient who is injected with the experimental mRNA treatment is considered “unvaccinated” until fifteen days have passed since his second jab. Some of the most severe reactions to the vax — including those resulting in death — occur within two weeks, so those serious adverse effects are conveniently being recorded as occurring among the “unvaccinated”. Those who experience adverse reactions to the vax often show symptoms that resemble those of Corona, so that deaths among the recently “vaccinated” are sometimes reported as “unvaccinated patients who died of Covid”.
Handel’s Messiah is a rare work of high art that most people enjoy and a large number have actually performed in. Not surprisingly, Canadians are worked up over what Handel’s Messiah has to do with George Floyd in the same way that Canadians decided that the topic of “Rembrandt in Amsterdam” required repeated references to Turtle Island.
A woke City Council member who has called the NYPD the Big Apple’s “biggest gang” is under fire for tweeting about a community garden instead of showing sympathy following Friday night’s ambush shooting in her Harlem district that left a rookie cop dead and another officer clinging for life.
Newly elected Kristin Richardson Jordan, a Democratic socialist, tweeted two hours after the shooting about her concerns over a neighborhood community garden being shut down.
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Denver public school teaching kindergartners BLM ‘guiding principles’ including ‘disruption of nuclear family’ Too many black people have no ‘nuclear family’ to disrupt. That’s the problem.
Jose Figueroa, who manages Polar Manufacturing, a small company that produces hinges, locks, and brackets in south Chicago, told Wired that he employed a robot on the production line that costs only $8 per hour versus a minimum wage of $15 per hour for humans. He said the robot has allowed workers to concentrate on other tasks while increasing output.
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The Ghost Gunner 3 is a 3 Axis CNC machine that can take a metal block and create a lower receiver in a relatively short period. You can then assemble that lower into a completed firearm without it being registered.
Since the only part needed to create these homemade firearms is a block of metal (pictured below), it would be entirely impossible for the ATF to regulate these without an act of congress.
ByFusion uses a combination of steam and compression to shape all kinds of plastics, even nonrecyclables, into standard building blocks called ByBlocks. These can be used to build anything from fences and retaining walls to public terraces and bus stops, but the real stars are the patented machines used to make them. Called Blockers, these hefty machines are fed mounds of plastic that are squeezed into blocks—no sorting or cleaning needed. After years of R&D, the company has installed a full production unit in L.A., where it can process 450 tons of plastic per year, with 12 more Blockers in the pipeline across the country.
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CNN anchor Brianna Keilar is hosting a temporary program pompously titled “Democracy in Peril.” On Jan. 18, Keilar huffed: “We can’t discuss the tsunami of disinformation, jeopardizing American democracy, without talking about the mothership, Fox.”
On the very same day, NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg aired a story claiming that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was callously ignoring requests from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask during oral arguments in deference to diabetes-suffering colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
President Joe Biden joined Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and numerous other Democrats this week in a partisan attempt to preemptively delegitimize the 2022 election.
Twice, the president was asked by reporters whether voters could trust the electoral system, and twice, the president contended that a fair election was unlikely unless the Senate was blown up and the Democrats’ election power grab was passed—a maneuver that poses a far more serious and lasting threat to the constitutional order than anything Donald Trump is cooking up right now.
“I think it would easily be illegitimate,” said Biden. “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms passed.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, sent out on the morning shows Thursday, offered basically the same position.
“It seems that, in common with the tobacco industry, the wind industry was well aware that its products were inimical to health. The introduction of larger turbines is also problematic because the larger the turbines, the more noise they produce.” (- Alun Evans, Centre for Public Health, The Queen’s University of Belfast, below)
This week’s show is a continuation of last week’s show. The point of the effort is to describe the various aspects of the ruling regime. We don’t have a good name for this form of rule and one reason for it is it just sort of happened. Unlike various forms of socialism, there is no one guy at the center of it. It is the combination of historical and economic events over the last two centuries. The great contribution of Karl Marx was having a last name that made for a pithy label.
In last week’s show, I thought the segment on managerialism was the best, but it is also the most studied aspect of the system. We have 80 years of writing on the growth of the administrative state. This week I think the two segments that are most important are Custodialism and Quadripartism. This growing sense by our rulers that they need to take care of us is rising from and encouraging this blending together of the power centers of the American empire.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The World State II
A Saudi-led airstrike targeting a prison run by Yemen’s Houthi rebels killed and wounded over 100 detainees on Friday, rescuers said, part of a pounding aerial offensive that hours earlier saw another airstrike take the Arab world’s poorest country off the internet.
Somehow I don’t see Yemen as a significant presence on the Internet. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a camel.”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Forest Service Chief Randy Moore have announced a new strategy to fix the nation’s wildfire crisis. Not surprisingly, the most important part of that strategy is to give them a lot more money.
