Amerika

~~~

What makes a crowd go insane? Society succeeds, and the goal is lost while enemies gather at the door and we focus on them instead of what we need, which is to focus on the whole of Us, or the civilization we have created.

Consequently society becomes a manager, school-marm, and boss: it tells us what methods we can use, so that we think the right things, and therefore we can all have a pleasant inner mental state.

People do not like competence. If you want to socialize, make yourself harmless first. Even if you are the center of attention, let your inner confusion and doubt hang out, like a stand-up comic or politician.

When people think they understand you, and could manipulate you, and that you are unlikely to attack them because you know better, they feel comfortable around you and will socialize.

They should really fear the Omegas because these “wild card” people have no interest in attacking others, but want to re-arrange civilization so that it avoids its usual “progress” toward self-destructive harmlessness.

As I wrote years ago in Crowdism, humanity faces the problem of social pressure.

In a Crowd, those who want to be popular realize that they do this by inducing comfortable mental states in others, which means reducing the ability of anyone to be harmful or to tell all of us that they know better.

Every part of modern society, the dogma you are soaked in every day from a million angles, says that no one knows better and that we cannot exclude anyone. Let everyone do what they want and we all pay for it; this makes you popular.

On the other hand, we are now seeing that this does not work because it drives our people insane and eats the core out of society, over time erasing helpful genetics and replacing them with the code for with selfish idiots.

We fought a Civil War for civil rights, or government-enforced equality, simply because that benefited the big cities and the moneyed interests behind them. However, the drive behind it was egalitarianism: no one should escape mass democracy and set up a small paradise like existed in the South.

Our societies then fought two disastrous world wars, acknowledged at the time as wars for democracy, because if anyone could thrive without democracy, we would feel like idiots for keeping it around.

Now we see the pattern repeating again. The West is broke and needs a war; Russia is even more broke and wants to, Napoleon-style, unite its people through conquest and plunder.

Like Genghis Khan, Russia spent its money on war, and has not produced a viable economy, so it needs to capture one. The spoiler is that people who cannot produce a viable economy cannot manage one either, and they tend to kill it off rather rapidly.

If our journalists had been around back in that day, they would have written about how egalitarian and progressive the rule of the Khan was, and how prosperous and joyful life was in his Soviet Union.

On the bigger front, we realize that the end of our end of history has come. Francis Fukuyama admitted as much recently, continuing his thesis that liberal democracy as the last man standing among political systems had become the de facto standard worldwide. We call that “globalism,” if we are honest: worldwide democracy, bolstered by civil rights and market socialism, created because it makes neutered harmless societies where everyone feels accepted even if only into equal poverty and irrelevance.

The miracle in the West has ended however. Diversity and socialism killed it, since they added marginal costs in layers upon everything, paralyzing our ability to act in a realistic and opportunity-seeking matter.

You have probably noticed that everything has become rent-seeking, from the workers demanding absurd wages for minimal activity to the companies that want to sell us Software as a Service, basically renting our software and paying five times as much.

When everything around you becomes a service, and you own nothing, it means that government is taking too much. Income taxes, corporate taxes, property taxes, sales taxes… all of these get passed on to the end consumer. This is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; the rich own stocks, bonds, and companies, and the poor get paychecks that suddenly do not stretch as far, even as more free stuff arrives from government.

We are at the end of the modern model. This means that change is coming, and we who want civilization (and the human species, since now that we are globalized, we all go down together) to survive need to think about what we want next.

~~~

• PIC slams Absa CEO appointment, demands transformation action plan
  

  “The PIC believes this is yet another missed opportunity for the Absa board to publicly demonstrate its commitment to purposefully transform the banking group and to advance diversity, inclusivity, and racial and gender equity at the most senior levels of organisation.”

  When your society goes diverse, you create a new voting and purchasing bloc that favors “transformation,” or wealth transfer from the majority to the minority groups. This is why democracy always imports them or enfranchises them, so that new leaders can take over and plunder what others created.

• How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy
  

  All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town “deplorables” might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane.

  We should be wary of any morality that aims for a subset of what is good that can be used as a symbol, instead of the wider cause of being a good person. The same is true of meritocracy, which chooses those who are good at tests but ignores who they are. Cosmopolitan cities, making their defect (cosmopolitanism) into a value, tend to consider themselves above the rest, and then every person in them competes to be the most righteous, which is just disguised attention-getting behavior.

• Why this Nonstop Fear Mongering?
  

  A top headline on the front page of arguably the most influential newspaper in the United States makes it sound like states are doing something wrong by scaling back their Covid response efforts and that experts think we should worry about a variant that’s spreading. The actual content of the article reveals that there is no new evidence or reason to believe states are doing anything wrong, no new evidence that we need to be concerned about the variant, and the experts are mostly local public health officials and doctors with little expertise or research in fields related to SARS-CoV-2.

  Fear sells power. When there is something to fear, people cling to those who claim to be removing it. That gives those in power incentive to never end the crisis, since when it goes, their power — from the Surgeon General on down to the lowliest Mask Karen — goes away too. That the Left has embarked on this course tells us that they know their almost unbroken streak of rule since WW1 has not turned out well, and they need to control us before we figure out how very bad everything has gone. Such is typical of Late Stage Democracy.

• New Google Docs feature to flag “potentially discriminatory or inappropriate language”
  

  For plans that have the feature, Google Docs will enable these prompts by default and use a purple underline to flag anything that it deems to be potentially discriminatory or inappropriate.

  Last December, Google Docs notifications were updated to restrict documents containing “hate speech” or “misleading content. Google has also directly censored several Google Docs in the past including a hydroxychloroquine coronavirus treatment trial document and six of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s documents about the COVID pandemic.

  The people who think they benefit from our diversity and inclusion system, since they believe that these things are actually popular even outside of their coastal enclaves of goodthinkers one-upping each other, will force their values upon us if they can. It makes them feel powerful, and that they have this need tells us that in their guts, they feel powerless against the decline of Western Civilization.

• ‘Evil and sadistic’ teenage girl, 16, jailed for kicking father-of-two psychiatrist to death in sickening homophobic attack was a ‘daddy’s girl’ who went ‘off the rails’ after her parents’ split
  

  Timms-Williams, who lived with her company director mother in the Vale of Glamorgan village of Creigiau around seven miles north west of Cardiff, was in a same-sex relationship herself.

  She is said to have been ‘distraught’ when her parents split up, though this still did not explain the callous killing.

  Neighbours said she started to ‘hang around kids that were up to no good and began drinking and smoking weed’, while she would also ‘no longer say hello if you saw her in the street’ and it became obvious she had ‘gone off the rails’.

  We know that divorce devastates children; why do we still allow it, or at least, why do we tolerate people who do it? Children need stable homes. When their parents split, it rejects the decision that led to the formation of the children, which children read as “I was a mistake.” This girl got the ultimate revenge on her parents by humiliating them publicly, even if she has to go to jail for a decade to do it.

• Romney suggests cutting retirement benefits for younger Americans
  

  In comments to the Senate budget committee on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Utah said that the spiraling costs of retirement programs had to be tackled to bring national debt under control. Romney raised the politically controversial idea of cutting benefits, but only for younger generations before they reach retirement age.

  Democracy spent itself broke. These programs all rob tomorrow to pay for today. The Baby Boomers, as the largest generation, created obligations that future generations cannot pay, so now the system will crash. The politicians are just trying to keep it afloat with duct tape, bubble gum wads, and sticking plaster long enough for the Boomers to die out, since those Boomers still donate the most money to candidates.

• Meet the Robot Frying Your Food at White Castle
  

  So what Flippy does, is he cooks all of the products. We have what we call AutoBins. We put the product in, and we also have a food dispenser for our fries. So Flippy will take a basket, go to the AutoBins, and the food from the AutoBins will drop in the basket. Then he’ll cook it, bring it up, and dump it to our front bag station. So it takes that entire process away from the team members, who aren’t having to do that.

  We have known for some time that technology will replace lots of jobs. Our solution has been to shift everyone into office jobs, outsource production to the third world, and divide jobs into ever more specialized repetitive and boring tasks. Now that we are spending most of our work life in meetings and answering emails, who actually does much of anything? This will only get worse. Then again, no society every needed the restaurant industry like we have it, nor the entertainment industry. Our only solutions here are either to get people back on homesteads, or to store them all in giant apartment complexes while living on welfare and eating bugs.

• Texas drivers license data reveals where new Houston residents are coming from
  

  Specifically, 468,426 people from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia have registered a driver’s license in one of the 254 Texas counties, as of January 2022. About 20% of these people are from California.

  The exodus from high-tax states has begun. Texas hides its taxes as property taxes which pay for Supreme Court mandated public schooling, most of which has nothing to do with education and is mostly free daycare and free school meals.

• Austrian neo-Nazi rapper sentenced to 10 years in prison
  

  According to the indictment, the rapper glorified Nazism, Adolf Hitler and the mass extermination of Jews in his music and videos.

  He had also produced hate songs targeting homosexuals, Muslims and people with dark skin, it said, as well as producing a video tribute to the assassin who killed 51 people in an attack on Muslims in New Zealand in 2019.

  The accused pleaded guilty. “I was blinded and only now realize the implications of my actions,” he told the court.

  This guy had terrible lawyers who told him to throw himself on the mercy of the court. As Leftism fails worldwide, we will see more of these incidents. In this case, the music was terrible and the lyrics deliberately provocative, but like all things in law, the precedent will be expanded over time. If you fail to vigorously enough support the welfare state, claim that diversity is our strength, and clamor for transsexual rights, you may be suspected of thoughtcrime and sent to the gulag. Leftism always goes this way.

• Tory minister endorses creation of national ‘Margaret Thatcher Day’
  

  Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch threw her “personal” endorsement behind the idea in the Commons on Wednesday after she was quizzed on the matter by MPs.

  We should celebrate the moderates like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. They realized that it is not a moderate position to accept socialism and unions, and did their best to hold back the self-destructive crowd, drunk on the viral pathology of equality, for as long as they could.

• More than 1,000 Pennsylvania workers quit AFSCME union in 2021
  

  Joe Mandrusiak, the Freedom Foundation’s Pennsylvania outreach director, attributed falling membership to union members not approving of how union leadership spends its funds.

  AFSCME 13 collected $26.4 million in dues, with $7.1 million going to the national organization. Mandrusiak highlighted some of the union’s political spending and other cost in the Freedom Foundation’s article:

  • $3.2 million on travel.
  • $373,720 on food/catering.
  • $2.7 million on partisan organizations.
  • $440,000 sent to 14 groups that call for defunding the police.
  • $25,000 to DEMOS (Defund the Police and Prisons) group.
  • $21,500 to Coalition of Human Need (to tear down the law enforcement apparatus).
  • $465,100 to Planned Parenthood.

  Collective reward and punishment systems are Leftist by nature; conservatives prefer to reward the good, punish the bad, and ignore the unexceptional and irrelevant, allowing nature to sort that one out. Conservatism is inherently Social Darwinist in nature, but also regular Darwinist, and does not believe in saving people from themselves, in part because if you do that, you accumulate a large pool of waste humans who are parasitic and predatory by nature. If you join a union, you have joined the Left. People are slowly figuring this out a century late which is par for the course with humanity.

• There Are No Petrodollars, Plus the Focus Misses the Point
  

  The fact that the very idea of the petrodollar keeps going to this day is instead a poignant if inadvertent acknowledgement of the limited monetary literacy provided by the dastardly discipline of statistics-obsessed Economics. We’ve all been left in the dark, and it began that way all the way back decades ago with the very people tasked with being “our” monetary stewards.

  Whereas the eurodollar system was already blooming by the early 1960’s, those at the Federal Reserve were caught unprepared and struggled mightily to make sense of its designs, aims, and methods. From their primitive viewpoint, these “dollars” (there weren’t pallets of physical stacks of Federal Reserve notes, merely book entries on a shared ledger system) must have been “exported” by the loud American balance of payments (BoP) deficits.

  By importing more merchandise than what had been exported, US-based companies and individuals were obliged, in the aggregate, to send more dollars overseas to pay for the imports than what came back to pay for exports. Many times during those early sixties discussions raising the eurodollar subject, or Euro-currency as it was often written, the FOMC blamed the country’s BoP deficit as its sole source.

  “Petrodollar” seems a popular term among proles because it allows them to avoid understanding anything about economics. The dollar is strongest because the US is the strongest consumer economy in the world and arguably its most powerful military. In reality, fiat currency seems a better target: the Leftist West produced a system whereby it taxes to the hilt, spreads the money around, and then claims growth because of the resulting expenditure.

~~~

• Biden takes flak for joke suggesting the Irish are dumb
  

  “Well, I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden continued. “I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter.”

  Dominic Giacoppa is the Sicilian name of Jill Biden’s father, Donald C. Jacobs.

  “What did the Irish do to deserve this?” asked radio host Joe Cunningham.

  The Irish — America’s first taste of diversity — tend to be masters of details but oblivious to the big picture, which explains why an otherwise lovely island remains covered in rocks and inept despite a huge flow of wealth to it from Europeans buying vacation houses. Send them back to North Africa!

• FEC fines DNC and Clinton for Trump dossier hoax
  

  The election agency said that Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm.

  Slowly the bricks in the wall are starting to fall. The Useful Idiots do not care, but the moderates are defecting from the Left as it is increasingly revealed that Democrats have been behaving more like Stalin than Jefferson.

• Trump Doctrine 2.0: Former president lays out plan to reverse Biden agenda
  

  “The system is totally broken. Our system is broken. And we’re going into socialism. And we’re going into communism,” he added.

  “Can I give you an example on the supply chain?” Trump asked. “You go to a store, they don’t have bread, like a third world country. They don’t have things. You go to buy something at Tiffany, you go to buy something at a hardware store – high or low – they don’t have product. They say, even me, ‘When I order things like furnishings for a building or something, they say it’s gonna take nine months to get when it used to be like, same day service.'”

  “We don’t have a free press. We really don’t have free speech anymore,” he said. “It’s very bad, very dangerous. These elections are going to be absolutely critical for this country.”

  The West has chosen to go out the same way the Soviets went out: failure of production. When you tax too much, you cripple economic activity at every level, which makes daily life too expensive for your middle class. In America, diversity and anti-poverty form the basis of our socialism, which we adopted for the same reason that Europe did: buy votes from the poor and foreign, then let our new comrades take whatever they want.

• Texas among most stressed states in U.S., study says
  

  Texas’ total score came out to a 53.38, but ranked as the second-highest work-related stress state and the fourth-highest in terms of family-related stress. Texas also tied Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming for the most average hours worked per week.

  If we were to drill down enough, my guess is that at the root of this we would find the “second mortgage” of property taxes, which are near 3% in most of the state. High taxes mean high costs and high stress since wages never keep up.

• Biden got 255,000 ‘excess’ votes in fraud-tainted swing states in 2020, study finds
  

  Looking at six swing states, the data he crunched found that voter turnout in Republican areas increased from 2016 to 2020 while voter turnout among Democrats dropped — except in places where voter fraud was claimed.

  It has now become clear that word from on high went out to the Leftist herd, who all participated in order to show they were goodthinkers, to induce panic over COVID-19 so that mail-in voting would be permitted to the degree that it enabled a fake election, aided by the usual ballot dumping and busing in of criminals, non compos mentis elderly, and illegal aliens. As the data accumulates, it damages American standing in the world, which is why this election will be decertified eventually. It becomes a question of which shadow government will win, the Chinese-controlled Tammany/Pendergast machine run by the Obama Democrats, or the alliance of military and intelligence professionals supporting Trump.

• Beat the Microbead
  

  These microplastics, hardly visible to the naked eye, flow straight from the bathroom drain into the sewer system. Wastewater treatment plants are not designed to filter them out; that is how microplastics contribute to the ‘Plastic Soup’ swirling around in our oceans.

  Another “smart” modern miracle, promoted by affirmative action CEOs as well as cynical MBAs, falls once public opinion hits the tipping point.

• Facebook’s most popular posts show how it’s vulnerable to exploitation, report finds
  

  The report by the Integrity Institute — a new nonprofit made up of tech industry veterans — found that Facebook’s lists of its popular content in 2021 were dominated either by posts from anonymous or spammy sources or that contained unoriginal material.

  The “wisdom of crowds” turns out to be idiocy, especially among the impoverished GNDN (goes nowhere, does nothing) people who spend most of their day on mainstream social media via their smartphones.

• NFL Orders Teams To Hire Minority Or Female Offensive Assistant Coaches For 2022 Season
  

  The policy was adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting on March 28 and requires all 32 NFL teams to hire an offensive assistant coach who is “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” regardless of whether or not the team already has a coach who satisfies those requirements among their staff.

  In the Clinton 1990s, the wisdom circulated that White America was getting replaced and therefore, business needed to cater to the New Americans. Various comically condescending attempts followed, after which point they finally hit on a solution of sorts: continue affirmative action but through private industry. To be part of the goodthinker club in the coastal cosmopolitan metroplexes where the executives, publicists, journalists, and investors live, therefore, it seemed like a logical rationalization from precedent to start with more of these programs, even though it is steadily driving away their core audience. Start making fun of your friends who still watch sports.

• Statue of explorer David Livingstone may be removed because he worked from age 10 in a mill that ‘likely’ used West Indian cotton – despite him being an abolitionist credited with helping end the slave trade
  

  A statue to David Livingstone, the anti-slavery missionary and explorer, in Glasgow was identified in a 119-page report identifying a series of sites in Glasgow with links to slavery.

  Livingstone condemned slavery as the ‘greatest meanness ever perpetrated’ but regarded cotton masters as benevolent and paternalistic.

  If you author such a report, you can have your career destroyed unless you find some scapegoats. This was never about slavery; it has always been about erasing White majorities and White history so that the newcomers could take over because that is what politicians, business, and media “think” is the “future.”

• US on track to hit 1M border encounters in first 6 months of fiscal year
  

  The mark would be the highest through the first six months of a fiscal year in at least two decades and would put the US on pace to surpass the 1.7 million encounters in all of 2021.

  When American politicians signal weakness on the border, they all come across. This displaces not just the majority, but recent immigrants. The situation has been untenable for decades and the only solution is ethnic repatriation.

• Make Europe Great Again
  

  By any metric, most of the countries in the European Union fall well short of the United States. They are poorer, less free, and far less dynamic. For the most part, their people are more bitter, less religious, and often profoundly bored with their lives. For many non-Europeans, the E.U. and its member states have largely ceased to be relevant for the past 70 years.

  Nevertheless, many on the political left (and a few reactionaries on the right) will insist on looking to the Old World for new solutions to today’s problems. They will characterize Western Europe as sophisticated, safe, orderly, and progressive while they disparage the U.S. as stupid, violent, messy, and backward. They believe that if only Americans adopted the ways of Western Europe, they too could experience the same supposed blessings.

  Europhiles like to believe that the EU is a better version of the American federal system, but it’s actually the opposite: “Instead of bonding its citizens with common culture and beliefs, the EU chooses to tightly bind them with copious amounts of red tape.” Rather than bolster member nations, the EU holds them down with regulations, migrant quotas, and countless committees.

  Europe has been cruising on past greatness for decades. Finally it has become unbearably clear that the situation is not working, and it has squandered its future for a variety of pie-in-the-sky schemes like immigration and the cradle-to-grave entitlements state.

• Saving nature: Conserving 30% of the land, sea just the start
  

  According to the most recent Protected Planet report by the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 17 percent of land habitats and around seven percent of marine areas were protected by 2020.

  Humans conserve what humans do not need. Leaving half of Earth for nature is reasonable, but it requires we end diversity and lessen global trade. We either do this or commit ecocide.

~~~

~~~

• Pregnant women exposed to disinfectants more likely to have children with asthma, eczema: study
  

  Previous research has linked exposure to the chemicals to asthma and dermatitis in workers, but few studies have explored the effects of disinfectant use during pregnancy and the development of disease in children.

  The study, published in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine, found that their children’s risk for asthma was 26 per cent greater, and 29 per cent greater for eczema, than the risk for children whose mothers were never exposed to disinfectants.

  All of our modern miracles worked well enough when there was fresh air and low usage, but now that everything is standardized based on fear of contagion, usage has increased to the point where we can measure the results most people always suspected were the case.

• Can Germany survive without Russian gas?
  

  Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Germany’s parliament last week that a sudden embargo on Russian energy imports “from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and the whole of Europe into a recession.”

  The reason, of course, is Germany’s much higher dependence on Russia for its energy needs: up to 55% of gas and 34% of oil supplies, according to the Agora Energiewende think tank in Germany.

  Since the war in Ukraine began on February 24, the European Union has paid out €21 billion ($23.3 billion) for fossil fuel imports from Russia, according to the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

  Germany has always suffered from a lack of natural resources. This might be a good time to invent a more effective nuclear energy source.

• Biden signs bill making lynching a federal hate crime
  

  The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is named for the Black teenager whose killing in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights era.

  Most likely, he was as guilty as George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Rodney King, and Mike Brown. This optics exercise serves to cement Democrat allegiances with minorities, the majority of whom in every group — including Italian, Irish, and Slavic — vote Leftist.

• Why U.S. Population Growth Is Collapsing
  

  Finally, yes, Americans are having fewer babies—like basically every other rich country in the world. Since 2011, annual births have declined by 400,000. Two years ago, I wrote that “the future of the city is childless,” and the pandemic seems to have accelerated that future. Just look at Los Angeles: L.A. County recorded 153,000 live births in 2001 but fewer than 100,000 in 2021. At this rate, sometime around 2030, L.A. births will have declined by 50 percent in the 21st century.

  The article includes lots of deflections and distractions to bury this fact: people are not happy, therefore they are not having children, especially as costs go up and risk of ethnic replacement intensifies.

• Senators Release Receipts Showing Direct Payments From Foreign Oligarchs To Hunter Biden
  

  According to the documents obtained by the senators, energy company CEFC, “an arm of the Chinese Government,” paid Wells Fargo Clearing Services $100,000 and designated “further credit to Owasco,” Hunter’s firm.

  The Clintons bowed to China, as did Obama. They are taking money from them. This is why we hear a lot about Russia from the Left: they want to deflect from China. It is also why they are engaging in deliberate sabotage of the national economy. They want China to win. The goodthinkers and diversity that support them want that, too, because then the rest of the money gets divided up and the White people BTFO.

• Crisis of low morale: support for the military in America’s working class.
  

  The peace and security of the global commons, provided by the US military, has allowed for international prosperity at the cost of social decline among many American working-class communities. The result is a loss of America’s working-class confidence in national institutions.

  The decline in the USA has occurred because of our Leftist policies and the three-quarters of our budget that goes to entitlements, requiring high taxes. It is another way to get to the same place that the Soviets went before their collapse. Leftism, it turns out, is fatal to the host society.

• A hidden immune feature may have spared unvaccinated people from COVID-19 infections
  

  They identified IgA (immunoglobulin A) in the respiratory tracts of several of the personnel who didn’t catch COVID-19, which could mean they had an antidote in their immune systems all this time.

  These antibodies are found naturally in mucous membrane secretions in the airways and gastrointestinal tract, where they protect the body by binding to viruses and other invading organisms.

  This shows us a link between good gut health and good respiratory health, and explains why so many of sickly got hit by COVID-19. Others simply had one of the 13 loci that mean this flu was a tricky survival event.

• Child Poverty Has Been Cut in Half Since 1996 Welfare Reform
  

  The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, known as “welfare reform,” introduced the principle of reciprocity to the welfare system, requiring beneficiaries to take positive steps toward self-support in exchange for assistance. The overall child poverty rate had remained largely frozen for decades before welfare reform, but after reform it dropped dramatically. Children today are half as likely to live below the official poverty threshold as were children in 1996. Deep child poverty (with resources less than half the official poverty threshold) has been nearly eliminated.

  Anti-poverty programs increase poverty in the same way socialism does: dependent on the system, they stop striving since they would be insane to leave a sure bet, and therefore remain in the system in perpetuity, which keeps them above starvation level but still in low-income status.

• China’s Sinopec to keep buying Russian oil and gas, exec says
  

  Chinese state energy company Sinopec will continue to buy crude oil and gas from Russia, a top executive said on Monday, even as Western democracies step up sanctions in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

  Decoupling continues. Biden quietly shifted a lot of wealth to the Russians and Chinese by acting after the fact on Ukraine, instead of before the fact as Trump did. Luckily this will further split the third world from the West, and force the West to become self-sufficient and militarized in response to the new threat.

• Our Elites Need to Recognize that America’s ‘Unipolar Moment’ is Over
  

  As President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War. But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world. She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation’s vital national security interests. Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world. She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be “the special province” of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences. Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop “disinterested globalist” attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as “internationalism” instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.

  The Obama administration pursued, and the Biden administration continues to pursue, a globalist agenda that prioritizes multilateral efforts against climate change; promotes nuclear disarmament; and seeks to transform our armed forces into a “woke” military concerned more with race, gender, and “white nationalism” than being prepared and equipped to win wars. The Biden administration is staffed (as Obama’s was) with elites who appear to be committed to a “disinterested globalist” or “internationalist” agenda. They seem to believe that they are as much “citizens of the world” as they are citizens of the United States.

  The US succeeded when it offered a better option. Now it demands allegiance to our political agenda instead of function. This draws interest away from us and toward other options. If we ditch Leftism, this process reverses. Leftists in China and Leftists in the USA are working toward a world socialist order run by the Chinese.

• Fertiliser inflation presages a global food supply crisis
  

  As a March 11 release from the US Department of Agriculture put it: “Fertiliser prices have more than doubled since last year due to many factors including [Vladimir] Putin’s price hike, a limited supply of the relevant minerals and high energy costs, high global demand and agricultural commodity prices, reliance on fertiliser imports, and lack of competition in the fertiliser industry.”

  Industries bloat just like socialist economies. The founders leave, and newcomers who do not understand what they are doing hire lots of people and those people then want the scam to continue. As a result, costs go up and so do prices, squeezing out smaller companies that cannot afford regulatory, tax, union, and affirmative action costs. This makes a fragile supply chain and this war may have kicked out one of its support pillars.

• Hunter Biden DID help secure millions in funding for US contractor in Ukraine specializing in deadly pathogen research
  

  The commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, claimed there was a ‘scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects’ and pointed to the ‘financing of such activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, which is headed by Hunter Biden.’

  No one trusts the Russians, but the emails from the Laptop of Doom suggest that they are correct in this case. “Ten percent for the big guy” means that more corruption connects to the Biden network, which explains how he went from having a $250k/year salary to being a multimillionaire.

~~~

• The End of Citizenship
  

  The sudden outburst of vicarious Ukrainian patriotism on the part of many Americans—as well as people in similar North Atlantic democracies—seems like a Freudian “return of the repressed.” Taught that celebrating their own national traditions is racist and xenophobic, and deprived of opportunities to play a meaningful role in national defense, many Americans and Western Europeans have found an outlet for a lost sense of belonging by borrowing the national pride of another nation.

  Diversity kills culture and replaces it with ideology.

• The Coming Disaster
  

  It used to puzzle me that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were so close and personable, after all the terrible things they and their supporters had said about each other. But that was back in those innocent days before I realized that the distinction between political parties is superficial compared to the real distinction between power on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. Clinton and Bush have no disagreements severe enough to challenge their joint commitment to being in charge.

  Government is a career now. This means that those who get ahead do so by working with others, and this crosses party lines. That plus many unelected bureaucrats, following the EU model, makes a Deep State.

• Massey University academic Cat Pausé dies suddenly
  

  Pausé spoke to Stuff in January about the discrimination fat people face in their everyday lives, especially in regard to healthcare. Moral panic over obesity levels perpetuate this.

  “Everyone has anti-fat attitudes. We find them in kids as young as three. We’re not born hating fat people, we’re not born finding fat people disgusting, or that fat people are lazy or lacking discipline or willpower,” Pause said.

  “We learned these attitudes, we can absolutely unlearn them.”

  …except when the fat kills you first. Very sad, but predictable. There is a reason that shaming of weakness, deformity, retardation, insanity, cruelty, and sickness exists.

• We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies.
  

  But the point is that this year’s nominees offer their share of famous actors, major directors and classic Hollywood genres. And yet, for all of that, almost nobody went to see them in the theaters. When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, “Dune,” barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

  Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore.

  When you have a unified national population, you can have big wins that penetrate deeply into the different niches and spread by word of mouth. When you have a divided population, people flee the stuff that looks foreign and alien to them, like all the diversity and equality propaganda, and just stay home instead.

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