Censorship Industry Secretly Shutting Down the Free Internet. By Jeffrey Tucker.

It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex.

The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret.

Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.

 

 

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees’ stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we knew only a fraction of it.

Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality.

The censors developed a belief at the highest levels of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: Our side favors banning gatherings and closing schools; says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake; favors masking, mass vaccination, and mail-in voting; and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury. Their side takes the opposite approach.

It was a war over information, undertaken in total disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn’t even exist. Moreover, the operation was not only political. It clearly involved intelligence agencies that were already hip-deep in the “all-of-society” pandemic response.

“All of Society” means all, including the information you receive and are allowed to distribute.

 

 

A vast swath of unelected bureaucrats took it upon themselves to manage all knowledge flows in the age of the internet, with the ambition to turn the main source of news and sharing into a giant American version of Pravda. All of this occurred right under our noses — and is still going on today. …

Incredibly, the censorship is so pervasive now that it is not even reported. All these revelations should have been front-page news. But so captured is the news media today that there are very few outlets that even bother to report the fullness of the problem. …

The new report from the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government of the U.S. House of Representatives … [presents] an overwhelming amount of evidence of a systematic, aggressive, and deeply entrenched effort on the part of the federal government, including the Biden White House and many agencies including the World Health Organization, to tear out the guts of the internet and social media culture and replace them with propaganda.

Among the well-documented facts are that the White House directly intervened in Amazon’s own marketing methods to deprecate books that raised doubts about the COVID-19 vaccine and all vaccines. Amazon responded reluctantly but did what it could to satisfy the censors. All these companies — Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon — became acquiescent to Biden administration priorities …

What took place was an absolute violation of speech rights that very likely exceeds anything we’ve seen in U.S. history. Keep in mind that we only know what we know, and that is severely truncated by the force of the machinery. We can safely assume that the truth actually is far worse than we know. And further consider that this censorship is keeping us from knowing the full story about the suppression of dissidents, whether medical, scientific, political, or otherwise.

There might be millions in many professions who are suffering right now, in silence. Or think of the vaccine-injured or those who have lost loved ones who were forced to get the shot. There are no headlines. There are no investigations. There is almost no public attention at all. Most of the venues that we once thought would police such outrages have been compromised.

To top it off, the censors are still not backing down. If you sense a lessening of the grip for now, there is every reason to believe it is temporary. This industry wants the entire internet as we once conceived of it completely shut down. That’s the goal.

If they have power over what you know, they can control your thoughts and actions.

hat-tip Mark S.

Canada’s rulers introduce bill enabling life sentences for speech, pre-crime detention, and anonymous accusers. By Matt Taibbi.

On February 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in Edmonton, announcing his government’s decision to introduce the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63. It was described in Canadian media as a “bill to protect kids” that would stop the “exploitation of children,” and Trudeau’s curt speech focused solely on minors. The scarf-clad PM angrily dismissed criticisms the bill might have a broader focus. …

 

 

Trudeau was lying when he said C-63 was “very, very specifically focused on correcting kids.” The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:

• enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
• introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
• punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
• penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
• force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”

Things you’re saying, things you’ve already said, things an administrative judge thinks you might say, all barred, with neighbors deputized as enforcers? Good times. …

C-63 is a Frankenstein’s Monster combining the worst censorship ideas already deployed by supposed ally government-in-laws like Europe’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s updated Australian Communications and Media Authority Act (ACMA), and Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which saw 7,152 complaints in its first week when the law took effect last month. …

[The bill] prescribes potential life sentences for any “offence motivated by hatred.” This is a difficult concept, but what the law proscribes is any violation of any “Act of Parliament,” no matter how minor, combined with hateful motivation. One example given was crumpling up an anti-gay flier and throwing it out the window in a national park, which would combine a federal littering prohibition with hate speech. …

The “prior restraint” portion of C-63 describes the process by which a person can be punished preemptively if an informant convinces a judge that either a “hate propaganda offence” or the aforementioned “offence motivated by hatred” has a “reasonable” chance of occurring … This clause might particularly affect a high-profile person like J.K. Rowling who’s already declared an intention to keep saying things deemed offensive to Canadians, who in 2017 passed a law (C-16) forbidding “gender identity” discrimination.

Trudeau’s Government is rolling back centuries of democratic and enlightened progress. If the Canadian ruling class gets away with this, it will spread  throughout the West.

Losing Military Supremacy Could Be Fatal. By Victor Davis Hanson, military historian.

I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given that the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.

They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense.

They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States; if 1 percent are engaged in espionage — and the FBI says it’s more than that — you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155-mm shells than we are. At the least, they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So we are not armed, and yet our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military — that has never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people: All of those numbers are the same. … The largest group is white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and Afghanistan, but these third and fourth generations are not joining up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics — 72 percent to 74 percent of all the dead in Afghanistan and in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.

And yet this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic, and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year. …

What this means for you (for my fellow Australians: Australia exists and was protected by the British Navy until 1941, then the US Navy):

We’ve lost deterrence, and that can be achieved militarily, economically, politically, but we’ve lost it in every category, and it’s going to be very, very dangerous to reestablish it.

I do think that there are people — like the Chinese Communist government, like the government in North Korea, like the government in Turkey, like the government in Iran — who are in a whole different moral universe than what we think they’re in. ….

[The ruling classes of societies that were wiped out] didn’t understand that these killers, the destroyers, were not like Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, they were men of education. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. Scipio Aemilianus had Polybius at his side, the great Roman historian, when he destroyed the city. Mehmed had the largest library in the Islamic world. Cortés was a man of letters.

So they didn’t realize that they had thought deeply about how to destroy. They didn’t just come in, kill, rape women, and leave. They really had an existential plan to erase these cities.

And when you look at today, there’s the same idea that no one would ever do that, it couldn’t happen here, this is in the past.

So I went through in the epilogue and looked at all the threats of extinction that we have seen in, say, the past 15 years. I was shocked.

It wasn’t just Kim Jong Un saying that he wanted to wipe out South Korea, and he would, but it was people like [Turkish President] Recep Erdogan. He has threatened, he said not too long ago, about eight months ago, that the Athenians, the modern Athenians, would wake up one morning and there would be a barrage of rockets to wipe them out. That was anger over his attempt to take back islands that are Greek off the coast of Turkey.

He said to the Armenians at Nagorno-Karabakh — a year ago, they ethnically cleansed every Armenian out of Azerbaijan. And they had been there for a thousand years. And he said, “We are going to deal with Armenia itself in the way that our grandfathers did.” And that was, of course, the destruction of Armenian culture in Turkey. …

Half the world’s Jewry is now in Israel, but more importantly, these are the observant Jews, and they are at what Rafsanjani called a one-bomb state, that one nuclear weapon could erase Jewish civilization itself.

[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, of course, says Ukraine is an aberration that doesn’t really exist, that it was a province of the Soviet Union and that the language should be obliterated, that it should be reincorporated into Russia. …

In the case of China, they have threatened to wipe out Taiwan and destroy the bastard idea of a Taiwanese civilization; they say it doesn’t exist. And they’ve threatened to nuke, as well, Japan if it aids Taiwan.

And also, the denial. People on the walls of Constantinople said: “We can work with a sultan. He won’t kill everybody.” And people said, “Alexander the Great is a philosopher; he won’t obliterate us like Philip did,” … or something like that.

And when you see the same denial, people get very angry when you mention Putin’s threats. They say: “Oh, he’s just bluster. He would never do that.” And, “Kim Jong Un would never do that.” And, “I’m not sure that’s true.” History says that the odds are they won’t, but it’s happened and there’s no second chances when that happens.

Our society only exists because it has been more successful militarily. We owe our existence — like most leading societies before us — to military success. Most of our ruling class has lost sight of that central truth, but it is obvious to those who aren’t in the West.

The Carbon Capture Con. By Viv Forbes.

Carbon-capture-and-underground-storage “(CCUS)” tops the list of silly schemes “to reduce man-made global warming”. The idea is to capture exhaust gases from power stations or cement plants, separate the CO2 from the other gases, compress it, pump it to the chosen burial site and force it underground into permeable rock formations. Then hope it never escapes.

An Australian mining company who should know better is hoping to appease green critics by proposing to bury the gas of life, CO2, deep in the sedimentary rocks of Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.

They have chosen the Precipice Sandstone for their carbon cemetery. However the chances of keeping CO2 gas confined in this porous sandstone are remote. This formation has a very large area of outcrop to the surface and gas will escape somewhere, so why bother forcing it into a jail with no roof?

Glencore shareholders should rise in anger at this wasteful and futile pagan sacrifice to the global warming gods. It will join fiascos like Snowy 2, pink bats and SunCable (a dream to take solar energy generated in NT via overhead and undersea cable for over 5,000 km across ocean deeps and volcanic belts to Singapore).

Engineers with buckets of easy money may base a whole career on Carbon Capture and Underground Storage. But only stupid green zealots would support the sacrifice of billions of investment dollars and scads of energy to bury this harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in the hope of appeasing the high priests of global warming.

 

Richard Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers.

 

The quantities of gases that CCUS would need to handle are enormous, and the capital and operating costs will be horrendous. It is a dreadful waste of energy and resources, consuming about twenty percent of power delivered from an otherwise efficient coal-fired power station.

For every tonne of coal burnt in a power station, about 11 tonnes of gases are exhausted — 7.5 tonnes of nitrogen from the air used to burn the coal, plus 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and one tonne of water vapour from the coal combustion process.

Normally these beneficial atmospheric gases are released to the atmosphere after filters take out any nasties like soot and noxious fumes.

However, CCUS also requires energy to produce and fabricate steel and erect gas storages, pumps and pipelines and to drill disposal wells. This will chew up more coal resources and produce yet more carbon dioxide, for zero benefit.

But the real problems are at the burial site — how to create a secure space to hold the CO2 gas.

There is no vacuum occurring naturally anywhere on earth — every bit of space on Earth is occupied by something — solids, liquids or gases. Underground disposal of CO2 requires it to be pumped AGAINST the pressure of whatever fills the pore space of the rock formation now — either natural gases or liquids. These pressures can be substantial, especially after more gas is pumped in.

The natural gases in sedimentary rock formations are commonly air, CO2, CH4 (methane) or rarely, H2S (rotten egg gas). The liquids are commonly salty water, sometimes fresh water or very rarely, liquid hydrocarbons.

Pumping out air is costly; pumping out natural CO2 to make room for man-made CO2 is pointless; and releasing rotten egg gas or salty water on the surface would create a real problem, unlike the imaginary threat from CO2.

In some cases CCUS may require the removal of fresh water to make space for CO2. Producing fresh water on the surface would be seen as a boon by most locals. Pumping out salt water to make space to bury CO2 would create more problems than it could solve.

Naturally, some carbon dioxide buried under pressure will dissolve in groundwater and aerate it, so that the next water driller in the area could get a real bonus — bubbling Perrier Water on tap, worth more than oil.

Then there is the dangerous risk of a surface outburst or leakage from a pressurised underground reservoir of CO2. The atmosphere contains 0.04% CO2 which is beneficial for all life. But the gas in a CCUS reservoir would contain +90% of this heavier-than-air gas — a lethal, suffocating concentration for nearby animal life if it escaped in a gas outburst.

Pumping gases underground is only sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to increase oil recovery from declining oil fields — frack the strata, pump in CO2 and force out oil/gas. To find a place where you could drive out natural hydro-carbons in order to make space to bury CO2 would be like winning the Lottery — a profitable but unlikely event.

Normally however, CCUS will be futile as the oceans will largely undo whatever man tries to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Oceans contain vastly more CO2 than the thin puny atmosphere, and oceans maintain equilibrium between CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 dissolved in the oceans. If man releases CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans will quickly absorb much of it. And if by some fluke man reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2 would bubble out of the oceans to replace much of it. Or just one decent volcanic explosion could negate the whole CCUS exercise.

 

 

Increased CO2 in the atmosphere encourages all plants to grow better and use more CO2. Unfortunately natural processes are continually sequestering huge tonnages of CO2 into extensive deposits of shale, coal, limestone, dolomite and magnesite — this process has driven atmospheric CO2 to dangerously low concentrations. Burning hydrocarbons and making cement returns a tiny bit of this plant food from the lithosphere to the biosphere.

Regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide is best left to the oceans and plants — they have been doing it successfully for millennia.

The only certain outcome from CCUS is more expensive electricity and a waste of energy resources to do all the separation, compressing and pumping. Unscrupulous Coal industry leaders love the idea of selling more coal to produce the same amount of electricity and electricity generators would welcome an increased demand for power. And green zealots in USA plan to force all coal and gas plants to bury all CO2 plant food that they generate. Consumers and taxpayers are the suckers.

Naturally the Greens love the idea of making coal and gas-fired electricity more expensive. They conveniently ignore the fact that CCUS is anti-life – it steals plant food from the biosphere.

Global Warming has never been a threat to life on Earth — Ice is the killer.

Glencore directors supporting this CCUS stupidity should be condemned for destructive ignorance.

Australia shamed and endangered by its antisemitism. By Greg Craven.

I have never before felt shame in my country. Frustration, irritation and incomprehension, occasionally, but never shame.

Now I am ashamed of our opportunist anti-Semitism, cynically tolerating Hamas murders by weaponising the appalling plight of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza. I am ashamed of fellow citizens, openly or snidely anti-Jew; of universities too frightened to let Jews speak; and Pontius Pilate governments, washing their hands of dead Jews out of political convenience or fear. …

Antisemitism is now trendy among many of the narrative people:

First, anti-Semitism is entrenched in the left as an instinctive, sometimes unwitting default position. Second, with the horrific chaos in Gaza, anti-Semitism suddenly is chic. People now routinely utter race libels that until recently would have had them ejected from any decent cocktail party. Correspondingly, anyone contradicting them will be abused or frozen into silence. Third, and chillingly, anti-Semitism is strongest among those who are young, trendy and left.

The same university students who ostentatiously agonise over climate change and social housing protest about the Jews. They do this through a self-confirming lens on the horrors of Gaza. If questioned, they smile pityingly, wave their banners and move on to the couscous. …

Interestingly, the old nostrum that “I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel” seems to be waning. In the current Gazan atmosphere of fear and loathing, the claim is not only implausible but unnecessary. Casual anti-Semitism is the new black. …

Oppressor-oppressed:

For many years Israel could counter this type of argument with an entirely different narrative. What we saw was a band of plucky Jews in army uniforms, repeatedly invaded by bully larger nations, yet invariably victorious in improbable circumstances. But as Israel has succeeded, not only militarily but economically, its status as a David against Goliath has dissipated. As demonstrated in Gaza, right or wrong, Israel is a superpower in the Middle East. …

If Israel is no longer the 97-pound weakling, it can be portrayed as a bully. The international terms for a nation-state bully are invader, oppressor and aggressor.

Jews must wonder at these terms, all of which are highly personal. Not only states but people can be aggressors and oppressors. If Israel has these qualities, it follows that its people have the same, and most of those people are Jews.

Everyone loves to hate a stereotype. In the Middle Ages, Jews were thieves, cheaters, carriers of disease and killers of Christian babies. Today they are rightist brutes, genocidal murderers and ethnic cleansers. The current language of the left is a recognisable translation of medieval charge sheets. …

If Israel is illegitimate, so is Australia:

Funnily enough, the idea of Israel as rogue state primarily composed of recently arrived Jews feeds directly into the grand obsession of the Australian crazy left. This is the devalidation of the Australian nation-state.

You know the trope. The first Europeans in Australia were mere invaders who warped into settlers. They had no right to inhabit the continent. Crucially, their collective posterity was no better, as they were tainted settlers by blood. The result was a perpetual settler state.

It follows that nothing done by our own settler state — such as making a constitution, let alone uncongenial laws — can be valid. Where this deconstruction of Australia leads is hard to guess but it certainly means that European Australians collectively are perpetually nasty, brutal, exploitative invaders. We are racially invalid occupants of the continent. Sound familiar?

Israel is constantly derided as a settler state. The Jews who came to their historic homeland during the past two centuries are dismissed as invaders. As articulated by Hamas, Israel should be destroyed and “the Jews”, not the Israelis, driven into the sea. This narrative is deeply attractive to the loopier Australian left because it validates their own national narrative.

This type of analysis is greatly assisted by the collapse of substantive education in our schools and our universities. Into the 1970s, kids would come out of school with at least a smattering of history and geography. They would know which river and which sea, and the reality of a historic Israel. Today, most students have never heard of King David, let alone Philistines or Moabites. They could not point out Jerusalem on a map. In this puddle of ignorance, prejudice and shallow leftism can wallow together.

So satisfying for the woke midwits:

In Mosman and Paddington, we can discuss the Jews and Israel quite free of content. It helps that the Carlton set’s dislike of the Jewish state is exactly the type of cause that delights the cultural left. They have no actual skin in the game. There is lots of flag-waving, lots of chanting. Naturally, there is no risk you will ever have to do anything.

But there are satisfyingly identifiable enemies. As Jewish students and speakers are harassed at universities, and Jewish schools have armed guards at their gates, the argument that this is all anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic is as implausible as the Loch Ness monster. …

Woops! We lost our own country:

This is not playing for peanuts. In Australia, there are people who routinely deny our nation and nationality. Lidia Thorpe is merely a technicolour example. But these sorts of views are expressed routinely in most universities and sympathetic parts of the media.

This type of rhetoric has the potential to undermine national confidence when we need to confront a new and dangerous world.

When we hear there is no valid state of Israel, that Jews in Israel are merely settlers, and Jews generally are problematic, we should understand that the bell tolls for us, too.

Leftism is incompatible with Judaism:

The second confronting reality is that there are some fundamental characteristics of Jews and Jewishness that are abhorrent to the left — including the Australian left — and will never be accepted by “progressives”.

The point of being a progressive is a desire for constant, sweeping change. Everything is wrong and I know how to fix it. From climate change to home ownership, our country is detestable, but I am here to help you.

Psychologically and practically, however, Judaism is adamantly opposed to a culture of constant goyim transformation. … The law of Moses is unkillable.

This is an enormous ideological difficulty for progressives. The concept of values and teachings that are immutable is an assault on their existence. Jews are a problem for progressives in much the same way as the Catholic Church: each exists outside time and temporary relevance. Little wonder that when the Australian Catholic Church was deservedly flattened by its child abuse scandal, ordinary Catholics who patently had no role in the horror were astonished by the personal vilification they received. Now, with Israel in Gaza, our local Jews can receive just punishment.

Albanese was very pro-Palestinian (or at least anti-Jewish and anti-American) when I knew him in 1982:

The third crucial element in the disdain of the Australian left for all things Jewish has been the development of a soft anti-Semitism. Particularly mastered around the conflict in Gaza, this is the practice of constantly professing sympathy for Jews, in the Middle East or domestically, but consistently refusing to recognise their rights, interests, realities and sensibilities.

This technique is important for governments as it allows them to avoid charges of anti-Semitism while holding and occasionally expressing views fundamentally hostile to Jews. … The Albanese government, occasional wriggling aside, has been a master of this sort of calculated nuance. Nervously condemning the Hamas murders, it seems almost relieved whenever some semi-plausible account of Israeli atrocities emerges.

A sad day for civilization.

The Mental is Political. By Sheluyang Peng.

Mania is [a political satire by Lionel Shriver,] set in an alternate-history 2010s, where a new movement called Mental Parity (MP) sweeps across the Western world, a movement that declares that there are no differences in intelligence between people.

 

This mania took over the West shortly after the publication of a bestselling book titled The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.

The MP movement quickly captures all of America’s institutions. Aptitude and IQ tests are banned. Schools are forced to dumb everything down — the word dumb is banned, along with any word that might imply a difference in intelligence, including stupid, idiot, wise, and dense. Even using dim in the context of low lighting is banned; one has to say “poorly illuminated,” and dimmer switch becomes “knob that raises or lowers how seeable everything is.” Movies and TV shows that depict vast differences in intelligence, like Rain Man and Sherlock, are banned. Anyone who refuses to go along with the MP movement is labeled a “smartist” and immediately socially ostracized. …

Our not-so-humble protagonist, an English professor named Pearson Converse, is a dissident who secretly resists the Mental Parity mania …

While the MP movement is an obvious satire of our current manias, the very premise of the book itself may be prophetic to a future one. After all, we’ve already had a mania over intelligence back in the Nineties, where Charles Murray was pilloried for co-writing The Bell Curve, a book that claimed that IQ was highly heritable and was a good predictor of socioeconomic outcomes. The Bell Curve was hugely controversial, especially over a chapter that linked IQ to race, which is why I was surprised to see that Shriver even dares to venture into that territory in this novel, almost as if challenging critics to “cancel” her book. …

I did note, though, that Converse carefully omits any discussion of what racial groups under her hereditarian framework do not have high IQs. Even Converse knows that there are some topics that can’t be conversed about.

Much of this novel is told in a style that blurs the lines between what is commentary on reality versus commentary on a satirical world. The forced equity of the MP movement ends up leading to widespread incompetence, reminding readers of the current controversies raging over DEI programs in the workplace.

Critical theory is about oppressors and oppressed. Have you noticed yet that the oppressor group always has a higher average IQ than the oppressed group? (Except for the groups based on sex such as gay and trans.)

It’s already starting to happening, and Shriver is just extrapolating to the logical endpoint.

Covid, Fertility, and AMH Levels. By David Archibald.

The fertility rate in Australia continues to drop, mirroring what is happening in the US [US fertility rate dropped to lowest in a century as births dipped in 2023].

The drop in birth rates started with covid in 2020, after the initial spurt in births due to the lockdowns. Each covid infection gives all the organs a whacking, shortening telomeres, and doing other dreadful stuff. But what does it do to the ovaries? In January this year there was a paper out that found that a covid infection, on average, reduced a woman’s Anti Mullerian Hormone (AMH) level by 0.24 ng/ml.

AMH is a glycoprotein produced by ovarian follicles. The AMH level is a predictor of ovarian reserve and thus the ability to conceive. AMH is the only reproductive hormone that is not influenced by different states of the menstrual cycle. It peaks in the early twenties.

First the anecdotal evidence:

I got confirmation today of almost total infertility today due to covid and not cured auto-immunity for four years. We can still try something but I am totally destroyed, I could not imagine I could suffer more than this. This is the most painful thing ever. I am also furious.

Americans are being infected by covid once a year on average. Let’s apply that to the known decline in AMH to see what is likely to happen. The result of that exercise is in this graphic:

 

Modelled effect of annual covid infections on ovarian reserve as measured by AMH level

 

The blue line is the natural decline from the age of 18. AMH drops to a low level in the early forties and after that it becomes increasing difficult to conceive. The red line is the modeled effect of annual covid infections from the age of 20. Fertility is over by the early thirties. A lot of women are delaying having children until their thirties. They are likely to find that babies and annual covid infections are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other but not both. Your body, your choice, as they say.

It is a similar story for annual covid infections starting from the age of 30. In effect, annual covid infections halve the remaining years of a woman’s fertility.

So what happens to girls who get their first covid infection as a baby, then in kindergarden, then in primary school and so on? A female is born with all her eggs, and they are getting whacked by periodic covid infections. They may not get to the starting line.

This matter requires close attention. Our civilisation depends upon it.

It was 1.5°–2.4°C warmer in northern Norway than the modern era of 1961–1990: wildlife abounded. By Joanne Nova.

A special cave in far northern Norway has a trove of thousands of old bones.

They are deposited in layers that stretch back from 5,800 years ago to 13,000 years ago. And it’s been a radical change: at the start, the cave was submerged under the ocean, so the bones are mostly marine species. But a few thousand years later the weather was warm, and birds and mammals had moved in.

By 6,000 years ago the researchers estimate it was the hottest part of the Holocene and 1.5°–2.4°C warmer than the modern era of 1961–1990.

After that, the cave was blocked by scree, and the bone fragments sat there seemingly undisturbed for nearly 6,000 years while the ice sheets moved and the Vikings came and went. Then in 1993 someone happened to build a road nearby.

Now a team have analysed the DNA in the layers and discovered that far from being an ecological disaster, when the Earth was hotter the Arctic must have been full of life. They found lemmings, shrews, voles, hares, geese, frogs, seals, and pheasants. They were also surprised to find dogs and cats there, even though there were no humans at the time. The DNA test couldn’t distinguish whether these were our domesticated furry friends or their wild cousins. In any case, there were species that lived there then, that don’t live there now because it’s too cold.

Some of these species are headed northward again, and small children at universities are probably being frightened and told this is “unprecedented”, but the truth is that the Holocene really was hotter than today, and some of these species were seemingly happy about that for thousands of years.

The other truth is that climate change happens naturally, even without SUV’s, and that species have migrated. Climate modelers have been trying to erase the Holocene period for ten years, because it was hotter than now, but CO2 levels were lower. When they are not denying it happened, they call that mismatch “the Holocene conundrum”.

Remember all the panic about animals being climate refugees forced to move because we drive cars? Well they’ve been there before. …

And if anyone wonders if the Holocene warming was just a Norwegian thing, there are many more Holocene markers all over the world. 6,000 years ago the world was so much warmer, the Sahara was lush green and wet. Sea levels were 1 – 2 meters higher around Australia, temperatures were warmer in Greenland and in Vostok, and people saw a wave of warmth in 6,000 boreholes drilled across 6 continents. The deepest oceans around Indonesia were 2 degrees warmer 10,000 years ago. Pacific Islands were born in the last 5,000 years as the oceans cooled and shrank. And fires were far worse 4,000 years ago in Northern Australia.

Here’s a temperature plot from the IPCC’s first assessment report, in 1990:

 

 

And here’s a recent diagram from an article by the climate industry, going back 100,000 years to just before the last ice age, and even it admits the Holocene was warmer previously:

 

 

Wikipedia:

The Holocene is the current geological epoch, beginning approximately 11,700 years ago. It follows the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat….

The Holocene corresponds with the rapid proliferation, growth, and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present.

For the world’s sake, Russia needs to crawl out of Ukraine on their knees, begging for mercy. By Jessica Berlin, a Germany-based foreign policy analyst and commentator.

Russia needs to lose and lose badly. Russia needs to crawl out of Ukraine on their knees, begging for mercy.

That’s what the Chinese need to see. That’s what the Saudis need to see. That’s what every dictator on the planet needs to see to ensure they don’t get any ideas themselves.

Because if what they see is, oh, Russia is allowed to invade a democratic European country, literally on the borders of NATO, to butcher senselessly tens of thousands of people, to threaten global food security, to cause refugee crises, to cause the kind of destruction we haven’t seen on this continent since World War 2.

If they are allowed to get away with this in the 2020s and then get back to business, well that’s not going to stop the Chinese from attacking Taiwan or pressing forward in the South China Sea, etc. because NATO will have shown that we cannot even keep the peace in our own front garden.

And that is much more dangerous than internal political chaos in Russia. The implications of this war are truly global. This war, this conflict, shapes our century. And what we do or don’t do will determine the rest of our geopolitical arrangement for the next generations.

Russia needs to lose, and lose badly. That's what every dictator on the planet needs to see. Our ability or failure to stop and punish Russia's crimes in #Ukraine will deter or encourage the aggression of dictatorships worldwide, and thereby determine the course of this century. pic.twitter.com/nKkpxHxI6f

— Jessica Berlin (@berlin_bridge) May 9, 2024

David Archibald adds:

Ukraine is the Spanish Civil War of our generation.

Some of the right in the US have been against aiding Ukraine because Biden is ostensibly for it. But Biden has been slow-walking aid to Ukraine to bleed the Russians as much as possible to increase the chances of a coup against Putin. Biden and the Democrats don’t care if hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians die in the process.

Time to get this war over with before the one with China starts.

The Spanish Civil War ended on 1st April, 1939 and WW2 started on 1st September, 1939.

Biden’s unforgivable betrayal of Israel. By Brendan O’Neill.

From the White House to those whiffy tents on campus lawns, from the leader pages of the liberal press to the Israelophobic pulpits of social media, the cry goes out: don’t attack Rafah. If Israeli forces launch an invasion of that southern Gazan city, in pursuit of Hamas, it will be a bloodbath, the posing peaceniks cry. It would be ‘genocide in action’, insists former Corbynite bigwig John McDonnell. If you do it, President Biden warns Israel, we will stop providing you with certain weapons.

In short: leave Rafah be. Which means leave Hamas be. Leave in peace the army of anti-Semites that butchered a thousand of your people — this, fundamentally, is the request being made of the Jewish State by the self-righteous of the Earth. …

We know that huge numbers of Hamas militants have decamped to Rafah. We know they’re firing rockets from Rafah. We know some of these deadly devices have killed IDF soldiers while others have fallen on Israeli towns, with the intent of slaughtering the Jews who live there. In such circumstances, the cry ‘Hands off Rafah!’ is really a demand that Israel throw its own hands in the air and submit to the violent persecutions of its medieval foe.

The Western elites’ hostility to an Israeli incursion into Rafah is intense. … The Guardian says any ‘intensification of [Israel’s] operation’ would be ‘unthinkable’. … It’s ‘unthinkable’ to seek to defeat the fascists who exterminated hundreds of Jews just seven months ago? Really? …

Biden steps over the line:

Biden’s intervention is the most striking — and unforgivable. He has threatened to deprive Israel of certain military hardware if ‘they go into Rafah’. This is the first time, as CNN notes, that Biden has ‘condition[ed] American weaponry on Israel’s actions’.

His comments have caused ‘outrage’ in Israel, as well they might. They come off as political blackmail disguised as high moral principle. Pause your pursuit of Hamas or we’ll punish you militarily and economically – that’s what he’s saying.

It is hypocrisy of the highest order that the state that funded and aided the Kurds’ hunting down of ISIS, including the Battle for Raqqa of 2017 in which thousands died, should now so pompously warn Israel not to do the same. …

Consider this: among the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, five are American citizens. … It is extraordinary that the American president would openly threaten the army that’s committed to liberating these Americans. What a gutless abdication of moral responsibility and of the national interest itself. And for what? For the fleeting thrill of an electoral boost. Biden is clearly troubled by the student protests and by predictions that he might lose the backing of ‘progressives’ and some Muslim voters over his Israel stance. So he sacrifices an ally, and literal American citizens, at the altar of a few more ballots. ….

Biden’s instruction to Israel to stay out of Rafah is an implicit acceptance of Hamas’s right to stay in Rafah. The White House is conferring legitimacy, no doubt unwittingly, on Hamas’s cynical dominion of Rafah. …

Hamas were relying on people like Joe Biden to protect them when they launched October 7 massacre:

We need to call out the phoney pacifism of the ‘Hands off Rafah’ lobby. The architects of the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust are there. The racist militants who’ve promised to carry out more 7 Octobers — right up to ‘October 1,000,000’ — are there. Attacks on Israel are being planned there. Attacks on Israel are happening there. Rafah has been turned, by Hamas, into a base for its cosmic crusade against the Jewish State.

The opposition to a clash in Rafah is less a plea for peace than an insistence that Israel accept war. That it learns to live with the existence, a few miles from its border, of a terrorist-ruled city from which deadly attacks on its soldiers and civilians will be launched. What poses as a defence of Palestinian life is really a devaluing of Israeli life. …

Let’s be clear: all-out war in Rafah would be terrible. … No one wants it. Not Israel, not the young IDF soldiers who will have to execute it, certainly not the people of Gaza. But if the pontificators of the Western world were serious about preventing war in Rafah, they’d be calling on Hamas to return the hostages and to surrender to Israel. That’s the only way this conflict ends: with the vanquishing of the fascists who started it.

Just as well it was Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in charge in WW2, not Joe Biden fretting about the votes of 2% of the electorate.