Energy: How to have a Future Worth Having

Energy: How to have a Future Worth Having. By David Archibald.

The peak month of world oil production was back in October 2018. … With peak oil now in the rear vision mirror, the decades of declining production are now upon us.

This won’t mean that solar power and wind power become more competitive. Solar and wind facilities are manufactured and installed using energy from coal and oil. In a tight energy market in which different sources of energy are semi-substitutable for each other, the coal price and the natural gas price will rise to the oil price in energy-equivalent terms. …

So deciding between renewables and coal for power generation is a false choice. Because coal isn’t a long-term option. There are babies being born now who will see the end of coal. There is not much point agonising about coal-fired power stations. The better use for coal is producing liquid fuels for transport applications. There is only one source of energy that can replace coal for power generation and that is nuclear. The sooner we replace coal with nuclear for power generation, the longer our coal reserves will last and the higher the standard of living our children will have.

 

Fossil fuels got civilisation started and U235 is the match that allowed humanity to light the nuclear fire that will maintain civilisation at a high level until Judgement Day.

 

The solar panels and wind turbines we are installing at the moment will be carted off to landfill at the end of their lives and replaced by nuclear power. This is because the cost of nuclear power should remain at about the price it is currently, while the prices of all other forms of energy will go up with the oil price. And there will be no point in using power from nuclear reactors to provide the energy to make solar panels and wind turbines, because the price of the power produced will be at least five times that produced by the nuclear reactors in the first place. …

If our civilisation is going to have a future worth having, it will be powered by plutonium breeder reactors. The only alternative to nuclear power is to revert to wood and horses which will result in an 18th century standard of living. It will be easier to get that nuclear future while we still have some oil and coal to burn. It will be hard to build nuclear reactors if we are using energy from horses. So, the sooner we start down the right path, the safer and happier we will be.

Read it all for the details.

Republican Group Running Anti-Trump Ads Finds Little Is Working

Republican Group Running Anti-Trump Ads Finds Little Is Working. By Jonathan Swan in the New York Times.

A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states. …

But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.” …

“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.

Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” Mr. McIntosh adds. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”

Examples of “failed” ads cited in the memo included attacks on Mr. Trump’s “handling of the pandemic, promotion of vaccines, praise of Dr. Fauci, insane government spending, failure to build the wall, recent attacks on pro-life legislation, refusal to fight woke issues, openness to gun control, and many others.” …

“It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump,” he adds, “otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”

That’s because Donald Trump is uniquely THE anti-establishment candidate.

 

Want to change the way the US is run? Want to stick it to the ruling class? Then vote for Trump.

 

Competence and track record no longer have anything to do with it.

Ann Coulter is getting it:

You’d think the one thing Republicans would have learned from the 2016 Trump campaign is that voters wanted something completely different from what the GOP had been offering.

For decades, Republicans had run on tax cuts, more military spending to fund the forever wars, and diversity-lite. But Trump proved that what voters wanted was a wall, mass deportations, and a white guy who wasn’t embarrassed about being white. The GOP was like a man who keeps giving his wife Super Bowl tickets for her birthday, when what she wants is a fur coat.

Canada: The Great Replacement

Canada: The Great Replacement. By Jayant Bhandari.

Canada’s population grew by more than one million in 2022. … When I moved to Canada in 2003, its population was 32 million. Today, it is 40 million …

26% of Canadians are first-generation immigrants. 18% are second-generation. 32% of children under fifteen in 2021 were second-generation immigrants.

Before the early 1970s, most immigrants came from Europe. Today, only 10% of the total immigrants come from Europe. This matters.

Canada has irrevocably changed in just the two decades since I immigrated. … India is by far the most significant source of immigration, accounting for 27% of total immigrants. A distant second is China, with 7%. Third is Afghanistan, with 5.4%. Fourth is Nigeria, with 5%. …

Canadians have put Canada on a path to inevitable destruction.

There is no history in human affairs when a society willingly gave itself away to foreigners. There is no history of a society maintaining any values once foreigners overtook it. Indeed, there is no history in human affairs where muti-culturalism and ethnic diversity have not led to massive civil conflicts, but Canadians love romanticizing these anti-values.

Most reading this article haven’t experienced such an increase in immigrants. But your anecdotal experience is not the statistical reality. The composition of people you socialize with does not represent the ethnic proportion of the Canadian population.

Put differently, the new immigrants often get ghettoized in areas you never visit. When you encounter them, your interaction will likely be short and superficial. But they have the same vote as you do. And they have no interest in European values. They are economic migrants without an interest in what provides nutrition to Canadian society. They have, at best, no interest or concept of Western philosophy.

Canada now has massive ghettoes. … Recently, Eritrean immigrants fought a pitched battle in Calgary. Khalistan’s posters can now be seen in many places. These don’t leave a lasting impression on native Canadians, but they must.

 

 

I provided the statistics, but you must feel, smell, and sense it. You will emotionally realize that Canada is irredeemably on its way to an ethnically non-European majority in a few short years. Should this matter? Of course, it does. None of the 200 countries on the planet is a civilization and has a non-European or non-East Asian majority.

Did I leave India because of its utterly venal and oppressive government? Not really. They are utterly stupid, and bribes take care of everything. But the character of the government is a symptom of the underlying society. It was the Indian society that I ran away from, which has no concept of honor, integrity, moral values, rationality, or interest in anything except the material, which is money and sex.

More precisely, I ran away from Indians.

With time, the institutions the British left behind have been hollowed out in India, and the civilizational constraints that they had imposed have fallen apart. …

India provides 27% of Canada’s new immigrants. Most other immigrants come from other Third World hellholes and have similar cultural backgrounds, one rooted in materialism and the absence of civilizational constraints and moral values.

Every Indian city today has at least one high-rise building devoted to housing agencies that help people immigrate to Canada, most offering help creating fake documents or getting admission to colleges structured not for education but for assisting people to stay in Canada long enough to become citizens.

Crazy, isn’t it, that Canada has given itself away to those who faked documents? So much for the much-touted skilled-class immigrants! …

A few years back, I went to an Indian event in South Vancouver. As happens in India, nothing worked. There was no coordination. What happened on the stage had nothing to do with the schedule. They played the wrong music. Then, they stopped it and ran around to correct it. Organizers openly argued with each other. They openly talked about how “we” should vote for members of “our Sikh” community in the government. Their swing vote already has a massive influence on the foreign policies of the Liberal and Conservative parties and NDP.

Sometimes, Canadian airports and train stations look indistinguishable from Indian ones, except that you can still get a train ticket without paying a bribe, the ticket-seller treats you respectfully albeit a bit less by each passing day, the trains still operate reasonably well albeit continue to worsen, and you still don’t see cockroaches inside the compartments. But you will get there.

Eventually, trains will collide, killing hundreds; massive forest fires will happen not because of climate change but because of a lack of work ethics, incompetence, and apathy; bridges will fall apart, infrastructure will deteriorate, quality of hygiene will worsen, and nepotism and bribery will become commonplace. But unless you understand this article, you will fail to pinpoint the reason.

You will have to start worrying about female infanticide and female genital mutilation. Caste problems will require you to create legal remedies. Some of these issues are already here, although no official inquiry will blame the cause of accidents on rampant immigration, diversity, inclusivity, and equity.

Hindu-Sikh problems will continue to worsen in Canada, but no one will have the courage to tell them to take their fight to where it belongs: back to India. These idiots will celebrate Indian Independence Day in Canada, utterly forgetful that they got rid of European rule from India and then took all the pains to move to a country ruled by Europeans. But among them, the concept of reason is conspicuous by its absence. They vote on a tribal basis and elect people of their kind, tribe, and religion, setting Canadian institutions’ conversion to what they left behind in motion. …

Changing culture is not a generation or two-generation process. It is not even a centuries-long process. It is, at best, a millennia-long process. And that is assuming culture is not hardwired.

Civilization is a uniquely Western concept. The Third World, where most Canadian immigrants come from, has no interest in Western values. For them, concepts like honor, honesty, and fairness are alien. They are driven by expediency and the acquisition of resources. Desperate in their Third World hellhole, it is not the absence of liberty or the rule of law that worries them. They are blind to them. They are only interested in money.

When they arrive, they do not see the existence of Western values. It is only the money-making opportunities that they seek. That is the only thing of value that they see. Given their state of mind, they think that Canada would be a much better place if their religions, rituals, and culture, and indeed tyranny, were to be imposed on Canada.

A senior officer from the Indian government, on an extended visit to the West, told me why he hated the West. He found that the lack of noise and smell made him lonely. His work got done without needing connections, and no one came to prostrate before him. There was no one lining up to meet and greet him. He felt deeply hurt and unrecognized. He didn’t know how to pass his time. He desperately wanted his bank to take longer to do his job and his electricity to stop working so he could use up his time chasing them. …

They have no interest in Western values or liberty. They are not running away from tyranny. They like it. They have a visceral hatred for peace and order. I might even add that they find Western values abhorrent.

The more skilled among them, even when they earn million-dollar salaries, vote for the Left. They love the nanny government. Their vote, now inching towards the majority, is increasingly reflected in Canadian politics. …

Assimilation is impossible unless you can trigger a passion among immigrants for Western values. No one has discovered how to activate this.

For a moment, let me go a step further. All my friends from the Third World, who are pro-Western and came to Canada for liberty, took years to feel at home. Simple things like a noise-free car and lack of potholes make them want to puke, for it is disorienting. How could others ever get assimilated?

The situation gets far worse when they live among their very own kind. Eritreans, Ethiopians, Pakistanis, Syrians, Persians, and Afghanis have found their own ghettos, for Canada has enabled enough mass immigration to give each ghetto a critical mass.

Based on faulty, unexamined beliefs, Canada has diluted its population by 100% in just over two generations. Trudeau, not happy with this, is ramping up immigration.

There is another erroneous Canadian belief that assimilation happens with time. It does happen in adopting the low-class hedonistic no-values.

The second-generation immigrants learn to speak English and French and wear Western clothes. But deeper down, contrary to conventional wisdom, the situation worsens. Not that the first generation necessarily had gratitude for the opportunities it got in Canada, but the second generation also finds itself split for the romanticism of the homeland their parents left.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, crime rate increases in the second generation. If you live in Surrey and attend a school dominated by Indians, you must be a part of one of the gangs. That is if you don’t want to be beaten up. In a way, they become more Indian than Indians are in India. The same is true with other immigrants from the Third World. …

The people of the future will be amused by how, using simplistic, unexamined, faulty myths of multiculturalism and diversity, Canada, which was once a great country, destroyed itself. They will be amused that, afraid of being canceled and to preserve their lifestyles from marauding leftists and wokes, Canadians let their land be ransacked within two generations.

Certainly don’t hear that experience or point of view in the Australian media. The situation of course is similar here. Actually, it is worse, in the opinion of the author (who wrote to the Wentworth Report). I like the point about importing a class of document fakers. Not true in every case, as our PC friends will be ultraquick to point out, but….

The One Election Issue to Roll Back the Globalists in Australia

The One Election Issue to Roll Back the Globalists in Australia. By Jordan Knight. No, not the Voice, the other one.

For 20 years, Australia has led one of the largest migration programs in the world, with a record 456,000 migrants arriving in Australia in the last financial year alone. Nearly 650,000 are predicted by next year …

Nearly 30 per cent of Australia’s population is now foreign-born, while Greater Sydney and Melbourne now boast a foreign-born population of around 45 per cent.  …

‘White flight’ is a touchy term that many would call a dog whistle, but as data found in 2018 by The Australian found, the truth is that it’s a statistical reality. In 2016, suburbs in Western Sydney witnessed a mass exodus of locals — typically Anglo-Saxon Australians — while at the same time receiving massive inflows of migrant arrivals. This means that with immigration ramped up to record highs, we might now see the same happen not just in other Sydney suburbs, but in Sydney itself. Note that last year 121,000 New South Welshmen left the state, with most moving to Queensland.

Witnessing the dramatic change of the neighbourhood you grew up in is now a common story for many Australians, old and young. The once-homogenous area my father grew up in is now over 60 per cent foreign-born, with above-average crime rates and poverty. In London, a BBC documentary, The Last Whites of East End, captures this phenomenon, and the heartbreak that entails. ‘I feel a foreigner in my own borough. We were born here. Lived here. Finding ourselves marginalised out,’ said one East Ender. ‘I feel like it [East End] is just going to dwindle out,’ said another.

Many will argue that having a majority foreign-born population is not necessarily a bad thing. But nobody to date has bothered to argue why exactly it’s a good thing either. The question of ‘how does this policy outcome benefit Australians?’ was never really answered. It kind of just happened, without a single word of discussion — as if it were an act of nature, and not a direct result of, government policy. …

Entire suburbs and cities of Australia have now had their composition radically changed. Yet it is deeply unfashionable to discuss such changes — unless, of course, you’re promoting it. …

Not only has mass immigration made the country poorer per capita — as many have argued — it’s fundamentally re-engineered our economy, shifting direction away from innovation and entrepreneurship, towards inflating unproductive assets. …

1.5 per cent of the entire world’s GDP is now stored in the Australian housing market. Not exactly the sign of a smart, healthy economy. …

We see immigrants, Labor sees new voters:

Then there’s the other major conservative complaint against the Voice — that it will capture our democracy and shift it further leftwards. Yet again, win or lose, it won’t matter — because this is already happening thanks to migrant voting habits. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s a strategy. To understand how and why they’re doing it, you simply need to listen to the people who promote it.

‘When these [immigrants] enrol to vote, 20 per cent more of them will vote Labor,’ boasted a Labor-aligned consultant, showing a chart of Labor’s exploding migrant arrival numbers.

Labor’s numbers stack up. According to research done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, newly arrived migrants are more than twice as likely to vote Labor as they are the Coalition (45 to 23 per cent). Their plan so far is working. In NSW, out of the top areas for foreign-born population, 16 out of 20 voted Labor. The Coalition, blindly supportive of mass immigration, are walking themselves into a political death trap. …

Matthew Goodwin ..: ‘Politics today feels more chaotic and less predictable than in the past because it is. Large numbers of people feel that they no longer have a voice in politics. That rising immigration, and rapid ethnic change threaten their national group, culture and ways of life. That the neoliberal economic system is leaving them behind relative to others in society, and who no longer identify with established politicians.’

Africa for Africans, but white countries for everybody:

This, he argues, has created a ‘pool of potential’ for national populist leaders to emerge.

To see what he means, look to Germany. There the immigration restrictionist party Alternative for Deutschland is currently polling at 21 per cent, putting them in second place. The now-governing right-wing national populist Sweden Democrats put their electoral success down to arguing against decades of neo-liberal economics which they say weakened their strength as a nation, and what they say is a declining ‘Swedishness’ brought on by mass immigration.

Politicians, pay attention!

Meanwhile, PHON, constantly embroiled in in-fighting, has struggled to strike a chord larger than a few sitting Senators. For Australia to successfully ride a way of National Populist sentiment, it will need professionalisation, away from personality politics. Whether this comes from a new Liberal party, a new PHON, or something else entirely, is yet to be seen.

While 53 per cent say they’ll be voting No [on the Voice], 70 per cent of Australians say they want lower immigration. The popular mandate is there, but where is the campaign? Where are the millions of dollars in donations? Where are the strategists, the headlines, the constant news stories?

Who benefits? Why are we never allowed to vote on this issue? First sensible Australian political party to make it the main issue wins. It won for Trump in 2016, and was a major factor in Brexit.

Australian Universities to Lower Their Standards Further — No One Can Fail!

Australian Universities to Lower Their Standards Further — No One Can Fail! By Steven Schwartz.

Over the past 20 years, government policy has encouraged the number of students studying in Australian universities to explode. The highest-ranked institutions have swept up the best-prepared applicants, forcing the less prestigious universities to lower their entry standards.

Not surprisingly, many of these poorly prepared students are finding themselves unable to complete their courses. Dropout rates have climbed to record levels.

Under the rules governing accreditation, Australian universities have a legal requirement to ensure that the students they admit have the educational background and teaching support to complete their courses. It appears that universities have flaunted this requirement, so the government has stepped in.

In a daring display of its unshakeable commitment to the academic success of its constituents, the federal government has introduced legislation that could revolutionize, or perhaps obliterate, the way we understand the concept of failure. …

The Australian government is mandating that university students who score less than 50 percent in their exams will be entitled to a slew of educational life-savers. University-funded tutoring, counselling, examination do-overs, special exams, and extended deadlines are all on the table.

With these bountiful resources at their disposal, no students will ever face the sting of failure again. …

A hefty fine of $18,780 per student will be introduced for those institutions that fail to help their students rise above the 50 percent benchmark. …

But will it work?

Failures give students the opportunity to “pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again.” …

Expertise takes a long time to acquire because, outside universities, 50 percent is not nearly good enough. The real world has much higher standards. …

Tenaciousness, resilience, drive, perseverance, and the ability to delay gratification while working toward a distant goal are just as crucial in achieving success as is intelligence. Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth calls this combination of character traits “grit.” It comes from confronting failure and overcoming it. Without failure, progress is impossible.

It may sound cynical, but universities, faced with high costs and potential fines, may be tempted to take the easy way forward and pass every single student.

Will a university degree retain its lustre when passing becomes an expected, almost mundane occurrence rather than a reward for hard work, grit, and resilience? If everyone is a winner, is anyone winning anything at all?

Politicians…

[Our politicians] look forward to offering voters a world where failure ceases to exist and success requires no effort. A world in which every student gets a degree just for showing up.

It’s an idyllic vision that might catch on across the globe. Imagine a future in which everyone gets a shot at the American Dream, even if their exam scores are below 50 percent; a time in which the “School of Hard Knocks” has shut its doors forever. …

But this trend is not just in Australia. The philosophy of keeping students happy by eliminating failure is also spreading across the United States. Grade-inflation has become more and more pronounced, with “A” grades now the average in many schools, and grades of “D” and “F” almost nonexistent. …

Both in the U.S. and Australia, it’s easy for many students to coast through to their degrees without much effort and never experiencing failure. This approach is pleasant for the faculty and profitable for the institutions, but it leaves students fragile when they face a world unlike the cocoon of education. …

Of course, we want our students to succeed, but passing every student will ensure just the opposite. By preventing students from experiencing failure, we will keep them from gaining the self-confidence that comes from overcoming it.

Midwits rule. And what do midwits want? A system so easy that they come (equal) first.

Why Midwits Rule Society Now

Why Midwits Rule Society Now. By Eugyppius.

A long time ago, Dean Keith Simonton published an important paper on Intelligence and Personal Influence in Groups, which shows why it is that all of society seems to be dominated by the discourse of somewhat intelligent but never all-that-brilliant people.

His central insight is that there exists a “range of comprehension” for a given level of intelligence. This is the range of less intelligent people who can still understand the reasoning of someone at the top of that range, and who are therefore susceptible to being persuaded by it.

A near-genius with IQ 160 will be able to argue persuasively to his quite intelligent colleagues of IQ 140, but for the 50% of everyone with IQ 100, what he says will seem baffling. Because very few people are in the IQ 140–160 range, having IQ 160 is not very socially advantageous. If your goal is to make friends and influence people, it’s better to be substantially stupider.

This and other theoretical considerations lead Simonton to propose this chart of social influence (“potential adherents”) as a function of IQ:

 

Those who are of merely average intelligence don’t have much social influence at all. They find their intellectual superiors far more persuasive than their peers, at least to a point. Those who are very intelligent suffer from much the same disadvantage, because they are comprehensible only to a fairly small pool of slightly less intelligent people at the extreme right end of the curve.

Ours is therefore an IQ 120 midwit society; it could not be any other way. Those with the most influence have an upper comprehensive range extending to about IQ 140. They are still capable of internalising and mostly comprehending the criticism of the smartest professors.

In the other direction, they look on the vast population of the unintelligent with a muted frustration, because their powers to persuade those with an IQ much below 100 are as weak as the power of their IQ 145 superiors is to persuade them.

Since our midwit rulers are cognitively better endowed than probably 90% of the whole population, it’s easy for them to overlook the rare 10% of people who are smarter than they are. Accordingly, they throw all of their opponents into the same basket of intellectual deplorables, and commit themselves to unceasing wars against “disinformation,” to devising various social manipulation schemes and to banning the political opposition.

It follows that the ideas which dominate our world are not necessarily the best or the most rational approaches to things. They are rather those ideas which appeal to people whose intelligence is above average if less-than-phenomenal, and whose other personality traits optimise their institutional influence. They have the brains of upper middle-class professionals, and they’re also much more extroverted, conscientious and conformist than the broader population.

In academia, where they dominate like nowhere else, we see a range of learned pathologies — not only a deep faith in irrational hygiene procedures like perpetual vaccination and masking, but a whole world of bizarre ideologies pertaining to human gender and biology, the environment and society.

Something has obviously gone very wrong with these kinds of people, but — and this is the crucial point — those things which have gone wrong with them are calibrated precisely to that midwit peak. However irrational the ideas current in this sphere, their appeal will increase with intelligence up to a point that is very nearly out of sight from us, because people of outlier high intelligence are extremely rare and their influence is negligible.

This is the result of a well-known phenomenon that people find those with IQs more than about 20 points higher hard to understand.

So if in the TV age the people elect a leader with an IQ of 125 (say, George Bush), with whom they are comfortable, then that leader will not hire staffers or advisors with IQs over about 145 because they will make him or her uncomfortable. Since the 1960s, the bright fringe have become frozen out of more and more areas. Yes, our leadership really is becoming more incompetent.

Now social media has accelerated the trend, as more policy is open to more discussion by a wider range of people. To say nothing of the numbers. Consider an IQ curve. In the right hand side, each drop of 10 points means the less smart greatly outnumber the smarter.

On top of that, the genetic component of average IQs has been dropping at about 1 to 1.5 IQ points per decade since 1880, and even the Flynn effect (which was about the non-genetic components of intelligence, such as learning to take IQ tests better) has now reversed.

On current trends, we are entering a technologically stagnant age of authoritarianism, run by a moderately dopey ruling class.

hat-tip David Archibald

Scientists ‘shocked’ and ‘alarmed’ at what’s in the mRNA shots

Scientists ‘shocked’ and ‘alarmed’ at what’s in the mRNA shots. By Rebekah Barnett.

Early in 2023, genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made an accidental discovery. While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasma DNA.

McKernan, who has 25 years’ experience in his field, ran the experiment again, confirming that the vials contained up to, in his opinion, 18-70 times more DNA contamination than the legal limits allowed by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In particular, McKernan was alarmed to find the presence of an SV40 promoter in the Pfizer vaccine vials. This is a sequence that is, ‘…used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies,’ McKernan explains. This is something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines. …

Other scientists soon confirmed McKernan’s findings, though the amount of DNA contamination was variable, suggesting inconsistency of vial contents depending on batch lots. One of these scientists was cancer genomics expert Dr Phillip Buckhaults, who is a proponent of the mRNA platform and has received the Pfizer Covid vaccine himself.

In September of this year, Dr Buckhaults shared his findings in South Carolina Senate hearing. ‘I’m kind of alarmed about this DNA being in the vaccine — it’s different from RNA, because it can be permanent,’ he told those present.

‘There is a very real hazard,’ he said, that the contaminant DNA fragments will integrate with a person’s genome and become a ‘permanent fixture of the cell’ leading to autoimmune problems and cancers in some people who have had the vaccinations. He also noted that these genome changes can ‘last for generations’.

Dr Buckhaults alleges that the presence of high levels of contaminant DNA in the mRNA vaccines ‘may be causing some of the rare but serious side effects, like death from cardiac arrest’. …

Safe and effective, they said:

In Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) maintains that Covid vaccines cannot alter a person’s DNA. …

There is already at least one peer-reviewed scientific paper demonstrating that the Pfizer Covid vaccine mRNA can enter the human liver cell line and reverse transcribe into DNA in vitro (meaning in a lab dish).

Other studies cited in the case materials show the presence of spike protein mRNA in the nucleus of human cells, and evidence that acquired immune traits pass down to the offspring of mice pre-exposed to the Covid vaccine mRNA-LNP platform. This is suggestive that, once in the nucleus, the vaccine mRNA can be transferred and integrated with chromosomal DNA.

Taking both the LNP-mod-RNA complexes and the recently discovered DNA contamination present in the mRNA Covid vaccines, acting solicitor Katie Ashby Koppens says, ‘Every single person who has been injected with these products has received a GMO that has not been through the expert regulatory process in this country.’ She adds, ‘The human genome could be changed permanently, and no one was informed.’

The Australian PM will be announcing these findings on Friday, and apologize on behalf of the Australian Government for encouraging vaccination. (Just kidding.)

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things (Like Getting mRNA Injections)

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things (Like Getting mRNA Injections). By John Carter.

During the lockdowns I was absolutely gobsmacked by how thoroughly so many of my friends fell for the psyop and succumbed to the mass psychosis.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, most of them are quite convinced that carbon dioxide is a pressing threat to the survival of the human species, one which photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries will save us from; that race is a social construct; that the pay gap between men and women is real; and that a woman is whoever uses she/her pronouns.

Still, in this case, it all just seemed too obvious to me that the entire thing was a put-up job, a hysterical collective nervous breakdown cultivated by an unholy alliance of politicians greedy for power and pharmaceutical behemoths greedy for cash. I mean, we had the Diamond Princess results in March of 2020.

These aren’t stupid people, by any means. I’m talking PhD scientists, computer programmers, engineers. In terms of raw cognitive grunt this is a group with serious horsepower. So despite the fact that they’d largely swallowed every other mandatory absurdity in the prevailing culture, I retained a naive expectation that they’d eventually come to their senses and realize that COVID’s dangers were exaggerated.

No such luck. Most of them still haven’t come to their senses. Even several months ago masks remained a common sight in professional settings, and of course, the majority dutifully, even enthusiastically, lined up for their untested gene therapy injections. Which, as so many predicted before the rollout, have done absolutely nothing to protect anyone from the Coof of Doom, and have generally proved to be far more trouble than they’re worth what with all the myocarditis. Many of them got sick from the shots. That didn’t stop them from getting more.

A few days ago Cremieux had a thread on Twixxor examining a recent study which found a strong positive correlation between cognitive ability and likelihood to have gotten jabbed. Here’s the money plot:

 

 

Given my personal experiences, I can easily believe the study’s results: in my immediate circle, amongst those I know professionally, I know precisely one other person who rejected the shot.

Cremiuex’s take-away from the study: smart people get vaxxed, so getting vaxxed is the smart thing to do.

Just because smart people do something, does not make that the smart thing to do.

It’s certainly a popular heuristic though, including amongst intelligent people. “Smart people do this thing, so if you want to be smart you should do it too!” is in practice a highly effective argument for manipulating the behaviour of people who identify as smart.

As a simple historical example, take God.

Within Western civilization, until recently essentially everyone was a Christian. The intelligentsia, however, tended to be the most devout Christians: for a long time, if you had any intellectual acumen whatsoever, you were very likely to find your career inside the Church.

For about the last century or so, this has been reversed: smart people are in general more likely to be atheists.

If you’d been born five hundred years ago, the argument would be: smart people believe in God so believing in God is the smart thing to do. Now, the argument is: smart people do not believe in God, so not believing in God is the smart thing to do.

Obviously, one of these groups of smart people is wrong. God either exists or he doesn’t. …

To inhabitants of a rationalist civilization that prizes logical reasoning as the best path to truth, this may seem strange. Intelligent people are better at reasoning, the truth is most effectively apprehended via reason, so intelligent people are more likely to achieve truth. Right?

Well.

Not really.

Intelligence really just boils down to the ability to extract meaningful patterns from information. The more rapidly this can be done, the more complex the patterns that can be discerned, the higher the intelligence. As a rule this means that intelligent people are capable of learning more rapidly, since learning is itself essentially a pattern recognition process in which the meaningful is abstracted from the meaningless and therefore more easily stored away for future reference. Hence ‘crystallized intelligence’, the sum total of the information that someone has acquired over their life, is usually a reasonable guide to how intelligent someone is. Early IQ tests relied to a large degree on tests of knowledge for this reason, until researchers realized that this measure was useless for cross-cultural comparisons, including comparisons of subcultures that had differential access to educational materials, at which point they ultimately settled on pattern recognition tests as an objective measure.

Basically, smart people are better at absorbing information.

Misinforming smart people is the fastest way to manipulate a society:

What happens when the information environment is saturated with nonsense?

GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Most people will happily absorb the nonsense just as readily as they will the accurate information, and the smart ones will do so more efficiently than the less intelligent.

Now, there are caveats here. If the nonsense is really obviously nonsense, in stark contradiction to the evidence of the senses, people are less likely to absorb it.

However, if there’s no real empirical test — much of metaphysics, for example –then this won’t apply, and the only remaining tests are ‘is this logically coherent’ and ‘will people shun me if I think/don’t think this’. It is quite possible to build great towering edifices of elaborate logically coherent absurdity on foundations of difficult to detect bullshit, meaning that the latter, social test is often, in practice, the one that gets applied.

Vaccines:

The propaganda in favour of vaccination has been absolutely relentless for a couple of decades, now. The party line has been that any skepticism at all towards not just vaccination as a concept, but even the product safety of any specific vaccine, is a marker for anti-science obscurantism. …

“Vaccine hesistancy” will get you branded a kook, in other words, and laughed at for being stupid. Smart people don’t like getting laughed at for being stupid. It is extremely important to them that they be thought of as smart people by other smart people, because being smart is central to their identities. …

Smart people, by and large, tend to work within the professional-managerial classes. They are well-paid for their intellectual labour on behalf of the institutions, and by refusing to get the shot they risked losing their comfortable jobs. Even if their employer did not have a vaccine mandate, they would (potentially) be subject to travel restrictions which — given the nature of many of their positions — could be a significant professional impediment.

Institutional dependence is a significant factor. The lifestyle enabled by their well-remunerated services is for many a gilded cage. A six-figure income sounds like a lot, but when you’ve taken on a mortgage for a million dollar house in a suburb with good private schools for your 1.5 children, you’re on the hook for loans for your hundred thousand dollar post-graduate training and a pair of hundred thousand dollar Teslas, and you’ve grown accustomed to free range organic artisanal farm-to-table everything, there isn’t a lot of wiggle in the household budget, particularly if you want to spend that week in Italy next summer. Lose your position, and you risk losing everything and getting busted down to the trailer park, where you’ll be even worse off than the trailer trash because their meth habits are probably less expensive than your undischargeable student loan. Getting a new position isn’t at all guaranteed, particularly if you lost your old one because you did something gauche like refuse a grandma-saving medical treatment due to those anti-science right wing conspiracy theories you gave credence to. Professional fields tend to be small, word gets around, and the HR ladies talk. A career is not the same thing as a job: it is much harder to get, and much harder to replace.

So, regardless of whatever they privately thought about the mRNA treatments, many of the cognitively gifted would look at the social, professional, and economic ramifications of refusal, and calculate that the best option was simply to sit down and roll up their sleeves. While most of the professionals I know personally were quite enthusiastic about the jabs, I also know several who received them despite private misgivings, precisely because of such considerations. …

On the upper end of the cognitive scale, where the pressures were far more intense, refusal to get the jab had nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with character. It meant that one had to be comfortable adopting an oppositional stance towards both the overwhelming majority of one’s peers and one’s employer, risking not just one’s job, but one’s career. It meant that one had to weigh in the balance everything one had worked for, against one’s gut feeling that something smelled off about the not-vaccine, and be willing not just to trust one’s gut but to trust it so far that one was willing to throw away a lifetime of training, education, and professional success. Now, sure, it wasn’t wholly an intuitive call: there was, and is, an entire ecosystem of open source analysts and independent media who were performing critical examinations of the safety profile and medical efficacy of the mRNA shots … but many of these are anons, and that community was vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming consensus of the medical profession that the shots were a good idea, backed up by the overwhelming consensus of society that the medical establishment was essentially trustworthy.

Who you gonna believe, John Hopkins and the CDC or some schizo writing Tweet threads? …

When the majority of the world’s intelligent people are acculturated into a system that prioritizes obedience over veracity, looking at what the smart fraction do might not be a great guide to actually smart behaviour. In fact, it may be the precise opposite.

Indeed.