“LEGO INSURRECTION” CHARGING DOCUMENTS FAIL TO IMPRESS:
After the pass given to literally every lefty group that has protested inside the Capitol in recent years, this is manifest injustice.
Archive for 2021
July 11, 2021
HERE COMES THE NEXT BIG THING: Law professors want “ecocide” made an offense on par with genocide. “Ecocide” would be defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
People are catching on: Black parents abandon public schools.. “The largest increase in homeschoolers was especially notable among minority groups, including black and Hispanic learners. In African American households, the proportion of homeschooling quintupled from 3.3% in spring 2020, to 16.1% in fall 2020. In Hispanic households, the number of homeschooling households doubled in the same time, from 6.2% to 12.1%.”
They probably don’t want their kids to be taught racist twaddle instead of math and reading.
Also related: The Dumbing Down of American Education. “School systems are ditching advanced courses and are revising standards downward. All parents should be mortified. The school systems say these actions are to increase diversity implying that black and Hispanic kids are too dumb to achieve at a high level. However, many charter schools demonstrate otherwise, [with] minorities achieving in advanced math and learning Latin. There are well documented methods of instruction that can dramatically raise the reading levels of low achieving students. Such have met resistance in the public education industrial complex. Instead of adopting these methods the schools are instead moving to teach to the lowest possible denominator.”
HIGHEST RATED COMMENT AT THE WASHINGTON POST ON A STORY ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS AND NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES AND HOWARD UNIVERSITY: “As long as Howard continues to focus on celebrity over intellect, and to foster the concept of racial segregation for its student body, the university is doomed to a destiny of mediocrity. As proof, take a look at the SAT scores of incoming freshman at Howard versus the Ivy League schools — no comparison.”
OPEN THREAD: Eat hard, sleep hard, rock hard.
I’M SURE THEY WOULD HAVE SAID THIS UNDER TRUMP, TOO: The Constitutional Analysis Behind President Biden’s Firing of the SSA Commissioner: OLC Acting Head Dawn Johnsen: “The President need not heed the Commissioner’s statutory tenure protection.”
OUTFOXING THE FOXES: The Victor Ashe Story.
He’s now taking on the entrenched Yale establishment.
IN A JUST WORLD WE’D BE SUPPORTING THE PROTESTERS IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE: ‘We Are Not Afraid’: Thousands Of People Protesting On The Streets Of Cuba.
Communism is a global plague. The fight against it should be the cause of all mankind.
SCIENCE: How Weight Training May Help With Weight Control: People who regularly do muscle-strengthening exercises are about 20 to 30 percent less likely to become obese over time than people who do not. “The benefits remained when the researchers controlled for age, sex, smoking, general health and aerobic exercise. People who worked out aerobically and lifted weights were much less likely to become obese. But so were those who lifted almost exclusively and reported little, if any, aerobic exercise.”
Plus, a reminder: “B.M.I. does not differentiate muscle from fat, Dr. Brellenthin points out. If you add muscle with weight training, your B.M.I. can rise.”
‘LIBERTAD!’ Massive demonstrations against the dictatorship break out in Cuba.
I’m so old, I can remember when organizations such as Amnesty International — and at least some of their celebrity spokespeople — would have been in favor of such a moment:
UPDATE: Oh, and speaking of “freedom:”
The song remains the same: Fidel, ‘Fiery Apostle’! The NY Times, WashPost Soft-Soap Another Dead Communist Dictator.
(Updated and bumped.)
THIS SOUNDS AWFULLY FA TO ME: Oakland, CA: White Antifa Thugs Disrupt Pro-Police Rally, Scream At Black Supporters.
Related: Antifa Doesn’t Really Care About “Transgender Rights” or Anything Else.
HYPOTHESIS: HIGHER ED IS FUNCTIONING AS A WUHAN LAB FOR THE INTELLECT. Universities play with dangerous idea, but have gotten sloppy about containing them. People used to get a thorough grounding in the classics and western civilization before being exposed to that environment; now they don’t. When dangerous ideas escape into the wild, as with “critical theory,” disaster results. And society’s immune system, in terms of free and open criticism and debate, has been deliberately undermined.
Ten years ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016 for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued economists’ interest in the discipline of “cliodynamics”, which uses maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin’s emphasis on the “overproduction of elites” raises uncomfortable questions, but also offers useful policy lessons.
Related: To quote Neal Stephenson, from In The Beginning Was The Command Line, “During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”
That was last century. This century the intellectuals are trying to bring to America what they did to Europe in the 20th.
WHY AMERICA SEEMS CRAZY: “It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.”
Hypothesis: We are under memetic attack, and our elites have been compromised as a result. Crazy idea? Not as crazy as the ones infesting our ruling class.
Plus: “Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of ‘experts’ that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed.”
AT HELEN’S PAGE: Denton Salle’s new book Sworn to the Light: The Avatar Wizard – Book 1.
DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE ROBOT THAT PASSES THE TURING TEST. BE AFRAID OF THE ONE THAT DELIBERATELY FAILS IT. Can a robot ever be conscious and how would we know if it were?
HARSH, BUT FAIR.
MORE ON VIRGIN GALACTIC’S RICHARD BRANSON FLIGHT: Virgin Galactic launches Richard Branson to space in 1st fully crewed flight of VSS Unity. Video at the link.
Related: It’s been a long road to passenger spaceflight for Virgin Galactic and rival Blue Origin.
EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS: Barrage of city-sized asteroids peppered Earth between 2.5B, 3.5B years ago.
UNSURPRISING: People Who Recover From COVID-19 at ‘Very Low Risk’ of Re-Infection: Study.
Researchers analyzed records from Curative, a clinical laboratory based in San Dimas that specializes in COVID-19 testing and has during the pandemic been conducting routine workforce screening. None of the 254 employees who had COVID-19 and recovered became re-infected, while four of the 739 who were fully vaccinated contracted the disease.
“The big takeaway was that if you are not vaccinated, and were not previously infected, one, you have a very high risk getting infected—24 percent of employees over a year tested positive. However, on the flip side, if you were vaccinated or previously infected your risk was near zero,” Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, clinical professor of preventive medicine and medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told The Epoch Times.
Klausner and Dr. Noah Kojima of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Department of Medicine joined with Curative workers to analyze the records. They released a pre-print, or pre-peer reviewed version of the study online this week.
Researchers found that of the 4,313 employees who were not previously infected or fully vaccinated, 254 became infected.
The findings add to the growing body of research that indicates people who had COVID-19 and recovered enjoy a similar level of protection as those who have gotten a vaccine, following a study in the United Kingdom and one by Cleveland Clinic researchers.
Actually, the protection seems better.
Flashback: NO POINT VACCINATING THOSE WHO’VE HAD COVID-19: Findings of Cleveland Clinic study.
Earlier: Rand Paul: The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines. “To dictate that a person recovered from COVID-19 with natural immunity also submit to a vaccine — without scientific evidence — is nothing more than hubris. If you have no proof that people who acquired natural immunity are getting or transmitting the disease in real numbers, then perhaps you should just be quiet. People are not getting re-infected in large numbers. And that’s not me saying so, that’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quietly admitting that on its website. One thing they also admitted, while at first trying to hide it, was that there are no studies showing that getting the vaccine if you already have natural immunity is of any benefit at all. They can’t show that, because it has not yet been studied. It took my friend Congressman Thomas Massie to make them admit this, by the way. They originally denied their own studies on this.”
WILL SHE BE IN TIME FOR ME? DOUBTFUL. Belgian-Dutch child prodigy gets bachelor’s degree in physics at age 11: “Immortality is my goal.”
OUT: FOLLOW THE SCIENCE. IN: FOLLOW THE KARENS. California schools to require masks for fall classes — despite CDC guidance.