Saturday, August 31, 2019

Migrants Kill Liberals

Intern, 27, is knifed to death by man who 'targeted her at random' while she was walking a dog in Washington, DC
A 27-year-old woman was fatally stabbed while walking a dog in Washington, DC, in what police say was a random attack. Margery Magill, a California native who was interning the capital for the summer, suffered multiple stab wounds and bled out on the sidewalk just before 9pm on Tuesday  Police say 24-year-old Eliyas Aregahegne randomly targeted Magill as she was walking a dog for a family who hired her through the Rover app.
Random, they say. Heavy reports he was an Ethiopian national. I find no corroboration for that in other media sources, but they'd would likely omit such information for the obvious reasons. He was a University of Wisconsin engineering dropout living in DC, with no family mentioned. His lightly used Twitter account shows that one of his last tweets was a video of Hillary Clinton on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Interestingly, the CNN homepage is not littered with headlines connecting Clinton to the murder, as they did recently after a racially motivated murderer had no documented history of supporting Trump. Can we at least get Kimmel pulled off the air for corrupting the youth?

While it's not explicitly stated, all signs indicate she was a liberal politico as a UC-Davis grad & 27-year-old intern with a "passion for women's empowerment" and foreign travel. According to family, she loved living in the imperial capital.
'She loved the city. She loved the energy. She really wanted to build her career here and thrive off of the energy that was Washington,' Raeann said.
There's a word for the energy that is Washington. It's called evil. But, there's no use in being overly critical of a girl in her 20s for being naive.

Maybe it was a random crime. I don't buy that. I'd speculate that the listless youth with no grounding, no roots, and no family was unhappy with his life and was trained by the corporate media that white people are to blame for all his problems. The victim was random in the sense that the El Paso shooter shot randomly into a Wal-Mart.

There are two influences for this type of reporting. Once is that the media is ideologically programmed to sensationalize crimes committed by whites and attenuate crimes committed against whites. But also, liberals prefer to see random crime. That was one of the insights given to us by The Anonymous Conservative: that r-selected types prefer random predation to selective predation. They fear competitive natural selection because they realize that they are disadvantaged. Random predation serves to neutralize that fitness gap. For example, if I start selectively hunting only the weaker rabbits in my area, then the overall health of the population should improve. However, if I hunt them at random then the weaker rabbits will still continue to reproduce. (Judging by what they do to my garden, I suspect the rabbits in my neighborhood are already quite healthy.)

At any rate, you can see why there will be no great outrage from the liberal media over this murder. They desire for liberals and conservatives alike to be disarmed and subject to the random murderous impulses of discontented foreigners.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Perpetual War Or Doom

Lindsay Graham went on to Fox News to warn against withdrawing from Afghanistan.
There is no substitute for American forces in Afghanistan to protect the American homeland from radical Islam.
This is an admission that America is a failed nation. America can't defend her borders and can't protect her people from terrorist attacks even with numerous warnings from foreign intel. America can't keep out people who want to destroy America. Thus, we must become a vassal state of the Empire of Columbia for our protection.

If we don't remain in Afghanistan after 18 years of occupation, says Graham, then we'll face another terrible attack at the hands of 19 Arabs from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, and Egypt. How long should we stay? Another 18? We know the answer is that NATO forces will remain in Afghanistan as long as possible because it provides a strategic point of force projection between Iran and China. It would be somewhat more palatable if he just stated the geopolitical objectives, but instead he warns of impending doom, because the empire doesn't rule by reason; it rules by lies and fear.

Someone should tell Senator Graham that there is no substitute for border control. 19 terrorists were given six-month visas by the US. It's a lot easier to just not do that, than to occupy landlocked countries on the other side of the globe for decades. There's no substitute for shooting invaders. Does Senate Graham realize that the number of illegal immigrants in the US is roughly equivalent (according to higher estimates) to the entire population of Afghanistan? Does he realize that while he was protecting us from terror training camps in Afghanistan, they were popping up in Arizona?

Monday, August 26, 2019

Lowering The Status Of White Liberals

In regards to the G7 summit, Trump tweeted,
The question I was asked most today by fellow World Leaders, who think the USA is doing so well and is stronger than ever before, happens to be, “Mr. President, why does the American media hate your Country so much? Why are they rooting for it to fail?”
I think the president should tweet less frequently, so that little gems like this get more attention. This is an excellent jab the cuts right to the motives of his adversaries. The primary reason people align with The Cult is that it is seen as powerful and status granting. The ambitious seeking academic tenure, a spot in the corporate boardroom, or Hollywood stardom must declare allegiance continuously. Conversely, those who publicly transgress the orthodoxy - and often those who do so privately - are liable to lose their jobs, be banned from social media, or subjected to a virtual lynch mob by the corporate media.

While many align with The Cult as a box that must be checked off to achieve their goals, the largest status boost comes from normal social acceptance by peers. Who are the peers of white liberals? Other white liberals, of course. Ultimately it is the approval of other, high-status whites that they crave. Even when engaging in outright bashing of whites, they are merely adopting the behavior of high-status whites, similar to how fox hunting was once a big craze for the wanna-be aristocrat. It's the same principle described in Staring At Stone, where Christian-hating progs travel to Europe to post selfies with the David, at the Vatican, etc. One couple I'm acquainted with fervently believe the normal drivel about western civ being the source of all evil, yet vacation every year in the old imperial capitals: Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, London, and Amsterdam all being recent destinations.

Despite Europe being the cradle of all evil, white liberals in America see it as a progressive mecca, a happy place with windmills and carbon taxes where slavery never ever existed. The see the EU as a platform from which liberal virtues can be imposed on a whole continent, and are envious. "We could have such nice things in America," they muse, "if it wasn't full of ignorant rubes." They see themselves as aspiring EU bureaucrats and dream of one day being invited to Davos. To them, the globalist European elite are the highest of the high-status whites they look up to, which is why Trump's tweet hit a nerve. The G7 summit core consists of 6 European heads of state (counting US & Canada), plus Japan, plus EU president Donald Tusk. Trump is using the left's own heroes to depict them as low status for believing the deranged corporate media. If Trump can convince the electorate that he is high status among the European cultural elite, then he will largely neuter the power bloc that opposes him. We should be doing the same in our own marketing, by not treating liberalism as just disagreeable, but as low-status. To defeat the liberals who threaten our world, learn to look down on them and make sure they know it. They hate to be judged, thus derision is a potent weapon we should apply consistently.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Contrabang! #19 The One Where Ethan Doesn't Understand Temperature

Astronomers Find A ‘Cloaked’ Black Hole 500 Million Years Before Any Other (link)

One problem for the Big Bang Theory has been the discovery of supermassive black holes far older than they ought to be.
The first stars should lead to modest black holes: hundreds or thousands of solar masses. But when we see the Universe’s first black holes, they’re already ~1 billion solar masses. The leading idea is black holes form and merge, and then rapidly accrete matter at maximal rates. But those rapidly growing black holes should be invisible, obscured by the dense gas clouds they feed upon. They were, until now. New observations have revealed the earliest “cloaked” black hole ever.
At least we can get some comic relief at the concept of a "cloaked black hole." It's black, but it's bright, but it's cloaked so it's dark.
Its light is 12.95 billion years old: the most distant gas-shrouded, growing black hole ever seen.
This resolves nothing. For one, the newly discovered black hole is younger than the unexpectedly old supermassive black holes. Nor is this an example of a "modest black hole." From the Wikipedia definition for quasar.
A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.
All that has happened in they have found a slightly younger supermassive black hole that still should not exist at that age according to the Big Bang Theory. It is yet more contradictory evidence, yet Ethan proclaims, "We’re one step closer to solving the mystery." How many wrongs will it take to make a right?

Is Energy Conserved When Photons Redshift In Our Expanding Universe? (link)

The question here is about the conservation of energy. The major rebuttal to the whole expanding universe / dark energy theory is that it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Siegel has previously told us that the argument is invalid because it does not apply to the fabric of spacetime.

But another issue arises. When a photon is red-shifted, it has lost energy. The question, then, is where did that energy go? He asserts that the model of an expanding gas is "very, very analogous to what happens in the expanding Universe."
So yes, it’s actually true: as the Universe expands, photons lose energy. But that doesn’t mean energy isn’t conserved; it means that the energy goes into the Universe’s expansion itself, in the form of work.
Ah, but that energy could not go into expanding the universe. We are already told that the expansion of the universe is caused by dark energy, which must be a distinct bucket of energy otherwise the First Law of Thermodynamics is broken.

Fortunately for him, his own analogy is bad and thus we can't use it to disprove dark energy. Temperature and wavelength are not analogous properties. Temperature is the measure of the average thermal energy of a substance, whereas wavelength is a property of a single photon. A single particle in an expanding gas does not necessarily change velocity, but the measured temperature is lower because there are fewer particles in the same volume. The proper analogy would be to compare to the heat felt when holding your hand near a light bulb. As you pull you hand away, the temperature decreases. Not because the individual photons lost energy, but because there are few photons hitting the constant surface area of your hand. Thus, less average thermal energy.

In addition to the faulty analogy and that it would nullify his own previous argument that dark energy doesn't violate the thermodynamics, there is no mechanism for photons to transform their energy into expansion of the universe. The mechanism is just assumed to exist somehow. That is not physics. Physics requires mechanics. If a teacher asks how a car moves, it is not a satisfactory answer to state, "the laws of thermodynamics are obeyed."

In all, this is perhaps the worst argument we've seen from Siegel yet in this series. Considering that the properties of light are taught in high school physics classes, and the ideal gas law in 7th grade science classes, there is no excuse for such a logical hatchet job. It must mean he is either not that smart, or not trying that hard. I suspect it's more the latter. He is more status-seeking than truth-seeking, thus his effort is spent concocting a plausible explanation to further ingratiate himself with the science establishment. Were he truly truth-seeking, and properly skeptical the way a scientist should be, he'd have realized that the wavelength of a photon is not analogous to the temperature of a gas, and that there is not not mechanism from a photon to exchange energy for universal expansion.

Ask Ethan: Can Black Holes And Dark Matter Interact? (link)

Critiquing the major premise of this one would be a bit like providing a rebuttal to a fairy tale, but I'd like to focus on one recurring claim we've seen in Starts With A Bang!, depicted in this image. He claims that spacetime flows into the singularity of a black hole. We've seen that imaged used several times now, and indirectly critiqued it in Contrabang! #12 Two-For-One Deal because he was claiming that black holes don't suck in matter, but then allowing matter to be sucked in anyway by spacetime flow into the event horizon. In this one, he is even more explicit.
The reason is simple: the fabric of space itself falls towards the central regions faster than the speed of light. Your speed limit is less than the speed at which the space beneath your feet moves, and hence, there’s no escape.
I have not been able to find where the standard science states that spacetime flows into a black hole. I can find where it is claimed to be warped around a black hole, but not sucked into it. The implication is that any body in the universe sucks in spacetime at a rate equal to its escape velocity, which means every particle is ultimately a spacetime sink. Well, that's clearly ridiculous. So why is there an exception made for black holes? Ethan even said that black holes aren't gravitationally special, so where does all this talk of spacetime "moving like a waterfall" come from? Under general relativity, mass is said to distort spacetime, but not cause it to flow like a river.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

The Problems Of The Problems Of Design

Recently, the Zman took on intelligent design in his post, The Problems Of Design. It includes a clear-headed paragraph on an ailment that plagues science.
Another central claim of Intelligent Design is that the natural world is either the result of chance or design. This is the keystone of their theory, as Intelligent Design is not an affirmative argument in favor of a designer. Instead, they frame the debate as between two competing theories. Therefore, if one is shown to be invalid, by default the other must be true. It is a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand to avoid the central problems of Intelligent Design, which of course is that it can never be proven.
Indeed, the is is the same problem that we see in other fields, such as astrophysics, where the least bad theory is held up as the truth, no matter how awful it is. It seems that the advocates are afraid that admitting the reigning theory is a failure equates to endorsing some lesser theory. It becomes a zero-sum game of truth, where collectively we cannot admit that much of the universe remains mysterious to humans.

Ironically, Z himself falls prey to the same mindset he opposes by defending standard evolution in his critique of intelligent design. (And doing so quite poorly, at that.)
That’s the case with evolutionary biology. Random mutations in the genome are one aspect of the evolutionary process. Environment obviously plays a role here.  Sexual selection is another. Human intervention is another. After all, people have killed off whole species. People have killed off whole groups of people. Like the sportsball game, there are multiple actors, acting and reacting, within a set of rules that science does not fully understand. Evolution is not an argument in favor of chance.
While normally very intelligent and insightful, he seems not to understand how evolution works. Evolution is an argument in favor of chance. That's the whole religion! For all his cogent analyses of the ailments of modern society, he has not yet realized, as we do, that materialism is a disease that infects all aspect of society, including science. Fortunately, he does not necessarily need to understand the fundamentals of evolution to make his point, as he admits.
Even if everything about evolutionary biology is wrong, it does not make Intelligent Design true. It simply means we have no good answer understanding the natural world.
Taking that into consideration with another quote...
This is why ID’er focus all of their energy on the negative argument, making various claims about evolutionary science. That way, the discussion is always on the science, rather than the theology.
seems to imply that Z thinks equates logical arguments against evolution as intelligent design advocacy. It's what drove Vox Day to issue a rebuttal, Statistical analysis is not Intelligent Design. Z concludes his article,
From a mainstream Christian perspective, Intelligent Design has some serious theological problems, with occasionalism being the main one. The one way to solve the theological problems is to move the designer back to the beginning, where the Bible writers preferred to place him. The classic watchmaker model, where God sets the universe in motion, according to a fixed set of rules, with evolution possibly being one of them. That leaves room to debate evolution, but does not make God a villain.
Throughout the piece, he did not adequately make the case that Christianity and occasionalism are at odds. As I recall from my Christian upbringing, the Bible routinely depicts God intervening in human affairs. Why else pray if it does not compel positive changes? Nor did he make a solid case that intelligent design is occasionalism. It merely implies that some intelligence exists that has guided evolution, as it could not have happened by natural selection. He gave a cartoonish depiction of ID conclusions in an earlier paragraph.
Intelligent Design is occasionalism. While the natural world seems to operate along a set of knowable rules, God often intervenes to change results. He is always in that space between cause and effect, ready to alter the relationship according to his design. God created the platypus for reasons only known to God. If he chooses, he can make the Nile flow south or the sky turn pink. The proof of this, according to Intelligent Design, is the variety of species alive today, as well those no longer in existence.
Take away the occasionalism, and God turning the sky pink or whatever, and you're still left with an organism that could not possibly have evolved by random mutations and natural selection as goes the standard dogma. We still have no evidence of a single species, or chromosome, or gene, or allele, being created by random mutation of the sequence of nucleotides. We have no evidence that intelligence is created from non-intelligence.

He says the one way to solve the problem is to move the designer back to the beginning. That's exactly the problem in Big Bang Theory and the theory for the spontaneous generation of life. It is the "one free miracle" that we have talked about here before. At the conclusion, we finally see the motive for writing is that ID implies that God is (as Z states in the prior paragraph) either a "designer without foresight" or a "fickle trickster." Well, that is certainly "an argument built [...] on a false dichotomy."

While we're on the subject, let's look at the first few lines of the Wikipedia entry for intelligent design.
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, so it is not science.
That is amusing, because that is exactly the argument we make against evolution. When two related species share a trait, it is proof of evolution. When they don't share a trait, it is also proof of evolution. Or when two unrelated species share a trait. Or also when they don't. Because all evidence is interpreted as proof of evolution, no matter what it is, the field effectively offers no testable hypotheses, therefore it is also not a science.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Virtual Asabiya

I've finally begun reading Peter Turchin's War And Peace And War in earnest, which has been strongly recommended by a number of reactionary writers. The major premise of the book - as far as I've gotten - is the concept of asabiya, a word borrowed from Arabic to describe a society's ability to cooperate towards national goals. Subsequently, he alleges that the primary environment for forging asabiya is at civilizational boundaries.

The first historical example given is of the conflict between the Russians and Tatars in the middle ages. The Russians were agricultural, centralized, and deeply Christian. The Tatars were Muslim horse-mounted herders. The boundary between the two was where the forests of eastern Europe gave way to the vast steppe. The Tatars regularly raided hundreds of miles into Russian lands to steal livestock and people, whom they sold off as slaves in the Islamic world. Both sides held great disdain for the other. The Russians saw the Tatars as uncivilized demons, incapable of creating their own wealth. The Tatars looked down on the Russians' dirt-digging as lowly, and thought the men were engaged in women's work. The Tatars were masculine and mobile; the Russians feminine and settled.

After hundreds of years of being constantly raided and having millions sold into brutal slavery, the Russians evolved from a loose federation that couldn't even unite on the battlefield against the Mongols into a centralized system organized to neuter the Tatar's mobility advantage. Moscow garrisoned troops in strategic fortified locations and then used rivers and a vast network of wooden palisade walls to create obstacles for the mounted hordes. The goal wasn't to prevent entry, but to slow the invaders down enough that border troops had enough time to counter. Even more importantly, says Turchin, the Russians developed a willingness to make sacrifices to aid their fellow Orthodox Christians. Ultimately it was that sense of shared destiny and willingness to co-operate that would forge the great Russian empire.

Hundreds of years later, the dynamic between Islam and Christendom remains similar. The west is civilized and effeminate; Islam remains relatively masculine and mobile. Muslims now travel thousands of miles to raid western welfare systems, repatriating much of the wealth to families back home. The only thing that has really changed is that Christendom is no longer Christian. The religious identity that compelled westerners to act together against predation on fellow countrymen has been replaced by a civic identity based on a secular religion that encourages such predation. The Russians solved their Muslim invasion problem with palisade walls and strong border patrols. In America, a wall cannot be built and the border agents are shot at by their own people! Our society is marked by a complete absence of asabiya - an inability to co-operate for mutual aid. To the extent co-operation does occur, it is not to beneficial ends. The last time our country took decisive action against the Muslim world was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not in the name of Christianity, but of the new false religion. We went to spread democracy, which meant to proselytize Equality. However, the Cult of Equality is a false religion, thus its actions constitute a fake asabiya. It was not intended to benefit Americans, but the whole world. We invaded Iraq to save Iraqis. At least, that was story used to gain the co-operation of the American public.

If no asabiya is preferable to fake asabiya, then at least we have that to look forward to, because there seems to be no hope that Americans will ever again co-operate towards mutual goals. The notion that anyone will blindly sacrifice for any arbitrary US citizen is quickly fading. The last holdouts have been the white civic nationalists, but they are losing their clout. Whites can only be told they are the devil so many times. It's hard to imagine what would unite Americans at this point. Traditionally, the government has leveraged some external enemy. Following World War II, the Soviets were the official national bogeymen. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Islamic terrorism became the global threat. Today, it isn't certain what foreign threat could fill the void. The left have already sided with North Korea, Mexico, and China against Trump, and now seem hopeful for an economic depression. It seems that even if foreign armies landed on America's shores tomorrow, half of the country would be praising them as liberators.

In the long run, while this experiment of multiculturalism - the merging of various civilizations under one roof - will destroy asabiya on the large scale, it is likely to increase it within the individual national components. Much of this is thanks to technology. Increasingly, people don't know who their neighbors are, but interact with various online groups. At the same time that forcing different people into close proximity is causing conflicts, the online identities give rise to virtual asabiya. Thus, the civilizational boundary is no longer at the national border, but cuts right through the entire society. As the civic identity fades and the multicultural experiments fail, it may turn out that virtual asabiya ends up a far stronger force than even what united the great nations of the past.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Justin From Canada Buys The Press

According to a recent report, the Trudeau government is busy bribing newspapers ahead of an upcoming federal election. Thanks to a "media bailout" the Toronto Star, self-described as a progressive media company, looks to receive $115,000 per week from the Trudeau administration. The Star previously endorsed Trudeau in 2015.

This may be peak political corruption. Some might think that government-run propaganda, something like the Ministry of Truth in 1984's Oceana or North Korea's state propaganda, is even more corrupt. But there is something transparent about a government printing lies that favor the government. Everyone knows what's going on. But paying off the "free press" to print propaganda brings an air of plausible deniability. Much of the electorate is either too simplistic to realize they are reading state-sponsored propaganda, or too corrupted by political bias to admit it. Noam Chomsky wrote a very successful book a few decades on the premise that a corrupt "free press" is more effective propaganda than state-owned propaganda, but his liberal brethren today dismiss such talk as conspiracy theory.

Many of us on the hard right have held out hope that, while we are being squeezed out of mainstream media, those outlets in a dying industry will soon succumb to economic reality. However, it should be clear that once liberals achieve power, they will begin directly propping up the corporate media directly with our own tax dollars. The message to Canadian conservatives should be very clear: they will not be allowed to partake in a peaceful debate of ideas.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Leftists Always Subvert

In a piece on the Hong Kong protests, Tim Pool - a self-described liberal - displays an understanding of leftism that even most conservatives fail to grasp. A lot of people in the US are noticing that, while Antifa burns American flags, the Hong Kong protestors are flying American flags and appealing to American history in their struggle for liberty. The natural conclusion then is that Hong Kong protestors have more in common with American traditional values than do America's liberals today, and that our liberals are rejecting the same liberties that other people in the world are willing to die for.

Be careful of that path of though. All that is really on display is that the left is always subversive, wherever it is found. The term itself comes about from the French revolution where loyalists sat on the right wing of Parliament, and revolutionaries on the left wing. Left-wing signifies the group of people who are disloyal to the traditional order. In America they fly Mexican flags to snub their own government; in China and Russia they fly American flags for the same reason. The Hong Kong protesters aren't pro-American so much as they want to snub Beijing.

It isn't so easy to pick a side in this confrontation. It is good and natural that the people of the semi-independent city of Hong Kong would push back against the growing imperialism of Beijing. And yet, it is troubling to see the same kind of left-wing anarchy that has infected the European nations (including America, Canada, etc) show up in Asia. One week it is appeals to equality and the next it'll be Satanic tranny pedophiles at story hour. The Chinese understand that, and I believe they will take firm action to keep out the Western cults of equality and materialism. They have caught a US diplomat meeting with protest leaders, and asserted that it was really a CIA operating under diplomatic cover. I assume they are correct. Thus, the protests are viewed as little more than US-backed subversion against Beijing.

In this battle, the Chinese are the force of order, against the American force of disorder - who are willing to degrade the great formerly British possession to degrade the Chinese empire. The CIA infecting Hong Kong with liberalism in a cold war with China is little different than the US military bombing Hong Kong in a hot war with China. In one scenario the city is degraded and littered with debris, in another the city is degraded and littered with hobos, used needles, and human feces. In either case, Hong Kong is a proxy war between the empires of Columbia and Beijing. The only surprise here is that the CIA is still engaged in battling America's foreign adversaries, rather than just smuggling drugs and conspiring to overturn unauthorized US election results.

While the Chinese are patient, ultimately they will err on the side of handling Hong Kong with force if necessary. Clearly the government of Hong Kong isn't interested in maintaining order, in the same way that US cities no longer rebuke panhandlers or bums sleeping on park benches. China will impose order on Hong Kong before they'll let it degrade into the next cosmopolitan disaster story. Many Republicans will then cry foul, that an attack on American-flag-waving protesters is an attack on America. But in reality, black-clad protestors in China waving American flags are little different from black-clad protestors in America burning American flags.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Contrabang! #18 If Cosmology Is In Crisis...

This week there are only a couple brief items from Starts With A Bang! to address. We'll also take a look at a couple bonus news items from this week that are relevant to that blog's doctrine.

If Cosmology Is In Crisis, Then These Are The 19 Most Important Galaxies In The Universe (link)

Since cosmology is in crisis, I guess those 19 galaxies are pretty important. Contrabang! has previously covered the so-called crisis, which is that scientists get different numbers when they estimate the age of the universe with different methods. One method has been to use cepheid variable stars, which oscillate with a frequency that is believed to be proportional to luminosity. There are many such stars in our own Milky Way. Another method is to use Type 1A supernovae, which are believed to have consistent luminosity (an assumption we doubt). Supernovae are much rarer than cepheid stars, but powerful enough to be observed at far greater distances.

There are 19 galaxies where both cepheid variable stars and Type 1A supernovae have been observed. We should expect that the two different methods would at least produce similar results for those 19 galaxies.
This small sample could be inherently biased, a legitimate worry among astronomers in the field. [...] With more examples and improved data, cosmologists hope to finally resolve this conundrum.
It's the usual pattern. When evidence seems to contradict the favored theories, assume that there must be other evidence somewhere else that doesn't.

Astronomy Faces A Field-Defining Choice In Choosing The Next Steps For The TMT (link)

This discusses opposition in Hawaii to the construction of a massive new telescope atop Mauna Kea.
The overwhelming majority of astronomers recognize that the preferred site for TMT, atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, would be the technically superior location to build it. But doing so would ignore the objections of many citizens whose concerns and values have been marginalized for over a century.
The left like to use the word marginalized. Apparently, if someone has been marginalized in the past, they must be exalted today. There is also some loose language in here of the objections of "many citizens." It is not US citizens at-large being considered. For example: I, a citizen, object to not building a 30-foot telescope on Mauna Kea. See? No one cares. What he really means is that the people of the Hawaiian nation have objections. They are Hawaiians, not Americans. The slippery language here is meant to convey that they are a separate nation of people without actually saying they are a separate nation of people.
A substantial percentage of the native Hawaiian population not only opposes the construction of any new telescopes or structures atop Mauna Kea, but view the very proposal of the TMT atop Mauna Kea as continuing a long history of disregard for their basic rights.
Which basic rights are being disregarded? As citizens of the US, none are. They have no particular religious claim to the mountain peak, nor is the US government allowed to acknowledge it, as we can't even have tributes to the Ten Commandments in Bible Belt courthouses. The claim, basically, is that the Hawaiians have different rights regarding public land use because of their race.  It is an inherently racist viewpoint, which is why the language is so carefully nonspecific.
The history of Hawaii tells a story of imperialism, colonization, exploitation and legal violence.
I agree. This blog's post from almost exactly two years ago - Democracy's Demographic Demonry - took on the subject of America's treatment of Hawaiians. From that post:
Hawaii is only 10% Hawaiian. When they were annexed by the US in 1898 they were 20% Hawaiian. Just a few decades before that they were 97% Hawaiian. The largest ethnic group in Hawaii today is Japanese, followed by whites. The Japanese are there largely because US businesses dominated the islands and recruited Japanese laborers as plantation workers. The Hawaiians were outnumbered before 1898 but still ruled the islands through their monarchy. It's pretty appalling really. The Americans drastically altered the islands' demographics, then forced democracy on them, meaning the Hawaiians lost control of their own lands. They are so hopelessly outnumbered today that there's no chance of Hawaiians regaining control of their islands. They are doomed to forever be a minority in their own land.
 Reportedly, many do not comprehend just what the Hawaiians have been subjected to.
A lot of people, even within the astronomy community, are having a difficult time understanding why a segment of the population is reacting to TMT with the furor and vitriol they’ve seen
The Hawaiians have been rendered virtually powerless in the land of their ancestors. They have little opportunity for positive acts of self-determination, so they pursue the other side of things - obstructionism. Whether or not another telescope is built is not the major issue so much as venting a nation's worth of grievances. The real problem isn't the astronomy, it's the invasion.

When I am emperor, I will handle Hawaii by fully restoring the old monarchy. The Hawaiian nation will regain power over the Hawaiian islands, with the exception that military protection will be provided by America, which will maintain control of a few key areas such as Pearl Harbor and the Mauna Kea scientific zone.

Glitch in neutron star reveals its hidden secrets (news link)

If there's one thing in all astronomy that we know is false, it is neutron stars. In order to explain regular oscillations of powerful X-ray and gamma radiation seen in distant stars, they've come up with an exotic model of a star collapsed to a hypothetical state of pure neutronium, which spins at relativistic speeds and somehow powers the strongest magnetic fields in the cosmos. While it never should have been accepted as standard science in the first place, it certainly should have been thrown out when "glitches" of oscillation speed were observed. Instead, they've created increasingly complex models to account for "starquakes" where mass moves vertically within the star, altering the rotational velocity.
“Immediately before the glitch, we noticed that the star seems to slow down its rotation rate before spinning back up,” Dr Ashton said. “We actually have no idea why this is, and it’s the first time it’s ever been seen. It could be related to the cause of the glitch, but we’re honestly not sure,” he said adding that he suspects this new paper to inspire some new theories on neutron stars and glitches.
In modern astronomy, contradicting evidence doesn't throw out absurd theories, but reveals "hidden secrets" which are really just highly complex and improbable models that have been conjured up by physicists.

Bonus: Dark Matter May Be Older Than the Big Bang (news link)

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe's mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new Johns Hopkins University study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang.
If there is a second construct from astronomy we know is false, it is dark matter.
For a long time, researchers believed that dark matter must be a leftover substance from the Big Bang. Researchers have long sought this kind of dark matter, but so far all experimental searches have been unsuccessful. "If dark matter were truly a remnant of the Big Bang, then in many cases researchers should have seen a direct signal of dark matter in different particle physics experiments already," says Tenkanen.
All efforts to find this dark particle have been futile. The obvious conclusion...that it doesn't exist? Nope. That dark matter is so ancient and mysterious that it predates the existence of the entire universe. They're getting really weird, even by their own standards.

Centre For Social Justice: Work Them Until They Drop

A policy proposal by a prominent UK think tank would have the pension age going up to 75 in 16 years.
A report out today by the Centre for Social Justice says Britain can no longer afford the current plan to raise the pension age to 67 in 2028 then 68 by 2046, so it must be speeded up. The pensions bill has ballooned from £17billion in 1989 to £92billion now, making up £4 of every £10 of welfare spending, the report adds. By 2023 it will cost £20billion more as the population ages and the birthrate falls.
That's strange, since the government said, decades ago, that immigration would help fix the looming pension crisis.
Government reports and press releases trumpeted the miraculous economic benefits of immigration: high levels of immigration would boost prosperity very significantly by increasing Britain's gross domestic product (the measure of how much the country produces every year); it would ensure an end to labour and skills shortages; it would enable the NHS and other public services to grow at a faster rate by using cheaper immigrant labour; and it would help Britain to avoid the "pensions time-bomb" created by an ageing population by adding a whole new tier of youthful and energetic workers.
Since Europe opened the flood gates to immigrants in 2015, everything should be peachy, right?
Welfare campaigners are appalled by the report and point out that with workplace pensions often unaffordable, three-quarters of Britain’s elderly will rely entirely on their state payments by 2036.
If current trends continue, and the new policy proposal is enacted, then in 16 years three-fourths of Britains will be working until about the time they become great-grandparents. Don't worry though, the people in charge think it's great.
“Working longer potentially improves health and wellbeing– we don’t do enough to help older people stay in work. The state pension doesn’t reflect healthy working life expectancy.”
Yes, as it turns out, working through your golden years to earn income to help prop up the failing social welfare program - which was also used as an excuse to flood the nation with so many foreigners that the major cities are no longer majority British - is good for your health! So holistic, too.

And from the Department for Work and Pensions,
"We’re creating opportunities for people of all generations with record employment.”
In Britain, the average life expectancy is 79 for men and 83 for women. Assuming a standard deviation of 15 years (the number given for US statistics), 42% of men and 32% of women will never collect a cent of their pensions. (The percentages would improve somewhat if we computed the conditional probabilities to exclude those who don't make it to their tax-paying years.) It's curious that social justice warriors have not adopted the cause of finding the systemic bias causing disparate outcomes for men and women, given that all genders are equal. Overall, men pay much more into the tax system over the course of their lives, and receive much less in return for it.

Others have computed that even pushing the retirement age to 75 does not push the needle into solvency, and it would have to be 79. The government, of course, would hesitate to propose a pension policy where retirement age is high that the average life expectancy of the group that pays the most taxes. I predict even the 75-year cutoff will never go into effect, as their pension program will collapse before 2036.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Just Don't Call Them Mothers

The quasi-governmental agency in the UK tasked with regulating advertising has banned a Volkswagen ad depicting a woman as a mother, determining it to be a depiction of gender that is “likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offense”.

Reportedly, the ad featured men and women alike engaged in adventurous activities such as mountain climbing and space exploration, but also showed a mother with her baby.
“We acknowledged that becoming a parent was a life-changing experience that required significant adaptation, but taking care of children was a role that was stereotypically associated with women”, ASA added in its ruling.
Notice the tone of their ruling. Becoming a parent was a life-changing experience. Taking care of children was a role. In their mindset, parenthood is an antiquated occupation. There is no longer a need to breed & raise a new generation of Britains, as new ones can simply be imported from other countries. Thus, showing a woman as a mother is to depict her as backwards and primitive. The war against motherhood is in full swing in the former global empire. The agency did not just criticize the ad; they outright banned it from broadcast. The banned imagery was of a white mother. I'd be curious if depictions of non-white mothers get banned. I'd suspect that the agency is more strict against white motherhood in the white nation, because that is how evil works.
“Our evidence shows how harmful gender stereotypes in ads can contribute to inequality in society, with costs for all of us”, Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA, said in a statement in June.
Guy Parker, an NPC with an NPC name, thinks motherhood comes with a societal-wide cost to everyone. Unfortunately, he won't be the one paying the real cost of discouraging parenthood. It will be the later generations. But he doesn't care about them. NPCs have been brain-washed to live in the moment. They have no concept of past or future. All Guy knows is that he is virtue-signaling right now. He is engaging in what he's been taught is high-status behavior right now.

Volkswagen responded well to the incident. [emphasis added]
Geraldine Ingham, head of marketing for Volkswagen UK, said: “As both a leader within this business and as a mother, I do not believe that the roles of the women in this advertisement are in any way portrayed negatively. Just like the men, they are shown taking part in challenging situations, such as in a tent perched on a mountainside and in a spacecraft, while another is shown to be embarking on what is surely life’s greatest and most valuable role – raising another human being.”
Volkswagen appears not to be a fully converged institution, which is more than can be said for Mercedes. Spend your hard-earned dollars wisely, and let the politicized businesses fail under their own weight.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Modernity, It Means No Memories

One of the most interesting scientific factoids that hardly any knows about is that there is no actual evidence that memories are stored in the brain. This has been known since the 1950s when scientists were unable to locate specific memories in the brains of frogs and rats. They were unable to remove a section of cortex and erase the memory, but they found that removing any area of cortex caused the memory to weaken. Remove half the brain, and the strength of the memory (some trained behavior) was weakened by half.

As usual, Big Science has refused to let experimental evidence challenge any assumptions provided by the philosophy of materialism. Instead, they issue yet another promissory note that one day evidence will be found the explains the mystery while keeping the assumptions of their particular religious beliefs intact. The most compelling explanation given was the comparison of brain memories to holograms, which function similarly in that removing a portion of the holographic medium dims the image rather than deleting a corresponding section of it. The holonomic brain theory, as it came to be called, inspired other theories such as holographic data storage and even a holographic theory of the universe. None have born success, and all seem to be dead pursuits.

The other explanation is that memories are not stored in the brain. If so, then the cortex acts more like an antenna than a hard drive, the brain a transponder more than a computer. Removing portions of the brain is then analogous to reducing bandwidth to read/write from an external source. If that is so, then memory starts to look less like data storage and more akin to the human spirit or soul - concepts understood by practitioners of all religions except materialism. While the theory may fall just short of scientific - I'm not sure how it would be experimentally disproven - it does open up some avenues for speculation and insights. Foremost is the implication that memory and spirit are ultimately the same thing. The failure of materialism in all domains results from a lack or misunderstanding of memory.

Alzheimer's disease primarily affects a person's ability to store and recall memories. When someone with late-stage Alzheimer's dies, it's common to here people say things like, "really she's been gone for a quite a while now." Spouses of late-stage Alzheimer's patients begin to see their caregiving as little more than keeping a warm body alive, an empty vessel that occasionally flickers with a hint of the life that used to reside there. It is not directly a fatal disease, but as memory fades, the will to live fades as well, and the body soon follows.

Alcoholism is a similar disease. We drink to forget, and alcoholics want to forget all the time. It is self-inflicted Alzheimer's, in a way. They and addicts of hard drugs end up as mere shells of their former selves. Like Alzheimer's patients, families usually express some degree of relief when they finally pass. They see their loved one as having been mostly gone already. Recovered alcoholics suffer from wet brain and realize that they are not as sharp or lively as they were before they began poisoning themselves. Even marijuana users fall into this category. Once high, they experience heightened sensual stimulation, becoming fixated on external inputs like movies, music, and food. Temporal reasoning is washed out by a strong sense of living in the moment. Indeed, pot smokers are notorious for their poor memories and lack of long-term planning. There was an old joke done by the Simpsons where the city referendum to legalize marijuana failed because all the stoners forgot to go to the ballots.

Without memory there is no life. A counterexample given might be that computers have memories, and are lifeless. But they don't really have memory like we do. They have only a physical state that resides in the material present. Early computers stored data on punch cards. There's no reason we couldn't do that today with modern computers; we choose not to for convenience, cost, etc. I don't think many would claim that the rich lived experiences that humans have access to is in any way equivalent to a stack of paper with various holes punched in it. Computers do not have a spiritual memory any more than a hammer does. Both are tools created by man. On the other hand, even the most minor forms of life must have memory, as we have debunked the theory of biological materialism on this blog already.

If there can be no life without memory, then materialism truly is a death cult. Whatever materialism touches, dies. Suicide and drug overdoses (same thing) are rampant. Entire nations have lost the will to live and are being willfully invaded. Scientific progress has flatlined. Hollywood stopped making meaningful movies and the media stopped doing journalism. Google, once opposed to evil, now shapes narratives of the past in response to current events, as was predicted by Orwell. They want to tell us what the changing past was. The left rally to support abortion - little more than child sacrifices made before the pagan altar of materialism. Even conservatism is dead! The notion that all questions of politics and morality can be reduced to economic equations and what Z calls Process Conservatism was overturned by Trump's appeals to nationalism.

Under materialism, there is only the present...only life in the moment. The past is merely a narrative crafted to justify the present, the future a promise made to instill hope in a world without a will to live. It's no coincidence that Barrack Obama's campaign slogan was simply HOPE. It's also no coincidence that he told Americans, "You didn't build that." In materialism, there is no past. There is only the present. Traditionalism is the memory of what works, while materialism rejects it and calls itself Progressivism. We must progress forward and forget the past. Eyes shut. Hope. Nationalism is the memory of who we are and is now the great threat to the neoliberal order because people with a sense of identity, of pride, of purpose, cannot be easily controlled. We know that, because materialism destroys the will to live, it eventually falters. All we have to do, really, is maintain our sense of who we are, speak truth in the face of The Lie, and know that eventually the Life Cults must win out.

Now would be a good time, for those who have young children, to re-watch the Lion King with them. It is the perfect tale of reclaiming the past. Mufasa, the wise father, teaches his son of the great cycles of life and the role he must play to maintain the order of things. Evil forces drive Simba away from his father and he enters the realm of Hakuna Matata. It means no worries, thus it means no memories. No concern for the past, no concern for the future. He eats when he's hungry and does little else. After an intimate encounter with Nala, he is forced to look again towards ensuring future order (as starting a family can do to listless, cynical young men). In one of the most powerful scenes ever produced, Simba finally remembers his past, and what he must do secure the future. Suddenly, his will of life is restored. He re-imposes the order of his father, and the desolate landscape becomes life-bearing again.


Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Google Covering Up The Largest Mass Shooting In American History

Call it another case of interesting timing. A couple weeks ago, all the news was about two mass shootings. One was clearly racially driven and one was clearly politically inspired by the left. The media spent several days telling us the racist attack was the political attack and it was all Trump's fault for enforcing immigration laws.

More recently, the news is all about Epstein. Hardly anyone believes the official story that he committed suicide. There is much suspicion that we'll never know what really happened.

In that context, a Google senior engineer turned whistleblower has provided the text documents that contained blacklists used by their censorship algorithms. One is a list of websites there were de-ranked by the search algorithm. While a few were to liberal sites, and a few are just outright amusing, the vast majority were politically conservative sites. This humble blog did not make the cut (must try harder!) but some of our favorites, like The Conservative Treehouse and Amerika are on the list.

This is all irrefutable proof that Google does, in fact, suppress conservative political commentary. The crazy right-wing conspiracy nut wins again! This should be enough ammo for the government to impose enormous fines and begin anti-trust actions. My concern is the same as for the Mueller incident. The crimes will be exposed, nothing will happen, which will give a green light to increased censorship. If crimes are exposed and not punished, then the exposure only emboldens criminals.

More than sites, Google was also blacklisting (as suspected) specific search terms. A screenshot shared on Gab shows that many blacklisted terms were related to the Las Vegas shooting - the largest mass shooting in American history - which targeted a crowd of whites and which the FBI effectively covered up. Nothing came out of their investigation - no motive, no political angle, no accomplices, no evidence such as hotel CCTV photos. (CCTV photos of the El Paso shooting came out immediately). Most on the right assume there was a coverup.

If some prominent conservative had said last week that Google was deliberately aiding a coverup on the largest mass shooting in American history, he'd have been lambasted in the mainstream as an unhinged nut. If he was a member of Congress, his colleagues might even give him the Steve King treatment and help the left demonize him and remove him from all committee spots. And yet, we can see in black and white which searches worried the left-wing propagandists at Google:
  • about stephen paddock
  • anti-trump stephen paddock
  • conspiracy in stephen paddock shooting
Why does Google not want you to know about Stephen Paddock or about his political alliances? Because Google is a political propaganda outfit the likes of which the world has never seen. Why does the mainstream media cover for Google? Because they are part of the same political propaganda machine. Amazingly, Google conspired to suppress interest in conspiracy about the shooting, becoming co-conspirators in the coverup themselves.

Obviously, if you are still using Google for your searches, you are getting Fake Search results. They are scrubbing the results to make sure you don't see anything they don't want you to see, and promoting what they do want you to see. I've been using Duck Duck Go for years. Some say it's not perfect, but it's certainly preferable to the blatant propaganda of Google. Similarly, you should trust nothing you hear in the mainstream media. Assume every claim without evidence is a lie. Assume they're lying even when it isn't in their own best interest to lie. Google stopped using the "Don't Be Evil" slogan once it became evil. Evil means always subverting and always lying.

Update: Google even had the whistleblower "swatted" by lying and saying he was suicidal and a public threat. Basically they abused the closest equivalent to Red Flag laws that we have, at a time where they are pushing for national Red Flag laws. SJWs always lie.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Western Women Out Of Control, Say Muslims

A couple weeks ago, a story made the rounds of a young Swedish woman who was denied service by a Malmo bus driver for being underdressed.
“I asked him what sort of sexist s**t he was trying to pull, but he just continued to say that I should cover myself up,” Hansson told the Kvällsposten newspaper. “What gives a bus driver the right to decide if a woman has ‘unsuitable clothing’ on?” she asked.
The woman took her outrage to social media, where the incident grew into a national ordeal.
Local traffic director Linus Eriksson immediately addressed the PR nightmare. “Something went wrong,” he wrote on Twitter. “Of course people are welcome on board our buses and trains in shorts and a camisole.”
The driver, who was not named, was suspended from duty.
He told Swedish media that the driver was not acting out of any “religious or political motive.”
It should be evident that the driver was a Muslim. The only interesting aspect of this whole story was the shock of the Swedish gal, as if she genuinely did not except such treatment in a city heavily populated by Muslims. Swedes are likely the most naive people on Earth, and are running short on time to figure things out.

In recent days, Swedish police have urged women not to go out alone.
Police in the Swedish city of Uppsala have warned women to walk in groups and to “think how to behave,” after four women were raped in as many days.
If you had said in 2015, when Angel Merkel opened the gates of Europe to the world, that in just four years even minor Swedish cities would be subjected to daily incidents of rape, you'd have been shouted down as a hyperbolic racist and, if in Europe, possibly fined or jailed. Yet here we are. This isn't the first time such advice has been issued, but retracted after protests from - you guessed it - feminists.
Similar advice to women in Uppsala has been criticized before. When four out of five schoolgirls said they felt unsafe outdoors in the city earlier this year, women’s rights groups called for a greater police presence on the streets, instead of security advice to potential victims. “Reducing girls’ freedom of movement is a serious development,” activist Mariet Ghadimi told SVT Nyheter in March. “It is a structural problem that restricts girls’ freedom and rights, and in the long run affects women generally.”
In much the same way that US colleges don't believe women are capable of granting consent, European women's rights groups don't believe women can handle information pertinent to their safety, and should be allowed to prance about in blissful ignorance. The feminists are deliberately putting young women in harm's way.

RT also reports on an incident involving Belgian girls in Morocco.
Three young Belgian girls are returning home from volunteer work in Morocco after a local school teacher allegedly threatened to behead them, for wearing shorts. The teacher has been arrested and the charity’s work curtailed.

The girls were part of a group of nearly 40 volunteers who were helping to build a road in the remote village of Adar. The charity that organized the trip, Bouworde, posted a video of their activities on social media, prompting the 26-year-old teacher to unleash decapitation threats because their attire didn’t “respect the Muslim faith”.
The link includes some photos and a promotional video which shows the girls mostly standing around, taking pictures, and gingerly passing small stones. A Morroccan politician is quoted, “Since when do Europeans start working in clothing that is meant for sunbathing?”
The debacle comes less than a month after three Moroccan men were sentenced to death for murdering two Scandinavian women in a popular hiking area in the Moroccan Atlas mountains.
The purpose of the mission is not to build roads for poor north Africans, but to build egos for rich European girls. No amount of beheadings, real or threatened, will deter them from their mission to take selfies showing them helping oppressed foreigners in need of white saviors.

Muslims and feminists both share the opinion that women can't make their own decisions and must be protected. They differ in that that Muslims believe women must be controlled, whereas feminists do not. Given that women are now being told they can't travel alone at night in Muslim-European cities, and can't dress as they like in Muslim countries, it's pretty clear which side will prevail.

A Shared Sense Of Doom

The college student who just finished a climate change hunger strike warned of food shortages, social disruption and riots. If you listened to the mainstream media for the last week, you'd be sure that armed militias were just waiting for the dogwhistle from Donald Trump to begin slaughtering all but the heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestants. A recent Yahoo! News article shows that some, at least, are looking to find an escape from America, with Poland, Israel, and Costa Rica given as destinations. When citizens are beginning to view Latin America as a refuge from political instability and violence, you can be sure their sense of our future is nothing short of cataclysmic.

Of note is that the names of the article skew Jewish, and are described as liberal. Someone once noted that, in mating and migratory patterns, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan. That is the only mindset that would predict liberals would choose locations that are beloved by various factions of the right - Poland being praised by the dissident right, and Israel by the evangelicals and neocons. [I have even considered the option of bugging out to Poland.] Those are the places the liberals most berate as being racist, evil countries that won't let third-world Muslims pour in through open borders... yet that is also where they seek safe haven. These locusts engage in an endless cycle of subvert, destroy, migrate, just as fleeing Californians have flipped Colorado and are working on Texas. We can see all three stages of the Liberal Locust lifecycle in action. And so, they seek out the last white refuges on the globe: Israel and Eastern Europe, not realizing that they are quickly running out of healthy hosts.

The right is, if anything, more apocalyptic than the left. Everyone I know realizes things are getting bad, fast. Even many voices on the right, who are otherwise liberals besides their concern for left-wing irrationality, warn of dire times, including Tim Pool, Stefan Molyneux, and Jordan Peterson. Pool has outright declared that we are headed to civil war, and that he has a bug-out van ready to escape the New York metro area.

It's not just in the realm of politics and culture that alarm bells are sounding.

Climate. The global warming people think the climate is about to destroy all humanity, but people on the other side of the issue are making dire predictions as well. The Grand Solar Minimum people - whom I listen to - suspect we are entering into a new cold spell, similar to what was seen in the late middle ages. They base the prediction off of historical climate data, rather than the unproven theory that the small amount of carbon dioxide generate by humans will trigger eternal global warming by water vapor.

While both sides strongly diverge on both cause and effect, they may actually share more in common than they differ: a compelling sense that were are entering a period of climate chaos which will have terrible effect on human economies and agriculture. Recently, both AOC and Joe Biden have made comments to the effect of preferring truth over facts. They have been ridiculed for the comments, which is fair in the context that liberals are always trying to hide from objective reality. But, if we give them some benefit of the doubt, they may be correct in some sense. I believe humans have some collective 6th sense about what is to come. They feel it, can't explain it, and look to the world for the answer. Thus they see different causes to the same strife. In politics, the right sees third-world invasions and the left sees white nationalist violence. Both are interpretations of the Balkanization that will be coming to America sooner or later.

Finance & Economics. While there is always someone, somewhere claiming the world is coming to an end, there are enough signals these days to be concerned. There has already been one major bank failure, which has largely been ignored. The Fed has lowered rates, despite a supposedly strong economy. The stock market has soared far higher than improvements in economic performance should justify. And, of course, the whole world sits on mountains of debt and unfunded liabilities. For most people, the question isn't whether the financial world eventually implodes, but when. It is likely to occur at the least convenient time.

Famine. Climate fears are accompanied with forecasts of starvation. My concern is that our modern food supply system is brittle and sensitive to supply shocks. A disaster in any of the other segments could result in food shortages.

Infrastructure. Western nations are already having trouble keeping the lights on, even in the major cities. Do not trust anything to work in times of even minor disruption.

The takeaway is that there is a shared sense of doom, across multiple domains, and among people who viciously disagree with each other. There is a full-spectrum alert of an impending perfect storm of collapse. I believe that it will take failure in just one area to send the others spiraling as well. While my own instincts are frequently faulty, a society-wide sense of foreboding should not be ignored.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Who's Suprised?

Sundance reports on some "surprising results" from the Iowa corn poll.
With gaffe prone Biden still holding a lead, it appears Pete Buttigieg is surging, and is now in a stronger Iowa position than national polls would suggest.
We aren't surprised. Styx opined the other day that Buttigieg is the most viable Democrat because he has managed to remain somewhat moderate in a field dominated by unhinged lunacy. Ironically, being officially certified gay gives him license to play the straight man. As an ideal citizen, he doesn't have to engage in the level of racial self-flagellation that whites like Warren and O'Rourke submit themselves to. Biden is also spared to a degree because of his past role as deputy to the first black president. He still polls very well among blacks. His strategy, as the default establishment candidate, is just to hang in there and pick up the superdelegate votes next spring. However, he is not currently on a trajectory to hang in there that long. His gaffes, age, and low IQ are becoming real burdens.

Warren tied with Buttigieg for second in the poll. (Both at 16%, versus Biden at 24%.) I still think she is vulnerable for her past race appropriation, and unhinged Twitter rants after being triggered by Donald Trump. If it becomes a heads-up battle, I suspect any capable opponent should be able to neutralize her.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

Contrabang! #17 Grasping At Straws

This One ‘Anomaly’ Is Driving Physicists To Search For Light Dark Matter (link)

Scientists are not looking for signatures of new light particles (again) because of some 'anomaly', but because they've exhausted even the range of absurdly large particles, and are circling back around in their endless quest for dark evidence.
Sometimes, the solution to a puzzle you’ve been stymied by lies in a place you’ve already looked. Only, until you develop better-precision tools than you’ve used to conduct your previous searches, you won’t be able to find it. 
See what I mean? There is no lack of evidence that will dispute the dark matter hypothesis. As a promissory science, a lack of evidence merely indicates that we need "better-precision tools", i.e. more funding.

Here, Ethan does us a favor by reviewing the success rate of looking for new particle types that might be dark matter. [emphasis added]
We’ve been looking for new particles not predicted by the Standard Model with an enormous variety of experiments for decades, from accelerators to underground laboratories to rare, exotic decays of everyday particles. Despite decades of searching, no beyond-the-Standard-Model particles have ever turned up.
The anomaly here refers to a problem that depends on the Big Bang Theory and it's associated model for the stellar lifecycle, where all particles are derived from nuclear reactions of hydrogen. (That is to say, there may not even be a problem at all.) In that theory, there is no straightforward route to come up with all the carbon-12 seen. One hypothetical & complicated route has been proposed, but not all the reaction products have been accounted for. Thus, the search for the missing pieces has been hijacked as a hopeful search for dark matter as well. Thus, the discovery depends on both Big Bang Theory and Dark Matter Theory being correct.
The jury is still out on whether this anomaly is as good as it’s hyped to be, but until we have a robust explanation, we have to both keep an open mind and look everywhere the data tells us new physics might reasonably be. Despite the null results, the search continues.
Nothing about this seems reasonable. Do you note a sense of creeping desperation to this? The search for dark matter has fully entered the grasping-at-straws phase.

Has LIGO Just Detected The ‘Trifecta’ Signal That All Astronomers Have Been Hoping For? (link)

Under General Relativity and the normal explanation for supernovae (accretion leading to explosive nuclear fusion), they should emit electromagnetic radiation, neutrinos, and gravitational waves, all traveling at the speed of light. The major goal now for LIGO is to find an event that registers in all three signals.
From the gravitational waves alone, scientists were able to perform a fast analysis and restrict the location where the originating event may have occurred to just 55 square degrees (out of ~40,000 on the entire sky) as the best place to look for other types of messenger signals.
Completely independently, the IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole detected a track-like neutrino event that corresponds to almost the exact same time of origin.
They independently found a gravitational wave signal and concurrent neutrino signal.
Of course, all of this is just preliminary at this point. The LIGO collaboration has yet to announce a definitive detection of any type, and the IceCube event may turn out to be either a foreground, unrelated neutrino or a spurious event entirely. No electromagnetic signal has been announced, and there might not be one at all.
That's a lot of disclaimers. It's a little early to be getting this excited, but that's what cheerleaders do.

This Is Why Black Holes Must Spin At Almost The Speed Of Light (link)

Many of them are spinning at nearly the speed of light. When you do the math, there’s no other way it could have been.
The problem is you can make the math work for about anything, if you're clever and persistent enough. The spinning of black holes turns out to be a contentious subject. Ben Davidson of suspicious0bservers.org argues that the law of conservation of angular momentum disproves black holes. If a spinning accretion disk is feeding into a black hole, that implies that a zero-radius singularity must be spinning at infinite speed, which isn't possible. The astrophysicists have noted this as well, and tell us that the single-point singularity model of black holes is only an ideal model for a non-rotating, neutrally charged black hole. Real black holes contain not a singularity of infinite density, but a ringularity - as we call them. Ringularities were proposed because they can spin, thus account for the rotation. There is nothing else to the theory, no explanation for how infalling matter would form itself into a ring, and so forth. Only the fact that someone made a mathematical model.
If you compress that volume down to be very small, those objects have no choice. If angular momentum has to be conserved, all they can do is spin up their rotational speeds until they almost reach the speed of light. At that point, gravitational waves will kick in, and some of that energy (and angular momentum) gets radiated away. If not for that process, black holes might not be black after all, instead revealing naked singularities at their centers. In this Universe, black holes have no choice but to rotate at extraordinary speeds. Perhaps someday, we’ll be able to measure that directly.
At the point the spin reaches the speed of light, gravitational waves will "kick in"? What does that mean...how does that work? It isn't explained, nor why it would ever happen. Perhaps the size of the ringularity expands as necessary to keep the speed within limits instead. He doesn't even attempt to explain how any of this would all work. He says that if it weren't for that process, then naked singularities (should be ringularities) would be exposed. Well, if it weren't for that process, as he explains it, then the spin would exceed the speed of light, which isn't possible. It's not a valid hypothetical, so you can make whatever absurd conclusion you desire. If not for that process, cows would say oink. 

This is a weak explanation of actual black holes. Their approach has been to use an idealized but impossible black hole to sell to the public, then provide a mathematically valid model to deflect criticism, without ever bothering to explain how the actual black hold would work.

FBI: All Americans Domestic Terrorism Threats

Supposedly, the year 2016 marked the vindication of the conspiracy theory. After three different batches of leaked Democrat emails, a lot of people were saying, only half joking, "Holy crap. Alex Jones was right about everything." Rather than vindication, Alex Jones has been banned from the public square and the left memoryholed the whole ordeal by engaging in the greatest conspiracy theory of modern history - alleging that the leaked Democrat emails proved crimes were committed by Trump rather than Democrats.

The conspiracy theorists continued into 2019. After Jeffrey Epstein's arrest - long rumored to be at the center of a high-ranking blackmail ring - conspiracies abounded: he was a Mossad agent, he would be killed in jail to prevent a trial, etc. We are now in the interesting predicament that nearly the entire American public are conspiracy theorists. It's just a little too convenient that he died in prison just as many expected and that cameras had conveniently failed and so forth.

What's ironic here is that this all comes just days after an internal FBI document surfaced showing that they view conspiracy theorists as domestic terrorism threats.
"The FBI assesses anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity," the document said. "The FBI further assesses in some cases these conspiracy theories very likely encourage the targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the likelihood of violence against these targets."
Golly, that's awkward, because the majority of Americans now doubt the official narrative regarding Jeffrey Epstein. Even more ironic, the FBI itself seems to doubt the official narrative, and has opened an investigation into the death. Apparently, the FBI must regard even itself as a domestic terror threat.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Epstein Dead

Applause goes to Martin Armstrong who writes a blog that is linked on this blog's sidebar. I added him because I thought he talked a lot of sense economically, and he seems to be on the money as far as power politics goes as well. From his July 25 post, titled When will Epstein be found Dead? Before or After a Deal?
Question: Do you think Jeffrey Epstein will ever go to trial?
Answer: NO WAY!!!!!! [...] Epstein will hang himself, so they will say, or be killed by a fellow inmate who will take the blame for time off his bid.

No high profile case is EVER allowed to go to trial where things the government does not want to be revealed could ever become public.  The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000, which collected similar data from states, expired in 2006, so it is next to impossible to get any data on even how many inmates commit suicide no less under what condition they are determined to be suicides rather than strategic murders.
Indeed, Epstein did hang himself before trial as predicted by Armstrong. This despite officially being on suicide watch.

This blog commented previously after Epstein's arrest on July 9 in Morning Grab Bag.
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 scant 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.
To my own credit, I was a bit more skeptical than most in the MAGA or dissident right quarters who were proclaiming that justice was coming, the swamp would be drained, etc. At this point, we still don't know if the arrest of Epstein was a black-hat or white-hat operation, and probably we won't ever know. In either case, Epstein was arrested by federal agents and was being held by a federal court system - which allowed either a murder or suicide to take place. If Trump was serious about draining the swamp, he should have had loyalists monitoring Epstein 24/7. The biggest failure of Trump has been getting the right people into the right positions, and his biggest weakness has been an inability - or unwillingness - to protect the people who need to be protected. Is his power really limited to nothing by Twitter activism? Tweeting what he thinks should happen? It seems so.

At any rate, Epstein is dead, his case is dead, and the closest development we've had towards swamp drainage is dead.

London Blackout, Climate Hungerstike, Biden Gaffes

London Blackout

The formerly British city of London, as well as much of Southeast England. suffered a significant power outage, caused by a shortage of generation on the national network. The incident struck during the evening rush hour, leaving commuters stranded all over the city as the electric trains sat inoperable.

London and New York, the two major cities of the western world, have both suffered recent power shortages. I'd expect the next two major metro areas - Paris and Los Angeles - to make similar news within the next couple years. Both are located in political districts with vowed devotion to green energy.

Will the response to the London outage be to build even more windmills? Interestingly, Michael Moore has come out with a new documentary highlighting the failures of green energy initiatives to achieve objectives. He's noticed a small sliver of our more general observation that liberal policies always have the effect of worsening whatever problem they're trying to solve. Often that works out in our favor - whenever the objectives are wrong as well. Increasing carbon dioxide leads to a greener planet more capable of supporting life, with negligible greenhouse effect. Thus, green movements to reduce carbon outputs actually increase carbon outputs, which is good. Hopefully Moore's movie doesn't gain too much traction. With the left, it's often better to have them fully deranged rather than half-deranged, so they cancel themselves out.

Carbon Hungerstrike

In a similar vein, a 19-year-old college student from UCSD has ended his 10-day hunger strike against climate change in the imperial capital. While I appreciate his exercise in impulse control - a rare trait these days for his age & ideological bracket, I have to question his level of commitment to saving the planet from impending doom. To really show support for saving Mother Earth requires a hunger strike of at least 30 days. 😉

It's nice to see a leftist actually doing their part to contribute to a change they want to see. All of the carbon we humans exhale comes from food. Large carbon molecules are broken up by our metabolism, and the leftover carbon joins the oxygen molecules we inhale to be exhaled as carbon dioxide. Thus, by strictly reducing his food intake, he was actually reducing his own carbon footprint. Good for him. Of course, those carbon savings were completely swamped by what was generated by his cross-continental trip from San Diego to Washington to engage in the political action. Still, there is clearly a potential benefit to be had here. All global warming activists should be put on strict diets and travel restrictions to reduce their personal carbon footprints. Any environmentalist consuming more than 1200 calories per day should be shunned by the more dedicated activists. We could even set up some camps where they could be monitored 24/7, to prove their loyalty to the cause of saving planet Earth from certain doom.

Biden Gaffes

Joe Biden is now spewing gaffes faster than anyone can even keep up with them. One juicy example was utterly racist, equating white kids as rich, and nonwhite kids as poor. He also said he supports "truth over facts." Actually, we can't tell if that one was a gaffe or an intentional statement, as it does sum up his party platform pretty well. When asked who his favorite non-President American historical figure was, he responded with Jefferson and JFK. Has Biden always been this stupid, or is age catching up with him? What's clear is that if Trump was exhibiting such racism and ignorance, the national media would be dedicating 24-hour coverage to it. Biden, of course, gets protected. Their protection of Hillary Clinton didn't pan out. It'll be interesting to see how much pull the mainstream media actually has, at this point.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Code of Life

DNA is often dubbed the Code of Life. A web search for that term turns up hits for universities, scientific journals & periodicals, and media outlets of the highest calibers of prestige, and even a highly ranked link to the creationist site Answers in Genesis selling a book called Code of Life. My own favorite Theory of Evolution skeptic, Do-While Jones at scienceagainstevolution.info, writes highly compelling (and entertaining) critiques of the theory of evolution by random chance, sometimes going line by line through published articles to demonstrate the impossibility of their conclusions. And yet, he still makes the same basic assumption that DNA is the Code of Life. His only objection is that it could not have arisen by random processes as the mainstream scientists believe. Do-While - a lifelong engineer - is certain that DNA had to have been designed. Thus, he believes in a designer. Does that make him a creationist, rather than a materialist? I say he is both. He believes in a creator, and yet he also believes that the form and function of all life is fully described by the material properties of DNA. His outlook is fully equivalent to that of Big Bang Theory advocates, as described in a recent edition of Contrabang!
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.
Creationists like Do-While do for species what BBT advocates do for the universe: push everything mysterious back to one free miracle. I realize now that Creationism isn't necessarily a religious standpoint, although evolutionists will assume it is in their haste to dismiss dissent. Do-While's personal beliefs do not bleed into his arguments. It is not clear whether he is a Christian, atheist, or something else. When you think about it, it's not even a Christian-compliant theory. No where does the Bible indicate that God created an elaborate mechanistic universe and then stepped aside while it ran its course. He intervenes routinely throughout the Bible. Nor does atheism allow for a Creator. Do-While's basis for a DNA designer stem solely from evidence, as the evolution of DNA by random chance is a theory without any supporting evidence.

Still, he misses all the evidence that should dismiss the assumption of material as the sole ingredient of life. Now, one might argue that perhaps he doesn't personally believe it either, but is merely adopting the standard assumptions to make the strongest scientific argument possible. Well, it doesn't work that way. There's nothing special about a scientific argument; it's either true or it isn't. Adopting a false framework to repudiate a false framework amounts to telling a lie to reveal a truth. It serves no net benefit. Still, I have no reason to believe that he is doing anything other than speaking the truth as he understands it to be.

The primary argument against biological materialism is that there are only 19,000 genes in the human genome. That this doesn't cause every rational being to immediately drop the whole notion of genetic Code of Life must be - besides religious conviction - a tendency to overestimate the significance of 19,000 genes and to underestimate the complexity of humans. Consider just the three pounds of the human body inside our skulls. They make up the single most complex structure in the known universe. Think of how complex a galaxy is, with its 100 billion stars neatly arranged into rotating spiral arms. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, which sounds similar in scale, until you realize that those neurons make up to 1,000 trillion (one quadrillion) interconnections- that is 1,000,000,000,000,000. 19,000 starts to like pretty puny. $19,000 sounds like a lot money. It sure would be nice to come upon an extra 19 grand! Now imagine that with that $19K you are expected to buy everything. Everything on planet Earth. All the buildings, cars, roads, nuclear submarines, mineral rights...everything. In comparison to all that, $19,000 will only buy a single new entry-level compact car. Saying that you can describe the form and function of the human body in 19,000 genes is like trying to buy the whole globe with 19,000 dollars.

Some will try to make appeals to combinatorial complexity to explain the shortcoming. "The state space of 19,000 genes is actually enormous!" Well, it is, but that is only relevant if you disregard everything that is known about cellular biology. Combinatorial complexity refers to the amount of data that can be represented by some data structure. For instance, a single bit has a state space of size two: 0 or 1. Two bits has a state space size of four:  11, 10, 01, 00. Three bits has state space of size 9, four bits size 16, five bits size 32, and six bits size 64. It would be tempting to say then, that six bits would allow us to encode, say, all 45 of the US presidents. That would be true within certain contexts. If I wrote software for a school, and I was tasked with recording each student's favorite president, it could be optimized by allocating just the six necessary bits per student to identify the president. However, those, bits don't actually tell any of the relevant information, such as the president's name, years served, notable achievements, etc. That requires some functionality to map the bit values to data stored elsewhere.

The genome really does explode with combinatorial complexity. There are 19,000 genes, each an average of 27,000 base pairs long, and 4 different base pairs, so there are 4^27,000^19,000 combinations. That reads as "four to the twenty-seven thousandth power to the nineteen thousandth power." That number is approximately infinity, so does that mean we have the near infinite data required to describe the form and function of the human body? No, because there is not a function to map the genes into other usable data. The genes are the raw data. Consider what happens if we alter a single set of base pairs on a gene. According to them, it would mean an elephant could become a squid. That's the implication if every genetic combination represents independent organisms. In reality, those changes will have - if any - a negative effect on the protein encoded by that gene, and potentially a disastrous one. The worst cases will result in defects so severe that the embryo doesn't survive a single cellular division and the brief pregnancy miscarries. Thus, the vast majority of the state space is invalid since non-functional proteins are encoded.

That is one technical argument, but there are other intuitive ways to understand this. There are many videos on YouTube of cell microbiology in action, thanks to microscopes that can see down to the molecular level. Many are mesmerizing, as the cell shows itself as a highly complex, organized, and efficient machine. The process of converting DNA to proteins is quite complex, requiring transcription, transportation, and translation. How do the various bits of the cell "know" what to do in these co-ordinated processes? It is assumed by most people that the activity is somehow controlled by the nucleus, which is often dubbed a "control center," even in educational literature. In truth, the cell can survive without a nucleus at all. Mammalian red blood cells have no nucleus, yet carry out their duties for up to four months. Some unicellular organisms are capable of re-generation; even fragments without a nucleus can re-generate the entire form of the organism - with no DNA at all! If that doesn't disprove the theory that all inherited traits are genetic, then I don't know what would.

Epigenetics is another challenge to the consensus position. Scientists have discovered they can condition rats with certain behaviors, such as fear of a certain scent, and that trait is still detectable in the next two generations of offspring, even when environment is strictly controlled. We know that the inherited traits cannot be genetic. Scientists assume changes happen in the body of the cell that alter gene interpretation. How that accounts for the coding of a complex behavior to a specific molecule accounts as yet more promissory science. No one knows how the cell could physically record and pass on such information, but it is assumed it must do it somehow.

Generally speaking, behavioral inheritance is probably the biggest thorn in the side for proponents for Biological Materialism. As pointed out in that article, one famous biologist has already called out the shortage of genes to explain the vast number of inheritable behavioral traits. Then another scientist responded, amusingly, that there don't appear to be enough enough genes for physiological traits either, therefore there must somehow be enough genes for behavioral traits.

The behavioral genes gap is even greater for the animals where most behavior is innate. For instance, robins innately know to start building circular nests in April. If geneticists are correct, they should be able to specify which genes would have to be modified to change that behavior. What about square nests in October? If genes account for all biological inheritance, then there must be nest building instructions in there somewhere.

Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest is a good summary for promissory science in general, but it falls short in the specific case of evolution by genetics, where the motto should be give us unlimited free miracles and we'll explain some of it. By comparison, religious fundamentalists only require the one free miracle. But that gets to our major point. The materialists are religious fundamentalists, their belief system just requires many more miracles. It takes an awful lot of faith to be a materialist.