Wind turbines are widely disliked by the general public in all countries where they are erected. They are a blight on the landscape, and their noise when operating is unpleasant, and even harmful, for those who live nearby. They are notorious for killing large numbers of birds, including endangered species such as eagles.
Recent research in Sweden has revealed that wind farms cause even more environmental damage than previously thought, notably through the erosion of toxic chemicals from the blades, which are dispersed into the environment surrounding the turbines.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Windmills Tilting at Us
Members of New York’s Reparations and Racial Justice Commission, Ron Daniels and Lurie Daniel Favors, have made headlines in the New York Post with their outspoken comments on a variety of contentious issues.
It’s interesting how many black women do their best to resemble white women as much as possible. Perhaps the high number of black men marrying (or hooking up with) actual white women makes them feel insecure.
For years, liberals have obtusely refused to acknowledge that part of Donald Trump’s appeal is his sense of humor. Often they have branded his comments as outrageous, when in truth they were intended as jokes, and understood as such by his audience. Now, for whatever reason, liberals are belatedly conceding the point. As in this Politico piece, which is, in its own unintentional way, funny.
Planet Fitness is defending its decision to ban the membership of a customer in Alaska who spoke out about a “man in women’s locker room shaving.”
Patricia Silva left the gym in Fairbanks, Alaska and shared a video on Facebook where she said: “I just came out of Planet Fitness. There is a man shaving in the women’s bathroom.”
She also said the man “woman” was in the locker room at the same time as a 12 year old girl.
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Ultra-processed foods are abundant in our food supply. Among the most common are highly refined breads, fast food, sugary drinks, cereals, cookies, and other packaged snacks. They are often high in salt, sugar, fat and calories and low in fiber and micro-nutrients such as vitamins.
And that’s as much of a definition of ‘ultra-processed foods’ as you’re going to get in this article. No indication of what distinguishes ‘ultra-processed’ foods from mere ‘processed’ foods. I guess it’s like ‘ultra-right-wing’; you know it when progressive see it.
At a time when Americans consume more than half of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, there is increasing evidence that eating too many of these foods can make us sick.
‘Evidence’? No, there isn’t. Here’s what they call ‘evidence’:
A study published in the British Medical Journal finds people who consume high amounts of these foods have an increased risk of anxiety, depression, obesity, metabolic syndrome, certain cancers including colorectal cancer and premature death.
The data come from more than 9 million people who participated in dozens of studies, which researchers analyzed as part of umbrella review.
Such ‘studies’ are merely statistical correlations … and, as any legitimate scientist will remind you, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Suspicious? Certainly–depending on the methodology of the study–which, as we are increasingly seeing, is often shoddy. But evidence? Not in the rigorous legal sense. None of which slows down the hammer of the people who want to ban stuff ‘for your own good’.
And pretty much always have been. (Western civilization? Sounds fascist to me….)
In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts.
Donald Trump has held a narrow but consistent lead in just about every poll for several months now—having never led in the polls in either the 2016 and 2020 election cycles. More significant is where this lead has come from. Trump has not improved his share of white vote at all; his improved standing has come from huge gains in minority votes, as John pointed out recently in drawing our attention to a Financial Times meta-analysis of polls going back several cycles.
The following excerpts are from Tragedy and Hope. They detail the monetary environment from 1914 to the 1930s. When looked at independently the context helps explain the confusion we find across today’s monetary landscape.
These passages help us better understand money and the lack of order that takes hold when international players desire a change to the system. The greatest challenge then and now was the battle between real wealth and claims on wealth.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Real Wealth vs Claims on Wealth: Bitcoin 2020s vs USDollar 1800s
After previously thinking NY Jets quarterback Aaron Rogers might be the right person to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is now planning to select 38-year-old Nicole Shanahan, the wealthy ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as his running mate. This according to a Saturday Mediaite report that cited “a source close to the campaign.”
Shanahan is a Bay Area lawyer and tech entrepreneur who’s been a Democratic Party benefactor and donated to Biden’s 2020 campaign. In a February Times profile, she described herself as a “progressive through and through.” Aside from opening her wallet, she has no political profile whatsoever, seemingly not even having spoken out or written about issues of the day.
Well, she managed to fuck two billionaires, Sergei Brin and Elon Musk; so far she has been more successful at that than Elizabeth Warren. She would seem perfectly qualified for any progressive administration.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on RFK Jr to Name Sergey Brin’s Ex-Wife as Running Mate: Report
As we browse the news, it’s easy to become desensitised to awful events. Amanda Ruggeri explores the psychology, and the steps you can take to avoid it happening.
Ironic, considering that the Narrative media like the BBC are the chief purveyors and popularizers of the abnormal-as-normal in modern times.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How the Abnormal Gets Normalised – And What to Do About It
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been a young darling of the Democratic Party, but residents of a Queens neighborhood in her district have become disenchanted with the lawlessness and illegal activity, including prostitution.
As a scholar of Arthurian literature, particularly that of England in the 15th century, I have a professional appreciation for the existence of physical media. If, instead of diligently writing out his Le Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory had only told his story aloud to friends, relatives, and his gaoler, we almost certainly would not have had the benefit of it over the intervening centuries that have passed since his death. Like so many other fascinating but ephemeral pieces of the past, it would have entirely disappeared, leaving future generations deprived of that which they did not even have the chance to know.
Physical connexions to the past are not only of interest to scholars of literature and history; both well-known texts and more recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library are obvious examples of how ancient written works quite clearly continue to influence the modern world, shaping the religious beliefs and practises of countless people. Such physical records are vital for providing insight into contemporary differences and debates, but they also serve as an objective authority that can speak for the past in a way that no credible scholar can simply dismiss without cause. It is for this reason that George Orwell’s 1984, with its nightmare vision of a totalitarian future, portrays a world in which The Party endlessly destroys and rewrites every record of the past. Once history is destroyed, truth ceases to be a matter of conformity to objective facts and becomes instead a matter of compliance with the powerful.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Need for Physical Media
Violence and crime are already completely out of control all over the United States. In fact, you definitely wouldn’t want to be caught in the streets when hordes of our lawless young people are running wild. If things are this bad already, what is going to happen if the election in November does not go the way that leaders on the left want and they give the green light to millions of radicals to cause widespread chaos all over America? I think that we got a small preview of what this could look like during the riots of 2020. Unfortunately, since that time the open border policies of the Biden administration have allowed millions of extremely desperate people to come pouring into this country. The stage is being set for civil unrest on a scale that we have never seen before, and it certainly isn’t going to take much to push our society over the edge.
If Trump gets elected, blue states will burn. Great news for the Narrative media; for ordinary people: not so much.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on What Will Happen When They Give the Green Light to Millions of Radicals To Cause Widespread Chaos All Over America?
In a recent interview on NPR, a reporter asked a 20-year-old woman with sickle cell disease how she would feel about a new treatment on the market, noting that the side effects include hair loss and sterility. The woman remained almost giddy—not merely because she already owned a closet full of wigs, but because, she noted, “I don’t want kids anyway, so that is a free form of birth control.”
Without diminishing from the seriousness of her illness—maybe she was just trying to look on the bright side?—it is still striking how often and how easily young women are proclaiming their desire to remain childless. How we arrived at the declining birthrates all over the world—but particularly in the United States and Europe—is a complex story. But Tim Carney—my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be—offers a readable and nuanced explanation for the phenomenon.
Family Unfriendly begins with the problems faced by people who actually have children and then works backward in time to the decisions young people are making about dating, marriage, and childbearing. Carney, who has six children of his own and lives in a community with other large families—think 10 or 12 children—describes the problems that families like his face. Oddly, finances are at the bottom of the list, despite the fact that Carney is not an investment banker and his wife stays at home with their children.
Think of it as evolution in action. People who don’t want kids will have no descendants, and so eventually everyone will be descended from people who do want kids–a self-correcting problem.
Like gravity and markets, natural selection works even when you don’t want it to.
In 2022, Seattle’s City Council passed an ordinance mandating a minimum earnings floor for app-based food delivery drivers in the city. The law finally went into effect in January 2024, but so far the main result has been customers deleting their delivery apps en masse, food orders plummeting, and driver pay cratering.
The ordinance, part of a legislative package called “PayUp,” was passed under the banner of protecting gig workers. By setting a compensation floor for app-based delivery drivers based on miles driven and amount of time worked, the ordinance operates as a (supremely complicated) minimum wage.
The wage floor is based on labyrinthine calculations: the “engaged minutes” for drivers are multiplied by a “minimum wage equivalent rate,” which is then multiplied again by an “associated cost factor” and then multiplied yet again by an “associated time factor.” Next, this sum is added to the total of “engaged miles” of drivers, multiplied by the “standard mileage rate” and then multiplied once more by the “associated mileage factor.” (If you’re lost, don’t worry—the text of the ordinance itself literally does the math for you).
There are days when I’m tempted to join the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders/Joe Biden crusade to impose confiscatory taxes on billionaires. Not for economic or fiscal grounds, or even less for making billionaires “pay their fair share” (“fair share” in liberal speak just means “more”). To the contrary, I’m starting to think we should take the fortunes from many billionaires to stop them from doing more harm than the government does when it taxes and spends and borrows our money. And that’s saying something!
Barron’s reported this week that billionaires are ramping up their philanthropy considerably. But not just to any old traditional charities, but to “transformational” charity.
The ‘inconvenient truth’ that most billionaires are progressives (or act as if they were), a fact that you will never hear from the Narrative media and Democrat politicians, is at the root of the problem.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on God Save Us From Altruistic Billionaires
With a title containing “Cowboys”, “Yankees” and “Patriots” it soundsAn illustration of Joe Biden looking at a map of the world. like a post about great sports dynasties, but it is actually about a recent podcast with Jack Posobiec and Mike Benz. In this podcast, Mike Benz, who is an “internet security expert” describes how US foreign policy is driven by two factions: the Yankees and the Cowboys.
The Yankees are the financial titans in New York and London. The Cowboys are the agrarian and military industries. Benz says that the factions use their political power and tools (sanctions for Yankees and military/regime change for Cowboys) to control foreign policy to their benefit. If a country is not cooperating with the American sugar industry, then they get an upgraded leader. If a country is not trading in dollars, then the financial hammer is dropped on them. He said it basically started with the Monroe Doctrine and continues to this day
It never ceases to amaze watching the so-called “mainstream media” (aka the far left press) foam at the reality someone who is an outsider to the conventional politics of the day – aka in this case Donald Trump – is ascending to the presidency. Again.
This time around – again! – there is the redoubtable editorial board of the far left New York Times foaming and spewing over the fact that former President Trump has clinched the 2024 GOP nomination. It is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.
Trump’s chief qualification for the Presidency is that all of the right people hate him.
The Babylon Bee lives rent-free in the minds of too many journalists.
How else do you describe constant fact checks on a site that churns out satirical news stories a la The Onion?
USA Today once fact-checked a Bee piece saying President Joe Biden sold Alaska to Russia. PolitiFact ran to the scene after a Bee article claimed, “ISIS Lays Down Arms After Katy Perry’s Impassioned Plea To ‘Like, Just Co-Exist’”
Ella Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter, is garnering support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency despite concerns over its alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, the New York Post reported.
A prime example of ‘resting fanatic face’. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the (grafted) tree.
Bucks County authorities have identified a suspect in a series of deadly shootings that prompted a shelter-in-place order early Saturday morning. As Fox29 reports, police say they are searching for 26-year-old Andre Gordon, who was last seen driving a stolen vehicle.
Yet another white supremacist engaging in gun violence. Oh, the humanity!
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Three Killed In Falls Township Shootings, Suspect Identified As 26-Year-Old Andre Gordon
A little over a century ago, in his 1920 encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, Pope Benedict XV declared the 4th century poet, theologian, and writer, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the Deacon of Edessa, to be a Doctor of the Church, a high and rare honor of the universal church. The 24th person so recognized since the Middle Ages, Saint Ephrem, was the first who did not come from the Western (Latin) Church or Eastern (Greek) Church. He was a speaker of Syriac and wrote exclusively in that language. In his encyclical, the pope mentioned the many clerics and bishops who encouraged him to take this step, especially the patriarchs of the Maronite, Chaldean, and Syriac Catholic churches, all spiritual descendants of Saint Ephrem.
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The ‘Syriac World’ (some prefer the term Assyrian or Aramean) is the ethnic and religious community that grew out of the Syriac language and Christianity in Late Antiquity—Syriac being a branch of Aramaic, the lingua franca of most of the Middle East in the centuries before the coming of Christ. This status was retained for centuries, until Syriac was displaced by Arabic with the triumph of Islam. The roots of Syriac especially look to Edessa (the modern city of Urfa in Turkey), the city of Saint Ephrem. From there, as much as from nearby Antioch and more distant Jerusalem, and from the peregrinations of Saint Paul, “Christianity, an Asiatic religion,” spread both east and west. The Syriac world became a largely Christian one, best understood in a group of often contending, fissiparous religious bodies, which were often in conflict with their counterparts in Constantinople and Rome: the (Assyrian) Church of the East (disparagingly called the Nestorian Church); the Syrian Orthodox Church (sometimes called the Jacobite Church); various Indian branches of these churches; and related church bodies using Syriac and in communion with the pope in Rome, such as the Maronite Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankaran churches. Today, all of these churches have diaspora communities in the West, which are sometimes larger and richer than the original communities from where they sprang in the East.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Cloud of Witnesses
Millions of people living with type 1 diabetes around the world don’t have reliable access to insulin. Due to their bodies’ inability to produce the hormone, they have to inject it to ensure that glucose can enter cells to produce energy.
But finding an affordable and reliable source of insulin has remained difficult in many parts of the world.
Now, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, have found a radical new way to produce the stuff: a gene-edited cow that produces human insulin in its milk.
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Twenty Four children were told they could not drink water at a school in Germany because three other students in the class were Muslims observing Ramadan, according to a report.
German outlet NIUS, notes that the fifth graders informed their parents after two teachers at the school made the decision.
One parent commented “At dinner, we always talk about how the day was. I asked my daughter what was new at school. She then told us that two teachers had forbidden the students from drinking in class because three of the 27 children were fasting.”
I first came across investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek’s work in 2020, when her essay “The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement” was published in First Things. It was a stunning piece—there are several journalists committed to exposing the transgender ‘movement’ (or industry, as Bilek calls it), but nobody has peeled away the façade of civil rights, pink-and-blue flags, and ‘trans kids’ like Bilek. If we had a mainstream press truly committed to uncovering and reporting the truth about the forces driving our culture today, her work would be cited by them across the board.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How a Handful of Billionaires Created the Transgender ‘Movement’: An Interview with Jennifer Bilek
At first people thought that drones favored defense, since Ukraine, in its war against Russia, was defending successfully with drones. But now Ukraine is using drones to attack Russia, and Russian oil refinery assets and warships. It is less obvious that drones are defensive assets on net. Furthermore, Russia is now using more electronic jamming, and more weapons that are drone-avoiding or drone-resistant, thereby limiting the defensive value of drones.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Do Current Trends in Drone Technology Favor Offense or Defense?
Toronto Police are being heavily criticized online for what many consider a shoulder-shrugging approach to the rash of car thefts that continue to plague the Greater Toronto Area.
At an Etobicoke safety meeting last month, Cst. Marco Ricciardi advised residents to leave their key fobs in a faraday pouch in a convenient place for thieves as a way to lessen the risk of violent confrontations.
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at the front door because they are breaking into your home to steal your car; they don’t want anything else.
“A lot of them that they’re arresting have guns on them and they are not toy guns,” he ominously added. “They are real guns. They’re loaded.”
That advice sparked an angry reaction on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Canada is rapidly descending into Turd World status.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Leave Car Keys ‘at Front Door’ to Avoid Violent Confrontations: Toronto Police
In the latest attack on transgender madness in women’s sports, former University of Kentucky Wildcats swimmer Riley Gaines and 15 other female athletes have filed suit against the NCAA alleging violations of federal Title IX law arising from its insertion of man-to-woman transgender athletes into women’s competition.
“The NCAA’s most basic job is to protect the fairness and safety of competition, but instead the NCAA…continues to openly discriminate against women,” Gaines told The Free Press.
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Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) announced on Friday that state officials intercepted a vessel carrying dozens of Haitian migrants with firearms and drugs amid widespread gang violence in the Caribbean country.
“Our Florida Fish and Wildlife officers interdicted a vessel that had 25 illegal immigrants, potential illegal immigrants from Haiti in their boat,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “In their vessel they had firearms, they had drugs, they had night vision gear and were boating very recklessly, which would potentially endanger other folks.” The vessel was intercepted in the last few weeks, and the illegal migrants “were turned over to the Coast Guard for deportation,” the governor added.
The announcement came a few days after a leaked Border Patrol email revealed the agency’s Miami officials were told to prepare for a potential influx of Haitian migrants fleeing the country’s gang takeover. “One landing will cripple the station and our ability to respond to other traffic,” the email said, urging officials to contain incoming migrants to one area while providing any necessary medical assistance and conducting background checks.
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One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of President Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non sequiturs.
We learn about Biden’s Corvette—twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden even jokes that there might be risque pictures of first lady Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.
In a sweeping move expected to dramatically reduce the cost of buying and selling a home, the National Association of Realtors announced Friday a settlement with groups of homesellers, agreeing to end landmark antitrust lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and eliminating rules on commissions.
The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prohibits agents’ compensation from being included on listings placed on local centralized listing portals known as multiple listing services, which critics say led brokers to push more expensive properties on customers. Another ends requirements that brokers subscribe to multiple listing services — many of which are owned by NAR subsidiaries — where homes are given a wide viewing in a local market. Another new rule will require buyers’ brokers to enter into written agreements with their buyers.
The agreement effectively will destroy the current homebuying and selling business model, in which sellers pay both their broker and a buyer’s broker, which critics say have driven housing prices artificially higher.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The 6% Commission on Buying or Selling a Home Is Gone After Realtors Association Agrees to Seismic Settlement
As Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, declared in 2013, “Rank cronyism, Enron-style accounting and outright financial fraud made [Fannie and Freddie] so powerful and unaccountable that they were able to wreck our economy.”
Despite the debacles earlier in this century, Team Biden is championing “no clean title, no problem” mortgage loans.
Biden policymakers believe they are so smart that they can turbo-charge housing demand while removing the guardrails — and nothing bad will happen (except Biden’s reelection).
In lieu of title insurance, the Biden administration will approve granting subsidized mortgages based on “attorney opinion letters” that assert a lawyer believes someone owns a house.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Joe Biden Is Once Again Taking a ‘Wrecking Ball’ to America’s Housing Market
I learned about the “Poverty Simulation” by means of a colleague’s letter to campus announcing such an event at the central Pennsylvania liberal arts university where I work. My colleague explained that “many families” in the local communities around the campus are in poverty. The figure she gave was 6 percent, leading me to wonder if “many” is the best term used to describe a phenomenon not being experienced by 94 percent of the people under discussion; also, since the national poverty rate is closer to 12 percent, it would be worth noting that the local poverty rate is extraordinarily low.
In any case, the school looks to involve our students in collaborative work with local communities, and so my colleague argued that they should know something about all this poverty. Such knowledge will require “dispell[ing]…preconceived notions about the experience and roots of poverty,” and an excellent method for dispelling such notions is “through experiencing and sensitizing participants to the realities of poverty.” The Poverty Simulation, I learned from my colleague’s letter, is “not a game [but rather] a role play in which participants get to experience the difficult choices” of those in poverty.
I wonder whether those of us who were actually poor when we were younger can test out of this for credit.
Fulton Country district attorney Fani Willis must fire her former lover Nathan Wade if she wants to continue to prosecute former president Donald Trump for election interference, a Georgia judge ruled on Friday.
Liberal lawyer Bradley P. Moss, Esq., who frequently appears on CNN, posted his reaction to the news on social media. “I am trying to imagine something scarier right now than being prosecuted by an angry Fani Willis,” he wrote.
Come on, dude. You must not be trying very hard. Here are 10 things that are definitely scarier than being prosecuted by an angry Fani Willis.
Charges will not be filed against a 32-year-old man who shot a gun Thursday in a crowded New York City subway car, with authorities saying he was acting in self-defense when he took a gun from an aggressor and shot him with it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Watch the Pigs Fly….
The Missouri school where a black student beat a white girl into a seizure last week has a history of anti-white racism cases and violent confrontations, according to local residents, former students and staffers.
Now a former student at the Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis has charged that anti-white bullying has been ongoing at the school for decades.
In addition, locals say fights have extended out into their neighbourhoods for years.
My, what a surprise….
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on School Where Student Was Beaten Into Seizure Has History Of Alleged Anti-White Racism
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Pamela Brown launched a smear campaign against New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers this week after it was revealed he was on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s shortlist for VP; accusing him of believing the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was fake. And when Rodgers denied their allegations, Tapper took to his show, The Lead on Thursday to falsely claim Rodgers was not only refusing to deny the allegations but was actively defending the conspiracy theory.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Jake Tapper LIES About Aaron Rodgers Defending Sandy Hook Conspiracy
