Sunday, March 31, 2019

Contra Bang #1

Welcome to the first installment of Contra Bang, intended to provide counterpoint to a popular, independent astrophysics blog. I intend to run this series every week, although real life will surely intervene from time to time.

Ask Ethan: Could ‘Cosmic Redshift’ Be Caused By Galactic Motion, Rather Than Expanding Space? (link)

A reader asks,
When we observe a distant galaxy, the light coming from the galaxy is redshifted either due to expansion of space or actually the galaxy is moving away from us. How do we differentiate between the cosmological redshift and Doppler redshift? I have searched the internet for answers but could not get any reasonable answer.
Understandable that he couldn't find a reasonable answer. How do I find out how much redshift is attributable to normal cosmic motion, and how much to expansion of the universe, which is still motion, but also isn't? It's not exactly a reasonable premise.
As it turns out, there are actually a total of four possible explanations for the redshift-distance relation we observe. They are as follows:
  1. The light from these distant galaxies getting “tired” and losing energy as they travel through space.
  2. Galaxies evolved from an initial explosion, which pushes some galaxies farther away from us by the present.
  3. The galaxies move rapidly, where the faster-moving, higher-redshift galaxies wind up farther away over time.
  4. Or the fabric of space itself expanding.
Notice how effortlessly he sets up a Sherlock's Folly? Provide four possible theories, and eliminate three with evidence. Thus, the remaining one must be the truth! This argument  assumes (1) that there really are only four possible theories, and (2) that all presumptions are correct. In this case, to assume that there really is a redshift-distance relation. What if there isn't? A lot of complexity has to be added if it's true. For instance, quasars - which are highly red-shifted - are forced to be "extremely luminous" objects only in distant space that only existed in the early universe, and thus none are observed in our nearby space. Some quasars are so impossibly bright that scientists have to invent additional explanations. Quasars are said to be directional, thus only the quasars that happen to be oriented towards Earth are observable. Also, the brightest quasars were determined to be gravitationally lensed, increasing apparent luminosity by an order of magnitude. On top of all that, of course, is the cosmic inflation theory, with all it's requisite suspension of doubt.

A simpler explanation is that quasars are not vastly distant objects, thus not impossibly luminous, and we currently don't know why they are so red-shifted. This hypothesis is not considered by modern astronomers. Redshift theory is assumed to be true. Thus, all theories it depends on - such as accretion disks that account for "extreme" and "hyper-luminous" emissions of x-rays and gamma rays - and all resulting theories - such as cosmological expansion - must also be true.
If we lived in a Universe where the distant galaxies were so redshifted because they were moving away from us so quickly, we’d never infer that an object was more than 13.8 billion light-years away, since the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old (since the Big Bang). But we routinely find galaxies that are 20 or even 30 billion light-years distant, with the most distant light of all, from the Cosmic Microwave Background, coming to us from 46 billion light-years away.
Contemplate how nuts that sounds. The redshift theory contradicts Big Bang theory. The resolution is a yet another bizarre theory, this one of unexplained cosmic inflation caused by "dark energy." It's not quite clear to me why physicists wouldn't just assume that the speed of light has slowed down, which would have the same effect without the needed magical dark energy. I suppose it's because the speed of light is believed to be a fundamental constant, and the community utterly fails to challenge its own belief systems.
It’s important to consider all the possibilities that are out there, as we must ensure that we’re not fooling ourselves by drawing the type of conclusion we want to draw. Instead, we have to devise observational tests that can discern between alternative explanations for a phenomenon. In the case of the redshift of distant galaxies, all the alternative explanations have fallen away. The expanding Universe, however unintuitive it may be, is the only one that fits the full suite of data.
Please take a moment to appreciate the utter hypocrisy of this paragraph. The modern scientists are very, very good at pretending that they apply logical and scientific rigor, and very bad at actually doing so. They absolutely do not "consider all the possibilities that are out there." They certainly won't consider the possibility that the redshift-distance relation is faulty.

5 Killer Events From Space That Could Wipe Out Human Life On Earth (link)

Ethan lists 5 cosmic events that could devastate Earth.
  1. Comet/asteroid strike
  2. Gamma-ray burst. Certainly possible, but the diagram shows gamma ray bursts as caused by colliding neutron stars, which is fantasy.
  3. Random encounter. Effectively the same as #1.
  4. A supernova.
  5. Our own sun, which will consume the Earth in 2 billion years. The sun-eats-earth prediction is based on a theoretical model for star lifecycles, of which there isn't really any evidence, and I don't believe to be true. Of much more concern should be a catastrophic CME event, which would be similar to an EMP nuke attack on the US, which would fry our electrical grid. The DoD has estimated that such as an event would kill half of Americans within a year, and as many as 90% overall.

This Is What’s Special About A Full Supermoon Occurring On The Equinox This Year (link)

Ethan provides some interesting facts about the supermoon coming up on March 20th... on March 26th. I guess he was off by about a week on that one.

What Was It Like When Oxygen Appeared And Almost Murdered All Life On Earth? (link)

An interesting piece on the great oxygenation event which caused a catastrophic extinction event on Earth and an extreme glacial period. Keeps allusions to current-day CO2 emissions, which are having a "massive impact on Earth's climate", to a minimum.

No, Quantum Tunneling Didn’t Break The Speed Of Light; Nothing Does (link)

A lengthy article refuting recent science reporting which claimed that quantum tunneling breaks the speed of light. He ends with this sentence.
But going faster than light? That’s still restricted to the realm of science fiction alone.
As if he shies away from science fiction.

 One Of These Four Missions Will Be Selected As NASA’s Next Flagship For Astrophysics (link)

There is always a concern that the big-budget missions will be dedicated towards some nonsense science - for instance, LISA, a proposed gravitational-wave detecting satellite. The four missions Ethan covers are all dedicated to general astronomy, and thus valid scientific ventures.

Ask Ethan: Why Haven’t We Found Gravitational Waves In Our Own Galaxy? (link)

The question asks,
Why are all the known gravitational wave sources (coalescing binaries) in the distant universe? Why none has been detected in our neighborhood? […] My guess (which is most probably wrong) is that the detectors need to be precisely aligned for any detection. Hence all the detection until now are serendipitous.
He responds,
If we come forward to the present day, we’ve actually detected a large number of mergers: 11 separate ones thus far. [...] If we look at the distances to these objects, though, we find something that might trouble us a little bit. Even though our gravitational wave detectors are more sensitive to objects the closer they are to us, the majority of objects we’ve found are many hundreds of millions or even billions of light-years away. 
He gives two explanations for why we haven't seen any sourced from within our own galaxy, or anywhere near, for that matter.
But again, we have not observed them in our ground-based gravitational wave detectors. And there’s a simple, straightforward reason for that: our detectors are in the wrong frequency range!
And
It’s true: during the time that LIGO and Virgo have been operating, we haven’t seen any mergers of black holes or neutron stars in our own galaxy. This is no surprise; the results from our gravitational wave observations have taught us that there are somewhere around 800,000 merging black hole binaries throughout the Universe in any year. But there are two trillion galaxies in the Universe, meaning that we need to observe millions of galaxies in order to just get one event!
It's not clear to me how they've inferred, from several observations over several years, that 800,000 black hole mergers occur in a year, but we'll assume it follows logically from their premises. There is a sound argument to make that, if we can detect events out to billions of light years, and only 11 have been seen, then the odds of any being nearby are faint indeed. However, there is another possible explanation, which Ethan would likely not consider. As described in More Tax Dollars for Gravitational Sinkhole, the gravitational detection process consists of looking at a very noisy signal, removing the noise somehow, and then seeing if what's left matches a hypothetical signature from a catalogue of over twenty thousand possible scenarios. That is our major complaint with the ground-breaking results. It seems that, whatever is detected, they'd eventually find something that looks like one of the signatures.

What they've found so far have been weak signals buried in the noise, so they're thought to come from great distances away. A nearby event would create signal many orders of magnitude stronger, which would clearly jump out from the noise. There would be no need for clever - and questionable - noise-canceling techniques. So here's the rub: if they're really just picking up false positives from the noise, they will never see a powerful, nearby signal. The detected gravitational waves are weak and "distant" because they would have to be if gravitational waves don't really exist.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Banned From Facebook

This blog has been, for all practical purposes, banned from Facebook. As RT reports (via Audacious Epigone):
“Going forward,” the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday, “while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.”



White nationalism and white separatism are hazy concepts. Facebook initially considered them in the same category of Basque separatism in Spain, the Zionist movement, or Malcolm X-style black separatism. However, the latest decision seems to place explicitly white movements into a category of their own.
Black nationalism (e.g. BLM)? Allowed.
Latino nationalism (e.g. La Raza)? Allowed.
Jewish nationalism (i.e. Zionism)? Allowed.
White nationalism? Not allowed. White nationalism is racist.
Omni-nationalism (nationalism for everyone)? Not allowed, since that would include white nationalism, which is racist.
Nationalism for every race except whites? That is allowed, and not racist.

This blog is omni-nationalist, and, by extension, verboten on Facebook. As described by Zman in today's post, anyone who believes there should be white countries is now part of an underground resistance. Vying for attention in the public square is hardly an option any more, and probably not worth the cost. Most people actually behave this way already. When I used to share posts from this blog on Facebook, the traffic stats showed a strong conversion rate of clicks, but very few likes - fewer than ten percent of readers left one. People liked reading the articles, but most opted not to leave a public trace of it.

Our energy is best spent in finding ways to increase the cost of enforcement by our cultural occupiers. As far as Facebook is concerned, the best rebuttal is not to argue the new policy on the platform, or challenge it by posting nationalist content, but to quit entirely. It's a dying platform, estimated to have lost a million American users already. The best course of action is to accelerate its death spiral by leaving and never going back. Last I saw, it had already become a platform populated almost entirely by women and liberal males. They can have it.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Creepy Joe Unofficially Announces Presidential Run

Several candidates have confirmed our claim that any white Democrats wishing to run for the highest office are required to (1) denounce their own race, and (2) praise the other races, particularly blacks. Bernie Sanders dragged Shaun King - a walking parody of black activism - on stage to announce his candidacy. Elizabeth Warren stumbled into quite a national embarrassment in her desperation to show even a trace of non-white genetic heritage. It may have made her unelectable to a general population, but also more likely to cinch the Democratic nomination. For them, no amount of racial self-hatred is too much.

Biden has sought to separate himself from the pack, by outright condemning "white guy culture." Our heritage as an Anglosphere nation? Also decried, in no uncertain terms. His comments were in context of questions about Anita Hill, a black woman of color, one of the left's heroic sexual assault survivors who manage to surface anytime a big upcoming vote is likely to go towards the conservative. She never should have had to face a "bunch of white guys", says a white guy who served in that same body for over 40 years.

With his requisite public display of racial self-humiliation completed, it is safe to say that Biden will indeed be running for President in the next cycle.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Aspiring Towards Mob Rule

A common exchange between a liberal and a conservative goes something like this.

liberal: You don't believe in democracy!
conservative: It's a republic!

On it's face, the dialogue shows the liberal as immature and dependent on emotions to navigate the world rather than reason. The conservative, on the other hand, displays an intellectual grasp of the reality of our social system. The founders intentionally architected a limited government to restrain the destructive anarchy of an empowered mob. These assertions are correct, but the larger question at hand is, is this actually better?

Lately, Vox Day has been making the argument that, as terrible as direct democracy may be, it's actually preferable to representative democracy. In a direct democracy, Brexit would not be getting sabotaged, illegal immigration would be all but halted with a wall built, banks would have never been bailed out (and crooks sent to jail), and the European Union wouldn't have passed Article 13, which effectively bans memes. As uninformed as the typical voter may be, public opinion polls tend to show a more favorable opinion on policies than what is enacted by our professional representatives. It's hard to think of counter-examples. Under direct democracy, we'd have elected Hillary, right? Well no, actually, because Trump's opponent would have been Bernie.

We normally think of democracy as some healthy balance between two extremes: unlimited mob rule and harsh autocracy. And yet, we can see that our compromise solution is actually worse than one of those extremes. It might also be worse than either extreme. There are many authoritarian nations that provide better governance. According to opinion polls, the Chinese hold their national government in high regard. That should give us some incentive to re-think the situation.

It seems that there is more to the debate than the degree to which decision making is centralized. What trait do the autocrat and mob have in common, which the elected representative lacks? They have skin in the game. They have ownership. The mob is easily misled, but voters will normally act in their own self-interest. They support policies that will benefit them. Autocrats and even plutocrats also have skin in the game. Alienate the people too far, and risk a coup. Weaken the country too far by indulging the people or by inefficient administration, and risk deposition by outside armies. A king won't normally plunder his own people and then bequeath his son a barren, resentful land.

Elected representatives, on the other hand, have much less skin in the game. Their fortunes come not from their service, but from bribes. Career politicians amass fortunes in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Their only tie to the people is to make whatever promises are needed to be elected so the embezzlement can continue another term. Their outcomes are not as dependent on the quality of legislation passed nor the long-term health of the country, so much as their willingness to sell out to whichever special interests can provide either cash or votes. The banks get bailed out at taxpayer expense, because they own everyone in Washington. The war the people disapprove of is still fought, only covertly and more indirectly.

Recent events show that the only thing that matters in this country is the corruption. In the Democrat primaries, the party stole the nomination from an anti-corruption crusader and gave it to - perhaps - the most corrupt family in America. Then, when emails leaked of the scandal, the corrupt system blamed it on her next candidate, another anti-corruption populist. Somehow he did it! Hillary was never indicted despite a mountain of public evidence. Trump committed no crime yet his presidency was neutered by a two-year publicly lauded shakedown. It's not because Trump is conservative and Hillary liberal, although that makes it easier to get the ideologically possessed media nutjobs roped in. No, the real reason was corruption. The griftocracy defends itself from all enemies, foreign and domestic. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a movie scenario with a more glaring example of a deep, systemic rule by corruption. America must be the most corrupt nation on earth, on the whole. It's right there, in plain sight. It's so normalized that the people hardly notice anymore.

The long-term prognosis, of course, is that our decision makers are not solving our problems. They are enriching themselves however they can. A country that doesn't solve problems will collapse. Whatever follows will be uncertain, minus one aspect: rulers will be made accountable for their decisions, one way or another. They will not be able to prop themselves up with a constant slew of lies while they plunder a great nation of its wealth. There will be nothing left to steal.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Blackouts

The state of a nation's energy sector is often a reflection of the nation itself. Venezuela's situation has become dire, as many technicians have abandoned ship. Electrical outages have not only disrupted what remains of the economy, but actually caused water shortages as well. Much is made of the starvation common of social collapses and now seen in Venezuela, but even deadlier are the disease epidemics that follow famine and deteriorating living conditions. The inability of the 3rd-world socialist utopia to keep the lights on and the pumps running will be the leading cause of outbreaks of diseases like dysentery.

The Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was built to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis, but not to the extent of the 9.1 magnitude Tohoku event. When the plant went down with the on-site backup generators flooded, the spent-fuel holding tanks began to overheat. The problem was fairly straightforward: they needed a temporary solution to add water to the tanks until electrical service could be restored. They attempted to ship in portable generators, but the plugs weren't compatible. In the end, they failed to maintain the situation, leading to fires in three of the reactor buildings and core meltdowns. Their failure largely reflects the culture obsessed with conformity and face-saving. The electrical company routinely failed to communicate the reality of the situation to Tokyo authorities, and was unable to cope with a disaster that fell outside of expected scenarios. The bigger tragedy was that the resource-starved country shut down most of its remaining nuclear reactors, and imports $38 billion in coal per year. The Japanese are one of the highest IQ and most conscientious societies on Earth, but certain aspects of their culture make nuclear power a threat to themselves and their Pacific Ocean neighbors.

In the US, electricity has historically been plentiful and stable. In modern times, over-regulation has led to higher prices and the stifling of innovation. Nuclear power is not particularly competitive on price, thanks to heavy regulation, and a number of coal-fired stations were shuttered by the Obama administration. And yet, when de-regulation was permitted, corporate vampires like Enron immediately engaged in abusing the markets to generate crises and extort high prices from desperate customers. It highlighted the plight of the American citizen, trapped between a government behemoth on one side and rapacious corporate racketeers on the other.

As reviewed in Greenouts, several Australian states now suffer routine rolling blackouts, thanks to environmentalism. They are establishing a pattern that will soon become common throughout the western world: widespread mental instability gives rise to electrical instability. Germany, currently dismantling all coal and nuclear plants, will likely be the next to falter. In the US, New Mexico has passed a law mandating it become a zero-carbon electricity consumer, joining Hawaii, California, and D.C. in making such pledges. Is it a coincidence that those places also happen to be 4 of the 5 majority-minority states of the union? Remember, the electrical grid is a reflection of the people. California spent over a billion dollars repairing the 819 MW Oroville dam after its 2017 crisis, which may be tested by floods as early as next week. The sanctuary state, where illegal aliens can freely shoot white women, will get to experience for themselves why the 3rd world is not renown for its public infrastructure.

Of all the examples of electrical grids failing in once-industrial nations, none are as glaring as that of South Africa, where blackouts have become pervasive enough to cause water shortages in its major city. One major incident occurred when a supplier provided rocks instead of coal. When the automatic alarms sounded, none of the control room staffers could be found. This all is typical in a country where companies are forced to hire large numbers of blacks who often sleep on the job or fail to show up at all, and crime is so rampant that it is actually halting major infrastructure projects. They will discover the hard way why Zimbabwe's electrical production history looks like this and agricultural output looks like this. In three decades, South Africa has degraded from a nuclear-armed modern country, to one that tries to burn rocks for electricity.

Monday, March 25, 2019

The Mueller Retort

There's not much to say about the recent news on the Mueller report. Just as all evidence indicated, the theory that Trump somehow collaborated with Russians to steal the election from the establishment candidate is a complete work of fiction. Normally we're more interested in the media response, but that is all predictable as well: lots of denial and scrambling to memoryhole the entire fiasco. The left will be onto the next fabricated crisis within the next few weeks, no doubt. Any overtures to self-awareness should be taken with skepticism. Remember, after Trump's election, The New York Times ran an apology for their terrible reporting and promised to do better and stop running fake news. (Update: they didn't.) But, it's mostly a moot point anyway: the doubling down by the media has been even stronger than I would have predicted. Here are some headlines that come up currently, as I'm writing this, on the Google News feed.
  • NPR - Mueller Report and Barr Letter Means Impeachment Less Likely [still on the table, of course! Major points: Trump not exonerated, a short-term win for Trump, investigation not over, etc.]
  • Deutche Welle - Opinion: Mueller report gives no respite for Donald Trump
  • The Hill - [opinion piece which says the major takeaway is Russia did interfere in the election]
  • LA Times - No, Mueller’s report is not a ‘total exoneration’ for Trump 
  • Washington Monthly - Barr’s Letter Raises More Questions Than It Answers
  • New York Times - Trump’s Shamelessness Was Outside Mueller’s Jurisdiction
  • Bloomberg - After Mueller, What’s the Political Fallout? [Answer: Investigations will - and should! - go on.]
  • Washington Monthly - William Barr’s Whitewash Cannot Stand
  • The Hill - Dem rep on collusion: 'Impossible' to 'write it off completely' just going off Barr summary
  • Washington Post - Trump won with illicit help. He abused his power. His AG is blocking a full reckoning.
  • Slate - William Barr Can’t Exonerate Donald Trump
  • Bloomberg - Former Prosecutor Questions AG Barr's Decision on Mueller Report
  • Vanity Fair - “A CRIME IN PUBLIC VIEW”: HOW WILLIAM BARR PARDONED DONALD TRUMP
  • New Yorker - On the Mueller Investigation, the Barr Letter Is Not Enough
  • ABC - Russian lawmaker cheers findings of Mueller's report
  • Salon - What's behind Bill Barr's whitewash? We need to see the full Mueller report to know for sure
And on and on. If reality cured delusion, we wouldn't be here, now two years on. So the media response isn't actually that interesting, except perhaps as a case study of mass psychosis. More interesting will be Trump's response to the failed coup. In healthy nations, traitors hang. A number of high mutineers should be publicly executed. Those include Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and Lynch - among others - for their roles in overseeing the subversion of democracy, as well as people like Adam Schiff for constantly leaking classified information and lying about the proceeding of Congress in order to move along the unlawful overthrow of the elected government. A more likely scenario is that we'll see someone like McCabe sentenced to 20 years and serve 5. That would not be any sort of deterrent to future coup attempts. The even more likely scenario is that no one will be punished.

Public execution would be the best outcome, but 20 year prison sentences would suffice, given the ages of most of the culprits. The media would cry foul at such retribution, calling it an abuse of power and a sure beginning to a cycle of political turmoil, but they always lie. In fact, swift enforcement of US sedition and treason laws is the only way to stop a descent into lawless by our elites and the left. They are only compelled by greed and only restrained by fear. Reason does not work, nor logic, nor evidence, nor anything else. Only heavy-handed justice will right a ship-of-state so far off course. It won't happen, of course, and we will only drift further into chaos. Every anti-establishment candidate from here on out will be sabotaged. There is virtually no downside to treachery.

Mike Pence called it a great day for America. He couldn't be more wrong. It is a tragic day for America. Our Justice department was weaponized against the democratic system. All that we learned was they couldn't actually charge Trump with a fake crime. But the operation was an astounding success for the deep state. Remember, the whole ordeal came about because leaked Democrat emails revealed wide-ranging scandals and crimes. Will the media now discuss the DNC rigging its own election, or the numerous outlets who illegally colluded with the Clinton campaign, or the evidence of pay-for-play bribery schemes? No, the distraction and misdirection were flawless. The entire scandal was magically turned onto its head as a witchhunt against Trump, whose crime was to offer a platform Americans actually wanted. It won't be a great day for America until heads rest on pikes. Until then, the rule of law has effectively been suspended for a rule of lies.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

The Multiverse

Yesterday's critique of the Ask Ethan blog was such fun, we should do another. It may seem tedious, but someone has to ridicule the charlatans. The ContraKrugman podcast is run by two economists who refute Paul Krugman - the left's premiere priest of economics - week after week. Their persistence in refuting a false prophet is commendable. Perhaps this blog will begin a weekly recap of all Ethan's nonsense (he seems to post almost daily). Someone needs to be doing it. The only real way to stop the lying liars is to ridicule them consistently and aggressively until they are too ashamed or marginalized to continue. For now, I'll just look at his most recent post.

One of the most solid logical arguments is the reductio ad absurdum. The premise is simple. If your argument leads inevitably to absurdity, it must be wrong. Ethan would like to turn that logic principle on it's head. The absurd must be true. Normal people might interpret this a little different. If cosmic inflation leads to the multiverse with "no way out", it must be an argument against cosmic inflation.
If this is the idea of the Multiverse, I can understand your skepticism at the notion that we could somehow know whether it does or doesn’t exist. After all, physics and astronomy are sciences that rely on measurable, experimental, or otherwise observational confirmation. If we are looking for evidence of something that exists outside of our visible Universe and leaves no trace within it, it seems that the idea of a Multiverse is fundamentally untestable.

But there are all sorts of things that we cannot observe that we know must be true. Decades before we directly detected gravitational waves, we knew that they must exist, because we observed their effects. Binary pulsars — spinning neutron stars orbiting around one another — were observed to have their revolutionary periods shorten. Something must be carrying energy away, and that thing was consistent with the predictions of gravitational waves.
The leading argument depends on the existence of neutron stars, which are an epic fiasco of scientific imagination run amok. But Nobel prizes have already been awarded, so the scientific community can't simply walk that one back. And, as we can see here, if you admit one absurdity, you leave the door open for about anything to follow. It remains to be seen how far things will have to get before the scientific community will refute research that has been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Anti-Gravity

One of our favorite science blogs (to pick on) has taken on an interesting question. From Ask Ethan: If The Universe Ends In A Big Crunch, Will All Of Space Recollapse?
When you describe the Big Crunch, you talk about a race between gravity and the expansion of space. It’s not clear to me that if gravity wins that race, whether space stops expanding, or simply that the matter in space stops expanding. I’d love to hear your explanation of this.
It's an interesting question because it's obviously absurd, yet follows logically from the standard model of astrophysics. Ethan tends not to shy away from these questions, but his normal routine is to ramble through the standard dogma, assert all kinds of theoretical constructs as absolute fact, and then fail to answer the initial question.
This is a complex question, but the physics we know today allows us to rise to the challenge and give a definitive answer.
It's not really that complex. If the "fabric of spacetime" is expanding because of dark energy, then will it still be expanding even if the gravitational attraction of the material contents of the universe overcomes the expansion, and it all crunches back? The answer should be yes, because the expansion is driven by a hypothetical force that is independent of the matter that the spacetime contains. It must be independent, because otherwise it would just have to be called anti-gravity. Scientists would have to explain how matter is attracted to other matter by gravity, but also repelled by anti-gravity. Universal expansion was concocted specifically to make that contradiction goes away. Since he is the expert, I'm sure Ethan will address all this in his "definitive answer."

He goes on to explain redshift theory, which should be familiar to regular readers here who slog through the science posts. It should also be familiar to the readers of his own astrophysics blog, but that is another matter. After padding out a half dozen or so paragraphs under the assumption that his readers are unfamiliar with one of the most famous conclusions of the field, he turns more directly to the question at hand.
Galaxies do move relative to one another, as the gravitational forces from the matter in the Universe push and pull everything around. But the fabric of spacetime itself cannot remain constant, either.
It's sloppy language to state that gravitational forces "push and pull" everything around. Gravity is only supposed to pull! But, in all reality, scientists have indirectly invented anti-gravity that pushes, so his verbal error is inadvertently apt. He then asserts that the fabric of spacetime cannot remain constant. Why not? He explains.
In General Relativity, spacetime is a dynamic entity. When you have a Universe like ours — where matter and energy are relatively evenly distributed on the largest scales — any relativistic solution that results in a static Universe is fundamentally unstable. The Universe must be expanding or contracting, as it cannot remain in an unchanging state. We cannot necessarily know which one it’s doing from first principles alone; we require measurements to teach us what’s going on.
Spacetime is not a dynamic entity under general relativity. In fact, Einstein later regretted that he had not thought of dynamic spacetime himself. This author doesn't know what he's talking about even in his own area of specialty. He then tells us that a "universe like ours" - implying that a universe is just some common, mundane thing - is inherently unstable, and doomed to either a Big Crunch caused by contraction, or a slow heat death caused by infinite expansion. It's the kind of worldview that really appeals to materialistic hedonists who follow I F*cking Love Science on Facebook. [It especially draws liberal losers, who love the notion that the universe is arbitrary and doomed, that there will be no judgement, that nothing matters because winners and losers alike are all doomed to the same pitiful demise.]

He goes on to say that we need measurements to determine which of the two tragic fates awaits us, because it can't be determined from "first principles alone." As if any of this is first principles! The expanding universe itself is merely a hypothesis to explain the redshifts, which weren't predicted by any theory. The observation itself is suspect, as it relies on the assumption that Type 1-A supernovas are standard candles, to which there is some contradictory evidence. The theory that they are standard candles comes from the assumption they are caused by the accretion of fissionable material from a binary companion star. There is no corroborating evidence for this theory. In fact, there is only the contradictory evidence of supernova recurring at the same star. And yet, Sherlock's Theory holds. They can imagine no other explanation that conforms to their beliefs, thus they proclaim the shaky theory to be a scientific fact, and then proceed to construct yet more theories upon it.

He then reviews the possible scenarios for galactic doomsday and concludes that the Big Crunch seems unlikely, with one caveat.
Unless, of course, dark energy is dynamical, and capable of changing over time.
This is very reminiscent of what the geneticists do. Genomic sequencing was supposed to validate the conclusions made by biologists and paleontologists regarding species hierarchies and timelines, but has caused more conflicts that it has solved. Explanations normally propose variations in the genetic random mutation rate. Here, we have Ethan suggesting that the cosmological constant is not constant after all. In modern science, the theories truly are axiomatic. They'll even downgrade a universal constant to a volatile variable before they'll question the stacks of assumptions on which their theories rest.

In the final paragraph, Ethan gives an answer to the original question.
But the link between all the matter and energy in the Universe, on one hand, and the expansion of the fabric of space itself, on the other, cannot be denied. We live in a Universe that, on the largest scales, is isotropic, homogeneous, and governed by General Relativity. In a very general sense, that means there’s a connection between how the Universe expands and what’s present within it.

If all the matter in the Universe stops expanding away, reverses itself, and begins to recollapse towards us, then that necessitates that the fabric of space is going to recollapse, too. There truly is a cosmic race occurring: between the expansion of the Universe and the force of gravity. Right now, it looks like the expansion’s going to win, but if dark energy is dynamical, that throws the outcome into doubt.
He concludes that the contraction of matter means the contraction of the fabric, in opposition to my assumption. (I don't actually believe in spacetime "fabric"... just running with their logic.) He says there's a connection between matter and spacetime fabric that "cannot be denied." Well, duh. The whole point of expanding spacetime was to explain the apparent motion of the matter. But that connection goes only one way. The expansion was made intrinsic to spacetime and immune to the effects of matter for a reason. Otherwise, it would just be an effect of the matter itself. In other words, anti-gravity. This buffoon has just stumbled into the explanation that the theory is constructed to avoid in the first place! But the alternative would be to say that spacetime will continue to expand indefinitely, while matter collapses to a singular point. You can appreciate the dilemma, at least.

Not only is his grasp of his own field comically lacking, so is his writing.
If gravity does wind up winning, and the Big Crunch is our ultimate fate, someone, a long time from now, might live to see the entire shebang recollapse into a singular state.
No, no one is going to survive a big crunch nor see a singular state. It makes no sense whatsoever. I'm as cynical about science and science writers as anyone out there, but I'm truly baffled by how awful this is.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

A Couple Successful Predictions

We have a couple predictions to close out.

First Prediction

Almost exactly two years ago, Why Democracies Drift Left predicted that liberals would attempt to open the vote to children under 18.
Enfranchisement of felons. They seek to enfranchise the last remaining adults deprived of the vote. They will attempt to enfranchise children if they can, just so long as it appears they will vote liberal.
The fundamental policy of leftism is to promise wealth redistribution in exchange for political power. It's true in all political systems, and in a democracy that means buying votes and expanding the electorate to those likely to accept the leftist scheme. That explains why Democrats obsess about immigrants - besides whites and Cubans. It's completely transparent. And now, as predicted, Nancy Pelosi is advocating to enfranchise 16-year-olds. Most amusing is that, while she must put forth great effort to finish sentences these days, she barely even tries to give a rational explanation for the policy. Yeah, we should give kids the vote because they're learning about it. Makes a lot of sense. Her health is failing, maybe we should replace her doctor with a 16-year-old who's learning biology.

The thing is that they don't have to make sense, they just have to be persistent. Try, try again. Hold the vote as many times as necessary to get the desired result, then never hold it again. That's the Racket Ratchet. The rule is that, once the electorate has been expanded, it can never be contracted. Always expanding, liberal democracies are inherently doomed to an electoral heat death.

Second Prediction

Last month, Roll Call of the Absurd made an observation about white Democrats running for national office.
Democrats are now the anti-white party, so any white people vying for power must recite the right prayers early and often.
It's been confirmed once, by Bernie Sanders. Now for another. Beto O'Rourke, fresh off a failed Senate run, is now chasing a golden ticket to the White House. When we say the Democrats are losers, we mean it. Talk about failing up! Beto has opted to dutifully follow the script in his campaign announcement, in a display of what Amren categorizes as Ethno-Masochism.
Mr. O’Rourke may have figured out a way to survive in a party dominated by anti-white grievance and minority politics: apologize for being white and agree that whiteness is bad. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he told Vanity Fair. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.”

Mr. O’Rourke added, “But I totally understand people who will make a decision based on the fact that almost every single one of our presidents has been a white man, and they want something different for this country. And I think that’s a very legitimate basis upon which to make a decision.”
Confirming what was said in the earlier post from today, Beto considers race-based voting to be "legitimate." Welcome to the new normal, civ-nats.

It almost feels dirty to watch him submit himself before the humiliation ritual, but it's more than made up for by the fact that lots of morons gave him money, which he effectively burns in his first day. "Yeah, I get it and think it's like, totally cool, man, if people don't vote for me because I'm a just another stupid dumb white guy, or whatever." Well then, prepare to step aside, loser. This guy isn't going anywhere, although it would be nice to see him spar with Trump on national TV.

Step one of running for Democratic nomination while white is an overt display of racial self-hatred. Second is a generous and sustained level of pandering and praise for blacks and browns. Let's see how he did.
The former congressman released his 10-point immigration plan in February. He says we have a lot of illegals in the country because we have made it hard for them to go home. He believes President Trump’s proposed wall will “ensure death,” and that since existing walls have already killed countless people, he would tear them down.

Mr. O’Rourke wants a pathway to citizenship for all illegals and to give citizenship immediately to illegals who came as minors. He would increase America’s annual visa caps and make it easier to apply for asylum. The plan implies that we would give even more foreign aid to Latin America and end our efforts to curb drug trafficking overseas. He demands that we speak of immigrants only in certain ways: “No more ‘invasions’, ‘animals’, ‘rapists and criminals’, ‘floods’, ‘crisis’ — dehumanizing rhetoric leads to dehumanizing policies. We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security — or we risk losing both.”

In other words, Mr. O’Rourke would sharply increase immigration, create millions of new citizens who would vote Democrat, and bring in more drugs and crime.

The then-Senate candidate wrote an op-ed last August outlining his vision for “criminal justice reform,” complaining that blacks are disproportionately jailed and suspended from school. He said prisons are the “New Jim Crow.” Mr. O’Rourke went on to demand an end to private prisons, the war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing for “non-violent drug offenses,” and bail bonds. All this is to help criminals, not keep Americans safer.

The former Texas congressman assumes white officers shoot black men because of racism. He told a black congregation last September: “How can we continue to lose the lives of unarmed black men in the United States of America at the hands of white police officers? That is not justice. That is not us. That can and must change.”
I'd say he nailed it! Hilariously, if you read the article, he's gotten lots of flak for not doing enough for minorities, and only appealing to suburban white voters. Tough criticism. I'd advise Mr Beto to double down. If the ethno-masochism isn't making them like you, then you probably just aren't using enough of it.

Shared Values Can Divide Us, Too

In his video, How Media Frame the Narrative to Make Trump Seem Worse, Tim Pool accuses the ADL of manipulating hate crime incidents - which are down under the Trump presidency - to give the opposite impression. For one, they've framed the data to ascribe the racial violence of the late Obama administration to Trump's presidential run. (Quite unlikely, as the media was reassuring everyone Trump had no mathematical chance of winning the primary up until almost June of 2016, and assuring us he had virtually no chance of beating Hillary all the way through election day.) Second, their protocol of categorizing incidents as either left-wing or right-wing extremism strikes Tim as being very arbitrary. He asks, why is racially motivated murder committed by blacks tallied as left-wing extremism while white racism is always described as right-wing?

It's right there in front of his face, yet he acts confused. He poses a fair question, or at least it would be if the old rules still applied. The old rules of civic nationalism were that a person should be judged based on content of character, rather than color of skin. It was the reigning orthodoxy that began with the civil rights era and ended with the election of Barrack Obama, when half of America was so ecstatic about affirming their anti-racist credos that they voted for a candidate based primarily on skin color. It's ironic that the election of our first non-white president would signify the end of the national experiment with color blindness, but that's when the publicly held ethos shifted back to encouraging racialist voting, so long as the vote was virtuous. Voting for the black candidate just because he was black was to be praised. Ralph Nader reported that his supporters mostly voted for Obama, because they wanted to "be part of history." Contrary, anyone who racially voted for McCain was deemed a white supremacist, an evil relic of our savage past standing on the "wrong side of history."

Americans are slowly waking up to the reality of the new rules. The country pretends the old rules are still in place, but mostly acts otherwise. It can be hard to tell who is pretending and who isn't. Tucker Carlson understands the paradigm changes, but is politically correct enough to play to the old rules. Ben Shapiro clearly believes the old rules, and guards them passionately. Tim Pool seems determined to act as if those old rules are the rules too, but the act isn't entirely convincing. It's understandable, of course, because the reality of the new rules is hard to accept, that the greatest civilization of human history is reverting from a rational society back into tribalism. What Carlson, Shapiro, and Pool all have in common is they are doing everything they can to push back against the descent into identitarianism, and they've all become quite popular doing so. People want to believe that things can just keep going they way they always have, that the modern insanity can be rebuffed with a little common sense, and that the demographics of a society aren't as important as it's shared values. Their pursuit is noble given the rules, but ultimately futile since the rules are only for pretend.

There's no reason why BLM calling for a black ethnostate in the American southeast is any different from the NZ shooter accelerating conflict intended to ultimately reclaim the white ethnostates. It's the same politics: violently rejecting cosmopolitanism in favor of national self-determination. When the ADL and other groups label white racism as right-wing and black racism as left-wing without a pause, they are inadvertently acknowledging the new reality. The right is the people who want to live in the countries that white people built, and the left is those who do not. Those who want to "fundamentally transform the United State of America", and those who do not. The center gets squeezed out, because it becomes impossible to reconcile the diametrically opposed sides. Hard-right conservatives have largely turned on white civic nationalists, because they sense the danger. The longer your side clings to the old rules, the more you lose. Eventually, nostalgic idealism must give way to pragmatism, and even survival.

The irony is that the current system will be doomed by getting exactly what it wants. They racially voted in a black president to prove the country wasn't racist. Now they say the country can stay united if we all share the same values. Increasingly the pre-dominant shared value is one of national self-determinism, and rejection of the multicultural experiment. The shared value, in effect, is to become divided.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Bloglist Housekeeping

Some housekeeping changes to the sidebar's bloglist.
  • Imperial Energy has been dormant for a year now, so has been removed. 
  • Audacious Epigone moved to Unz a few months ago. The link has been updated.
  • Anonymous Conservative is a sad one to lose. He used to be a favorite around here, with many great contributions to understanding r/K political theory and narcissistic personality disorder. However, he has suffered from paranoid delusions for over a year now, and promotes Q conspiracy theories regularly. Hopefully he centers himself and we can add him back in the future.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb posts too irregularly, and lately has been focusing on IQ metrics as a swindle, which isn't terribly interesting. His blog has been cut, but his books are all still worthy of a read.
  • Armstrong Economics blog has been added. He does a few short pieces a day on politics and finance, which all get posted from a European timezone. Thus, it may be beneficial to click the link directly to the page to see all the day's posts, rather than just the most recent one.

Monday, March 18, 2019

The Real College Scam

The recent college admissions scandal has been a delight. Somewhat surprising has been the sustained level of outrage, as if people truly did not realize that our country is immoral and corrupt. Admissions bribery is hardly the biggest scandal in academia; it isn't even the biggest scandal in college admissions. They openly discriminate students based on legally protected factors such as race and gender, so it's hardly shocking that they'd discriminate based on whose parents are sending massive piles of cash. The only scandal here is the widespread naivety, which will only persist despite the revelations. Tell the average mainstream American that the global warming models are a scam, that much cancer research is a scam, that social science spending is, on average, a scam, and they'll look at you like a crazy person.

For us anti-establishment types, the sounds of masses of citizens, from the left and from the right, condemning a corrupt system run by immoral elitists is fantastic. It's fuel for populism on both sides. It plays well to the politics of either a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. (At least, a pre-Hillary-endorsement Bernie Sanders.) There's a difference between the populism of the two, however. Bernie Sanders says that the system is rigged and the elites are evil. Donald Trump says the system is rigged and the elites are incompetent. So who is correct in this case study of crooked elites? Do the actors paying to get little Johnny into state college seem evil? No, they don't, but they do seem incompetent. Not only did they raise a midwit, not only did they push him towards college (which is a ripoff most of the time), but they paid several times the cost of a degree so that little Johnny could get further ripped off wasting four to six years of his life for a piece of paper he doesn't really care about. The real college scam is they paid the bribe! And now they'll go to jail for it. Hilarious, but cruel. Haven't they suffered enough already?

One actress's daughter was very blunt. She doesn't care about the college aspect, but wants the experience of campus life, game days, etc. Perhaps there's a business model here: charge young adults hefty fees to live in a campus-like environment, with none of the educational obligations. But then, that basically is the college business model these days, at many places, and it only gets worse as the federal government fuels the cancer of fake academia.

To the people seriously outraged about the unfair advantage of the elites, they should calm down. It's really the kind of thing you might actually wish on your worst enemy; that he pay a million dollar bribe so that his sweet beloved daughter can enroll in Harvard or Berkeley and degenerate into a blue-haired shrieking femi-Nazi who will never spawn him grandchildren (at least not of his own race). There's nothing to be jealous about. All that's happened is we removed a hidden self-imposed tax on the incompetent elites.

Friday, March 15, 2019

Rule by Fear

In yesterday's off-the-cuff response to the Christchurch mosque shooting, I opined that the incident is an example of the inevitable violence we've predicted would arise in response to mass foreign immigration. Despite the assailant's intentions, and the likelihood of retaliation by Jihadis, I would reckon that the incident will not trigger a spiral of violence, so long as the economy remains stable. However, I did not venture a prediction for the media response. Common sense would suggest a monstrous reaction from both mainstream and social media platforms to graphic video evidence of a white nationalist acting viciously. Surely the noise should be deafening. And yet, I did not venture such a prediction, because I also hold on to a counter-intuitive theory that would make the opposite prediction. While NZ is the number one story, it's not being given the attention it deserves. At the time of this writing, CNN's major headline is about New Zealand's gun-control response, which is predictable. MSNBC doesn't even have a major headline on the event. A text search shows the word Zealand mentioned only twice in minor sidebar headlines, with Trump mentioned 14 times throughout the page, including the leading headline. Newsweek, the reigning anti-Trump outlet, runs a slightly tighter spread at 14 Trumps to 10 Zealands, but does include such incendiary headlines as White Europe is Imaginary. European Islamophobia is not and New Zealand's Hidden Problem of White Supremacy. (I don't advise holding your breath waiting for analogous headlines such as Black Nigeria is Imaginary. Nigerian Christophobia is not or China's Hidden Problem of Chinese Supremacy.)

The story is still getting strong attention, but not what the truly gruesome livestreamed footage of an actual white hate crime would be expected to receive. To put it in context, the energy level behind the slaughter of dozens of innocent Muslims in a mosque is significantly less that what was given to a group of Catholic high school students being disrespectful to an American Indian, which wasn't even true. So why the disconnect between expected versus actual media outrage? I'll provide a theory in a moment, but I'd like to swing by a couple other aspects of the incident first.

The response to the incident is even quieter on the mainstream right than the left. Fox News gives 6 Zealands to 24 Trumps. That may be expected, as the story is politically inconvenient to them. The far right is far more active, since we share ideological common ground with the sentiments of the shooter. Many even express praise and admiration, and agree with his policy of extreme accelerationism. There is a case to be made for it. I've often been baffled by the Islamic terrorism in Europe, such as the Bataclan massacre. If you're a Jihadi in France - with a Muslim population of around 15% - and you want to make France into an Islamic state, and the natives are foolishly permitting a strong inflow of Muslims into their homelands, why would you even consider engaging in such brutality? The strategic benefit should be to milk the high immigration rate for as long as possible before turning openly hostile. Accelerationism would seem to hinder the invaders, and benefit the nativists so long as they hold the numerical advantage, which seems to be an argument in favor of the New Zealand terrorist.

My retort is that righteous men do not shoot up crowds of civilians, especially in their place of worship. It is a cowardly act. Anyone with a gun can kill scores of unarmed people. Some might respond that patiently waiting for natural societal collapse, as advocated here, is merely an excuse for cowardice, as we remain docile while our demographic situation becomes increasingly dire. So the case can be made for cowardice on both sides. How do we choose one?

These kinds of dilemmas always have an answer. The simple heuristic is to pick the approach that is most honest and truthful. Accelerationism is inherently deceitful. It involves deliberately making the situation worse than it would otherwise be, with the intention of provoking a reactionary response in the preferred direction. It's just a form of lying. This blog often promotes passive accelerationism. I advised, when Hillary Clinton was the likely future president, that her disastrous reign might actually be preferable to Trump getting some reforms in place which would delay (and thus amplify) the inevitable. I still voted and advocated for Trump. Passive accelerationism means doing your due diligence to improve things, while also managing the downside of defeat. When Trump was elected, liberals cried and screamed. If Clinton had been elected, I would have laughed and doubled down on bracing for collapse. It's the stoic approach. Do what you can, and handle realty as it comes. Active accelerationism means tricking or abusing your own clan into action. Treachery is never patriotism. My advice to any would-be assassin: just have some kids. The order of loyalty is God -> Family -> Nation. If the white nations must be tricked into defending themselves, then fuck em'. They don't deserve to persist. You can't save anyone who doesn't want to be saved. Your more primal loyalty is then to family. Ensure that your children's children will have children. And short of that, there's a fundamental duty to God. Shooting up a place of worship, unprovoked, is the opposite of godliness. It's evil.

I'd suspect that the shooter had no family. No wife, no kids. Nor was he a regular at any church. Based on his trolling humor during his savage act, referencing insides jokes from 4chan and 8chan, it seems his social life was largely constrained to the online world. The same is true of Muslim terrorists, who are normally young unattached men. I believe their high terrorism rate is partly a result of polygamy. A man with a beloved woman or child, dependent on his ability to provide, will be far less likely to willfully martyr himself for a creed. In the western world, feminism is starting to have a similar effect.

There is one other thing that we must honestly consider: gun control would have prevented the crime. His manifesto states that he chose to target New Zealand to demonstrate that Muslims were present even in the far corners of Christendom. That is bullshit rationalization. He went to New Zealand to access legal firearms for training. He remained there to commit his atrocity because he had no way to get his firearms over to Australia. Like it or not, the incident gives a strong case for tightening gun control in New Zealand. Many whites will not want Muslims to have legal ability to acquire firearms to commit retaliatory attacks on churches. (Of course, that logic does not apply in the US, where our porous border allows enough illegal narcotics to kill 70,000 Americans per year. But in New Zealand it's a different matter.)

Returning now to the initial question, why are liberal media outlets downplaying the atrocity? And why do Jihadis attack Europe despite the negative backlash it might cause on immigration policy? The answer is fear. Surely readers hear have noticed that liberals gleefully bash Christianity without a second thought, yet are careful to avoid offending Muslims. They'll drag a Christian baker all the way to the Supreme Court to force him to bake a sodomy cake, but not the Muslim. Because they know there is no safer a target than a Christian baker, whereas insulting Islam is flirtation with death. Christian bakers are harmless, so they are attacked. Catholic school boys are harmless, so they are attacked. Heavily armed murderous white vigilantes are not harmless, so some care is given. They certainly don't want to advertise that whites might resort to violence. The irony is this. The more violent the group, the less the left will tend to denounce them as violent. They denounce our speech as violence, but actual violence compels them to shut up. Muslims sense this, so they shoot up concerts and newspapers. The result is that the liberals in the west are terrified to criticize Muslims, who are largely permitted to continue their annexation of western lands. The media are afraid to run critical stories. Even the police are afraid to report the actual crime statistics! It's nuts, but it is the truth. Our society is permeated by unsophisticated weaklings, who crumble at the hint of violence. The west is regressing to a barbarian state, where preference is given to the most fearsome rather than the most adept.

Anti-Islamic Terrorism

Two New Zealand mosques have been attacked, reportedly by a single gunman, causing multiple fatalities. While Islamic terror attacks against Europeans are fairly common - although it has been very quiet for a couple years now - the violence is rarely returned. To my recollection, this is the first mass shooting directed towards the immigrants, rather than the other way around. The shooter, now in custody, left a 74-page anti-immigration manifesto on social media, where he states that his quest for vengeance began with the murder of 11-year Ebba Akerlund, who was run down by an Islamic terrorist in Stockholm while shopping with her mom.

A single act by a lone gunman is not a trend, but my gut reaction has to be that this kind of violence was inevitable, and this will not be the last of it. The responsibility for any single shooting lies on the gunman himself, but a trend of reactionary violence - if indeed one develops - lies squarely on the western democracies and their almost total disregard for the nations over which they rule. The people routinely vote against immigration, against wars, against bailouts. Candidates makes promises but the results rarely show. The major idea of democracy is that, rather than having competing factions fight a war for political control, we instead take a head count to decide who would have won, and let them call the shots until the next election. This works so long as the people who win the headcount are normally the same people who would have won the war. If the strongest faction comes to believe that their votes are not actually relevant, eventually they will cozy up to the notion that they might be better off to go ahead and fight that war.

This man seems to have come to the conclusion that he was going to have to take defense of western civilization into his own hands. This blog takes a similar stance, in general, although that hardly amounts to advocating for such indefensible vigilanteism. Opening fire on random civilians - at prayer, no less - is not just savage thuggery, but also happens to be totally counterproductive to his own goals. An isolated incident is only likely to increase Muslim immigration, because it makes martyrs of them, gives the left a rallying cry, and associates anti-immigration sentiments with unhinged violence. My stance on punishment for terrorist crimes against random civilians is that the culprits be publicly tortured and executed. There's no reason I'd spare this criminal the same fate.

Our focus should be on survivalism, not vigilanteism. That means rejecting the materialistic culture in favor of family, and preparing for the collapse scenario. Violence will quite likely be a core component of the defense of our nation, whether we wish it or not. (When/if it comes, we'll wish it hadn't.) That is not the same as seeking it out, or being utterly reckless about it, as was this radical western terrorist. No, he's only given his political enemies a gift, and the response will be quite predictable. The idea that any one of us is going to single-handedly defend western civilization, like Brutus fighting off the Etruscans on the bridge, is maniacally delusional. If violence was to be applied, let's say, his approach was exactly the opposite of the right way to do it. If the goal was to terrorize Muslims into leaving, then it should be done with sustained, low-grade violence, not flash-in-the-pan spectacles which leave the instigators dead or imprisoned for life. If the goal was to rally his countrymen in defense of the homeland, shooting up an innocent crowd at prayer seems like the worst possible idea. And if the goal was to influence the elites and politicians to serve the interests of their own people rather than foreigners, then the violence should be directed at them instead. Liberals are easily intimidated by fear. The major reason they vote for high immigration is they're afraid of being called racist. If they were even more afraid of what nationalists might do to them, the invasions would stop pretty fast.

[Update: evidently the goal was accelerationism. The shooter wants a strong reaction against whites & right wingers, wants to begin balkanization now rather than later. It seems like an outlandish strategy, but it's not so different from the Iraqi insurgents baiting US troops into using excess force against civilians in the hopes of stoking popular revolt against the occupation.]

I don't suspect we'll see any copycat attacks, or a signifiant trend towards this kind of violence in the short term, although I'd expect retaliation from Jihadis. The long-term prognosis is armed ethnic conflict for most of the western countries, but it will concur with pronounced economic crises, those to the level of food and fuel shortages. In the short term, incidents like this only give the left leverage to disarm us, shut down our websites, and otherwise sabotage our efforts to prepare for the ongoing collapse of our civilization.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Civilizations should protect their daughters from being raped to death

The fundamental duty of civilization is to provide reproductive advantage to its people. Tribes arose as an organized way for men to protect & provide for the women and children most closely related to them, improving the success of their lineages. Tribes, and even nation-states, are logical responses to the natural order of things. Civilizations that don't benefit the citizens tend not to last long. The Aztecs murdered a fourth of the children under their domain. The result was an empire so fragile that Cortez and a handful of men were able to play off popular resentments to loot and utterly devastate their entire civilization. The Romans became so overbearing that the rural peasantry began aiding Germanic invaders, who ultimately conquered Rome. This is the fundamental social contract that cannot be violated. Other rules are secondary and might be bent or broken depending on circumstances. But civilizations must improve the reproductive fitness of their people, or perish in favor of a better society.

The western world now seems almost deliberately engineered to violate that fundamental contract, and it's only getting worse. Healthy societies solve problems, and the best ones do so proactively. Basketcase societies not only fail to solve problems, but they exacerbate them with their solutions, while also introducing new ones. Every single progressive policy lowers the fertility of western nations, and - if anything - improves that of foreigners. Every single one. Men are encouraged to have fervently active sex lives with each other, rather than controlling their impulses and directing them towards family building. Boys are chemically castrated by their mothers, to adoring praise by other social media psychopaths. Women have been trained that empowerment means terminating their pregnancies and working for a corporation rather than raising their own children. Those same corporations' advertisements typically depict women in interracial relationships. Climate change is the only problem they want to be highly proactive about, but it's a fake problem, and the solution is that western countries should have fewer children, while diverting resources towards highly polluting nonwestern countries.

That modern society now discourages female fertility, weakens the nuclear family relative to the individual and the state, and redistributes wealth from American families towards immigrants and single mothers, is enough of an outrage in itself. Most wars throughout history have been fought over far lesser grievances. The corrupted system perpetuates because (1) the US has no powerful peers providing an external threat, and (2) people generally believe they still fare better in a collapsing yet still-functioning America rather than embroiled in a civil war. Mostly it is a soft tyranny. The progressive agenda can be largely avoided by a disciplined community, besides the heavy taxation. Still, there must a limit to how grievously the fundamental social contract may be violated, even by an economic superpower.

The core clause of the fundamental contract is that the people, particularly the women and children, be protected from harm. Not only does the west routinely fail to protect her daughters from rape and murder, but it is increasingly unwilling to do so. Worse, the liberals seem almost to encourage that outcome. Recent examples abound. The Kate Steinle case became a national referendum on whether we will tolerate illegal immigrants coming and shooting American women. The verdict: that is fine. The Mollie Tibbetts case was leveraged as an opportunity to virtue signal liberal values by both the national media and the immediate family of the murder victim. In Europe, immigrant-on-native aggression is so rampant that women are encouraged to wear Muslim headscarves to help avoid being raped or even dismembered alive by Nigerian gangsters.

Lately, there seems to be a trend of western women being murdered while backpacking in non-western countries. Late last year, two bicyclists were murdered in Tajikistan, possibly because the female was not dressed to local expectations. Then two Scandinavian women were brutally murdered while camping in Morocco. Video soon surfaced on social media of a Danish woman being beheaded alive with a kitchen knife. It was surely beyond traumatizing for the girl's mother, who believed that sending the young blonde women to backpack alone in North Africa was a good idea, since all cultures are equal. (The press reports make no mention of the father.)

This week, the body of yet another young blonde backpacker, this one from England, was discovered in the bushes near a scenic overlook in Guatemala, after she had gone missing for several days. She was found naked, with numerous blows to the body, and died of impact trauma to the brain. A spokesman for the family has stated that they consider foul play to be unlikely, and have called assumptions that she was raped and murdered as "unnecessary and distressing."
“She died doing what she loved,” her parents said.
Presumably they don't take "what she loved" to mean being raped and bludgeoned to death and left to the vultures on a mountaintop in a 3rd world s-hole over 5000 miles from home. No, they must mean the scenario where the globe-trotting, carefree hippy, who had quit washing and whose own parents were unsure how to provide an up-to-date physical description, liked to strip down naked on popular hiking summits and managed to fall in such a way as to cause bruises, lacerations, and fatal brain damage. (More believable if she had been found below the overlook, rather than atop it, but entirely possible.)

The parents released a video while she was still missing, seen here. It's tempting to make assumptions about them, but they seem normal. It's possible they foolishly instilled into her the worldview that led to her grisly demise. But it's also entirely possible they disliked her lifestyle, yet had little control over the 23-year-old in the empowerment era. In any case, the strong pattern is that liberals of the west can't get enough 3rd world immigrants - who tend to rape and murder the native European ladies - and even go so far as to deliver the women right to their doorsteps. Not only does our civilization not protect our women and children from invaders, it opens the door to them, and whispers into the girls' ears, "go ahead, they won't bite. You aren't racist, are you?"

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Piety + Irrationality

Last month, this blog's post Roll Call of the Absurd made a prediction about the political outlook for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in response to her widely ridiculed Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released her Green New Deal last week. It's not worth reviewing much, as it is the most juvenile political proposal ever made. Even many liberals are openly mocking it or keeping their distance. Conventional wisdom is that AOC torpedoed her career right out the gate. I say she'll come out ahead in the long run. She just made herself high priestess of The Cult.
That prediction was made when even the likes of CNN and Nancy Pelosi were ridiculing the proposal, and many analysts thought that the freshly minted freshman representative had vastly overextended her political capital. Their analysis was based on political rationale, whereas here we categorize liberals as a secular religion. The most powerful political statement that can be made within The Cult is one that signals piety to the group dogma and is logically irrational. The notion that irrationality is preferred overall by today's liberals is the hypothesis being tested by predicting AOC would become more popular even while catching flak from her own party's leaders and propaganda outlets.

There is some early evidence to validate the prediction. From the Daily Mail, by way of Amren's article titled Ocasio-Cortez Draws Bigger Crowd at South by Southwest Than Any Democrat Candidate for President.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dominated the South by Southwest conference with her mere presence, bringing in a larger crowd than any of the 2020 presidential contenders, all of whom were asked about her or her Green New Deal in their own sessions at the popular event.

The 2,000 plus ballroom — one of the biggest in the Austin Convention Center — was packed, the overflow rooms were flooded with attendees and Bill Nye tweeted a photo of himself from the room waiting to hear the freshman Democrat from New York speak.

The crowd rose to its feet, whooping, cheering and hollering when Ocasio-Cortez entered, but, when she spoke, you could hear a pin drop.
She isn't even running for president. She couldn't - she's not old enough. And yet she's stolen the show even from the veteran foot soldiers vowing to end the reign of NeoHitler. How? Well, she knows the winning formula. Piety + irrationality.

Her performance at SxSW seems to have been a masterful one. Consider the original headline from the Daily Mail.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses her SXSW talk to label FDR's New Deal 'racist' compared to her 'Green New Deal' and protests minorities being treated like 'garbage' - as she draws a bigger audience than any Democrat 2020 hopeful
She spent most of her time talking about the bad treatment of minorities, even going so far as to label the original New Deal - which her own political treatise parodies - as racist! That is some serious irrationality. Excellent touch. My only suggestion to her - and I could be wrong, it's her speciality after all - would be to back off slightly on the pandering to minorities. That's the domain of the lowly white candidates, who must grovel before POCs for their approval. No, as a proud woman of color, she can rise above that level slightly, and instead focus on attacking her enemies for their lack of piety. Call Nancy Pelosi a racist. Would it be insane for the lowest-ranking Democrat in the house to mutiny against the highest ranking? It's a leading question. As a minority, AOC actually outranks Pelosi in the ways that matter to Democrats at-large. Pelosi is already weak, babbling and demented, disliked by progressives who hate seeing old whites in power. With a sustained attack, initially subtle but increasingly aggressive, she could likely drive Pelosi out of power, single-handedly.

Another public performer was in attendance.
And there was a surprise during the Q&A session when Bill Nye the Science Guy came up to ask her a question, which earned a roar of delight from the crowd
Bill Nye is not very science smart, but he is very shrewd at gaining attention and praise from The Cult, just like AOC. He's an old white guy, which is almost a deal-breaker these days, but he largely redirects his fans by dressing up as a scientist, a revered priestly class amongst the left. And he has deliberately chosen not to have children, making him a role-model white guy to the modern progressive. He's the kind of guy who owns multiple homes throughout the country, and then shows off his solar panels to guests as a display of environmentalism. It's just irrational enough to work, and if he's showing up to lend support to AOC, she must be doing something right. Expect to see much more from her. (Also, brace yourself.)

Thursday, March 7, 2019

No Right to Exist

Breitbart runs the headline today, Linda Sarsour Refuses to Acknowledge Israel’s Right to Exist. They are just as bad as any of the mainstream outlets at engaging in sensationalism and gotcha journalism. The only real difference is that their politics are more agreeable. But not in this case. Why should Sarsour have to state that Israel has a right to exist? It's hard to imagine she holds that opinion. Why compel her to pretend? The whole thing is just a heresy trap. The journalist who posed the question was hoping that she wouldn't confirm Israel's right to exist, which violates the moral principle that all national politicians - which she basically is - are supposed to put Israel's rights before any others. It's no different than CNN's Oliver Darcy getting Alex Jones banned from social media for making politically unapproved statements. It's all outrage porn that they sell to the public.

Where does Israel get this supposed right to exist? Certainly not from the UN, where support for Israel often emanates from a single, powerful vassal state ally. Jews might say that their right to exist comes from God, as they are the Chosen People. Fair enough - other than that most Jews don't really believe in God - but most Muslims do believe in Allah. There's no reason to expect them to respect the divine rights granted by a Jewish god to a secular people. No, Sarsour should not be expected to lie in defense of the Jews. After all, lying is a sin under the Torah.

In the modern era, rights are meaningless. They're just opinions. It is especially amusing when liberals appeal to universal human rights. Rights according to what? In the US, we have natural, or God-given, rights, based on the Lockean ideals of rights to life, liberty, and property. Fortunately for secular Americans, those rights still exist even if God doesn't. The "God-given" aspect was primarily a rebuke to the British monarch, who claimed a divine right to rule. The rights actually stem from a social contract theory of governance. In America, you agree not to violate the Constitutional rights of others, and feel secure that your own rights are legally protected. Or at least that's how it's supposed to work. The concept has been abused beyond all recognition. The liberals say things like, "every American has a right to a home." Of course we do! Your home is your domain, and neither the government nor other citizens can arbitrarily remove you from it. Ah, but that's not what they mean by rights. What they mean is you have the right to be given a home if you can't procure you for yourself. That means taking property from someone else. Rights as described by the left are always anti-rights, and they reject the actual rights specified in the Constitution (freedom of speech, right to bear arms, states' rights, etc).

That's a bit of a digression, but the point is none of this applies to foreign states. There is no social contract where Jews have a right to a homeland. They get what they can take and keep. Israel was founded - not all that long ago - by dispossessing the prior inhabitants, and by fighting several wars against neighbors who rejected their claim. The Jews have a right to a homeland. And so do Arabs. Who gets to possess that particular sliver of land on the east coast of the Mediterranean? Whoever can hold it. My preference goes to the Jews since Arabs control vast domains in the region already and the Jews are more capable of maintaining an advanced society in the arid lands. But that's hardly grounds to express moral indignation that Arabs might disagree. It's perfectly natural that they would.

Some related Breitbart articles were linked in their sidebar.
  • Democrats to condemn 'All Hate,' Not Anti-Semitism Specifically, In Resolution. Conservatives are jumping all over Democrats, saying that their general renouncement of hate is a decision to not stand against anti-Semitism. Trump called their behavior shameful. But it's no different than the liberal media condemning Trump for renouncing hate on both sides in the wake of the Charlottesville incident. He was correct then. This blog said at the time that Trump was the only one acting like an adult. But, like most politicians, principle flies out the window when Israel is involved.
  • ‘Legitimate Criticism’ of Israel is Democrats’ Phony Excuse for Ilhan Omar’s Antisemitism. Nothing Omar said was Antisemitic. I don't doubt she is anti-Semitic, nor do I care. My concern is she's anti-American, yet lives here anyway and was elected to Congress.
  • Liz Warren Defends Omar: Calling Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic Has ‘Chilling Effect'. The white Oklahoman who has spent most of her career brown-washing her own identity is correct. Is Fauxahontas now the prominent adult in the room?
  • Bernie Sanders Defends Ilhan Omar in Antisemitism Crisis: ‘Legitimate Criticism’. Spineless communist and Hillary endorser-in-chief Bernie Sanders is also correct. He's also nominally Jewish.
Why are conservatives yielding easy moral victories to leftists? It is asinine. Just say what is obviously true. The Israeli lobby holds tremendous influence over Washington. America goes to war for Israel. In this particular domain, the Democrats are actually better than the Republicans. At this point, David Duke is more likely to endorse Warren or Sanders for president than Trump. Zionist control of the US is his big issue. It will be amusing to watch.

The one group of people that should be internalizing the reality that Jews have no right to be given a homeland is Jews themselves. They must defend their own position or they will be evicted. Their strategy of co-opting American military dominance to enact their desired foreign policy is a dangerous one. They become weak at self-defense. Hopefully their performance in the 2006 Lebanon war raised some alarms. Israel's survival lasts only as long as America is able and willing to provide money and military engagement. That American Jews then vote over 70% for Democrats is truly astounding. Not only are Democrats less sympathetic to Israel, but they favor a number of policies sure to erode American dominance. Jews are dependent on America while at the same time working towards its destruction.

We should take a similar lesson. White Americans have no right to their own homeland. Not even in the true sense of what rights are. That is, we aren't even permitted to state a desire for such a thing, let alone act in our own interests or expect to be given anything. We'll get what we can take and hold, just like all nations. It's the natural way, and no amount of quibbling about rights is going to change that.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

A Government For the (non-White) People

We did it! Western society finally won a battle against the sodomites. UK public schools have backed off on homosexual indoctrination of schoolchildren after outrage from conservatives Muslims. As Alex Jones describes it, the average UK Muslim is now more commendable than the average Brit. How the great Victorian society has fallen. If you're a Brit, you might almost have to wonder if strict sharia law wouldn't be preferable to the tyranny of the trannies. While one might suspect that liberals are facing an analogous conundrum, they probably aren't. It's already clear that Muslims outrank LGBTs on the victimhood hierarchy. If the left don't like being told they can't normalize their sodomy to children, well, keep flying those "Refugees Welcome" signs to find out how those refugees deal with homosexuals in the communities they control.

The major thing to note is that the government actually responded to the desires of unhappy Muslims. If white conservatives had protested, they likely would have been arrested for hate speech. That's no exaggeration. In England, you can be arrested and jailed for misgendering a transexual. Rejection of gay education could similarly be construed as violence against oppressed people, if the authorities wanted to. Further, any whites that led protests would likely face a virtual lynch mob seeking to dox their addresses and employers to intimidate them and ruin their livelihoods. (Firefox founder Brendan Eich was forced out of his own company for merely making a private donation towards protecting traditional marriage.) The Muslims, of course, are spared all this indecency. British society serves the interests of the non-British.

Last month's Roll Call of the Absurd noted that today whites must dutifully pay homage to blacks and other victim groups if they want even the chance to compete for the Democrat presidential nomination.
During her announcement, [Elizabeth Warren] referred to "people of color" so many times that even some liberals expressed annoyance. Of course, the Democrats are now the anti-white party, so any white people vying for power must recite the right prayers early and often.
Watching these displays promises to be one of the most entertaining aspects of the new political process. Bernie Sanders has announced he will be bringing anti-white activist Shaun King along on campaign events. The only question is whether King will lead Bernie out on a leash.

Former Denver governor and self styled "extreme moderate" John Hickenlooper announced his candidacy. His victimization angle?  “As a skinny kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a funny last name, I’ve stood up to my fair share of bullies.” Yeah, this dweeb is going to take on Trump. He clearly doesn't even understand the reality of his own party.

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Common Dieting Myths

Wherever science meets government, always be suspicious. This blog frequently delves into the ludicrous theories that are often taken as standard dogma in fields like physics, biology, and climate studies, although the same pattern seems to hold regardless of the domain. At some point, more funding does more harm than good. The truly brilliant minds can normally get their work funded - or at least, I think we can agree that they should be funded. Once they are taken care of, more money means more meddling midwits who aren't likely to make significant scientific breakthroughs, but can certainly craft a grant application to match the acceptance rubric. People commonly believe that funding more scientists means that more good science is likely to occur, in the way that a whole team of prospectors is more likely to find nuggets of gold in a rocky stream. In reality, it just means more dependency on a federal funding narrative, where the truly creative insights are drowned out if not shunned altogether. It results in a brittle orthodoxy that is incapable of challenging its own basic assumptions. We've seen it time and time again. Scientists are willing to construct extravagant theories consisting of deeply nested unproven hypotheticals in order to avoid questioning core beliefs.

The most ludicrous theoretical construct in the more serious sciences that I'm aware of is the neutron star. It's the kind of thing you get when you couple publish-or-perish career progression with heavy government funding, particularly the NSF's preference to fund "high-risk, high-yield" research in hopes of finding the big breakthroughs. These kinds of results often range between amusing and annoying, but there is aways some degree of moral outrage because the government has stolen the money from taxpayers for such research. I do not consent to have my income highly taxed only to be rewarded with such national embarrassments. Even worse, however, is that the scientific consensus can actually be harmful. Of course, we're quite aware that climate-change theories - such as the consistently failing IPCC models - are being used to make disastrous economic decisions that have caused rolling blackouts in once first-world nations like Australia, and soon Germany. But on a more personal, day-to-day level, the government has for decades promoted bad nutrition advice, and continues to do so.

The most well-known governmental health advice was the iconic food pyramid with its broad base of grains and thin peak of meats and proteins. Nearly everyone I know who is dieting is on some sort of low-carb diet. Keto diets, which are extreme versions of carb cutting, are somewhat trendy. Thankfully, rejection of the food pyramid is common amongst actively health-aware dieters. But, mainstream nutrition beliefs and official government guidance have only slightly improved. The current model is ChooseMyPlate.gov, which was unveiled by First Lady Michele Obama. She said,
As long as half of their meal is fruits and vegetables alongside their lean proteins, whole grains and low-fat dairy, then we're good. It's as simple as that.
The increased emphasis on vegetables is the only real improvement. But overall, it still delivers the same message that made the food pyramid so dangerous: fats are bad, carbs are good. Harvard University released a modified version of the plate recommendations.
Harvard's plate features a higher ratio of vegetables to fruits, adds healthy oils to the recommendation, and balances healthy protein and whole grains as equal quarters of the plate, along with recommending water and suggesting sparing dairy consumption. 
Their model at least recognizes that fruits aren't that healthy and that oils are necessary. Other than the recommendation to avoid dairy, it's an improvement. Let's look at some specific examples of bad nutritional advice commonly promoted.

Grains are fundamental
Grains are unnecessary and should be limited, if not avoided entirely. They are ubiquitous because they grow well in European and North American climates and are easily transported and stored throughout winter. They became popular despite human dietary preferences. Grains consist mostly of carbohydrates and drive a massive insulin spike when consumed, which lowers metabolism and puts the body into fat-storing mode. Carbohydrates are primary fuels of the body, but are toxic in excess. After eating conventional meals, I frequently enter sneezing fits, which can be embarrassing in restaurants. I could never narrow the culprit down to any particular food allergy, but if I moderately limit carbs then the sneezes don't occur. Grains and excess carbs are an irritant to the body and cause all kinds of auto-immune disorders, as well chronic fatigue syndrome.

Fat is bad
People assume that fat in the body is caused by fat in food. Thus, we see the almost unquestioned assumption made by food producers and consumers that reduced fat is synonymous with healthy. It continues today, even with all the popularity of keto, paleo, and Atkins diets. Not only are fats essential as building blocks for our cell membranes, they are a preferable source of energy than carbohydrates. Fats and proteins are complex macromolecules. They are harder to digest than simple sugars, which are easily digested and consumed. In our evolutionary environment, food was scarce, thus we are designed to seek out sugar as the most efficient way to fuel the body. Even then, it was often feast or famine. Gorge on fruit when it comes in season, and the resulting belly fat will help you survive the winter. Today, there is no winter, and fruits never go out of season. So a high-fat diet is actually more natural, since we evolved to build up fat stores and then live off them in lean times. High-fat diets cause less fat accumulation on the body, because carbs eaters must eat every few hours to stave off hunger pangs.

There is a sub-myth that you should strain the fat out of ground beef. Most people do this without thinking about it. Of course, the recipes often mention it. The Hamburger Helper package says to strain the meat, probably because they can then put lower saturated fat values on the nutrition label. They know the populace has been trained to think fat is bad. The proper way to make Hamburger Helper is to buy the cheapest (i.e. least lean) beef at the store, and then don't strain it. It tastes better and makes for a healthier meal. It's amusing that the same people who will pay a premium for the fatty cut of beef in the steakhouse will go pay a premium for the lean beef in the grocery store, and then strain the best part into a jar.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day
The logic of this is that meals should be eaten when we're active so that calories are consumed rather than stored as fat. Further, we are told that eating breakfast "kick starts" our metabolism in the morning, causing us to burn more calories throughout the day. Question, do you feel that your metabolism kicks in after a meal? Or do you feel kinda feel like lying down for a nap? The reality is that eating causes an insulin spike which lowers metabolism for several hours. Carbs have the biggest effect, and fats the least. Breakfast literally means "break fast" because it comes about 12 hours after the evening meal, which is where fasting mode begins. Eating in the morning takes the body out of a high metabolism fat-burning mode and back into feeding mode.

Some breakfast foods, like eggs and sausage, are very healthy, but should be eaten later in the day. Do cereal commercials on TV still boast "part of this complete breakfast" and then depict a child eating cereal, toast, fruit, and juice? Part of this ADHD diagnosis, more like. I do find it disturbing that we outlaw marijuana in this country to protect children, but then allow corporations to market and sell pure sugar to them as breakfast foods. Pop-Tarts should be banned, and all who push them incarcerated as felons. Do an experiment. First thing in the morning, eat a big bowl of cereal (skim milk only!), some healthy, nutritious whole-grain bread (no butter!), and a big glass of orange juice with all its yummy vitamin C. If 2-3 hours later you don't feel like absolute shit, then your body functions completely different than mine and you should ignore all the dieting advice in this post.

Eat many small meals per day
If physics, statistically the highest IQ field of study, can come up with such intellectual flops as neutron stars, imagine what the dummies in the other fields can do. When I was in college, I was amused by a gym poster that gave nutritional advice for various fitness goals. Trying to lose weight? You should eat 5-6 small meals per day. Trying to gain weight? You should eat 5-6 small meals per day. Training for athletic competitions? You should...well you get the idea. This advice is right up there with loading your child up with carbs before school. The belief is that fasting causes the body to go into "starvation mode" where it lowers metabolism and hordes all available nutrients as fat. The human body has evolved to store excess food as fat, and then consume it when needed. But we're supposed to believe that it responds to lean times by...storing more fat?? Fortunately for us, the human body did not evolve to be so stupid, unlike the modern dietician. Maybe that's not fair to say. Dieticians have just evolved to survive lean times too. They know that obese dieters naturally select for diets where they get to eat all day long, rather than the ones advising them to eat just once per day.

Eating all day means your body is constantly in high-insulin, fat storage mode. Eating all day, even in small amounts, ensures you won't lose weight and will always feel tired. Worse, the body becomes accustomed to the high insulin and even more carbs are needed to satiate hunger. If their theory was correct, then fasters in "starvation mode" should be extremely hungry, while the many small meal "dieters" should never feel hungry. But they're the ones who constantly say they're starving! Popular dieting advice amounts to feels over reals, it seems.

If you want to feel best, shift to a low-carb, high-fat diet with long stretches between meals. Skip breakfast, eat a light lunch with as few carbs as possible, and eat a big dinner to consume most of your daily calories. It's okay to permit some carbs, since they will be stored as fat and consumed during the day while your body is in ketosis. Of course, take it easy, because excess amounts of carbs are still bad for the body, and you're likely to become groggy and lose productive hours in the evening. I find that, once I get accustomed to a proper low-carb diet, it becomes somewhat self-reinforcing. Cheating feels like freedom from an oppressive dieting regimen, but then you feel like crap, and learn to avoid it. Eventually, a cookie doesn't even sound very appealing.