Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Fire Suppression

A few years ago I did some backpacking in California, including the northern 60 miles or so of the John Muir trail terminating in the Yosemite valley. In one stretch of forest, our group remarked on the amount of fallen debris littering the ground. We knew that the government agencies had largely learned their lessons about fire suppression resulting in more dangerous fires, especially after one in Yellowstone left soil so scorched that plant life was not properly recolonizing the area. Well this place was a vast tinderbox. Dry timber had accumulated to about knee depth, on average, across the entire floor. "If this thing ever lights up," we remarked, "it will be a complete inferno." A couple of months later, during the dry heat of mid summer, it did just that, fueling a wildfire severe enough to make the national news which closed down the trail and threatened to close down the valley itself.

Today, Sundance is picking up on a news piece by Maria Bartelomo on what he terms crossover - the president's domestic turmoil crossing over into his foreign affairs agenda. Specifically, the Chinese have decided that their best strategy for dealing with Trump is simply to wait out the clock - which reflects their national policy of dealing with America in general. They have decided that Trump is weak enough that they may not have to deal with him at all. He gets little support for his hardline stance against China, anything he does is likely to be undone by the next Democrat, and he may even be impeached or assassinated. Thus, they wait, because they detect weakness. Mutineers have gone unpunished. The scandal has been laid bare, yet nothing has changed. The media go on unhinged, the opposition still plots impeachment, and their voters remain spellbound. That the mutiny failed is not so significant as that it has gone unpunished. Trump has no power to punish, thus he is weak. Republicans in Congress going after Mueller should keep one thing in mind: the more they publicize the baseless nature of the Mueller Probe, while it remains unpunished, the more they encourage further mutiny against the president, because it only demonstrates that there is no downside to malfeasance: try, try again until you get lucky. It's a free-for-all.

On the other hand, the whole thing makes for a show of strength for the Deep State. Think of it: emails leaked that showed the leading Democrats are Satan worshippers who sold government positions, and they turned it into a mock public trial against Trump! That is some power. The big message may end up being that the Deep State is so powerful that it can engage in scandals of the highest order in broad daylight without fear of retribution. If we lift the veil and nothing happens, then we've merely relieved them of the need to operate in secrecy. The shadow government just becomes the acknowledged government.

The world is certainly noticing the American public circus. Debacles like the Kavanaugh hearing, the Russia Collusion hoax, and vibrant national debates over whether or not we can criticize formerly great American cities for becoming rat-infested, crime-riddled shitholes (literally, in some cases), are all signs of an America that is far too irrational to hold onto its global supremacy. Would-be emperors like Putin and Xi are certainly waiting for the end of American global hegemony. For most of its existence, America has operated under the Monroe Doctrine, which established that other empires were not allowed to hold colonies in the New World. Since World War II, that policy has extended to the whole globe: no other empires are allowed. While Trump the Usurper may be neutralized, his election reveals cracks in the edifice. As it turns out, the Land of the Free cannot be maintained in the face of the free flow of information, which is why Twitter and Facebook are in a frenzy to ban all dissenters.

For three quarters of a century the world order has been Pax Americana. The world's lone superpower has thwarted all challenges to its supremacy, and largely contained ethnic rivalries by intervening before they become violent and containing them when they do. The downside is that this world policing may just amount to a global application of fire suppression. Grievances don't wane; they accumulate. Rivalries don't fade; they fester. The only thing that has been forgotten is the horrible reality of war. The collapse of Pax America, especially if it is sudden, may open the gates to an era of violence not seen since the first half of last century. I believe old ethnic rivalries will flare up like wildfires. More, there is likely to be tremendous backlash against Americans after they are shown to be weak. While I often describe our empire as the Columbian Empire, composed of the District on the Potomac and us as her vassals, the rest of the world will not see it that way. Not only will Americans have to deal with the many millions of hostile non-Americans who reside within our current borders, but we will have to deal with the pent up rage of foreigners as well. The Chinese have been humiliated for centuries now at being subjected to western power. While many believe the Chinese will be less imperial than the west has been, as they are more insular, that may all amount to wishful thinking. If the Chinese ever start claiming their New World enclaves - places like Vancouver - as proper colonies, their treatment of whites is likely to become brutal.

Many in our circle, who see the signs of collapse all around, and who are even willing to state the verboten, still assume that it will be a slow, gradual decline. But consider the decades of global fire suppression, the resentment to mass export of cultural degeneracy, and the vulnerability of our brittle, interwoven economy to supply shocks, and the whole thing starts to look like one big tinderbox waiting to ignite.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Ethnic Cleansing In The Democrat Party

Summit News reports that the Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has been forced to step aside for not doing enough to diversify DCCC leadership - that is, for being white. Two Hispanic representatives have demanded that she be replaced with a qualified "person of color" - that is, anyone but another white. This event fits within our working conceptual model of the Democrat party, as does the response of the ousted party apparatchik.
Jaslow then reportedly held a meeting with her staff during which she cried and apologized for not supporting “diversity” strongly enough.
Rather than fight, she slunk away to her staff and cried and apologized for being white. This is the future for white liberals. First, they virtue signal their allegiance to their growing non-white base, so long as they maintain their positions of power and prestige. But once the party base is sufficiently non-white, it demands the higher positions of power for itself because non-whites do not want to be presided over by whites, nor should they. The Democrats brought in the foreigners because their votes bring power. Now those neo-Americans desire to wield that power for themselves.

To really drive the nail home on this theory, just browse her Twitter history. Consider this Tweet of only ten days ago.
This is everything in a nutshell. Michelle Obama claims America belongs just as much to non-Americans as it does to Americans, echoing her husband's infamous quip of "you didn't build that." Jaslow then shared the sentiment of "Our America." Now her career is destroyed because she is racially of the America that was "born here," despite her prostrating herself before the altar of diversity. Whose America is it that you've supported, Allison? It's not Our America, it's Their America. Check yourself.

Will she and her ilk wake up to their own predicament? Largely they will not, but who knows. People have a habit of putting their own interests first. If white liberals start realizing they have no career prospects as Democrats, they will be quietly pulled to the side of Heritage America. The only good news out of all this was that Jaslow deserved to lose her job, and she did. The universe tends to be rational, even if people are not.

Our working conceptual model of the Democrat party is best summed up by Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore, who said that if a democracy becomes multicultural (which really means multi-ethnic) then the people will tend to vote based on their ethnicity and religion. That is the first half of understanding the Democrat party. The other half is understanding that the white liberals have acquired power by importing voters, but that system was never something that could persist for very long. The more voters they bring in, the more they hasten their own demise. I would mark 2016 as the year in which Yew's prediction came true for America. The conversion of the major parties to ethnic blocs is not complete, but it is well underway. Before then, most people of both the far left and right would moan that both parties were really two wings of the same party: the global corporate party. We noted that it didn't really matter who was elected, the same policies were enacted anyway. Then Trump hijacked the Republican party by appealing to (Heritage) Americans and declaring the need to stop the importation of people that both Democrat leaders and capitalists prey upon. Now, the Democrat party is being ethnically cleansed. Nancy Pelosi was called a racist by a freshman dingbat of color and no one defended her, while whites are being purged from unelected positions.

Part of this is why I've held on to my Buttigieg prediction, despite the poll numbers. I have trouble seeing Biden carry through as an old, white, straight male, in a party that despises that particular demographic. I suspect he'll end up ducking out for medical reasons or some similar excuse.

Monday, July 29, 2019

Contrabang! #15 One Free Miracle

You Must Not Trust Experiments That Claim The Existence Of Parallel Universes (link)

Nor those that claim the existence of dark energy, but that's another matter. Ethan gives a warning to ongoing research involving parallel universe theories. He cautions that the experiments are prone to false positive results because of poor understanding of the background noise, as occurred in the 1980s when scientists incorrectly determined that they had discovered cold fusion. Why, then, is he so optimistic about the LIGO detection of gravity waves? He should share the same skepticism that the weak signals they've allegedly found are likely just a product of the strong background noise.

Ask Ethan: Can We Really Get A Universe From Nothing? (link)

Ethan fields another difficult question, which is the premise that the entirety of the universe expanded from a single infinitesimal point of pure energy. This seems to contradict the theory for other singularities - black holes - which he has depicted in previous Starts With A Bang! articles as pulling in spacetime. Why does the singularity of the Big Bang instead push spacetime outwards?

His answer relies on dark energy, a mythical force that permeates the universe. He reckons that the primordial universe might have contained much more dark energy than it does today, which drove the expansion of the universe and was converted to normal matter/energy in the process. How was it converted? Of course there is no answer, as no one knows what dark energy even is.
[B]ecause dark energy is a property of space itself, when the Universe expands, the dark energy density must remain constant.
Does this not contradict his musing that there may have been much more dark energy in the past? How could there be more dark energy in the past if the dark energy density must remain constant? Further, this illustrates the major argument against dark energy, which is that it is a perpetual energy device which violates the first law of thermodynamics. Dark energy drives expansion, which creates more dark energy, which creates more expansion....and so on. It cannot be true, but physicists permit all sorts of nonsense so long as it is proceeded by the words dark or black.
Our intuition may not be reliable when we consider the physical concepts of nothing and negative/positive gravity, but that’s why we have science. When we do it right, we wind up with physical theories that accurately describe the Universe we measure and observe.
This is quite amusing, as the different groups can't even agree on the rate of expansion that they "measure and observe." Looking at different stars gives different numbers. But Ethan is quite sure that he has the correct theories to consistently predict the inconsistent measurements being made.

All of this stems from the modern scientists' need to push back the mysteries of existence to a sort of universal wind-up clock that proceeds mechanistically from its initial conditions. Ask them how or why the wind-up clock was set into motion, and they are left grasping at straws, but still are very confident that it all follows logically from that point. As Rupert Sheldrake quips about modern scientists, give them one free miracle, and they'll explain the rest.

Update: William Briggs has taken on this article as well on his blog.

Saturday, July 27, 2019

Penn State: Women Not Capable Of Granting Consent

From the DailyWire comes the story of two young lovers from Pennsylvania State University. After a flirty period of courting, the two had sex in a dorm room, which was followed by an additional period of text flirting and the girl telling her friends she intended to maintain a relationship with him. Six months later, her take on the situation changed and she filed an official complaint with the school's Title IX court against the boy for sexual misconduct, claiming he had forced her into the situation. The school sided with the girl stating that his own flirtatious language (as documented by their texts) amounted to "cajoling," going so far as to amend their official policy on consent to disallow cajoling and then using that policy - ex post facto - to substantiate their decision.

There are a number of relevant social trends tied into this single story. Foremost, of course, is feminism. When it comes to sex, the female is always right. The Title IX banana court will invent whatever procedures and rules are necessary to rule in favor of the female. (Title IX was expanded by the Obama administration into a campus court system intended to favor "protected" groups, without all the annoyances of the normal legal system such as due process, the presumption of innocence, etc.)

Second is subjectivism. What was true yesterday could be false tomorrow. In 2017 a college girl had consensual sex. In 2018 she decided, no, she had been abused. What changed? Only her feelings, but that's all that matters. Was she a scorned lover? Doubtful, as it took half a year for her to file the complaint. From what I hear, the days of girls being traumatized when a guy doesn't call the next day (or ever) are long past. Transient sexual encounters are assumed to be the norm on campus. It is noteworthy that her complaint came shortly after the rise of the #MeToo movement, which spiked in popularity in late 2017. Perhaps she just needed some excuse to share the #MeToo tag on Twitter to gain praise and social status. Whatever the reason, it's clear that the nothing in the past is ever objectively true, but must be evaluated through the lens of the moral fads of the current year.

Finally, and most interesting, is regressivism. When we say that progressives are actually regressives, we don't mean in a colloquial sense, such as calling them backwards, unsophisticated, etc. We mean in the literal sensing of reverting to a previous state. Viewing society as a series of cycles means understanding that "progress" eventually loops back around to the very state that the progressives were trying to run away from. In this instance, the feminist court has determined, effectively, that women are not actually capable of giving consent. They invent all kinds of rules the men must follow such as not "cajoling" to protect the woman from her inability to make her own decisions. That gets us back towards the days where it was widely accepted that women could not make optimal mating decisions, thus fathers held dominion until over their daughters until husbands could be found. Suitors did not ask the girl for her hand in marriage, but the girl's father. After all, it takes more than some cajoling texts to win over Pops.

Friday, July 26, 2019

South Africa Explores The Zimbabwe Option

South Africa is considering going the way of their former Rhodesian neighbors to the north.
Amending Section 25 of the Constitution is officially before Parliament again after the National Assembly passed a motion on Thursday to establish an ad hoc committee to draft an amendment to allow expropriation without compensation.
In other words, they are considering legalizing the theft of property from whites. If it passes, let history be our guide. The economy will tank, the government will print money in an attempt to meet obligations, the currency will fail, and the people will resort to looting even critical infrastructure in desperation to acquire foreign coinage.
[The ad hoc committee] will have 11 voting members, six from the ANC, two from the DA, one from the EFF and two from the other parties.
Given the dominance of the ANC on both committee and the general assembly, things look grim for the whites of South Africa, and the future of the country as a whole.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Irony Is Dead

Our national political theater has provided some news stories recently that have struck me as ironic.

First was the Mueller testimony before Congress. Lefties were hyping it up, of course, because they are desperate to focus on the alleged crimes committed by their bogeyman Trump, rather than the latest anti-American tirade to come out of The Squad. The ordeal backfired tremendously, as Mueller's anemic performance was a PR disaster for both Democrats and the deep state in general. Some are asking if he has dementia. Some are wondering if Mueller was just a figurehead to bestow legitimacy to the coup, but not necessarily orchestrating the operation. He seemed to lack knowledge of some items in the report that bore his own name. Of course, liberals lie, so they are saying that the event was damning against Trump, but the truth can be discerned through actions. Fox News reports that they couldn't get any Democrat Congressmen to come on to talk about the proceedings, and gave up after reaching out to seventy.

Next, the Ilhan Omar saga has provided even more irony than expected, even for those who realize that lefties always accuse others of the crimes they are guilty of. First was the revelation that Omar's family is part of the Somali ruling class and was involved in the trade of black slaves. Her father changed his name before migrating to the US to hide his reputation from authorities. Unlike the evil whites the left prattle on about endlessly, there are actually living members of her family who have owned slaves. Then, someone dug up a tweet Omar made during a spat where she told another POC that she should be deported back to whatever country she came from. So the timeline is this:
  • AOC called Pelosi a racist. No Democrats in Congress defended the Speaker.
  • Trump defended Pelosi, and tweeted that if The Squad hates American so much they should leave.
  • Pelosi violated House rules to condemn Trump as a racist for his comments. Democrats voted to ignore the rules and pass the resolution.
  • It turns out that The Squad had used nearly the same language themselves on Twitter.
That is a truly ironic timeline.

Finally, a black lawmaker from Georgia posted a video to social media sobbing about an encounter at a grocery store where an evil white bigot told her to "go back to where you came from you son of a bitch." A man came forward and said he indeed had a dispute with her after he told her she had too many items to be in the express lane, which prompted an explosive response. As it turns out, the man himself is of Cuban descent (she assumed his ethnicity!) and had complained bitterly on social media about Trump's comments. Now witnesses have corroborated not only his side of the story, but that the woman had used racist language in her tirade.

Is it worth pointing all this out? Irony is when perceived reality is very different from the actual reality, thus actions with an intended effect can cause the opposite reaction. The only reason any of the above stories are ironic is because the liberals are truly delusional and control the mainstream narrative...not perhaps the one that most people believe, but the one that is assumed in national-level discourse. The first story is not ironic if you realize that the Mueller probe was based on a purely fictional crime lacking even probable cause, and was a deep state reaction against an unauthorized electoral result. Similarly, the other two stories are not ironic from our perspective. They are only ironic from within the liberal narrative. Irony is dead, because it is now so common. It is only worth pointing out when it occurs to a degree that we wouldn't have even thought possible.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Contrabang! #14 Unified Theory of Nonsense

This week's edition comes a couple days late, as I've been dealing with a little bout of midsummer flu. In this one, we'll only dive into a single article, and take a glancing blow at a second.

Sorry, Black Hole Aren't Actually Black (link)

This title - another clever variation of the no-comma (honorable mention also goes to this week's Yes, Virtual Particles Can Have Real, Measurable Effects) - is sure to raise curiosity. Well, then what color are black holes? Green? Blue? Desert camo?
Physicists sure do give counterintuitive names to the things they find.
Or things they don't find. Despite the implications of the language, scientists have never "found" a black hole. They are assumed to exist because (1) General Relativity allows that they could exist and (2) they are required to account for galactic dynamics. But, enormous peripheral clouds of dark matter are also required. It might just be that they don't actually understand galactic dynamics.

Some might claim that the recent imagery of a black hole does mean one has been found. All that has been shown is that given enough data and a big enough algorithm (over 900,000 lines of code) an image can be generated to match theory if the reward is worldwide fame and praise.

In explaining black holes, he provides this gif, along with the caption,
Both inside and outside the event horizon, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall, depending on how you want to visualize it. At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center. Outside the event horizon, though, other forces (like electromagnetism) can frequently overcome the pull of gravity, causing even infalling matter to escape.
The animation depicts the black hole as pulling the very fabric of spacetime into its murky abyss. That seems to be in direct contradiction of last month's article (also an excellent no-comma) No, Black Holes Don’t Suck Everything Into Them, which assured us that black holes do not have any special powers to pull matter into them; they behave like normal massive objects, and just so happen to be particularly massive. (The article itself is internally contradictory, as it contains the same animation, but we did not adequately address that before.) The explanation for all the infalling matter is thus attributed to theoretical accretion disks. But here, Ethan is depicting black holes as having the special ability so suck spacetime into them. Thus, a star in a normal, circular orbit around the black hole would be sucked into the event horizon.

The contradiction is that his refutation of the myth of "galaxies sucking everything into them" is in the context of Newtonian gravity, but then spacetime is shown getting sucked in under General Relativity. Ethan well understands the difference between the two... he explains it about every other week. Last month, he wrote an article titled This Is How, 100 Years Ago, A Solar Eclipse Proved Einstein Right And Newton Wrong. He believes that General Relativity has totally replaced Newtonian gravity. Yet he writes an article refuting a common myth which only holds in the context of Newton. If you are sitting on a rug and I pull it across the room, you'd likely not argue that I hadn't moved you across the room because you were just sitting there!

This amounts to fraud, in my judgement. I don't believe Ethan is so confused on the matter. He's explaining away some apparent shortcoming of his favored theories by paring away relevant context which he himself claims to be true and valid. It's little different than what run-of-the-mill journalists do when trying to sell sensationalism or some agenda, except that Ethan is smarter than them and should know better.

Here's another quote from earlier in the article.
Instead of viewing space as a fixed network of three-dimensional streets, it’s perhaps more accurate to view space as a moving walkway. No matter where you are in the Universe, the space beneath your feet is being dragged by all the gravitational effects at play. Masses cause space to accelerate towards them; the expanding Universe causes unbound objects to speed away from one another.
What a mess this is. It says "masses cause space to accelerate towards them." How can that possibly be true? The implication then would be that the Sun sucks the Earth toward it, the Earth sucks the moon towards it, the moon sucks lunar orbiters to it... yeah, this theory sucks. I have never heard the implication that spacetime would be such a dynamic, fluid thing. It should be relatively static. Mass doesn't attract spacetime; it distorts spacetime. I do not think that accelerating spacetime is an actual consequence of the Theory of General Relativity.

Then - the main reason I picked this snippet - he says that the expanding Universe cases unbound objects to speed away from one another. Why would he choose that language - unbound? Think of what the implication is for the expanding universe. It is universal. Thus, it should be driving the moon away from the Earth, the Earth away from the Sun, etcetera. (By my napkin math, given the official rate of universal expansion, the Earth should be moving away from the sun at 7650 miles per year.) That would, I reckon, make the orbits inherently unstable. The distance of the orbiting body increases, so it's velocity would have to decrease to maintain the circular orbit. (Perhaps they will have to invent a new force called dark drag to account for it.) I couldn't find any Starts With A Bang! articles that address this particular question, but top hits on a web search state that it is too small small to detect at the solar system level, or merely that "gravity wins out." The first is refuted by the definition of the Astronomical Unit (distance of sun to earth) which in miles is given to 8 digits. Thus, 7650 miles per year should be observable. To the second, that gravity "wins out"... they aren't even trying.

So how does Ethan account for the fact that the Earth should be getting sucked into the Sun by General Relativity (according to him) and should be getting pushed away by dark energy? The answer, I suppose, is that the two effects must perfectly cancel! What are the odds? Now we have a theory that actually relates dark energy to General Relativity. I call it the Unified Theory of Nonsense. (Actually I call it something else, but it's not fit to print.)

Ask Ethan: What Does ‘Truth’ Mean To A Scientist? (link)

This is a fairly reasonable overview of what constitutes scientific knowledge. It conveys that scientific models are only ever approximations of reality. Thus, nothing can ever be perfectly true. It also reminds us that the ultimate goal of science is to invalidate theories, not validate them, though you'd never realize that by simply observing what goes on in a number of supposedly scientific disciplines.

The article makes only a single reference to the need of theories to make novel predictions. It's very easy to make postdictions - as I call them - or backwards predictions that retroactively show how an observation was predicted by theory. Starts With A Bang! is littered with those kinds of arguments. It is often impossible to tease out the rationale from the rationalization, thus we lean on future predictions to test theories. 

These scientists are very good at explaining how science should work, but often seem inept to point out failures in practice. They often engage in a practice I call truth wrapping. To sell the lie, it must be wrapped in enough truth to appear palatable, in the way that a bitter pill is coated in sugar. Thus, anyone wishing to lie big must spend plenty of time in accumulating the proper portion of truth to mix in. In fact, he will likely spend so much time on truthful things that he assumes he is truthful in general and thus doesn't realize that the core of the pill is actually quite bitter. The best liar must first lie to himself.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

The Real National Debt

Much is made of the national debt. It is perhaps the key issue that unites the far right, mainstream conservatives, and the socially liberal, fiscally conservative types like libertarians. And that makes sense, as conservatism - which has conserved precious little - has been reduced mostly to economic arguments, plus a degree of indignation against general insanity. Maybe we shouldn't encourage children to mutilate their genitals. Maybe we shouldn't take on insurmountable national debt. Conveniently, the national debt is one of the few appeals to rationale that conservatives can make without fear of being called a bigot, which is perhaps why they've largely retreated to that corner of social advocacy. In the near future, you probably will be called mean names for arguing against debt since it fuels social programs to buy votes from aid minorities, or because the debt benefits financial interests disproportionately dominated by Jews. Picture the future headline: Why Opposition to Crushing Debt is Anti-Semitic. Maybe Ben Shapiro will write it.

The upside of the national debt debate seems to be that it is one of the few useful rhetorical weapons that Republicans have in restraining Democrat-driven growth of the monolithic state. Every year or so a big battle rages about raising the debt limit. It is always raised, of course, but the left is forced to compromise on some demands. Thus, the national debt argument at least serves to put a damper on the Racket Ratchet. In practice, however, the Republicans are no more gentle than Democrats on debt growth; they just prefer to spend on war rather than welfare. It doubled under Bush, then again under Obama, and continues to grow quickly under Trump. Liberals no longer buy the Republicans' passionate calls for fiscal responsibility, thus those arguments are actually rhetorical weapons used against the Republican voters. Republican politicians are elected based on their promises to defend the interests of American families and America as a nation. They get to Washington and realize it's not so easy: if they defend the American nation, the corporate media will call them racist and xenophobic; if they defend the American family, they'll be called racist, homophobic, and sexist. So, they pay great lip service to fighting the national debt to appease their increasingly agitated electorate, but the debt just keeps growing.

What exactly is meant by the phrase national debt? What is the implied nation...the American nation? Such a concept has been declared racist by the left, and even much of the so-called right. What liberals and other opponents of America like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argue is that America is not a nation but "belongs to all nations." Does that mean the nations of the world are going to pay off our debt? No, because the term national debt is a misnomer. It's not the debt of the nation; it's the debt of the federal government, which is hardly the American nation. No, the federal government is perhaps the foremost adversary against the American nation. We should pray night and day for the bankruptcy of the federal government as quickly as possible. [I don't mean that rhetorically, I mean literally pray. Jesus had an opinion on usury... his only noted act of violence was against the Jewish moneylenders. Do you think it is mere chance that the explosion of debt has coincided with plummeting church attendance? I don't.]

We should re-phrase the term national debt entirely. It should be referred to as the federal debt or as the imperial debt, depending on the audience. It should never be called the national debt because we don't own it, it was used against us, and we're told we don't exist anyway. There is, however, a real national debt, and it is much more dangerous to us than the ledger balance in Washington. We have a serious national debt in the sense of what programmers mean when they talk about technical debt. It is the defects that have been allowed to accumulate with, at best, the intention to correct later. In the sense of this blog's recent post Maintenance-Free Means Unmaintainable, it is the cost of the many decades worth of societal maintenance that traditional societies understood as vital but we have neglected. Just a few symptoms of our national debt are as follows.
  • Sub-replacement birth rates, and all factors that contribute to it
  • Decline of marriage and the rise of the "modern family"
  • Rampant materialism and nihilism
  • An opioid epidemic and general acceptance of substance abuse
  • Stagnation of wages while global capitalists are flooded with new wealth
  • Stifling student loan debt which drives young couples to delay family-building, often until it is too late
  • The normalization and necessity of dual-income households, and the resulting "latchkey children" raised by daycares and government schools
  • The surrender of our educational and media institutions to a demonic "secular" religion
We could spend pages writing these kinds of bullet points. Each is a bigger concern to us than whether or not Washington maintains its credit rating, or even if it resorts to runaway inflation. Inflation is the bogeyman everyone fears. But why? For one, inflation erases debt. Are you more worried about the lenders, or all the young people who have been lured into debt slavery? The individual can survive inflation, possibly even thrive, if prepared. Inflation would not only address some serious domestic wealth disparities, but would neuter the power that foreign holders of our currency hold over us, as this blog advocated a couple years ago in Global reserve currency: army of the modern empire.
The ugly reality is that the US will ultimately have to default. We should not look at those foreign reserves as debt we owe, but as a price those countries paid to have the liquidity to conduct international trade, which benefited their economies. And we should do so while we still have the military strength to not be told otherwise.
Similarly, I'd offer another piece of advocacy that would actually bring elements of the far-left and far-right together for some positive, combined political action. They should all, in unison, engage in a debt strike. No more student loan payments. That is much more constructive than this trend towards wonton violence by young, disgruntled, debt-riddled youth. Antifa goons bludgeon their opponents in the streets. The recent attack on a government facility by an armed left-wing lunatic was a guy who had been caught up in a nasty custody battle for years. (More costs of the national debt.) And at least a couple young right-wingers have shot up synagogues. [One of the stupidest reactions possible. The revolutionary Jews are almost always secular. Shooting up a synagogue because you despise Zionist control of media/finance institutions is about like shooting up a Catholic church to protest the proliferation of Marxist professors in the universities.]

I long noted the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Both had the same fundamental disagreements. Both have been agitated by the media into fighting each other in the streets, rather than joining together to express common grievances. There is nothing they fear more than a unified debt strike. In addition to that, we should not reflexively oppose increases to the federal debt, so long as we prevent tax increases and social spending that harms the nation (like free healthcare to illegal immigrants, which all the Democrats support). We should also understand that we will eventually have to devalue the dollar to keep foreigners from sucking all the wealth back out of the country once it starts to lose favor. There are some hints out of the Trump administration that he is considering devaluing the dollar to compete with China's currency manipulation. I see no reason to oppose him on this. If you are on a fixed income, collect a salary from a place where cost-of-living increases are stingy, or have your life savings stuffed in a mattress or bank account, you may want to address your exposure to inflation. If you are in debt - most people are - and the US starts actively devaluing the dollar value, consider making the minimum payments and letting inflation do some of the work for you.

Friday, July 19, 2019

Power Outages Expected in Core American Cities

One of our favorite past times around here is to look at power outages occurring in places with once stable, first-world electricity infrastructures, and then to look at certain policy changes that are normally to blame. USAToday reports that outages are expected in the core cities of the most powerful empire on Earth: the "Empire City", the "Second City", and the Imperial Capital itself.
An upcoming heat wave could lead to power outages in the central and eastern U.S., including the major metropolitan areas of New York City, Washington and Chicago, experts say. As temperatures rise and more people turn to their air conditioners for relief, the demand for power can become overwhelming.
This follows on the heels of a recent Manhattan power outage caused by an equipment failure.
“There is always high demand in the summer – air conditioning is very power-intensive, and you will always have some failures of equipment,” Apt said.

Con Edison said Tuesday that demand for power in Westchester County and New York City was 10,541 megawatts. On Friday, when temperatures are forecast to be in the mid-90s, Con Edison is predicting a power demand of 12,400 megawatts, Drury said.

That is well below the highest demand for power in history, Drury said, which happened during a heat wave in July 2013. It peaked at 13,322 megawatts.
The peak demand in 2013 caused outages. Why is it that, six years later, New York cannot handle expected loads of 93% the previous peak? Let's consult their own Newspaper of Record, which provided relevant analysis just last year in How New York City Gets Its Electricity.
Coal, the original fuel, is on the way out. The state has announced plans to close the remaining plants or convert them to natural gas, which is currently cheap and plentiful. [...] By 2030, Mr. Cuomo wants half of the electricity consumed in the state to come from renewable sources produced here or imported from places like Canada and New England.
Western cities facing blackouts invariably have some initiative underway to reduce coal and increase wind & solar. Paradoxically, the narrative will be that the heat waves are the work of man-made climate changes, and thus the failure of the renewable energy sources to keep up with demand is proof that we need additional reliance on renewable energy sources. In clown world, stable negative feedback loops are inverted into dangerous positive feedback loops.

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Chaos in Congress

Breitbart reports on the events that took place yesterday in the US House of Representatives.
Pandemonium overtook the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon and early evening as a Democrat-led effort to rebuke President Donald Trump over his criticisms of socialist lawmakers backfired badly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi violating the rules of the chamber.
When Pelosi raised the motion to condemn Trump as a racist, a Republican Congressman objected because the rules of the House forbid them from calling the president a racist. It was the first instance of a Speaker breaking the House rules in nearly 40 years. Chaos erupted for hours, during which time not only did Pelosi exit the chambers, but so did her replacement, meaning no-one was presiding over the floor. Some are saying that it is unprecedented in the entirety of American history. In short, it was a total disaster.

This all arises because Trump defended Pelosi from attacks by "The Squad" that she is herself racist, and then said in very direct terms that if an immigrant to America professes a hatred for America, they should leave. The layers of this irony onion are tough to peel back:
  1. That Pelosi - who wast just called a racist by The Squad - took to the podium to denounce Trump for being racist towards The Squad.
  2. That Trump's comments had nothing to do with race at all.
  3. That there is more evidence for AOC's claim that Pelosi is racist than for Pelosi's claim that Trump is racist.
  4. That Trump, by defending Pelosi, was able not to just lay the bait for Pelosi to publicly embrace the usurpers within her own ranks - lest she be associated with Literally Hitler Except Worse (LHEW) - but forced her hand so hard that she made a humiliating spectacle of herself doing so.
When I said several months ago that AOC should call Pelosi a racist in a bid to overthrow her, I mulled over the notion of retracting that opinion, since it seemed like a little much. I'm glad I didn't. It has had a much more immediate payoff than I ever would have expected. They now have the entire media establishment rallying around them, supporting them, praising them as the vanguard in the fight against LHEW. Pelosi, in a rash attempt to regain her status as taking the fight to LHEW (and, no doubt, over eager to prove she is not, in fact a racist, as white liberals and cuckservatives are prone to do) was forced to bestow status to the mutineers. Trump wins because he has not only chopped his major opposition leader at the knees, and got the Democrats to embrace The Squad at a time Pelosi was looking for any way to neutralize them, but he also got them to violate their own rules to pass useless non-legislation to condemn him as racist for comments having nothing to do with race. [To say they do requires some assumption. You must assume that all immigrants are non-white, which is ignorant, or you must assume that all immigrants who hate America are non-white, which is either racist or race-realist - both of which are mortal sins in the morality framework they've created for us.] The Republicans win because they managed to mostly stand behind their leader on this one in the face of intense media pressure to pin the tail on the racist. Even better, public opinions seem unmoved, which means that not only has Republican unity improved, but the media's power to control everyone in Washington by calling them racist has diminished.

It's tempting to say the Democrats lose, but they don't. In the context that their bogeyman Trump wins re-election, sure. But otherwise, what is underway is what we've always predicted. It's the revolt of the browns and blacks against their white masters on the Democrat vote plantations. The party is not so much damaged as the power dynamics have shifted. All evidence indicates that public displays of sheer lunacy do not destroy the Democrat party. All evidence is that they don't even harm the Democrat party. That should be obvious in this post-Kavanaugh environment. Any Democrats who have remained faithful so far won't be fazed by any of this.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Maintenance-Free Means Unmaintainable

Up until so recently, I was in the market for replacement windows, as mine are originals dating back to 1963. I knew they exhibited the normal issues of old windows: cracked panes, poor operation (with some being welded shut by decades of paint), aged appearance, and a couple having serious drafting issues on cold winter nights. I knew I wanted to replace them, but was unsure if the replacements should be wood, vinyl, or fiberglass. I even allowed a couple of door-to-door salesmen to come into my home to give replacement estimates. (Don't do that.)

Fortunately, my online research led me to OldHouseGuy, who advises to always restore old, original windows rather than replace. He has two arguments in favor of keeping old windows. The first is artistic. Old houses were individually designed by an architect, as opposed to today's cookie cutter houses. Thus, unless you have a good reason to know why, in particular, your windows were installed in error, you likely understand the design of your house less than the professional who designed it. The second argument is one of pragmatic efficiency. Wood windows, if properly maintained and restored every 50 years, will last about 200 years. Replacement windows, on the other hand, will be re-replaced in about a tenth of that lifespan.

Buyers believe they are making an economical and environmental choice. The salesmen lie, in a roundabout way. Buyers are told that their energy savings will be 50%, which sounds fantastic. Later, they will find out that the advertised improvement specifically means a 50% reduction in thermal radiation loss through the glass. The overall energy efficiency improvements are normally so small that the new windows will not pay for themselves over their expected lifespan. Additionally, a whole set of plastic-framed windows will find their ways to landfills every twenty years or so. Yet the marketers have managed to convince a gullible public that this unsustainable practice is actually the responsible, environmental choice. [I wonder if anyone has calculated the landfill space required to satisfy AOC's Green New Deal plan to retrofit all buildings to save the environment.]

Doesn't this all seem like a microcosm for America? For one, there is the public virtue (environmentalism) which is hyped to the point of religious fervor and then used to sell solutions to the public that are expensive, make the original problems worse, and introduce new problems. Second, it is symptomatic of America as a throwaway society. Maintenance-free means unmaintainable. Replacement windows don't get fixed, and often can't be. They get thrown away. The same goes increasingly for all consumer goods, including appliances and electronics. Americans now pay over a thousand dollars for the latest iPhones, which get thrown out every couple years. The consumption cycle is to consume, make conspicuous displays of virtue or wealth, and then throw away before consuming again.

It's not just a cycle of stuff, but an approach to life. It is how we treat our own people too. Consider the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019, or, as I call it, the Replace America Act. It passed the House with strong majorities out of both parties. Now, over a third of the Senate is co-sponsoring their version of the bill, including Roy Blunt of Missouri and twenty other Republicans, along with Antifa Party leftists like Kamala Harris. What these pro-family Republicans and pro-labor Democrats are saying is that the American family and the American workforce are effectively maintenance-free. When they start to wear out, just throw away and replace. The combined populations of India and China are so substantial that they could re-populate the entire North American continent with little noticeable impact to their own homelands. Roy Blunt and his cohorts in Congress would like for that to happen. They would rather protect Silicon Valley corporate profits than to maintain the American nation. A preferable solution - which I politely suggested to Sen. Blunt via his contact page - would just be to send Google and Facebook to India, which would solve a number of problems.

It's not just corporate Republicans like Roy Blunt and anti-white agitators like Kamala Harris that promote the Maintenance-Free America agenda; the worst of the lot are the large and generally decent group calling themselves socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Many people find this to be a safe compromise zone to hang out in. Social conservatism has been demonized by the media, and fiscal liberalism carries the stigma of irresponsible idealism. These fence sitters may, in fact, be even more dangerous than the leftists, because socially liberal, fiscally conservative is the same doctrine as Maintenance-Free America. The Replace America Act falls right in line with socially liberal, fiscally conservative, which is why so many Senators from both sides of the aisle are piling on to co-sponsor it. They can all sell it as a victory. Republicans can say, "I supported fiscal conservatism by raising taxable corporate revenues helping to balance the budget." Democrats can say, "I supported social liberalism by importing millions of brown foreigners who historically vote 65% in favor of Democrats." Everybody wins!

Everybody who matters, anyway. The Republicans get their sweet corporate profits. The Democrats get their new voters plus the continued destruction of the American nation. The foreigners get to upgrade to a first-world life in Silicon Valley. (A disputable benefit, as the only place where residents shit in the streets more than India might be San Francisco.) The politicians get their war chests filled with corporate lobby money. Who pays for it all? The American family, and the American worker, whom the Republicans and Democrats pretend to care about. One of the most common things I see today of couples near my age (and I'm not terribly far from 40!) is to delay child-rearing, delay home-buying, delay family-building until they can reach a better financial position. Usually, that means paying off student debt and saving up enough money for a down payment on a home. For those who have migrated to west coast cities, the idea that they'll ever own a conventional family home is merely a pipe dream. Americans have always been told that going to college is the best route to a normal, middle-class life. Instead, tuition rates have skyrocketed, housing prices have skyrocketed, the stock market has skyrocketed, and incomes have stagnated. Why? Because Republicans like Roy Blunt are more interested in the profits of left-wing, treasonous enterprises like Google than in providing livable incomes to American families. Because radical mainstream Democrats like Kamala Harris are more interested in destroying the American nation than in defending American labor. Because no one wants to spend the time and energy in the traditional methods of maintaining the integrity of the family and nation, least of all the socially liberal, fiscally conservative crowd. Instead, the family and nation are treated as maintenance-free, which means they are treated as replaceable.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Contrabang! #13 King of the No-Comma

No-Commas

Last week I wanted to comment on the frequency with which Starts With a Bang! employs a grammatical device we'll call the no-comma. The no-comma starts with the word no, followed by a comma, and then an explanation of how someone is wrong. Fortunately, Ethan gave us two more examples from article titles in just the last week. If we look back over his articles from the past month, the trend becomes apparent.
  • No, The Laws Of Physics Are Not The Same Forwards And Backwards In Time
  • No, Black Holes Will Never Consume The Universe
  • Yes, The Apollo Moon Landings Really Did Happen (this is just a sneaky no-comma)
  • No, Black Holes Don't Suck Everything Into Them
  • No, The Universe Cannot Be A Billion Years Younger Than We Think
  • No, This Is Not A Hole In The Universe
That's a frequency greater than once per week. Compare that to this contrarian blog. In the past year, only a single instance of the no-comma appears, in No, Mr. President... which was only intended to satirize another article. There is something childish, even bratty, about the no-comma. My five-year-old uses it constantly, always searching for ways that the adults are wrong and she's right. It's really annoying, but kids normally grow out of that and learn more polite ways to engage in civilized disagreements. Ethan - who has already hinted that he holds grudges for how he was treated in school as a geek - has not outgrown the urge to declare in direct terms that he is right and you are wrong. It's the same reason he's a Category 5 Clinger to the scientific consensus opinions: an overwhelming desire to be the one who is right, and, similarly, an aversion to any risk of being wrong.

Ask Ethan: Why Do Gravitational Waves Travel Exactly At The Speed Of Light? (link)

General Relativity has nothing to do with light or electromagnetism at all. So how to gravitational waves know to travel at the speed of light?
It's a good question. As we've learned, Ethan does not shy away from difficult questions, but then fails to give them satisfactory answers. In this case, he begins by explaining the source of c, the speed of light in a vacuum.
There are two constants of nature that show up in Maxwell’s equations:
  • ε_0, the permittivity of free space, which is the fundamental constant describing the electric force between two electric charges in a vacuum.
  • μ_0, the permeability of free space, which you can think of as the constant that defines the magnetic force produced by two parallel conducting wires in a vacuum with a constant current running through them.
When you calculate the properties of the electromagnetic radiation produced, it behaves as a wave whose propagation speed equals (ε_0 · μ_0)^(-1/2), which just happens to equal the speed of light.
Thus, the speed of light is not truly a fundamental constant, but can be calculated so long as a couple other constants regarding electric and magnetic properties of the universe are known.

After a bunch of chatter, he gets to the one sentence in the 3,000-word essay that actually addresses the question.
Gravitational waves, like any form of radiation, have zero rest mass and yet have finite energies and momenta, meaning that they have no option: they must always move at the speed of light.
That is not an answer; it just an assumption. The speed of electromagnetic radiation is determined by applying Maxwell's equations of electromagnetic fundamentals. The speed of alleged gravitational radiation is determined by a shrug of the shoulders.

It is not at all obvious why gravitational wave speed should be determined by vacuum permittivity and permeability. That would seem to imply that gravity is actually an electromagnetic phenomenon. [Interestingly, some people in the Electric Universe camp suggest just that!] The article ends by describing some experimental evidence that supposedly confirms the theory that gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light. The major problem with that is...there is no theory.

This Is How Mastering Dark Matter Could Take Us To The Stars (link)

In this piece of science fiction he really outdoes himself.
Even though we have yet to directly detect it, and even though we aren’t sure exactly what its true properties are, dark matter holds a tremendous promise for the future of humanity. Ubiquitously located all throughout the galaxy and far beyond, dark matter could be the perfect fuel that makes our interstellar dreams come true.
Yes, one day this mythical particle, which we can't detect and is theorized to not react with normal matter in any way besides through gravitation, will solve all the major technical limitations of interstellar travel. Also, they say it cures warts.
But dark matter offers a tremendous advantage over normal matter in this regard. Why? Because you don’t have to do anything special to collect it.
He actually said that the same matter they've not been able to observe or produce in a lab or even provide a working theory for what it may be, requires nothing special to collect.
There are a multitude of experiments looking for the collisions of dark matter with both normal matter and itself.
Yes, and they all fail. (The Supicious0bservers newscast provides routine updates on these experiments.)
If you can collect two dark matter particles and make them interact with one another, there’s a finite probability that they’ll annihilate. When an annihilation occurs, they’ll produce pure energy in a 100% efficient fashion: via Einstein’s E = mc². In other words, if we understand dark matter correctly, there’s a free, unlimited source of energy everywhere humanity dreams of going.
A finite probability as opposed to, what, an infinite probability? He's suggesting that there aren't just dark-matter particles, but anti-dark-matter particles as well, and they also float in diffuse halos around galaxies in whatever places are necessary to make the gravitational equations work. Also, they haven't already annihilated each other yet. It doesn't matter why, because dark matter and anti-dark-matter are magical and just do whatever we need them to do.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Bitchute Grab Bag

The USA, China, and the Thucydides Trap

An interesting livestream by Vox Day on the rise of China and simultaneous decline of the US. It's an hour long, but I usually set the playback speed to 1.25X for Vox, since he talks slow.

Global Volcanic Feedback Loop Now Causing Unusual Cold Temperatures

A 20-minute video from Adapt2030 covering the recent flurry of volcanic activity seen globally in concurrence with some record cold temperatures being set in various places. Increased volcanic activity is something that has been predicted by the space weather and Grand Solar Minimum people as a consequence of solar cycles and Earth's weakening magnetic field. They believe, based on historical evidence, that volcanic activity increases during grand solar minima, and that atmospheric ash - ejected all the way into the stratosphere - is the biggest contributor to the lower temperatures of those periods.

AOC Calls Pelosi Racist

Back in March, I offered AOC the following advice:
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.
As David Knight reports, she has done just that, by suggesting that Pelosi is prejudiced against women of color. The predictions we've always made about white liberals are starting to be realized. We've said that the primary method the Democrats use to gain power is to import nonwhite foreigners and promise to give them wealth taken from whites, in exchange for votes. We've also said that the model would eventually fail for white liberals, as the Democratic party would simply become an ethnic voting bloc with no tolerance for white masters.

Interestingly, the president has publicly defended Pelosi, telling reporters that she is not a racist and that AOC's comments were quite disrespectful. It's true, but those comments coming from Trump will only erode Pelosi's position. The Democrats have been brainwashed by the media that Trump is literally Hitler except worse. Thus, by siding with Pelosi, he subtly reinforces AOC's claims against Pelosi. Trump is playing his hand very well. The media have given Trump one superpower by making him into a Satanesque figure: he can make the liberals hate anything he wants, simply by saying he likes it. He's now exercising the power that they gave to him.

The likely outcome is that Trump sees his opposition fractured, AOC gains additional clout in the anti-white party, and Pelosi becomes the first high-ranking white liberal to be eaten alive by the monster that she helped create.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

140 Reasons Not to Vote Republican

The thing about most extremists is that, if you don't cuddle up to their particular form of zealotry, they automatically assume that you are the polar opposite of whatever they are. I saw this during the election, when I still participated in mainstream social media. Anytime I made any argument about CNN being politically biased, the retort was always, "b-b-b-but muh Fox News!" If you're not on the one team, you must be on the other. Where I grew up, you were either a Cubs fan or you were a Cardinals fan. Every now and again some smartass would say something ridiculous, like they were a White Sox fan... but no one ever took those types seriously.

And so, the arena sports mentality of team loyalty is also a defining feature of our political discourse. I'm actually not the biggest Fox News fan. It is still corporate-run Big Media. It is the home of the news bimbo, and of overly dramatic special effects. While I appreciate their dedication to aesthetics, it's hard to take such an organization seriously as a purveyor of objective truth. (Studies have shown that men are less capable of absorbing information when delivered by beautiful women, which my own independent studies have also confirmed to be true.) Fox News is not all that conservative, either. Not by my book, of course, but not by anyone's book. Sheppard Smith is every bit the flaming anti-Trumper that Anderson Cooper is, and the OG anti-Trumper - Megyn Kelly - was a Fox News host before she got too big for her britches. There are some redeeming characters, like Tucker Carlson - the closest we'll probably get to a nationalist on mainstream TV - and Maria Bartiromo - who provided excellent coverage of FISAgate. Still, overall, Fox News isn't really my thing, I don't watch it, and I'm certainly not indirectly defending Fox News anytime I criticize CNN.

Similarly, some people that I know have said they can't believe I ended up becoming a Republican. Well, they can trust their lack of belief, because I'm not. Enthusiastic support for Trump does not equate to party loyalty. I also enthusiastically voted for Ron Paul, but did not vote for either McCain or Romney. The corporate/deep-state Republicans are hardly any more palatable than their Democrat counterparts. The major highlights of the Bush II presidential legacy were the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, Wall Street bailouts, and wonton imperialism. With conservatives like that, who needs liberals? 

Today, the Republicans have given us more reason to reinforce any belief that they are not deserving of our loyalty. Not because they aren't better than Democrats - they are - but because they still can't be depended on to do the right thing. The House of Representatives voted to extend green cards to an additional 300,000 Indian contractors, plus 300,000 of their family members, plus an extra 75,000 to be awarded each year. The House voted that the middle and working classes, who were finally starting to beat the scourge of stagnant wages and eternal debt plaguing them since the 1970s, should remain destitute. Both parties voted for the measure. The Democrats voted that middle and lower-class incomes should continue to fall relative to the very rich. The Republicans voted that economic arguments always outweigh all others; that corporate profits are more important than American families or national cohesion. 140 out of 197 Republicans (71%) voted yay, as did 224 out of 232 Democrats (97%). Oh look, the Republicans are somewhat less evil and less hypocritical than the Democrats...which is all we ever said they were.

Appeals Court Upholds Ruling Against Trump Twiitter

In May of last year, I commented on a ruling made by a federal court out of the Southern District of New York that decreed that Donald Trump was not allowed to block anyone on Twitter.
While I incorrectly predicted the outcome of the initial case, I have to stick by that inclination. I don't see how this ruling stands.
Wrong again! A federal appeals court has actually upheld the ruling. At this point, unless the case is picked up by the Supreme Court, it will stand as the official legal opinion of the federal courts. Terrible news? If you held out hope that our legal system was a rational system, and above making petty political rulings, then yes, it's bad news. But overall, this is a good ruling for us, as it causes some serious headaches for Twitter and other politicians on the platform.

Following the ruling, two Twitter users who were blocked by AOC filed suit against her in the Eastern District of New York - which happens to also fall under the jurisdiction of the appeals court that upheld the Trump ruling. It would seem that the court would have to follow suit, and rule that her account (even her personal account) is a public forum from which no Americans may be excluded. That, or they will have to come with even more contorted logic to explain how the president's Twitter account is a public place, but a US Representatives' is not. The onus is now on the federal courts to decide whether the ruling applies to all elected officials, or if the decree is merely that special rules apply to Trump only.

This is going to make things interesting for other politicians. Despite all claims, Trump wasn't blocking anyone - even political opponents - from engaging in rational debate. Those blocked were the ones being verbally abusive, obstinate, and inflammatory. They were not having a discussion, they were hurling abuse at the president to gain status points from their ideologues. They were not engaging in the kind of discourse vital to democratic health that the courts pretend they were. They were doing quite the opposite.

So the ruling would seem to state that "all elected officials must be subjected to all forms of degrading abuse on their personal Twitter accounts." That makes Twitter vastly less appealing. It degrades the platform of our enemy, which is great. However, we know what the response will be. Twitter will simply ban anyone berating liberal officials while permitting anything directed at conservatives short of death threats. It's the same selective enforcement that already occurs, except that now there is a legal precedent to be allowed access. All conservatives banned by Twitter will be positioned to enter a class-action lawsuit against Twitter for blocking their access to a federally-protected public space. (I'm tempted to create a Twitter account just to get banned, so that I can jump on.) It should be trivial for any lawyer to show that many conservatives were banned with no evidence given that they violated the terms of the user agreement.

The benefit of all this is that it puts more pressure on the establishment institutions that it does on us. The courts have to engage in a public spectacle of rationalization. Twitter must expend great energy in regulating all this, while at the same time their appeal to public officials is greatly diminished. And liberal officials may now be subjected to the same abuses they encouraged to be lobbied against Trump. All in all, we have a lot of reasons to hope that this ruling stands.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Groups of Teenagers

We learned during the Covington Catholic affair that, if a group of mostly white teenagers are involved in some altercation, even if they were not at fault, the media will put the entire white race on full blast, invoking blatantly racist terminology such as white privilege, an implication that whites have some unspecified but unfair advantage in life, and must be given a handicap. Here are just a few snippets from the flood of mainstream commentary which identified the boys who had allegedly committed a hate crime.
  • "Dozens of mostly white teenage boys" - The Daily Beast
  • Salon spoke of the boys' "White victimology, white privilege"
  • The Atlantic said the boys were "nearly all white"
  • The Washington Post described them as "white, MAGA-wearing schoolboys"
  • CNN described them as "mostly white"
  • The New York Times described them as a taunting "group of white teenagers"
On the other hand, when there is an epidemic of violent, anti-social behavior by non-white teenagers, even when the video and photographic evidence makes clear the crimes and the perpetrators, the media absolutely refuse to specify the race, instead using generic terms to describe them, just as "teenagers" and "youth." Here are a few examples currently or very recently in the news.
  • When 60 black teenagers ran amok and looted a Philly Walgreens "group of teenagers (CBSABCBreitbart)
  • When Chico police arrested a group of black teenagers causing trouble at a city park. (local CBS & NBC affiliate)
  • When one adult and four underage Hispanics shot randomly at cars (2News)
  • When black thieves ran rampant in the Seattle area (KIRO7)
  • When blacks stole $30,000 in merchandise from a North Face outlet (Insider)
  • When black teens were beating random strangers on the street (DailyMail)
Not included are numerous recent examples from Europe, where everyone inherently knows who is being referred to, but all photographic evidence, and even the names of adults who may have been arrested along with the legally protected minors, are kept hidden from the public. As a rule of thumb, if the media reports on some miscreant behavior by teenagers or youths, and does not somehow identify them as being white, it can be assumed that they are not. The mainstream media reports on incidents differently depending on the race of the culprits, because they are racist.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Morning Grab Bag

Just rounding up a few things not worthy of their own posts.

Buttigieg Taking the Lead?

Nearly 3 months ago, in Social Gospel Movement, I predicted Buttigieg as the eventual Democratic nominee.
This Buttgay fellow is a similar deal. A gay progressive Christian! The left will simply adore this open mockery of the Christian faith. He's just the kind of degeneracy the left is looking for. And, the first gay president beating Literally Hitler...it's a story arc that's hard to resist. [My prediction, at this point, is Buttgay wins the Dem nomination, but loses in the general because blacks and Latinos are not going to turn out strongly for a homosexual.]
I've not retracted that prediction, nor offered a replacement. Today, Styx reports that Buttigieg raised more money in Q2 than the other Democrat candidates, including Biden. He is becoming the corporate-preferred candidate and, as we learned a couple years ago, the establishment always wins in Democrat primaries. Progressives, to their credit, have only shown lukewarm support for Sellout Sanders. They seem to realize - although they'll rarely admit it in conversation with a Trump supporter - that he shilled out to the corrupt, establishment candidate because of a media propaganda narrative that Trump was literally Hitler except way worse.

Riots in Israel

World Israel News reports on widescale rioting in Israel after police there inadvertently executed an Ethiopian Jew when a warning shot fired into the ground ricocheted and killed a suspect. This is after months of friction between Ethiopian Jews and Israeli police, as we reported on in February in Canines in the News.

In regards to the revolt against the Israeli state by Ethiopians, I can offer them only one piece of advice: diversity is Israel's strength. I would advise that they tear down their border walls (which are racist) and build bridges instead. It's time for the ruling Ashkenazi Jews to acknowledge their white privilege and cease their racist, anti-Semitic behaviors towards Ethiopian Jews. 😂

It would be easier to evoke some sympathy if Jews would spend some more time in maintaining internal security in their own nation-state and less in destroying ours.

Tommy Robinson Begs for Asylum

Tommy Robinson, who just received what may amount to a death sentence for exercising what in American would be called his Freedom of the Press, has begged for asylum in the United States. As Vox Day points out, Tommy has never referred to himself as an American patriot or nationalist, but has called himself a Zionist. Perhaps he should instead ask for asylum in Israel. 

Epstein Arrested

Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested in New York after a police raid on his Manhattan home. The media and Wikipedia have been working to suppress all record of Epstein's involvements with the Clinton cabal and instead associate him with Trump. This is the closest we've come yet to seeing some actual swamp drainage. It has long been alleged that Epstein is at the center of a vast blackmail ring that keeps various factions of the ruling elites bound together. While the actual evidence collected in the raid will likely not see the light of day - because by nature it is pornographic - it may be an effort by white hats to break up the corrupt ruling cabal. On the other hand, details are skant about who actually is running the operation here. We've lost trust in both the DOJ and New York state prosecutors. It could actually be an effort by black hats to secure the damning evidence to protect the cabal.

Monday, July 8, 2019

Theories of Defeat

The first job offer I accepted out of college was from Ridgecrest, California. I visited China Lake - the naval base there, did some interviews, and got a job offer. Ultimately, I retracted my acceptance to remain in Missouri, but my ears still perk up when I hear something about the area, and I often wonder if I should have taken the job. (I surely wouldn't be able to write with the candor that I do today on this blog.) Further, one of my favorite websites, Science Against Evolution, is written by a China Lake veteran out of Ridgecrest.

Last week, Ridgecrest was hit with a 6.4 earthquake, the largest in SoCal in over 20 years. Interestingly, just that morning Suspicious0bservers had put out an earthquake alert for the west coast. The next morning, proprietor Ben Davidson cautioned that there was no reason to believe that seismic pressure had been adequately relieved and to expect more activity in the area - which was shortly followed by an even stronger 7.1 earthquake. To the second prediction, he wasn't entirely accurate. His comment was that there was no reason to believe that the slipping fault near Ridgecrest, which runs primarily east-west, would relieve pressure on the much larger San Andreas fault, which runs north-south. If so, then the situation has not changed, and California is still at risk for activity on its major fault line.

How was Suspicious0bservers able to make its successful predictions? They have two theories. First is the belief that cosmic electrical activity affects earth's weather and tectonic systems. They believe that a combination of two events - (1) the weak solar output of the sun at the low-point of an already weak solar cycle, and (2) Earth's weakening and shifting magnetic field - will have the following effects:
  • increased cloud cover
  • cooler temperatures
  • weakened jet streams, leading to more chaotic weather
  • increased seismic activity
  • increased volcanic activity, to the point of even further lowering Earth temperatures
  • stronger electric storms
  • a shift towards climate patterns more similar to what was seen several hundred years ago in the Maunder minimum
The second theory was that the elevated snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which compressed the plates under its weight, has melted, leaving room for rebound movement which might trigger earthquakes. That is why they were able to focus on the US west coast as a place of exceptional risk, even though their primary theories for "space weather" have a more global impact.

Compare the success of the unorthodox space weather promoters to the hyper-establishment doctrine of global warming. Global warming has failed as a theory. How do we know? Because they changed the name! Global warming theory had some supporting evidence, but lots of contradictory evidence. For example, global warming does not predict global cooling. Global warming predicts warming. The recent heat wave in France was taken as evidence of global warming. However, cold snaps like the record-breaking arctic blasts that hit the the interior US last winter must either be ignored, or imagined to have been caused by warming. In reality, there was very little localized cooling predicted by global warming. They did predict that the melting Greenland glaciers would expel so much frigid water that it would disrupt the Gulf Stream current and turn Europe into a snowball. They certainly didn't predict that Greenland glaciers would actually be growing!

When they renamed Global Warming into Climate Change, it was an admission of defeat. It was an admission that results had not matched predictions, and amounted to a re-branding to stay relevant. It was a poor re-branding at that, as no one besides Bill Nye ever expected the climate to be static, so now they're shifting to Climate Chaos as the new slogan. Climate chaos is a more fitting term. The climate is becoming more chaotic. Record cold, record heat, record floods...it would be a tough chore to argue against climate chaos right now. But what have they changed? Only the name! Nothing has actually changed in the theory, at all. It's the same proposed process: human-produced CO2 causes a slight increase in temperature, which causes the atmosphere to absorb more of the biggest greenhouse gas (water vapor), which causes more warming, which causes more vapor, thus more warming, etc. The theory is still that the Earth is just a big water-powered heat bomb waiting to explode, and humans are lighting the fuse on it. When observations don't match a theory's predictions, there are two ways to go about it. Change the theory, or keep the same theory but change the things it predicted. Climate alarmists have done the latter by keeping the same theory but changing the name.

There has been a similar re-branding in evolution. Under Darwinism, there was supposed to be slow, gradual change that led eventually to new species. This hasn't actually been observed. Now, if you were to debate an evolutionist on the subject, they'd probably claim you were wrong and the slow gradual rate of change is exactly what the record shows. Fortunately, you don't have to engage on that particular thorny subject, just refer them to renowned evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionist who developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium to account for the lack of gradual change in the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium is an admission that the fossil record is not as predicted. Even more, punctuated equilibrium should imply that evolution can be seen relatively quickly if strong artificial selective pressure was applied to a species (such as is done in horticulture and animal husbandry). And yet, we've never seen a new trait evolve, never seen a new gene or chromosome evolve, and certainly never seen a new species evolve. Punctuated equilibrium is proof that the theory of evolution is broken.

Finally, in astrophysics, the theories of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, etc, all should be taken as admissions that the theories are broken. "There's magical voodoo that can't be observed" is hardly a scientific theory. It's likely that similar Theories of Defeat exists in many other domains as well, so long as you know to look for them.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Contrabang! Bye Week

After last week's two-for-one deal of Contrabang!, we now are treated to something of a bye week. For the most part, Starts With a Bang! did not delve into the subjects with which we take issue. Most articles seemed to be reasonable, as best as I can tell. The closest it came was in Meet the Largest X-Ray Jet in the Universe, which described the jet as being powered by a supermassive blackhole. However, we covered that topic pretty heavily last week, so there's little need to revisit it now.

To offset this week's science deficit, I'll try to work in an evolution post. I've been sitting on a couple for a while now.

Friday, July 5, 2019

How do you feel about your verdict?

The words of this title - How do you feel about your verdict? - are enough to get you imprisoned in the tyrannical nation of Great Britain. According to Ezra Levant of Rebel Media, the utterance of those words to convicted Pakistani child gang rapists outside of a courthouse was one of three reasons given for Tommy Robinson's re-conviction today of "breaching the peace" and of contempt of court for violating a "reporting restriction." In England there is no freedom of the press; all facts must come via sources approved by Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service. [As of yet, there has been no statement of condemnation against the outlandish ruling issued from Elizabeth II - the worst monarch of all history - nor will there be one.] In true irony, Robinson faced much more intrusive haranguing from BBC and other approved journalists outside the courthouse of his own hearings.

It has been reported that the court heard from a former police officer that the British government had effectively banned all investigations into Pakistani rape gangs, informing police stations that the girls were fully aware of the sexual reality of the world they were entering. It can't be repeated enough: in England, foreigners who operate child prostitution rings are permitted to operate, while citizen activists who cover a rare instance of actual prosecution for the crimes are imprisoned.

There are several reasons the government might behave this way, none of which are mutually exclusive. Most obvious, the government is trying to save face. They don't want the reality, that the British government has eagerly imported the foreigners who are now turning British children into sex slaves, getting too much publicity. In a sense, Robinson really is breaching the peace, because there is a fear that if the British people really knew what was going on in their country, they would revolt against the government. That fear is largely unfounded, though. Where are the riots now that it was revealed the government was actively suppressing investigation of child rapists? There are none, and anyone with a rational mind suspected that was happening already. The British people are not going to revolt; they will meekly accept their fate as a captive nation. I suspect that the British government is not only wasting its time by prosecuting Robinson's unauthorized journalism, because nothing will happen anyway, but they risk making him a martyr for the increasingly disenchanted populace to rally around. That is, they are more likely to bring about the result they fear most (popular revolt) by making a big public spectacle of their miscarriage of justice than they would if they just let Tommy continue reporting to the small portion of the British population who will listen. They are, it seems, attempting to rule by fear, discouraging any future rogue reporters from piping up.

A second reason for the government to be more concerned with guerrilla journalism than the organized sexual exploitation of minors is that the upper branches of British government have a history of pedophilia scandals going back to the 1960s. It may simply be that the old cliche of "foreigners are doing the jobs that the whites won't" is proven true again. The Paki gangs supply children to the perverts in Parliament, and are granted semi-official immunity in return.

The reasons grow even more grim from there. It may simply be a milestone of the transition of England from a free, Christian nation to one enslaved by Sharia Law. And it may be that the government of Great Britain hates its own people and works singularly towards the goal of seeing the citizenry enslaved. Call it a wild-eyed theory, but there is really no evidence to counter it, only evidence to confirm it, such as what was seen today.

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Contrabang! #12 Two-For-One Deal

This edition will be the largest one yet, as it encompasses the entire latter half of June because I fell behind while on vacation. As usual, it will be divided up into a section for each Starts With a Bang! article that was deemed to justify some scrutiny.

Ask Ethan: What’s The Real Story Behind This Dark Matter-Free Galaxy? (link)

I read a study that said the mystery of a galaxy with no dark matter has been solved. But I thought that this anomalous galaxy was previously touted as evidence FOR dark matter? What’s really going on here, Ethan?
He begins by explaining how astronomers determine the mass of a galaxy. There are two approaches. One is to analyze all the observable light from the galaxy to approximate the mass. Another is to analyze the relative motions of components within the galaxy.  Presumably, the two approaches should yield similar results.
In most galaxies, the two values for the measured/inferred matter content differ by about a factor of 5-to-6, indicating the presence of substantial amounts of dark matter. But some galaxies are special.
Think of other realms where there are two methods of measuring something. For instance, the police have a couple different ways of determining how fast a vehicle is moving. From the air, they can use markers on the highway, a known distance apart, to determine the speed by measuring the time it takes to travel from one to the next. Or, more commonly, they use a doppler radar from a cruiser. If using the two techniques resulted in wildly different measurements - by a factor of 5-to-6 - we'd assume that at least one of the approaches was faulty. Because the aerial approach is so simple, we look first towards the doppler approach as the likely source of the discrepancy. In astrophysics, no such assumptions are made. It is assumed that their theoretical understanding of the universe is sound, thus they invent enormous dark clouds of theoretical exotic matter to explain away the difference.

He goes on to explain that, in 2008, a team from Yale discovered a small galaxy whose measurements indicated a lack of dark matter - which was taken by some as proof of the existence of dark matter. Later that year, another team found a measurement twice that of the Yale team - contradicting their results. The Yale team them used another approach that confirmed their original findings. Now, a team from Spain has found that the galaxy in not 64 million light years distant, as previously believed, but 42 million light years away, changing the analysis to indicate a dark-matter ratio of around 50%.

All in all, we get a situation of shifting sands, where the conclusion of whether the galaxy has dark matter or not varies almost monthly, and the question of which result would actually support Dark Matter Theory seems to vary depending on who is being asked and what the current result appears to be. The Spanish team thinks a dark-matter-free galaxy refutes Dark Matter Theory; Ethan thinks it proves it.
The one takeaway, if you learn nothing else, is this: this new result resolves nothing. Stay tuned, because more and better data is coming. These galaxies are likely extremely low in dark matter, and possibly entirely free of dark matter. [...] The discovery of a dark matter-free galaxy, if that result holds up, is an extremely strong piece of evidence for a dark matter-rich Universe.
Ethan, perhaps becoming a skeptic himself, suggests that the current results can't really be trusted. He is correct. Unfortunately, his motivation is to hold out for the particular results he desires. But, it's one step closer to realizing that the vast inconsistencies coming out of experimental data arise because their basic assumptions are invalid.

How Did This Black Hole Get So Big So Fast? (link)

It’s not impossible according to physics, but we truly don’t know how this object came to exist.
Other things not impossible according to physics: unicorns, alchemy, and leprechauns. Calling something "not physically impossible" does not make it realistic. In this article, Ethan grapples with a recently discovered galaxy, dated (with redshift theory, of course) to be improbably old in light of the Big Bang Theory model of galactic formation.
It has a mass of 800 million Suns, an exceedingly high figure for such early times. Even if black holes formed from the very first stars, they’d have to accrete matter and grow at the maximum rate possible — the Eddington limit — to reach this size so rapidly.
Finding such a galaxy at the theoretical limit is something like a Major League baseball player batting a thousand for a season. Sure, it's technically possible, but no one actually believes it to be realistic. How does Ethan handle this contradictory evidence?
Is this problematic for cosmology? More data will eventually decide.
This is how so-called scientists with pre-conceived conclusions handle evidence. If it supports their theory, they call it "proof" of the theory. Otherwise, they just wait for different evidence.

This Is What Will Happen To Our Sun After It Dies (link)

In this one, he catalogs all the ways different ways that our sun might meet its inevitable fate. This is all based on a theory of stellar evolution of which there is no direct evidence. Many different star types are observed; it is assumed that a star transitions though different states and then dies. This is all based on the assumption that stars are fueled by internal fusion processes, which is not a confirmed theory. In fact, nearly all the observable features of our own sun would seem to refute the theory.

What we see here are the psychological maladies that plague these people. That existence is futile. That there is only a material existence. That they must cling on to the least-worst theory, rather than admit that most things are still a mystery to we humble humans. This is not the first time Ethan has delved into the stellar demise subject since Contrabang! began running about three months ago. Why does he revisit the subject? Is this hyper morbidity? I don't think so. I'd suspect he realizes that there is something awry in his worldview that life is random and meaningless, which is why he finds himself re-examining the most despairing conclusions.

No, The Universe Cannot Be A Billion Years Younger Than We Think (link)

One of the most surprising and interesting discoveries of the 21st century is the fact that different methods of measuring the expansion rate of the Universe yield different, inconsistent answers.
We've already ridiculed Ethan before for insisting that both techniques, which give different estimates for the age of the universe, can be correct. Here, he goes into more detail. The gist of it is that, if we scale the ratio of dark matter to dark energy in the universe just right, then we'll find that both approaches actually yield a similar number, around 13.8 billion years. This is just the kind of answer we'd suspect. As usual, dark matter and dark energy are the magical fudge factors that make all apparent discrepancies go away. Just stick generous amounts of the undetectable, hypothetical forms of matter in the right places. Here, Ethan has actually managed to combine the both, in a sort of two-for-one deal for galactic fudge factors.

He continued on with the subject a few days later in Ask Ethan: What Could Solve The Cosmic Controversy Over The Expanding Universe? where he reviewed some other exotic solutions that scientists are proposed for the problem of the universal age discrepancy. In that article he concludes with,
It’s time to seriously consider the fantastic: maybe this really is an omen that there’s more to the Universe than we presently realize.
Typically, the word omen holds a religious connotation, which makes it especially fitting. Also, "there's more to the Universe than we presently realize" is another way of saying "we don't actually understand the Universe all that well." Which is true.

No, Black Holes Don’t Suck Everything Into Them (link)

[The extreme mass of black holes] has led to a picture that most of us have in our heads about black holes that’s prevalent but incorrect: one where black holes suck all the matter from outside their event horizons into them. We think of black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners, consuming everything that dares to approach their vicinity. Even though NASA itself has released videos illustrating this effect, it’s a complete falsehood. Black holes don’t suck, after all.
This is true, and it's good for him to set his readers straight on the subject. The way to think of a black hole is not like a drain in a bathtub, sucking everything nearby into the abyss. There's no reason for a black hole to act any differently than any other massive object. The sun, which is supermassive in regards to our solar system, does not suck our planet towards a fiery death. We orbit the sun, and it orbits the galactic center.
If you’ve ever seen Cookie Monster get his hands on cookies, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Sure, every cookie in the nearby vicinity will find its way into the area near Cookie Monster’s mouth. The cookies get funneled inside towards it. But the overwhelming majority of the cookie matter that approaches the mouth of Cookie Monster won’t wind up getting devoured; instead, it gets spit out in all directions, having been accelerated by a variety of chaotic forces. If you’ve had a child (or been one) since the 1970s, you’ve probably seen it in action for yourself.
This has to be one of the stupidest analogies I have ever read, and is not worthy of any further consideration.

He then goes on to give an explanation for the vast jets of x-ray emitting particles that are often expelled by galaxies and were never predicted by general relativity. Gas particles are accelerated by the gravitational field to such high temperatures that they disassociate into ions and electrons. The rotating charges set up an enormous magnetic field, which tends to propel particles in a perpendicular direction. This is similar to the Electric Universe theory for galactic dynamics, only the magnetic field is established from internal dynamics rather than external forces. However, the are problems with this formulation.
  • How are the gases so heated? The whole point of this article is that black holes don't suck in material, yet he then refers back to the standard depiction of black holes "feeding" off accretion disks. The reason people mistakenly believe that black holes "suck" in material is because that's exactly what the accretion disc theory he believes in says they do.
  • If the particles disassociate into complementary ions and electrons, how is a magnetic field generated? Since there will be a positive charge for each negative, they should all cancel each other out.
  • Why do particles ejected remain at x-ray emission levels for hundreds of thousands of light years?
Ethan has run into a paradox. No, black holes don't suck in matter like a vacuum. But scientists must act like they do for their models of accretion disks - credited for everything from black hole x-ray emissions to Type I-A supernovae - to function.

This Is Why Every Galaxy Doesn’t Have The Same Amount Of Dark Matter (link)

The actual reason that every galaxy doesn't have the same amount of dark matter is that dark matter is a fudge factor for an incorrect model of galactic dynamics. If all galaxies required the same ratio of dark matter to normal matter, it would imply that the models were basically correct, save for perhaps some constant or scaling factor. Because the models are wrong, each galaxy requires its own unique fix. The same would be true for any hare-brained scheme. Perhaps you believed that the speed of a car is determined by the amount of fuel in the tank. You might test your theory by observing cars on various roadways using a police radar and a camera with a telephoto lens to view the gas gauge. You'd find that the observations don't appear to match expectations, but if you assign "dark fuel" as needed, you can make the formula work. The amount of dark fuel for a given car would depend on its circumstances. A car traveling very fast while running on E would require a tremendous amount of dark fuel to fit into the the model; a car with a full tank crawling along in a traffic jam would require none. Then, for any observed car, you simply add the required amount of dark fuel, and proclaim that its velocity was, in fact, predicted by your Fuel-Velocity Theory.

Before we get into the article, it is probably worthwhile to re-examine why dark matter was invented. In our solar system, the orbits of the planets comply with Newtonian physics. The inner planets move very fast compared to the outer planets, as seen here. [Best played at 2X speed, and keep in mind it looks funny because the distances aren't proportional. Saturn is actually twice the distance from the Sun as Jupiter is, for example.] In galaxies, however, all bodies rotate at roughly the same speed. This has lead scientists to propose that there must be great amounts of unseen matter - five times the visible matter, and much further out. These are the vast clouds of dark matter that surround galaxies.

Ethan begins,
There are two assumptions that everyone makes about the Universe for extremely good reasons, but they might not necessarily be true. The first is that the laws of physics that govern the Universe are the same everywhere and at all times. The second is that the Universe was born with roughly the same properties everywhere. The full suite of observations that we’ve taken — of stars, galaxies, gas, plasma, dust, and all forms of light — are consistent with these two assumptions being true, but we cannot know for sure.
Actually, that's not true. They dismiss the first assumption as necessary. They say that singularities - such as black holes and the entire pre-Big Bang universe - are places where normal physics breaks down. And they permit dark energy, which allows for violations of the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, and the laws of motion.

He then spends a number of paragraphs building the case that dark matter is not subject to many of the same forces that normal matter is - such as electromagnetism. Thus, it should be expected that normal matter might be ejected from a parent galaxy, while all the great clouds of dark matter more or less stay put. Thus, there should be small galaxies out there, formed from the ejected material, with little or no dark matter.
If you’re clever, [...] you should be able to form galaxies that are either low in dark matter, or contain no dark matter at all.
Well, of course. If you're clever you can also concoct a working model that maps vehicle fuel levels to velocities.
The big question, of course, is where are these galaxies without dark matter? Because they only form in environments that also contain much larger, more massive galaxies, they may not live for very long. The majority of galactic interactions and mergers have already occurred long ago in the Universe’s past, billions of years prior to the present day. As soon as a large galaxy pulls these dark matter-free galaxies back into them, they’ll cease to exist.
Typical. If the galaxies are found, it proves dark matter theory. If not, that's okay, it does not count as evidence against. The article continues by describing how there is surely evidence out there that will be found of galaxies without dark matter. That will be taken as proof that dark matter is real! And if they're not found? Well, then all the galaxies contain dark matter, which is proof that dark matter is real! In all scenarios, the evidence supports dark matter. The real question to ask Ethan is: how could dark matter be disproven?