The Crazy Years

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Related reading: Great Society by Amity Shlaes.

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It would be fascinating to compare this to “white-on-black” murders - especially shown in proportion to each normalized as a percent of the population.

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These few little lines/notation succinctly show the absolute failure of “democratic” self-governance.

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Here you go.


(Click image to enlarge.)

These are raw numbers, not scaled to the fraction of population. As the person who prepared these charts observed, scaling to the fraction of population cuts both ways. Here are victims and perpetrators of interracial murders per 100,000 population from the 2021 FBI crime statistics, plus computation of relative risk.

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Another Florida legal scam:

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Well, I guess it beats US$ 1 million to fly into “space” with Virgin Galactic. Note how they used a super wide angle lens to exaggerate the curvature of the Earth visible from an altitude of 37 km.

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Military priorities:





As if I was reading The Rat and The Butterfly

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And thanks for reminding me of The Rat and the Butterfly; good read!

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Looks like George W. Bush.

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In an appearance on Fox News, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley (born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa: “Nikki” is a Punjabi name meaning “little one”) (“Invade 'Em All Apu”) responded to an audience question with a reply that may have ended her regrettable campaign. Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/nikki-haleys-dangerous-idea

Haley blamed much of the problem on social media and on forces outside the United States. “If you look at social media, the misinformation and the dramatic sides of social media are instigating this,” Haley said. “Why? Because it’s being pushed by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It is why, when I get into office, the first thing we have to do — social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name. First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you’re gonna get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say, when they know their pastor, their family members are going to see it. It’s going to help our kids, and it’s going to help our country.”

(Emphasis in the original.)

Here is the statement, in context, from a video by The Hill.

As approximately half of all living political pundits observed within minutes, the authors of The Federalist Papers, U.S. founding fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote under the pseudonym “Publius”, and anonymity has been considered a part of protecting free speech for centuries.

While the poop volcano was still erupting on the Internet, Haley’s campaign issued the following “clarification”, in full:

We all know that America’s enemies use anonymous bots to spread anti-American lies and sow chaos and division within our borders. Nikki believes social media companies need to do a better job of verifying users so we can crack down on Chinese, Iranian, and Russian bots. That’s common sense.

Who is this “we” of whom they speak? I certainly do not “know that”, and to the extent such subversion is going on, it is minor in magnitude compared to the thumbs on the scale of public discourse applied by the tech oligopolies who control the data silos of the Internet at the behest of the Deep State and its legacy media toadies.

Then, realising the situation was rapidly deteriorating, Haley appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box, talking even faster than usual and, around one minute into the following video, unleashed a Camel-Hair magnitude word salad which tried to imply that her earlier statement (go back and listen to it or read Byron York’s transcript) did not apply to U.S. persons.

At 1:30, she put her foot, three (or is it six?) inch heel included, squarely in her mouth, declaiming:

… I don’t want anonymous American people having free speech; what I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.

Well, maybe she bobbled the words in the first part, but doesn’t “free speech” mean that everybody has it, regardless of nationality and ideology? Or is it to be reserved only to people of whom Nimarata Nikki approves, which excludes almost everybody who believes that the U.S. should not be borrowing money from the Chinese to fight wars in lands distant from its shores. And also, if only “Americans” are to have free speech (congratulations, almost everybody in the Western Hemisphere, you’re in the club!), how is this to be verified without those privileged speakers proving their identity to confirm they’re not among the excluded? Should they trust the social media companies as custodians of their true identity, to be revealed only on grounds of the “national security” with which Nimarata Nikki is so concerned or when some blue-haired twenty-something disapproves of what is being posted and decides to summon the Social Justice Enforcement mob on the anonymous poster by revealing their identity and address?

The owner of 𝕏 is unimpressed with the concept.

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Maybe I should ask Nimarata to pen a blurb for “The Digital Imprimatur”, since she, like her Democrat colleagues, appears to have misunderstood this cautionary document, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, for an instruction manual when, twenty years ago, it discussed “The End of Anonymity”.

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I don’t even know what she considers anti-American. Given she seems to be a warmonger, I should assume anything anti-war is in her opinion anti-American. Maybe anything anti-State is anti-American.

In The Network State which you previously discussed and provided the link, the author provides the Oxford dictionary definition of a Nation:

Let’s start with Oxford’s definition by way of their free service Lexico:

A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

From that definition, we can extract the following properties:

  • A large body of people: has to be of a substantial size (10-100k+?)
  • united: members see themselves as being part of the same group.
  • common descent: shared genetics, have intermarried more with each other than people outside the nation.
  • (or) history: shared past, have lived near each other for some time.
  • (or) culture: shared dress, food, mannerisms, religion, and/or customs.
  • (or) language: shared spoken and/or written tongue.
  • inhabiting a particular…territory: found in a specific region of the globe.

In order for there to be an anti-American there needs to be an American. Fifty plus years of dividing people into rich vs poor, black vs white, male vs female, straight vs gay, “vaxxed” vs “unvaxxed”, importing overwhelming numbers of people that don’t have a shared language, history or culture and celebrating multiculturalism has done the job of eliminating the nation. This wasn’t done by anonymous bots from Russia, China or Iran.

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Science reports:

Brain games?

Whistleblowers and former lab members suggest star neuroscientist Berislav Zlokovic may have manipulated data that support a major stroke trial and important Alzheimer’s research

In 2022, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) placed a large bet on an experimental drug developed to limit brain damage after strokes. The agency committed up to $30 million to administer a compound called 3K3A-APC in a study of 1400 people shortly after they experience an acute ischemic stroke, a perilous condition in which a clot blocks blood flow to part of the brain.

The gamble seemed warranted. Lab studies, most by a longtime grantee, prominent University of Southern California (USC) neuroscientist Berislav Zlokovic, had generated promising data. A small safety study of the drug, sponsored by a company Zlokovic co-founded called ZZ Biotech, was also encouraging. Analyses of data from the phase 2 trial hinted that the treatment reduced the number of tiny, asymptomatic brain hemorrhages after stroke patients received either surgery to remove the clot, the clot-busting drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), or both.

But a 113-page dossier obtained by Science from a small group of whistleblowers paints a less encouraging picture. The dossier, which they submitted to NIH, highlights evidence from the phase 2 trial that the experimental remedy might have actually increased deaths in the first week after treatment: Six of the 66 stroke patients who received 3K3A-APC died within this period, compared with one among 44 in the placebo group, although the death rate evened out after a month. Patients who received the drug also trended toward greater disability and dependency at the end of the trial, 90 days after treatment.

Deepening the concern, the dossier also highlights evidence that dozens of papers from Zlokovic’s lab—including many supporting the idea that the compound was ready for human testing—contain seemingly doctored data that suggest scientific misconduct. The whistleblowers say apparent changes to images used for protein identification and other purposes seem to skew results in favor of the scientist’s hypotheses, which include influential ideas about the blood-brain barrier and its role in stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as how 3K3A-APC supposedly affects it.

But speaking to Science anonymously, four former members of Zlokovic’s lab say the anomalies the whistleblowers found are no accident. They describe a culture of intimidation, in which he regularly pushed them and others in the lab to adjust data. Two of them said he sometimes had people change lab notebooks after experiments were completed to ensure they only contained the desired results. “There were clear examples of him instructing people to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis,” one of the lab members says.

Under Zlokovic’s leadership, the USC institute has expanded to more than 30 labs and grown its annual funding more than 10-fold, exceeding $39 million in 2022. NIH grants to Zlokovic have totaled about $93 million. A prodigious fundraiser, in the past decade alone he has added at least $28 million from private sources, according to USC.

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Germany is on course to receive more than 300,000 asylum applications this year, the highest level registered since Europe’s 2015-16 refugee crisis, and between a quarter and a third of all asylum applications filed in Europe.

The influx is costing the country some €50 billion a year, equivalent to around $53 billion, roughly the size of its defense budget

(empasis mine)

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Wait’ll somebody tells them that electric charge is binary.

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