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- As usual, “real result” of United Russia would have been around 35% instead of 50% (and a simple majority instead of a Constitutional majority). But Western criticisms much less effective in the wake of analogous – if statistically implausible – claims about the 2020 US elections.
- EVERGRANDE. I was a China bull since I started blogging in 2008, but one thing to bear in mind is that most of its more developed neighbors had financial crises around its current level of development. 30 years without a major correction. Tread carefully.
OTOH, if it does happen, I don’t expect it to be anywhere near as bad as, say, the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Disbalances in China are a lot more modest than in the affected countries back then. And really much of this is China taking preemptive actions to deleverage its overheated property market in order to avoid a real crisis a few more years down the line. Adam Tooze is calling it a “controlled demolition.”
My guess is the musical chairs still have some time to run, there’ll be a fourth Corona wave this winter and associated stimmies, stocks still have room to grow despite Buffett Indicator being at 200%, and Bitcoin will be making new ATHs before the New Year. Let the printing continue!
- Emil Kirkegaard: Thou shallt not look at the polygenic scores. (Steve, too).
* Lee Jussim and Nathan Honeycutt: The Accuracy of Stereotypes: Data and Implications. Endorsed by Pinker.
- POWERFUL COMMENT. Vanya on Russian research on nuclear rockets.
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Glenn Greenwald on the latest in the Russiagate scam. But, it’s done its job. Nobody cares now.
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Rafal Smigrodzki, parent of the first polygenically selected child, has some very based views on the mainstream media and acknowledges the 13/50 issue.
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Steve Sailer: Foundation vs. Dune. I wasn’t a big fan of the book, I allow that the movie will be better. Have yet to see it.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
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https://twitter.com/chenweihua/status/1440643721398087698
Over-reaction.
https://twitter.com/admirim/status/1439886037174603778
https://twitter.com/admirim/status/1439898261003902976
https://twitter.com/kos_data/status/1440783200989560834
https://twitter.com/kos_data/status/1440788249149009922
https://twitter.com/SerbiaBased/status/1441061700338323460
Should all be added that this is yet another flagrant Albanian violation of Brussels Agreement with the license plates since ~2012 and that 3 Serbs logging near the “border” have already been beaten up by Albanian “Kosovo police”. Serbs also obviously demonstrating at “border” crossings against this with ~400 protesting for more than a few days.
Stock market crashes and property bubbles are always overrated. Money is not wealth, it is a claim on wealth. Goods and services are wealth. The more goods and services a nation can produce, the wealthier it is.
Even if the housing market collapsed tomorrow in China, it wouldn’t be some apocalypse. Housing prices going down wouldn’t ctrl+delete China’s infrastructure, engineering firms, technological expertise, and industrial firms. Those would still be around and they’d still be making goods and services. China would still be the world’s workshop and the whole world would still be dependent on Chinese industrial products.
And for a totalitarian regime like China, it’s not that difficult to overcome financial issues. Most of Evergrande’s debt is denominated in Yuan. The Chinese central bank could simply print Yuan and buy up Evergrande’s debt. They could do the same for the regional banks and corporations that are overleveraged.
It’s just one accounting exercise. The US regime does it regularly for its globohomo corps like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, GM, and Bank of America. Japan could’ve done it in the 90s to save its financial sector but the Bank of Japan deliberately prolonged the recession in order to break up Japan’s cold war, cartel-style economy and remodel it into an American-style neoliberal economy.
They could do the same for homeowners and small businesses as well. But democracies don’t do bailouts for the average guy. No, that’s white supremacist and racist. Only big banks and corporations who can hire congress people as ”consultants” get that privilege.
Our patience has limits- Conservatives for the 1287th time as a black tranny queen pounds him in the ass with a dragon dildo.
Somebody posted in Sailer’s Dune thread this thing about how Herbert used archived Caucasus warfare in writing his books:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-history-of-dune/
“Who care” indeed.
Never understood opposition to genetic engineering and ‘designer babies’. Genetic engineering is a perfectly natural process that occurs all the time and will occur regardless of what we think or do. I mean, we all started out as single cell organisms and evolved into Chihuahuas or whatever.
Opposing directed evolution is like opposing showers because you don’t like water falling on your head. Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much you complain – it’s still going to rain. So instead of complaining, why don’t we make something useful out of the fact?
And as far as as winners and losers go, there are always winners and losers in genetic lottery. Directing the process allows us to level the playing field, like pretty much all technology does. So winners can still be winners but losers get a chance to improve their subsequent generations. It’s a wonderful thing.
And ultimately, you can drive evolution far beyond what is currently possible, producing traits such as enhanced radiation resistance and customized immune systems. Why deny humans such gifts?
Unfortunately, I see “bioethicists” locking up human progress on those matters and banning such research. As I mentioned elsewhere, this where deep space science research stations will certainly come in handy – impossible to find or intercept after launch, they can do experiments and genetic sequencing, transmit data back, and there’s nothing anybody will be able to do about it. At least not until it comes back on high elliptic orbit some 20 years down the road.
Well, thanks to our Stunning and Brave Congresscritters, we are going to be sanctioning the Germans after all lol.
https://www.rferl.org/amp/nord-stream-us-congress-sanctions-russia/31474034.html?__twitter_impression=true
Listening to my conservative talk show this morning, here in California, I heard a federally-sponsored public-service message explain that I should not try to scoot ahead of the train at a railroad crossing. Another message explains that I should yield for the ambulance. Of course, I wondered why they thought that the electricians and dentists who constitute the audience for this program need to be chastised with such messages. But my main wonder is whether such messages exist in, say, Russia.
I suspect that this train-scooting is a metaphor for a uniquely US impetuous idiocy.
Anatoly, have you read Jean-François Gariépy’s book The Revolutionary Phenotype? If so, would you consider reviewing it? JF is in favor of banning gene editing technologies like CRISPR, embryo selection, etc.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41PWhHJ1-AL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
He went through all that trouble but then didn’t take the much easier and more basic step of selecting for a son? Makes me question how based he can possibly be, especially in the USA where having a daughter is a recipe for all kinds of headaches, diversity related and otherwise.
Why would I waste my time on this crap?
Weren’t you on JF’s show at one point? Based on your response, I assume you have a low opinion of JF Gariépy in general. Do you have any counterarguments to the sorts of things JF Gariépy believes?
Concerns the ECHR claim on among other things Litvinenko:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/09/23/putin-poisoner-more-doubts-over-attempts-to-delegitimize-russia-leader/
I read this cool quote of Deng Xiaoping from 1977.
“Deng Xiaoping, May 24, 1977
The key to achieving modernization is the development of science and technology. And unless we pay special attention to education, it will be impossible to develop science and technology. Empty talk will get our modernization programme nowhere; we must have knowledge and trained personnel. Without them, how can we develop our science and technology? And if we are backward in those areas, how can we advance?
We must recognize our backwardness, because only such recognition offers hope.
Now it appears that China is fully 20 years behind the developed countries in science, technology and education. So far as scientific research personnel are concerned, the United States has 1,200,000 and the Soviet Union 900,000, while we have only some 200,000. The figure for China includes the old, the weak, the sick and the disabled. There are not too many who are really competent and can work regularly.
As early as the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese began to expend a great deal of effort on science, technology and education. The Meiji Restoration was a kind of modernization drive undertaken by the emerging Japanese bourgeoisie. As proletarians, we should, and can, do better.”
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2010-10/15/content_29714580.htm
Bourgeois streets of New York like Greenwich Village definitely have an almost European atmosphere – number of outdoor cafes looks closer to Italy than the stereotypical American city.
I don’t have any particular opinion on Gariepy as I’m not into the YouTube-sphere.
As I recall I discussed Russian affairs with him.
I don’t know why I should spend my time on reading books with what I assume are typical rightoid takes. If his arguments can be condensed into a few paragraphs, I’ll be happy to look them over.
I vaguely recall Foundation being pro-atom, as indeed Asimov himself was, and a lot of scifi from that era. I wonder if that will come through – guessing not.
At any rate, I have no desire to watch some progressive prolefeed TV show, where some black lady works to save civilization. Maybe, if they took the opposite tack, and updated the story based on America and Western Europe’s decline, and the population explosion in Africa.
European Christians like expensive heating bills?
I wonder if the career of actor Michael Caine represents general dysgenics in the UK. Were they fetishizing the working class just as blacks in America were fetishized?
I mean, I remember watching “The Man Who Would be King” and thinking, “He’s harder to understand than Connery, why have they made his character seem smarter?”
What Lithuania has revealed is a lot more insidious that you may realize, Xiaomi has built a general censorship system, not limited to a set list including “宗教虔信者阵线”, “Front of religious believers,” it self-updates based on the last time.
I suspect these clinics would make sure that your children are all pozzed.
Deng Xiaoping was saying this after untold numbers of scientists were purged, sometimes killed, by the Cultural Revolution. Fast forward to today and we see a lot of cargo cult and outright fraudulent “science” being done in the PRC, in part by the CCP’s insane metric of judging scientists by the number of papers they get published. This has consequences as they can’t for example match Russian military jet engine technology, they are improbably far away from being able to do EUV lithography for cutting edge computer chips now that the only company in the world that’s managed this insane feat is in the Netherlands and is embargoed from shipping machines to them (which is not to say they can’t do what they really need with 193 nm lithography), etc. And need I mention the distinct possibility they accidentally gifted the world SAR-CoV-2?
Why would he want to ban those things? Those things would make people more intelligent, more beautiful and healthier, all with no extra work.
I’m sure he has some really long and convoluted rationalisation, but it better be extraordinary.
If it is “nature says this” or some other dishonest ventriloquist act then I will die from cringing.
Should El Salvador have adopted Ethereum instead?
How long until their official wallet is hacked?
I have no idea who that dude is but why should anyone care what he’s in favor of banning? The moral pontificating over “bioethics” is infuriating and anyone who is a professional bioethicist or even likes to assume the airs of a bioethicist in their spare time is the scum of the earth. The very existence of Bioethicists as a profession is a crime against humanity.
Should there be bio-safety experts to ensure research is being done in a responsible manner to minimize risks and prevent harm? Absolutely.
Should some areas of research be off limits due to terrible risk vs reward ratios? Maybe so.
Should “ethical” concerns prevent the pursuit of research that could dramatically improve the quality and even duration of life? Not if I had my way, but if the majority of the population felt otherwise I’d have to concede the point as per the will of the people.
But should a handful of smarmy professional virtue signalers aka bioethicists get to stymie the roll of human progress based on what is essentially personal WHIM? If society as a collective decides that a perfectly safe, high reward/risk area of biomedical research should be taken off the table then so be it, but what right does a group of a few dozen old bloviators have to dictate to the rest of the human race that this research should not be pursued because in their great wisdom they decided they just don’t like it and think it’s icky? Anything spouted by a bioethicist should be met with a dismissive “cool story bro, now tell it again.”
TLDR Version: Unlike other disciplines such as engineering and medicine where the value of the professional is objectively weightier than the value of a layman, bioethics is an entirely subjective realm of value systems. The idea that there should be professional boethicists whose personal value systems outweigh and dictate to the collective value system of all of humanity is preposterous in its face.
Prichal to depart to the ISS soon.
I was planning a vacation in America for the last couple weeks, and when it noticed my searches, I had YouTube algorithm sending my television the first days with happy content about “best states of America”, “inside this $100 million mansion in Newport Beach”, etc.
Then it learned that I click on the negative videos, and YouTube has been sending me these increasingly divergent content on America.
These kind of videos I received on the television Kensington Philadelphia – this channel uploads daily videos of the zombie apocalypse situation.
There is on the opposite side of the world, bourgeois New York areas where there are fewer fat people, European cafe culture, and it could be claimed African Americans have been “ethnically cleansed”
There the comparison of Detroit with 1980s South Bronx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF0Xw2cC_cU
Michael Caine could be smarter than Connery.
Are you aware of how things work in academia in the USA? And have you heard of something called the “replication crisis” — where, in some fields, 90% of papers are irreproducible?
The problems you describe are not unique to China. If anything, they’ve aped the way things worked in the USA. Sure, it’s insane over there, but it’s no better over here — and it may indeed be worse.
You might say that. It’s clear you have no idea whatsoever, including the hierarchy of sorts with math at the top, and the fields with extreme replication crisis problems at the bottom.
Ones that started getting heavily corrupted in the US a century ago when a certain ethnicity started to gain gatekeeping power so it could falsify a variety of facts that were inconvenient to it and it’s universal agenda. And biology is pretty bad, say “biomedicine” is probably about half wrong, but is still a lot better than the perhaps 90% wrong of the worst field (although we need to reevaluate that 2005 paper by John Ioannidis now that we’ve taken his measure in the pandemic). Also makes a difference that a lot of biology research is hard. There “high impact” papers get get real traction from others in the field, get put to the test in a way unlike the social sciences. And note how prepending “social” to anything nowadays means 99% of the time it negates what follows.
But we can see for example many concrete accomplishments in the pandemic from combinations of chemistry, biology and medicine. Mother Nature is harder to fool than associations and journal publishers, people get sick or they don’t, go to the hospital or they don’t, and die or they don’t. The more solid the metrics for a field, the more likely more of its research is to be solid. Thus see Moderna design its COVID vaccine literally over a weekend, which turned out to be safe, effective, relatively easy to manufacture, and and a lot more physically durable the BioNTech’s. Of course, that’s the results of decades of research and development in both mRNA vaccine platforms and designing safe vaccines, but they were ready when we really needed them.
The last tweet is by an idiot, Boris Johnson has natural immunity at minimum, claims I assume to have vaccine immunity on top of that. And it’s important for leaders to set examples, something Trump was totally allergic to when it came to masking.
None of those are gonna happen since the rationale of progress (“transhumanism”) is rejected wholescale. The tools themselves won’t be used much if at all, since everyone is moving the other way, back into organic social evolution. We are not going to be superhumans but people better adapted to demodernized, post-industrial realities.
Do you realize it is based on the half of phony biomedical “science” you are trying to discredit?
Have you ever visited Kosovo btw? I guess I should admit I may be “biased” since I went out with an Albanian girl for a while, so of course, I would hear about the similar outrages about Serbs acting like pigs when Kosovo was often practically under Serbian military occuption during the Yugoslav era, or people spitting or not talking to her simply because she was Albanian, blahblahbalh.
Karlin says:
The data of the oppositionist you mention contradicts polling data from one to two weeks prior to the election:
Date / Polling firm / United Russia %
13 September / FoRGO / 42–46%
13 September / FPP / 41–44%
9 September / INSOMAR / 45.1%
All of them pointing to an outcome substantially above 35%.
A brief googling shows that Sergey Shpilkin is a darling of Meduza, RFE/RL, the Wilson Center, among others ill-wishers.
Can Karlin explain why he, who’s fond of polls, is against them this time, choosing instead to amplify an oppositionist who’s more than happy to socialize with, and give his time to, these hostile organizations?
Performing medical experiments on strangers is generally considered to be a bad thing. It doesn’t make it any better if those strangers are children. In fact, it makes it worse.
Where would you be interested in going?
The talk on manga-comic comparison inspired me to say this all over again: you can’t be an escapist into pop culture forever.
In WWI & WWII existing pop culture is retooled to churn out war propaganda on conscripts and civilians that were mildly enthusiastic at times and indifferent otherwise. In the coming WWIII, much of it will simply collapse for their massive civilian commercialization, after a long period of detachment from its markets under woke & general non-based pressure. The rest of it will be done when it is co-opted by the war propaganda machine like last time and the last viewers turn against them on their anti-authority instincts.
And maybe organic folk culture rooted in tradition can finally be born.
Our civilization risk-reward calculation in technological progress and application has just been crossed into negative territory. We just need to wait for the anti-Great Reset-antivaxx coalition to effect the catastrophic unraveling of the Machine.
I haven’t personally read The Revolutionary Phenotype, but I may read it at some point in the future. JF frequently talks about his book on his show, and it seems like the sort of thing that is relevant to your interests. Based on what JF has said about it, it’s more about science than politics. It talks about the origin of life, and how DNA-based life may have emerged from a simpler life form. He also theorizes that life goes through events that he calls “Phenotypic Revolutions”. He also talks about how additional phenotypic revolutions may happen in the future, namely through gene editing technologies, and how this will result in unintended consequences and the creation of life forms that will end up outcompeting humanity. He also talks about the differences between genetic and memetic evolution, and how memetic evolution lacks the mechanism of random recombination that genetic evolution has.
Here’s the Amazon description of it:
The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.
Because JF has an overly human-centric worldview, and wants to preserve the human species at all costs. He believes that gene editing will result in the creation of life forms that will out-compete humanity, and this will lead to human extinction. JF is big on having as many children as humanly possible and making as many copies of his genes as he can, and he wants to prevent his lineage from going extinct, even if it means holding back progress.
In evolution it is the environment that decides winners and losers. It is possible that your beautiful and smart designer children will be first to be exterminated by Martians for reason only Martians know and you have no way of anticipating.
Our beautiful and productive cows and pigs that we helped to evolve survive only because they are useful to us. The moment human race is finished all those cows and pigs will end up being losers when confronted with raw nature.
Idiot. What does ‘your’ lineage really mean after five or more generations? If he really wants to extend life of ‘his lineage’ he should fuck his mother and his sisters (and his father as well so he does not feel left out) and his daughters and then his granddaughters and then keep jerkin off as many times a day as it is possible and storing his sperm in liquid N2 for his great grand daughters to use…
Here is an example of great Amish lineage (not brothers):
https://i.ibb.co/bQRXhBR/amish.png
The new film adaptation of “Dune” – my impressions are mixed.
The atmosphere is well conveyed, the music is excellent, the views of the planets are excellent, the cast as a whole is very accurately selected. The film follows the book with minimal deviations. In fact, the film is a classic symphony (music plays a major role in the film), where the music is illustrated by a video sequence. In this respect, the film is brilliant and full of tragic beauty
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E16y4x2WEAQWS9n.jpg
The technique is well done, the scenes with graders, ornithopters, lighters are shot very effectively
https://www.movienewsnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/dune12.jpeg
Very good Timothy Chalamet as Paul Atreides
https://d.radikal.ru/d35/2109/f6/9dfd26d4302d.png
But! If you watch the movie without reading the book, the world invented by Herbert will be undiscovered. According to Herbert, once humanity developed using computers, but then smart computers got too smart, machines rebelled against mankind, and were destroyed during the all-galactic war. Now computers (and a number of other technologies) under the strictest ban, but instead of them, special people (mentats, navigators, Gesserits) are used who, with the help of drug spice, can process huge volumes of information and, due to this, look into the future. And spice cannot be synthesized – it can only be extracted in the deserts of the planet Dune. Without spice, flights between the stars will become impossible (the routes are laid by navigators who are under the constant influence of spice) – accordingly, without spice, the entire civilization will collapse.
This moment in the film is blurred. A person who has not read the book at all will have the impression that spice is just some kind of drug playing an auxiliary role, and the whole struggle is for money from the drug trade. Mentats are extremely disappointing – ordinary intelligence officers are shown, their diabolical abilities are not revealed in any way. The Bene Gesserit, on the other hand, are shown quite well.
https://yummymovie.org/ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/duna-film-09.jpg
Harkonens good – the baron turned out to be a smart and scary creature
https://mfst.igromania.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/dyuna-harkonneny.webp
The key point of Herbert’s fantasy is that force fields made soldiers invulnerable to firearms and lasers, and this is why there was a return to cold weapons and hand-to-hand combat. The exception is the desert Dunes – there, because of the worms (which feel the protective fields, and attack them), you can not use these very fields, so the local natives are armed with firearms (while civilized people have long switched to swords).
Here the military actions are the weakest moment of the film. In the film, the logic is lost – first they show how the fleeing soldiers are killed with missiles from the air, and then how they are cut down with the attackers with swords. Well, it’s absurd after all – why do you need to engage in hand-to-hand combat, if you can kill the enemy with missiles? Then, in the hands of the Fremen, a completely modern-looking firearm appears. In Herbert’s book, this was logically justified. In the film, it looks completely absurd.
https://mfst.igromania.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Dyuna-vzryv-1536×643.webp
According to the mind, it was necessary to show the Atreides warriors walking unharmed through the explosions, since when the missiles hit directly into groups of fighters, the flashing blue cocoons of force fields protect the soldiers from the shock wave and shrapnel. Then it would be clear why such a strange situation is when the warriors of the interstellar empire are armed with swords
Well, the sword fights themselves are not impressive – there is no drive necessary for film performances. This applies both to mass scenes and to the combat exploits of individual heroes.
The Sardukars are completely disappointing – in the film they are ordinary rather sluggish soldiers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkQG1P4WAAENnpr.jpg
Based on the film, it is completely unclear what their infernal reputation is based on.
In the book (at the end of the first part) Paul Atreides sees the future under the influence of spice, but in the film this prophetic vision occurs in small pieces throughout the film, and this violates the logic of the work.
The riddle: why was it necessary to take the beautiful Rebecca Ferguson,
https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/1400/bd1d5193591849.5e68bf7f1a05a.jpg
to play the role of a beautiful witch seductress Jessica, and then make a colorless church mouse with her hair tied up in a bun out of the heroine.
https://cs14.pikabu.ru/post_img/2021/09/18/11/1631989090112143114.jpg
I wasn’t impressed with Duncan Idaho. Momoa without a beard and mustache (and with muscles hidden by armor) does not give the impression of a great warrior at all
https://www.gateworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/momoa-dune-trailer02_wide.jpg
This could have been redeemed by powerful combat scenes, but here, alas, the creators of the film failed-Idaho’s fight with the Sardukars does not catch at all.
Gurney Helleck is quite good, although he does not quite match the image from the book
https://mocah.org/uploads/posts/347470-Dune-Movie-Josh-Brolin-Gurney-Halleck.jpg
Chani is a shame: the heroine of the book, who has the “face of an elf”, will be replaced by an plain girl with a wide face and a duck nose. Well, how can the Messiah be charmed by such ordinary girl?
https://peopletalk.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/e4flmq0weamfmxv-e1627040987914.jpg
Well, if she took charisma, because she plays the same way she looks.
In general, if you have read the book, then it is definitely worth watching the film adaptation. But if you haven’t read Frank Herbert’s novel, it’s better to start with it
Who else would you perform medical experiments on? The only reason we even have such thing as medical science is because we perform medical experiments on strangers. You can’t really test things any other way – cell and animal studies will only take you so far. Human trials will always be the gold standard in medicine.
Children never get a choice, on the account of never being there when relevant choices are made. It’s just reality of the situation. But it is reasonable to assume that they would prefer to be prettier, taller, smarter, and healthier rather than the other way around.
Films are not for people who read books. That Rebecca Ferguson I have never heard of is much more sexy with much more sex appeal in the 2nd pict were according to you she is like a church mouse. You would be surprised how passionate and sexually uninhibited the church mice in the real world can be. Always go for mousy librarian or lab assistant. There is something in the air in libraries. Must be the old paper or glue in book.
Shpilkin is a patent crook, and his “method” is a patent scam, at the level of astrology or clairvoyance (although outwardly covered by mathematics). It is sad that you refer to such prostitutes
Here is an analysis of the Shpilkin “method”, nothing has changed since then
https://wiz-aut.livejournal.com/5934.html
Forced evolution can simulate environments conventional evolution couldn’t even dream of. Humans with tardigrade genetics will be able to nap outside of space stations or in hydrothermal vents. And how exactly being weak, ugly, stupid, and sick will help you fight off genocidal Martians? Not sure how that logic works. I’d think being beautiful and smart would be an advantage to fighting the Martians, not a hindrance.
Feral pig infestation is pretty wild in US. So it’s not all clear cut. But overall, yes, we optimized pigs for meat production, not wilderness. But we can optimize for other traits, including survival, which will help us deal with raw nature, no problem.
You recombined DNA will carry on, absorbing more and more information about its environment and developing more and more solutions on how to deal with it. Your lineage is an environmental computer that has been operational for billions of years. Something to be proud and be in awe of. Not quite immortality, but as close as you can get to it in the real world.
And what do you really mean? You are not even the same person you were when you were like 2 years old – the cells that made up the bulk of your body back then are long dead. You are a new pile of cells stacked together only to fall apart again in short order. The only thing that carries on is information contained in you. And that would be your lineage.
Well I am glad that you have such a great practical knowledge in this field
https://ru.artsdot.com/ADC/Art-ImgScreen-1.nsf/O/A-8YDJZX/$FILE/Karl_pavlovich_brulloff-nun_s_dream.Jpg
In Australia, the Tesla Megapack battery did not work for 4 months of the year
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australia-sues-neoen-lack-power-its-tesla-battery-reserve-2021-09-23/
According to the results of exit polls, United Russia is gaining 42-47% of the votes. Were the exit polls (conducted by different organizations) also falsified?
https://meduza.io/news/2021/09/19/exit-poll-edinaya-rossiya-nabiraet-45-2-golosov-na-vyborah-v-gosdumu-u-kommunistov-21
Shpilkin has a very advanced method – he draws a graph of voter turnout depending on the time, then (meditating on this graph) falls into a trance, and in a trance state announces the numbers-exactly the numbers that the customer who finances Shpilkin needs
https://katehon.com/en/article/mali-fate-great-africa
Because my goal here is to accurately observe reality, not provide feed for Western Russophiles or any other kind of NPC. If you dislike that, you should probably not read my blog.
A quick glance shows that VCIOM was giving UR 26-29% in the month before the elections: https://wciom.ru/ratings/reiting-politicheskikh-partii/
Adjusting for non-participants/don’t knows, that’s around mid-30%s.
Percentage amongst those who would “definitely come”? 35.3% https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/rezultaty-vyborov-v-gosdumu-2021-prognoz-vciom
Yes, people who take an interest in and study electoral fraud in Russia will overwhelmingly be pro-Western liberals. And Western media will likewise be interested in propping them. That is neither new or surprising, but nor is it a legitimate counter-argument.
Straight from the link you gave
“На основании данных опроса аналитики ВЦИОМ подготовили прогноз результатов выборов. Согласно прогнозу, в Думу пройдут пять партий:
«Единая Россия» (42%), возможный диапазон между 41-44%;
КПРФ (19%), возможный диапазон между 18-22%;
ЛДПР (11%), возможный диапазон между 10-13%;
«Справедливая Россия — Патриоты — За правду» (8%), возможный диапазон 7-9%;
«Новые люди» (5%), возможный диапазон 4-6%.”
That is, the forecast is: “United Russia” (42%), the possible range is between 41-44%;
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (19%), possible range between 18-22%;
LDPR (11%), possible range between 10-13%;
“Fair Russia-Patriots-For the truth” (8%), possible range 7-9%;
“New people” (5%), possible range 4-6%
I had a look into that exit poll.
INSOMAR is an organization I have never heard of (though Google informs me that they have a rating of 2.3/5, with people complaining about spam calls).
Tellingly, VCIOM either did not do exit polls, or didn’t publish them. Presumably because as usual they were lower than the official results, perhaps even more markedly so than in previous elections, but inventing numbers wouldn’t do either, as they actually have something of a reputation to protect.
Are you seriously implying that this hierarchy — to whatever extent it actually exists — is an American thing, and that in China (and Japan, France, etc.) it is not just as well established? If anything, it seems to me that engineers and physicists are higher-status in China and Europe than they are in the USA. (I mean working engineers and physicists, 99.9% of both professions. Sure, the USA has its handful of celebrity professors, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.)
Besides, money can sometimes be a decent proxy for status, and look at how professors in the US are paid:
https://www.salary.com/articles/how-are-college-professors-paid/
Law — the greatest waste of human capital by a tremendous margin, quite literally a human capital shredder — apparently pays best. Economics — among the softest of the soft sciences — pays better than physics or math.
Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech are both mRNA vaccines, developed along the same lines, at the same time, with the same tech. Moderna just happens to be much higher dosed. So your comparison here is a very odd one.
Now, SinoVac and Sputnik are derived from a totally different technology, and a much more traditional one. They may not have been prepared over a weekend, but they were not introduced any later than Moderna, and I don’t believe that they’re much less effective. Data from just yesterday has SinoVac, Moderna, and AstraZeneca performing more or less comparably in Malaysia: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sinovacs-covid-shot-highly-effective-against-serious-illness-malaysia-study-2021-09-24/
As an aside, that no US or western European countries developed a traditional SinoVac/Sputnik-style vaccine was a huge, world-historical mistake. A mistake that understandably fueled all sorts of vaccine hesitancy.
Anyway, if you’re implying that Moderna is a triumph of American exceptionalism and that the Chinese are idiots, you’re way off base.
Vtsiom stated that it would not conduct an exit poll since there is no customer
https://ria.ru/20210823/vybory-1746911605.html?in=t
“Exit poll будут, если будет заказчик, это очень дорогое удовольствие. За свой счет его проводить не можем”, – пояснил Федоров.
Впрочем, он подчеркнул, что ВЦИОМ готов провести всю необходимую работу, если заказчик все-таки появится. Время на подготовку, по его словам, еще есть.
But there is a VTsIOM forecast – United Russia has 41-44%. Use it if you consider the VTsIOM data to be reliable
SPLC: Jan. 6 Video Suggests ‘Russia Insider’ Entered Capitol
So why are SPLC writing about this?
The Sputnik V vaccine was created (using ready-made technology) in two weeks (according to its creator)
Yes, forecast higher than percentage of “active voters” who intend to vote for UR (35%) according to their own polls, because they adjust up for fraud, though that’s left politely unsaid.
And even so, they’re way off anyway, with UR getting 49.8%.
I don’t blame them, it’s a fine line they have to toe as a fully state-owned enterprise between maintaining a reputation as an independent pollster without too openly embarrassing the political authorities.
Just a major national election that happens twice a decade, no biggie, certainly not something worth spending any time or energy on at all. /s
It’s not about that – if you refer to VTsIOM, it’s better to give the VTsIOM forecast (41-44%), and not other figures. If we consider the VTsIOM forecast to be false , it is better not to refer to VTsIOM completely.
These data (from VTsIOM) are completely different from those that the fortune teller Shpilkin came up with. I was not interested in the question much, but I can say one thing for sure – Shpilkin’s “electoral mathematics” is such a shameful pseudoscience that a reference to this man discredits any statement
It’s a shame Jodorowsky had all his ideas stolen and denied the funding to make Dune. It would have been awesome.
Also brah…. Your beta is showing. Harry Potter good? Asimov/Herbert meh? Does your shirt come in men’s?
From what I know about the Jodorowsky dune , it’s lucky that this film was not made. This project was terrible
Two days ago, Ann Barnhardt, the virgin churchmouse exponent of Catholic flyover America, unironically quoted Bronze Age Pervert without elaboration or explanation (or citation).
https://www.barnhardt.biz/2021/09/22/the-mass-annihilations-that-will-be-carried-out-by-homosexual-transsexual-and-especially-lesbian-commissars-will-exceed-in-scale-and-cruelty-anything-that-has-yet-happened-in-known-history/
She has the book.
No, Asimov is absolutely great. I found Dune overrated IMO, worldbuilding is cool and unique but everything else seems meh, it’s the only book of Herbert’s I read.
Harry Potter series in its entirety has sold more copies than any other literary work save the Bible and by a huge margin at that. It defined the cultural references of an entire generation, the Millennials. Like it or not, it is the crowning relic of our age. “Read Another Book” meme is the grudging acknowledgement of this reality.
A strange assessment. Half of the subsequent science fiction and fantasy is based on” Dune “- including” Star Wars “and”Warhammer”, which were licked from the Dune. In this regard (through their children like the mentioned Star Wars) Dune surpasses in its influence not only the sterile creation of Asimov, it far surpasses Harry Potter. The plot in Dune turns into irrational chaos after the first book (actually, only the first book should be read). But the first book is written brilliantly
Both the KMT and the CCP made intensive efforts at modernization that were derailed by the Japanese invasion and by the GLF/Cultural Revolution, respectively. So, unlike a lot of developing countries, Deng at least had a template to work with.
One thing that’s interesting is that Mexico attempted to do a lot of the same things (look up “maqiladoras”) that China did in the 1980s. But, among other factors, they didn’t develop educational infrastructure needed to get to the next levels.
Until the day when democracy can be put out of its misery, I’m happy to let the Russian government manage election outcomes. That said, plausibly establishing election fraud is much harder than amateurs claim it is. As for Shpilkin, apparently he couldn’t hack it in physics.
By what? Asimov’s “Foundation” is a pseudo-history transferred to the space of the distant future. The personages there are flat and formulaic and designed to illustrate the author’s sociological schemes. The adventures of heroes – in the style of books for middle school students (the level of Harry Potter, but on a template pseudoscientific-fantastical background). The only fresh idea is about the Jewish Freemasons who secretly rule the world with the help of telepathy and hypnosis. But the Bene Jasserit Order was invented by Herbert earlier
And then being ravaged by successive debt crises that China has largely avoided before firmly setting their feet in high-tech production & R&D?
Shpilkin could guess about the election results with the help of Tarot cards – the degree of” scientific ” of his work would not change from this. But the Russian authorities who have made the elections as opaque and dubious as possible are strategically doing great harm to themselves and the country
Never heard of the Barnhardt person. On her home page she had this which I thought was a laugh riot:
https://www.barnhardt.biz/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/img_5097.jpg
Do they still have that subreddit I am going to hell for this?
I agree. Faking of elections should be done more professionally, as in some other countries. Perhaps a foreign consultant should be hired.
Revisiting the BS Regarding Artemi Panarin
His family was said to be in danger on account of his pro-Navalny Tweet. His father in law just got the nod to coach the Russian national men’s ice hockey team, from Vladislav Tretiak, who has ties to the dominant political party in Russia.
https://tass.com/sport/1342013
This article proved correct over the gossip that Panarin’s family was in danger:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/27/putting-artemi-panarin-situation-in-proper-perspective/
Irish EU Rep Rocks:
https://twitter.com/ClareDalyMEP/status/1438139489239633925
Are you actually making your case from an anomaly? These guys could just be four big galutes, or they could have genetic abnormalities. The Amish, at least the ones I’ve seen on trips to Pennsylvania, appear to be sturdy, healthy farmers who’ve built a decent community for themselves, whether one believes in their Faith, or not. You might be very young, but growing up in a very Catholic community when I was a kid, where birth control was frowned upon and abortion equivalent to child sacrifice, there were many children who suffered from Down’s Syndrome, who had six or eight other healthy siblings.
David Goldman has something intelligent to say about EverGrande, as usual:
https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/evergrande-bubble-popped-in-time-no-lehman-moment/
Those 6 or 8 healthy siblings matter.
Of course not. Just that cheating in the PRC goes much higher up in the hierarchy. In part for cultural reasons, but above all because that’s what the CCP incentivizes.
Only odd if you’ve failed to notice the massive differences in the cold chains each requires, normal medical freezing for Moderna, dry ice or ultra-low temperature freezers for BioNTech’s, as well as the latter being a lot more physically fragile. The next quote is out of order to illustrate a point:
Umm, No. This is even before going into how “active” vaccines like mRNA ones are more traditional, like Jenner’s all means to the end of getting some mRNA to make some viral proteins inside of cells.
Because SinoVac’s is a a “passive” inactivated whole virus vaccines, the very most primitive you can develop, and the type the anti-vaxxers love to tell us failed in their initial versions against SARS and then I assume MERS. And it turns out Valneva in France is trying to develop such a vaccine with U.K. money, but their “big” Phase III trial has only 4019 subjects. This is only useful to maybe get funding for a big, useful for authorization trial, and the U.K. recently canceled their contract(s) with the company for failure to perform, which I can believe based on just this one trial and no future non-tiny ones registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.
On the other hand Sputnik V uses the second newest and previous to COVID least tested of technologies, and it’s active to boot. The most we’ve seen from virus vector vaccines like it is the first Ebola vaccine, very successful in dealing with the last major outbreak, but uses a different and replication competent virus.
While Janssen, Oxford, and Gamaleya of Sputnik V fame all use adenovirus vectors, and none prior to COVID got further than Janssen’s European Phase III trial for their own Ebola vaccine, the first dose of which uses their Ad26 based vector. Sputnik V uses the same virus for their first dose, but Gamaleya made a terrible mistake with their second dose Ad5 vector platform, no one in Russia or Argentina so far can make it in quantity, the latter in a 6:1 ratio for their first non-test batch.
So Sputnik V is more theory than practice in terms of fighting COVID being largely unobtanium, as utu said essentially correctly Russia’s vaccine diplomacy began and ended with tiny San Marino (about 35,000 people). Although they’re repurposing the first dose as Sputnik Light, it’s very much like Janssen’s one jab vaccine except grown in different human cells.
See above, not in the least true for Sputnik, and all three Western adenovirus vector vaccines have had trouble getting produced in quantity. Whereas the much more simple mRNA vaccines have turned out for the same reason to be easier to manufacture in bulk, E. Coli beats human cell culture hands down, although there are a lot of in vitro steps in mRNA vaccine production after that workhorse bacteria makes DNA plasmids including the code for stabilized spike proteins.
That’s one more difference between Oxford and Gamaleya’s vaccines and the rest of the Western ones, they use wild type spike proteins. Although I’ve lately been wondering if they get adorned with sugars like the true wild type from infections.
Given this particular forum, I’ll mention Russia has two other vaccines in the works, a very interesting one from the Vector Institute that presents three bits of proteins, currently from the spike protein, to the immune system along with an adjuvant, and another from the Chumakov Centre not so far along which is an inactivated whole virus vaccine. Which India’s Bharat Biotech’s version shows can also induce immunity to the “N” nucleocapsid protein, which is probably a very good thing.
The timeline for when Janssen started testing their same technology vaccine candidates aligns with this (there’s quite a delay while you make your first batch for testing, wait two weeks to prove sterility etc.).
Once you have your adenovirus vector platform, two for Gamaleya but this work can be done in parallel, you’ve already knocked out their E3 set of genes that inhibit immune system responses, and all you have to do is replace or splice in place of the E1 genes for replication the DNA for the target.
Which the whole world got access to on January 10th (not with CCP approval of course). Oxford had a head start because their second attempt at a MERS vaccine had its Phase I real start date in mid-December 2019. Thus allowing them to go straight to their Phase II test substituting the COVID for MERS spike protein, for example only used one dose for that (Phase I is all about dosing).
I do not know how things are in Argentina, but in Russia you can get four doses of Sputnik without any problems, that is, two first and two second (Ad5)
So, kinda like a more efficient, even more suppressive Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok etc. China is out front about threatening, imprisoning, economically harming and controlling people to induce correct speech and thought. The Chinese people typically have no illusions about supposed freedom in our sense of the word. Americans and Latvians, by contrast, are under the delusion that they are ‘free.’
Oh those terrible chinese. It’s much better to have corporate and government employers ruin your career and starve you out if you won’t put their preferred drugs in your body or if you express the wrong opinions or even ask the wrong questions. At least we’re ‘free’, LOL.
The chinese and us governments are two peas in a pod. Disgusting.
No matter his many faults, and I think the Foundation series original trilogy is at the low end of his fiction, Asimov wrote compelling stories. Like our host, I only read one by Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment, and it was so awful and disgusting I wrote off reading anything more from from him.
Herbert’s books are very different in level. In the Dune series, the first book is brilliantly written, the rest are monstrous trash. So in the case of Herbert, each book should be evaluated separately, they are sooooo different
Libertarian ideology is going to be globalized. It used to be only suited to the highly neurotic, individualist and collective-hating American culture. But with all those invasive state policies implemented across the board it will become the global zeitgeist.
No, but a branch (they have a memory of living in Kosovo and Metohija since around 1700’s) of my family was forced out by Albanians in the early 60’s.
A grandma worked in the Pristina hospital where Albanian nurses stabbed needles through the heads of Serb babies (because babies have soft heads so they could get away with it, of course).
Another ancestor was a judge and WW2 veteran who fought for Partisans against Germans and Albanian SS divisions. He sentenced many Shiptar criminals and scum successfully for violent crime and terrorism against Serbs. After Rankovic was removed by Tito and Kardelj, his position became untenable and Albanians shot bullets at his door and window in the night (he was a man that survived Germans shooting a bullet into his lung that stayed there even after WW2). After several nights of that, him and his family had no choice but to pack and leave although they could’ve maybe fought the Albanians, but there were only a few dozen of them compared to hundreds that the Albanian clans and tribes could’ve summoned (they were also in Metohija, technically Kosovo but sort of its own region/sub-category, not far from the border with Albania).
During the SFRY only in the time of first Aleksander Rankovic and then Milosevic was Kosovo in any sense “ruled by Serbs” (so effectively ruled by Albanians from 1945-Rankovioc ascension and ~1960-Milosevic ascension ~1989). “Serbian military occupation” (JNA was also multi-ethnic and Serbs were around ~40% until it was reformed into VJ in April 1992) only existed during Milosevic’s time as a reaction against Albanian separatism, terrorism and subhmanry.
It might be pointless to explain further, but Albanian mass immigration occurred in waves during SFRY with no more than a few hundred thousand in total, but in waves of ~50,000 mostly and ~100,000 once (although Albanians had already been relative majority but combined with high birthrates it was yet another fatal blow).
IMO, early Asimov is top form Asimov, with all his flaws (horrendous dialogue and characters)
After being dubbed a great and getting more senescent, and physically declining from heart problems and HIV, his novels become very self-indulgent. His absolute low point was when he tried to tie everything together in one universe, with Hari Seldon becoming an obvious stand-in for himself.
Yes. And this is typical for many authors (the same Herbert, Zelazny)
Quite possible – they come from a similar class. And I don’t mean to make a direct comparison so much as to highlight the wider trend, which I think Caine was emblematic of.
Perhaps, it had something to do with the Beatles, but it seems very pronounced today. And I think it is not some random change, but reflects changes in values. That lower people once aspired to be part of the upper class, and that was a message promoted to them, that they could aspire to it. But now I think diversity signaling has destroyed it. They say even the Queen’s accent has changed.
In America, there seems to be a weird parallel trend of anyone with a British accent automatically being elevated, particularly BIPOC.
It’s just an optimistic vision at the moment about next summer, with this paperwork and the pandemic not finishing.
I’m optimistically going to visit Bay Area/Palo Alto, but then afterwards to use the visas and difficult entry procedure – maybe we will try to add a vacation in New York, or anywhere else in the USA (Hawaii is tempting but probably a bad idea considering its distances).
–
By the way how was your experience travelling in Europe from America during this pandemic?
Another thing from YouTube – what is this hype about a mass exodus from California to Texas?
Texas’s economy seems to be better planning of US states recently. Texas property prices must be a boom.
Under Japanese administration Manchukuo became the top industrial powerhouse in Asia that rivaled the Home Islands. They don’t get much credit for it since their rule of Manchuria also involved opium peddling and other criminal activities.
After Red Army’s Invasion of Manchuria (Operation August Storm 1945), the Soviets handed off Manchuria to CCP, but took apart the industrial foundation wholesale and shipped it back home. Nevertheless Manchuria remained a large part of PRC’s GDP in the early years.
The Soviets would give PRC’s First Five Year Plan industrialization a huge boost from the early 50’s. This is remembered as 156项重点工程 156 Major Industrialization Projects.
After Sino-Soviet Split (1966) Mao opens door to America and joins Dollar-Reserve system. In the 80’s a huge amount of investments would come from — Japan.
In succession PRC followed 3 models of modernization 1. USSR 2. Japan (and Asian Tigers) 3. USA
The fourth model being discussed is the stakeholder (rather than shareholder) capitalism of Germanic Europe.
Every place has good points and bad points. CA and TX (I have lived in both) are a stark contrast. One of the best features of TX is the state government compared to that in CA which is totalitarian. One of the best features of CA is the weather.
There really isn’t that much to do in TX except make money and the business of Texas is business. There is a slack minority but they are the bottom of the society as opposed to CA where that is the mainstream. The same building that takes two years to build in CA gets put up in six weeks in Texas. When I lived in Houston the two Mexican guys in the apartment next door to mine used to sprint to their car to get to work at 7:00 A.M. Monday through Friday. This behavior would not be recognized among their California cousins.
The pushback against vaccine passports provide a near-term boost that pushes many (even Democrats) to leave who won’t have the intention otherwise. Even more so with the NY-FL rush since Cuomo and DeSantis represent 2 opposite poles in their treatment towards COVID policies.
It starts looking like population exchanges that have preceded clean partitions/secessions.
This is straight out of the playbook of Kaiser’s Germany. Investment in STEM education is one of the main reasons how they surpassed Britain by 1900’s*. Also initially they only had to copy industrial technology from Britain and Netherlands, innovation didn’t come till later.
Deng studied five years in France and one in Moscow (unlike Mao who never lived abroad, and only traveled twice outside China, both times to Moscow). Amongst CCP founders he was the most educated on economics.
Despite knowing Russian, he was not particularly pro-Soviet. This was a reason why he, unlike Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai, survived the Cultural Revolution. So in the 80’s under him, Glasnost and perestoika did not take place.
*They also didn’t have to maintain an extensive colonial empire and allocated capital more efficiently under Konzern system
Which is why American Imperial system is setting up once again a more lopsided WWI scenario with Japan as France, in order to impose Versailles-style constraints on China and reverse the emergent trend.
It’s an interesting article. Thanks.
But 2004 was an election year. Bush’s policy was to inflate the real estate bubble in order to keep the economy running hot.
Perhaps he could have popped it in 2005.
The video does a good job explaining what’s going on. California’s long road down trying to build a liberal, quasi-socialist, system is backfiring in a big way. It’s wealthier citizens are regurgitating the “eat the rich” philosophy of its ensconced Democratic politicians, and leaving. Those making less money, up to 100k can no longer afford the high cost of living, including homes that start at over $1M.
Houses in Arizona are being bought/sold by buyers unseen. A guy in San Francisco sells his $6M home, buys one in Arizona for $1-2M, pockets the rest and lives happily ever after. Arizonans are most anxious about these Californians bringing with them their liberal political views and screwing things up here too. This is touched on in the video clip. The video also indicates that up to 48% of the country’s homeless take up residence in California. Who wants to live in a state with so many homeless drug addicts that end up living in your neighborhood’s streets, and paying exorbitant prices for the privilege? The country’s highest combined state/federaltax rates, are you kidding?…
Yes I also saw on the CNBC YouTube a lot of hype about Arizona’s investments for electric vehicles and semi-conductor manufacturing.
In CNBC they focus on these are untested EV startups – it’s not clear if they be successful. But there is also a investment of semi-conductor manufacturing (with Intel and TSMC) to Arizona.
Economically America benefits from high labour mobility in certain industries, but from a negative it can also seem like workers are expected to behave like migratory birds how easily moving across places. I guess a negative aspect of this labour mobility might be a contribution to reduce cultural distinctiveness of the different regions?
Texas governor also claimed that Elon Musk said he exited California because of in part social policies, although Musk denies this and said he avoids politics.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1433474893316722691
But I guess less of contrasts than emigrating from California to somewhere like Massachusetts?
That is, Texas still has Mexican maids, palm trees, warm weather, garden swimming pools, and similar houses and city planning styles.
Its also come to my attention that the business climate is booming in Colorado too. I don’t know what exactly is propelling this growth? Many Russian/Ukrainian immigrants are relocating to this state, landing good job opportunities. I do know that lot of wealthy Iranians, Indians and even Russians are moving to the Denver/Aurora areas and building beautiful large homes.
Apparently, at least some of the Haitians invading the US now are the ones that corrupt people imported into Chile to pick fruit to be sold to the US in the off season.
I’ve been thinking about how globalism works in these complicated ways.
For example, Mennonites moved to Honduras ostensibly to help Hondurans by educating them on farm techniques. Some of them were from the old Soviet sphere, though I suspect the anchor population was American Mennonites. I wonder whether they helped Hondurans immigrate to the US. Seems pretty probable.
Instead of bringing Somalis to work in chicken-packaging facilities, the US government should have cut a deal with Mennonites to work in these factories.
Is there even actual need for this, except some stubborn sclerotic political inertia at the very top? I mean why should it hurt any real power balances or levers if UR was ordered from Kremlin to make a Duma ruling coalition with LDPR and New People party, which could be easily achieved without any excessive vote faking?
Cringe.
Gang uber-antihumanism.
Well, depends on what you consider human.
I say, the Final Solution to the Human Question is transcendence into an indestructible, immortal, perfect body with no needs, obsoleting all problems instantly. Anything short of that is, well, not good enough
Arizona has long been a place where semiconductors were designed and manufactured, Motorola in particular had a big presence there and subsidiaries it sold off like Freescale still have a presence there. Not sure when Intel started investing there, but it’s an obvious place for TSMC especially in terms of reliable power which is something Taiwan’s leaders are said to be catastrophically screwing up.
For a very long time California’s unassailable advantage in high tech was its long standing public policy of making non-competes unenforceable, giving the Bay Area for example the most liquid pool of semiconductors, hard disks, computers, telecom etc. talent in the world. And I’ve been wondering when they’d effectively kill that gold goose by negating the advantages of that, which for example helped bring down the Boston area high tech ecosystem after the Cold War ended.
Good analogy. Despite fame for the adage “Politics is the Art of Possible”, Bismarck violated it himself by annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and precluding the possibility of Franco-German rapprochement.
Nevertheless the number of parallels between Kaiserreich and PRC cannot be overstated. Wilhelm I-Bismarck Era 1871-1890 can be compared with Deng-Jiang-Hu Era 1979-2013. The question is whether Xi can avoid the fate of Wilhelm II.
https://imgur.com/8r8HOYR
Li Hongzhang und Reichskanzler Fürst Bismarck, Friedrichsruh 1896
Supposedly, in Japan, at one time, it was common for companies to require some sort of pedigree for all job applicants. You would send in a copy with your resume.
Wonder what the exact purpose was. To catch Koreans? Or Bakuman? Or bastards? Or search for samurai for leadership positions?
Anyway, I think it is quite an interesting idea, and I’d like Euros to adapt it.
Basically, you want to perform horrible trial-and-error medical experiments on children for the sake of some sort of nerd utopia. No thank you.
I might go along if we are talking about eliminating some terrible genetic disease by editing a single gene. In that case, the risk/reward ratio is reasonable.
But “making humanity more intelligent”? No way.
To begin with, it’s a cockamamie objective. Even if achieved without any negative effects it will likely do more harm than good.
But it will have negative effects. Plenty of them. We know that it requires editing hundreds or thousands of genes. No one knows what else these genes are responsible for, either singly or in combination. You are monkeying around with genetic code when you have only a foggiest idea of how it works. The results will be easy to predict. The poor victims of your experiment will be in for a lifetime of hurt. And for what reason? Gaining a few IQ points? The risk/reward calculation here is equal to infinity.
You are free to experiment on yourself if you really want to. Leave other people’s defenseless children out of it.
You can’t compare a handful of self-contained short stories with an enormous novel. Azimov is a mediocre writer but he is a great sci-fi writer. Far better than Frank Herbert, who only wrote one good book.
And where did get that Herbert invented Bene Gesserit before Azimov? Foundation predates Dune by 20+ years.
I would be very interested in reading more about this. Some of the superintelligence-transhumanist-singularity authors with one course on the subject of genetics (if that) write like it’s inevitable and soon. Not just geniuses but invincible warriors. The practical experience of breeding animals and plants for agriculture over hundreds of years seems to be more along the line of one-step-back-two-steps-forward.
Genetic diseases can be horrible. Like worse than death horrible.
I guess part of the improvement in the conditions for growth of these states, can be so simply that production in many “tech industries” are less sensitive to location than traditional industries?
Oracle can relocate its production from California to Texas just by building some new office buildings (and asking employees to change their house), but a more traditional industry like ExxonMobil cannot relocate its oil production from Texas to California.
In theory Oracle’s production could be moved around America geographically in a few months (just the time required to relocate employees and their office equipment, who are responsible for production).
So when states like Texas or Arizona adapt more regulatory hospitality, these location insensitive industries can more easily relocate their production than was possible in previous historical times.
Although Arizona’s new investment is partly in semi-conductor manufacturing, and Texas is receiving things like a new Tesla giga factory.
https://twitter.com/RepChipRoy/status/1441221201586622479?s=20
https://twitter.com/pjmorell/status/1441462739361226754?s=21
The Chinese public is more adapted to being ground under the boot of authoritarianism than Americans; recall the concept of one’s outer face vs inner face for instance, or that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.
The US and its population is in an interesting situation here, ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense. Or should we call it zugzwang? Several available paths, all of them looking like things get much worse.
Which is called Buddhahood or Mystical Union with the Divine/Tao/Brahman.
The mistake of your view on the current situation quite common to most observers, is to assume the temdency being limited to one’s own country, while in fact the whole world is afflicted more or less by the same malaise. You don’t realize the anti-vaccinr passport movement is more active in France and Italy, and for once in Moscow (against restaurants). Several assassination of Black national leaders are suspected to be for their anti-WHO, anti-COVID narrative stance. It is at the core the bad karma of Americanization and the world-system.
I don’t see how the CCP incentivizes it more than the US academic culture of “publish or perish.” That phrase didn’t originate in China.
Besides, as you yourself have alluded to, cheating is hard to hide when it matters. It’s difficult to effectively disguise cheating in the hardest sciences such as math and physics, and difficult — as a practical matter — to effectively cheat in the chemical and material sciences. Cheating in softer sciences, and in subjects like economics, is generally of no consequence. Besides, those subjects are so poorly understood that even well-intentioned researchers typically produce garbage.
And in the subject of law, which is nearest and dearest to the modern American heart and has the most well-compensated practitioners and professors, the entire concept of “cheating” is utterly meaningless. (It’s just a foolish game, but one which devours lives and minds. China has one strong — and little commented upon — edge over America: A much more constrained civil legal system.)
As for vaccines, I do see your point, but hang out on /pol/ for five minutes, and you’ll find it impossible to escape the conclusion that otherwise reasonably intelligent people are averse to this “untested” mRNA technology in particular, and that a “most primitive” Sinovac-style vaccine — even if only as a fourth option — would likely have been better received. And, hey, it works pretty well, despite the fact that it’s the most primitive option.
Poland is in the early stages of a massive demographic implosion. Subsidizing children to the tune of 4% GDP didn’t help, and the effect of 1990s has yet to fully kick-in.
https://twitter.com/RafalMundry/status/1441080645564997632
If you’re not a Catholic flyover American, there is no reason you should have. She’s sort of a modern Jeanne d’Arc for this demographic. (Which is why I thought it was surprising and significant that she promoted BAP.)
Only to shitlib Hell, which is something between purgatory and paradise for normal people.
Poland’s 90s demographic hole was not nearly as bad as was Russia’s.
So, for example, under my proposed system BoJo’s brood would lose caste, instead of probably being rewarded in transactions that are untraceable to the public.
The current system in the West is designed to reward bastardy, which strongly promotes cucking. Obviously, what is needed is a multi-layered system designed to prevent this at every level. And also designed to prevent one’s elites from being born internationalists, like Obama or Harris, or many others.
I heard a few people recommended Peter F. Hamilton, including someone based.
Tried reading him and the first line of the first book I picked up, “The Nanoflower”, read like the most extreme scat.
Anyway, I get the feeling that everything that is bestselling now is pozzed and/or extremely decadent, no exceptions.
Poland’s TFR gradually slid from 2.08 in 1989 to 1.22 in 2003. Annual number of births declined by 38% during this time.
So we can expect that Poland will be producing around 200,000 babies during 2030s (down from last year’s 355,000). That would be the target for this decline.
I propose the creation of a new country called “Bastardia”, to which the civilized world could deport all its bastards.
The ideal location would probably be Africa, though I wouldn’t necessarily be against the US having it’s own location for domestics, provided it was walled off and minefields deployed around it, since there is so much utility in the idea.
21th century Draka but it’s impotent.
If you society treats them as they should, you need to leave some around to visibly suffer this and provide stark object lessons.
And what about adoption?
For women in Russia in the 1990s, the completed fertility has been 1,6 children per women. It’s below replacement, but any significantly not more than Poland.
Poland’s demographically worse difference from Russia, is that it has open borders emigration availability to some wealthy countries in Western Europe (which possibility is far limited and difficult for Russians). As a result, Poland have a greater problem of emigration of young workers. On the other hand, Poland receives free trade and massive investment from the EU which is an acceptable compensation for the demographic losses.
As part of any natalist propaganda push, I think it would be essential to amplify the crazy cat lady meme. For example, on an ensemble show, always have some old maid character that is made to look lonely and uncool.
Though, she need not necessarily own cats. In fact, doing a good job would require coming up with interesting variants, like the “Log Lady” from Twin Peaks, who carries around a small log and talks to it cryptically.
In general, modern adoption primarily seems to reduce itself to some form of cucking. I don’t know any same-race adoptees who aren’t middle-aged or older. I have heard that even the Mennonites have adopted some black children.
But in general, I would say part of the solution is having women marry younger. In my experience, it is often women who already have biological children who are looking to adopt, because they are getting older and still haven’t had a single girl or a single boy, or because the last one came out messed up.
Wouldn’t say I am an absolute hardliner against adoption. Some forms aren’t necessarily cucking, like adopting the children of relatives.
There is no compensation that could ever make up for the dying out of one’s people, one’s extended family.
Pardon the interruption here, but I remember in the Open Thread #165, that you were still considering adding in one other area to your upcoming visit to the States. Hawaii seemed too far away, and you were writing some very interesting comments about Russian modernism. You might want to consider visiting the Twin Cities, it should also satisfy your sweet tooth for older neighborhoods with great Victorian architecture (some nice homes by Frank Lloyd Wright too, if that’s your thing too). Look what’s on exhibit at the Minneapolis Russian Art Museum:
https://tmora.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_4982.jpg
Alexey Brodovitch: Designer of the Avant-Garde will be on view in the Main Gallery June 23 – October 24, 2021
Need some more:
https://tmora.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/01515-0022_web-500×426.jpg
And everybody loves traditional Russian lacquers, right:
https://tmora.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/6-ALEXI-B-copy-500×490.jpg
The permanent collection is a great romp mostly into Soviet Realism……you could do a lot worse!.
Needless to say people are not dying from emigration. But by living and working in the rich European countries, they are being lost from the point of view of Poland’s economy – decline in Poland’s workers and tax base. But in Poland there is also enormous economic benefit of being in EU.
The names of the last two exhibits didn’t come through for some reason:
“E.O. HOPPÉ AND THE BALLETS RUSSES
Saturday, September 18, 2021 – Sunday, November 14, 2021”
“THE ANCIENT ARTEL: LACQUER MINIATURES FROM PALEKH
Saturday, August 14, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021”
BTW, September/October are two of my favorite months in Minnesota!
Thanks do you live near there? I guess these are cities to visit if you drive across the North from one side to another?
It’s about birth rate per population in the 1990s. There were more Polish kids being born per capita in the 1990s than there were Russian kids. So according to Worldbank, in 1993 the crude birth rate in Poland was 12.9, versus 9.4 in Russia:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?locations=RU-PL
The birth rates equalized in the year 2000 and then Russia had the advantage until 2019, when Poland’s was very marginally higher.
So all things being equal, even though the 1990s-born kids will have fewer children of their own in Poland now that they are adults, there would still be more of them in Poland than in Russia. Of course this advantage will be erased if many of them have simply left the country. As a result, in 2019 crude birth rates in each country are about the same (9.9 Poland, 9.8 Russia). Russian women have more kids but there are more Polish women of childbearing age – the 90s hole in Russia is equalized by the emigration and lower fertility in Poland.
But Poland will get worse when the people born in the 2000s reach peak childbearing age, which will start soon. So Felix wasn’t really wrong, he just misidentified the problem generation.
Correct. Russia has better long-term prospects. My point was that Poland did not have as much of a demographic hole as Russia did, in the 1990s. This will make the effect worse for Russia than for Poland – although as you note, Poland has additional disadvantages.
I don’t live there now, but live in AZ. It’s really in the center of the northern part of the US, as you point out. Being in Mpls/St. Paul this time of year is great for outdoors sightseeing too – the colors are really vibrant – I hope that you make it there, and whether you do or not, let us know about your big trip!
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=RU-PL
Well, the 1990s, Poland’s slid from 2.06 in 1990 to 1.37 in 1999.
Russia’s slid from 1.89 in 1990 to 1.157 in 1999.
The largest gap was in the early 1990s. In 1993 it was 1.87 for Poland and 1.385 for Russia.
2002 was the first year when Russia exceeded Poland.
Minnesota is sort of like Finland or northern Sweden or parts of Russia – flat, with forests and a lot of lakes. Nice, but I’m not sure it would be particularly interesting for him. Similarly, the Twin Cities offer a great quality of life (unless BLM has ruined this) but they aren’t really spectacular. Chicago has more interesting architecture. MN is also far from everywhere. If you are going to travel all the way from Russia, MN is probably not a worthy destination.
Also, if he were to drive cross country, the southern route would be better. Places like Arizona or Utah are absolutely unique.
This difference is irrelevant for the topic of natural population replacement between the countries.
It’s important if you are working in government to plan schools and pension allocations, but the relevant input for population replacement is the completed fertility – and in Russia and Poland not much difference in the completed fertility in these years.
In terms of the rhymical fluctuation in birth rate – this is a problem for the country in terms of planning of allocation of the resources like school capacity, and the 1990s has enhanced this wave pattern in the population pyramid.
There is a strong “waves” in the population pyramid in Russia, and this is contributing in various problems for the government planning.
But the completed fertility rate was more or less the same for women who were fertile in Russia in the 1990s, as for those women who had been fertile in Poland during the 1990s.
So Poland not different from Russia, from this perspective (of natural population replacement).
So other determining facts for population replacement to look at, can be the spacing between generations (where larger space, or older parents, will reduce the speed of the decline; younger parents increase speed of decline).
Not well known for its mountain range, it does have one (The Sawtooth Mountains) in Northern Mn. I know, they’re tiny in comparison to other ranges in the States, but beautiful in their own right and quite traversable (I know because I conquered “Eagle Mountain” in my youth, wonderful views from the top!).
Having lived in both areas, I can say that the Twin Cities are much nicer overall, and offer much more culturally than the Phoenix area. It’s the long cold winters is what tore me away from Minneapolis. The dozen or so lakes, rivers and ponds in Minneapolis, with some of the most beautiful old Victorian neighborhoods, are something to behold and something that I’m quite sure that Dmitry would enjoy seeing. How many “Russian Art Museums” can be located in comparable sized cities, in the world? The largest art museum, the Minneapolis Museum of Arts is home to many masterpieces and is constantly adding quality works to its collection. There’s even a great museum dedicated to modern art, that houses some nice sculpture by Archipenko, The Walker Art Institute. For those with a large plastic card, there’s the Mall of America, still one of the largest of such malls in the world. All four major sports are well represented, as are nearby lakes/rivers that provide for superlative fishing opportunities. Music venues? A major symphony orchestra and all of the pop music shows that would please most any hipster of any persuasion or passion.
To be sure, it’s a long trip by car from either coast. But as Dmitry mentioned Hawaii as a possibility, I envisioned him flying for the long lengths of his trip. If he is indeed flying, the Twin Cities is still highly recommended. Autumn in Minnesota, I’m quite sure rivals even the sights in New England. If you don’t believe me, take a car trip a little past Duluth on the rugged North Shore and see some breathtaking autumn views.
You don’t need to go to New England to see views like this:
https://www.mnhs.org/sites/default/files/mnhs_api_client_images/distad_photography.jpg
A little bit closer:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/split-rock-lighthouse-north-shore-lake-superior-minnesota-autumn-198163926.jpg
Split Rock Lighthouse, North Shore, MN
I guess the way to attain a perspective about America, would be a crosscountry drive in both routes (North and South – Route 66).
You would have to travel slowly, so you don’t spend all day driving or inside a car, and can relax some days in every city.
So maybe 4 weeks in one direction, 4 weeks in another – with a couple weeks in the coasts?
Personally I can’t have such extended vacations (perhaps when I am a pensioner) – but maybe there are more time-lucky people here who have done this? Sadly fated Gabby Petito supposedly was trying a 4 month roadtrip, somekind of really hippie timescale.
This is captured by the crude birth rate.
Fertility rate is number of children per woman. If there are few children per women but many women, the population may grow at the same rate as in a country with few but very fertile women.
An extreme example: country X has 100 million women of childbearing age this generation, each of whom has only one child. The next generation will have 50 million people.
In country Y each woman has 2 children, but there are only 25 million women. So the next generation will have as many people as in country X – 50 million.
Relative to Russia, Poland has more women of childbearing age per capita because the previous generation had been more fertile. But this advantage is squandered by a lower fertility rate by these women, compared to Russia. So births per capita in Poland and Russia are about the same. However this will change in 3-5 years.
No, it was significantly lower in Russia. The 1970 cohort (women who were 25 years old in 1995) in Poland had a cohort fertility rate of about 1.9. In Russia women of this birth year had a cohort fertility rate of about 1.6. So every three Polish women of birth year 1970 had about one additional child than every three Russian women of the same birth year.
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_events_6123/news_press_releases_4630/press/lifetime_fertility_on_the_rise_3144
https://i.imgur.com/35vTcYq.png
Yes, though you can probably do 3 weeks in each direction. I once drove from Michigan to the Pacific Ocean in about 10 days, with stops along the way. Many places have no real city to relax in, so you should just spend the day driving and enjoying the view from the car. The impressive treeless plains of Nebraska, eastern Colorado and Wyoming, are like this, you can observe far-away weather systems (sun up above, heavy storm somewhere far off to the northeast, etc.) as if you are in the middle of the ocean. But there isn’t really any place worth stropping out there for an extended period of time. Just drive for hours and hours.
That is very beautiful and comes close. A difference is that New England has higher mountains and a greater diversity of trees and therefore leaf colors. The White Mountains of New Hampshire are 6 hours by car from New York:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/568bfdfdbfe873997302fc42/1612957719187-OMF1WUUROT8JU31Z2Z7Y/4N9A5722-1.jpg
Maine, where the mountains meet the ocean, is only 7.5 hours drive from New York City:
https://d368g9lw5ileu7.cloudfront.net/races/race108139-customSectionAttachment604146f0a354f3.79899192.png
There are exotic and tasty dishes there such as fresh lobsters and clam chowder.
Beautiful Minnesota is 20.5 hours drive away. Or you can fly there but it still takes longer and is much more expensive (2 hours in airport, 3 hours in sky) then drive from Minneapolis to North Shore 3 hours for about the same length of time. I’d rather recommend flying to Utah or Arizona.
Nick Johnson’s video about Dayton Ohio was pretty interesting to me. He’s producing a series of vlogs about problems with Ohio.
He thinks the main problem is loss of manufacturing jobs. But that there is lot of people who are voluntarily unemployed. He says when he visited a restaurant they said to him that they cannot find workers, because people don’t want to work.
He talks about how Turkish immigrants are trying to develop Dayton. (Not actually from Turkey, but a Turkish minority from postsoviet countries https://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2019/05/07/turkish-center-leader-talks-about-cycle-of.html )
For next year, I will only have a week extra to visit. I’ll visit a week in Palo Alto, and maybe another week we should add for somewhere else. I was thinking probably New York or maybe somewhere else. But if I can receive the multi-entry visa, I’ll be visiting America probably quite regularly in the future.
Lol I’m so blank about this area even on a cultural level, I was trying to think if I saw any films set in the area.
Then I remembered Werner Herzog’s classic “Stroszek”, in which a mentally disabled German immigrant tries to settle in Wisconsin and shoots himself.
If United Russia in reality got about 35%, who would get more? Who was cheated?
Coen brothers are from there. Their films Fargo and A Serious Man are set in Minnesota and next-door North Dakota.
Which means that Russia probably won’t get much worse, than it is today, whereas Poland’s demographic meltdown has only just begun.
There is another interesting chart you can find at worldbank. It shows the share of children in the population.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS?locations=RU-PL
You can see how Russia greatly benefited from the “Putin-boom”, and is now significantly more youthful society, than Poland. Poland, despite having an edge throughout communist period, completely stopped reproducing itself.
There are a lot more than 2-3 films that have been shot in Minnesota. Here’s a list of about 120 such films, I’m sure that you can find a few here that you recognize. The “Grumpy Old Men” series was quite popular at the box office starring all star perennials Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. I enjoyed seeing some modern day noirs shot in Minnesota, in addition to “Fargo” that AP has mentioned, I got a kick out of “Feeling Minnesota” and especially “A Simple Plan”. Prince was another ambassador for Minnesota, and his film “Purple Rain” was quite popular with the hipsters of that era.
His main residence is located in Chaska, not in California, and he always enjoyed life in his native Minnesota. It’s now a museum of sorts, dedicated to his life and music (Paisley Park has daily tours)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_shot_in_Minnesota
And for AP. who appreciates more “diversity” in his Autumn trees and colors:
https://www.twincities.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/temperanceriverstatepark.jpg?w=1024&h=597
More North Shore colors
https://assets.bigcartel.com/product_images/256202849/Minnehaha+Falls+Autumn.jpg?auto=format&fit=max&h=1200&w=1200
And you don’t need to go “way up north”to see great fall colors. This photo was taken at Minnehaha Falls right in the center of South Minneapolis. I used to watch the foliage change color daily as a college student, walking by bridge from the left bank to the right bank of the U of M over the Mississippi. When you thought that the colors were at their peak, you’d walk slowly and stop a few times while crossing. 🙂
Like this?
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1572200190800.jpg
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1556373951-20190427.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5aLYGEUwAMN3n1.jpg
Exactly the opposite, actually.
Happiness and pleasure are merely consequences of a balance, not the end goal.
Hence, in scenario one, every few years all the VR cattle are to be injected with time dilating drugs and then tortured for what will appear to be quadrillions of years to them, in meatspace, before being offered to return. Make the torture extra strong because escapism is cringe and I hate anyone who would take it on a molecular eternal quantum level.
In the second, a frowny face that will seek to destroy the happy face’s work.
There, balance, but so extreme nobody will find it actually good.
The true solution – neither. To be as neutral and balanced as possible, so such extreme measures don’t have to be taken.
Why can’t you be more Buddhist?
I’m not Asian and frankly I don’t care about it. It’s not in my assigned cultural package.
Taiwan with its developed testing capabilities, but with generally previously unexposed and unvaxed population, may show quite accurately that true CFR of current Covid is about 5% after the end of 2021 summer outbreak. Further studies are needed to assess probable IFR, which may be somewhat different, but doubtful it will be that drastically lower, as the conventional wisdom about the ratio of 10 not catched cases to 1 known is hardly applicable to Taiwan at this stage of pandemic.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
“Money is the root of all evil”
“A Simple Plan”
A small hidden gem that you probably never watched. It sucks you in and takes you for a wild ride!
https://youtu.be/0hSX2hDtJp0
I was speaking objectively: the Northeast United States (New England and upstate New York) – as well as the Smoky Mountains – do actually have the widest array of deciduous tree species and the brightest red and orange colors in fall in North America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/fall-foliage-atlas/colormap-xxlarge.png
Overall tree diversity (the southern ones do not necessarily produce bright colors):
https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Trees.jpg
This is a busy highway in the New England state of Connecticut, an hour from New York City. Imagine driving 80 mph under such a leaf canopy:
https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.608799563.0962/mp,840×830,matte,f8f8f8,t-pad,1000×1000,f8f8f8.u3.jpg
The same state:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/69/34/376934c5e4a39fa0fad5255de0b46256.jpg
Same scene with more saturation:
https://i.redd.it/e7i4w16d5l301.jpg
I can’t fight the laws of physics , nor tree diversity maps! My favorite tree, that reflects all of the awe inspiring colors of the autumn season are sugar maples. Green, lime green, yellow, orange, and of course bright fiery red are on full display, even brown and purple are to be seen within the maple tree. This map shows that Minnesota is on the outer edge of the “maple zone” and doesn’t have nearly as much as in the New England states. Wisconsin, right next door, however, seems to be abundantly full of this beautiful tree, at least in he northern part of the state. I do notice that the abundance of these trees doesn’t seem to extend all the way to the coast, areas that you’ve included mostly here, I think?…
https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/atlas/tree/curr_ivlittle_318.gif
Actually, I was wrong in my assessment of both New England and Minnesota. In Minnesota the light green color (31 – 50) is quite abundant through the eastern part of the state, and in New England, the green zone does indeed cover the areas closest to the sea. I was hasty and was looking at the red zones when I made my original assessment. Seems like there are a lot of maple trees throughout the whole zone. So, a lot of color for a lot of states!
I also like the idea of exiling all the women with tattoos to a country that would be called “Tattooine.” Some of the men too – depends where they have it.
One day, I hope the forces of justice prevail in the US, and the pernicious Shaw Memorial is removed from Boston Common and transported to the place of exile of “good whites” in Africa, where they can still admire it in-between their bouts of malaria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gould_Shaw_Memorial
Of course, there is a greater historical context within the US, but in a way it can be reduced to the same process by which Europe is afflicted with black statues, in order to clear the way for invasion by blacks. Blacks were basically a rare sight in the city, until about the 1950s or 1960s.
Taking balance to its logical conclusion would mean destroying all of reality. If nothing exists but absolute nothingness, imbalance can’t exist, since the amount of everything that exists would be zero.
WTF is the point of exit polls (dimwit)…… for a 3 day vote? Only a loser would want to do that. Nobody knows what turnout or what hours are going to be busy for this new type of vote to anticipate how best to conduct the exitpoll anyway.
It’s even more dumb when you know afew million are going to vote electronically, where obviously no exitpoll is done.
In 2016,exitpoll was also 45% and ER got 54% in final result, this year the exitpoll was 45% also… and ER received 50% final. This is perfectly normal – and electronic voting going to be even more Pro-ER.
Just for selecting candidates to represent ER, 11 million votes were received earlier this year. With 11 million votes guaranteed for this election, how dumb do you have to be find it anything else except completely plausible that ER got 17 million more votes from the remaining 45 million russians who also voted?
I feel like the new countries created this way (by radical segregation) would help increase world tourism. That is, supposing that some of them were still functional states.
Not to mention, that many of them would be interesting psychological experiments. For example, would a tattoo-freak identify with other tattoo-freaks? If they were his countrymen, would he be a nationalist? Or would he intrinsically identify with outsiders, even if all the tattoo-freaks were his countrymen and there were none outside of it?
Perhaps, some could be created based on physiognomy: Soyland, Whaleland, or Non-detached Earlobes Land.
Perhaps, it would have made more sense for the USSR to have had a smaller army, after it got the bomb, and to have put the difference into the production of blockbuster movies.
“Cosmetic” segregation won’t be the future, and what we will have instead is ethnic and ideological segregation, or what’s called population exchanges before partitions.
What did the post-socialist emigration waves select for? Supposedly more pozzed people who left to find greener pastures (to them)? How much of it has led to the apparent “ideological freezer” post-socialist countries have come out from?
I spent some years out West, regularly doing a lot of hiking and some camping in some spectacular national and state parks. But eventually I really missed the smell of maple trees in fall. Do you?
Glad to see the Vikes get a win. Became a fan of theirs when the Giants traded my favorite player Fran Tarkenton to the Vikings after announcing they were leaving NY to NJ, which at the time wasn’t taken so well by many NYG fans. At the time, the Giants weren’t good unlike the Vikings.
https://youtu.be/u_yT-h3orfY
I thought this latest influx of Haitians was interesting. Because at least some of them were in Chile for a few years. Not very long, many only like 2-3 years. Some a little longer.
You might say that that is not comparable to people who have managed to “launder” their legitimacy by being born in another place or even being the grandchildren of immigrants. And for all I know, there might still be many Haitians in Chile, yet I feel like the whole incident demonstrates how transitory these movements could be, and how superficial the motivations for moving are (pure economic gain).
What is difficult to understand though is how the intuitive “moral” values of liberals could be circumvented. I feel like that is the key to the whole thing. Progressives have no loyalty to their countrymen. And for all the talk of environmentalism, I feel like they are, in the main, just not able to grasp longterm trends – the consequences of having open borders. Not that I believe that open borders would be popular, if on a ballot, but it is hard to see how the regime could change its values, without being totally replaced.
I’d like to see Rightists organize a based alternative to the UN, just for trolling and for subverting the concept of internationalism. Could be done purely over the internet, with no salaries or rent, I guess. Though, I imagine that the members would quickly become targets.
To your original comment – picking subcultures you don’t like and populate places exclusively by them is meaningless and stupid, except if they do it by themselves.
As for Haitians, it’s because France transplanted entire slave populations from Africa to Saint Domingue, then after a slave revolt imposed extreme reparation + debt burden on a rapidly localizing economy that went from the “richest” plantation economy in the Americas to subsistence level. Someone’s karma shifted onto others.
It has its uses as a thought experiment.
For example, if you can walk people through some of the more ridiculous examples, and get them to imagine the differing consequences, then that might help them to consider more realistic and fruitful proposals that are less politically correct. It also helps one to think about group dynamics and the possibilities of exiling people who belong to your group, but who don’t play nice with the group – and it need not be an unpleasant exile.
Have you ever seen a Haitian IRL? I ask because I have noticed repeatedly that they have visibly smaller heads. And Dominicans who are not my idea of a model population, and who share a lot of customs with them, really, really hate them – like something that you have to see to believe.
Without the massacre, Haiti might have eventually become similar to Jamaica. But that is supposing a higher level of white immigration and miscegenation, as well as a longer period of rule. And Jamaica isn’t exactly a great place.
Do you see my username? I’m at the opposite end of the world from Haiti. If you mean some Latino from Dominican Republic, it’s partly because of Trujillo’s propaganda.
Jamaica was on a decent track of development until ~1970.
I am nearly at the antipodes of Haiti myself – or at least in the way that people used to conceive of distances. I merely asked, in case you have traveled to the US, in which case, it would be difficult to avoid seeing them, at least in some places.
I dislike this phrase, though some employ it. They are clearly a different people than mestizo Mexicans, and they actually do have a sort pseudo-uniformity. Not a race, yet – thought they may be among the closest of Latin Americans in getting there.
Trujillo wasn’t exactly an ethnic nationalist. (see his visa policy during WW2) Haven’t cracked open any Dominican school books, but the point is, they’ve had a lot of experience with Haitians since then. Haitians are perennial migrants into DR, for low wage labor. The border is also swarming with ones that return every day to act as merchants. The traffic of labor has always been one way. And there are regular campaigns to deport them.
It was a British colony until 1962, and like many colonies, remained heavily under British influence, for some years, while nominally independent. I have seen my fair share of Jamaicans too, and never wonder where they went wrong. The answer undoubtedly lies in the soft soil of their progenitors, and with the terrible diseases of the tropics, which made life very uncertain and pushed evolution in one direction instead of another.
Before its rebellion, Haiti was anyway colonized by prerevolutionary France.
A higher quality of political and legal system is generally inherited in the United Kingdom’s colonies and ex-colonies.
Jamaica’s socioeconomic situation is somewhere near a lower point of the deviation from the mean for the Kingdom’s colonies and semi-colonies. Aside from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Canada – there are ex-English colonies like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and British Virgin Islands which are developed countries by income. Maybe Barbados is middle income, and Montserrat low income.
Without knowing anything about the region, we could predict nationalities who share a single island are already probably going to hate each in most scenarios. And I also noticed Dominican Republic has a GDP per capita 5 times higher than Haiti, and receives proportionally a large flood of immigration and guestworkers from the latter (maybe something around 8% of the population, or a number like that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitians_in_the_Dominican_Republic.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve missed the smell of maple trees, but yes, I have missed the overall smell of autumn in the air, including the fallen leaves of many types of trees. There are different species of the maple tree in the more northerly climates of the Western states. Close to home, I’ve encountered them in Flagstaff, and further away in Oregon. In fact, I was surprised to run into the beautiful catalpa tree in Flagstaff too, now that was a surprise.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_YjtYXrJYwQ8/Sqb_8sBCGDI/AAAAAAAABQ4/zhoh6P6Zmh0/s400/Arizona+Maple+Rim+Road+9.jpg
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/fall-color-porcupine-mountains-lake-cloud-61234018.jpg
Northern Arizona, a you can see, can rival even Minnesota and New England when it come to colorful autumn foliage.
Well how about that, Fran Tarkington was (and is) my favorite football player of all time. He was a magician that kept everybody glued to the TV, trying to anticipate his next incredible play. I think that he was with the Vikings longer than he was with the NYG’s?
I don’t think that there are enough colonies that one can draw any conclusions, nor would it be trivial to adjust for human capital differences between colonies. And the fact that the English were extremely competent and largely benevolent administrators, which can hardly be said for any other nation, must also be taken into account.
Today, in any case, the Common Law tradition is in shambles. It has done the inevitable: It has collapsed under its own weight. Most developed countries with Civil Law codes have more efficient, far less mercurial, and ultimately more effective civil legal systems.
It’s not entirely appropriate to compare those nations with Haiti. If you add up the populations of Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, the British Virgin Islands, Barbados, and Montserrat (pop: ~4500) — you’re at less than 5% of the population of Haiti. Add Jamaica, and you’re somewhere around 30%.
Haiti is in a uniquely bad position, with tremendous population pressure, worthless institutions, and a populace which is good for nothing. This sorry situation is, in part, due to their legitimately disadvantaged and bloody colonial history. But not entirely.
The North American West does not quite have the diversity of deciduous trees of the East (or Europe), although we make up for it with our bigger variety of beautiful conifers. But we do have more than enough to enjoy a symphony of colors under our serene blue skies when we look out of the window in autumn.
https://i.imgur.com/YOLtww1.jpeg
Yes, as he started out with the Vikes before going to NY, followed by his return to Minnesota.
Couldn’t stand that second stadium the Vikes played in. They had a greater advantage playing outdoors before their fans, when the weather got cold.
I’m not sure that the legacy of systems of law is really that important, in the sense of French vs. English. After all, France inherited its own system of law. And there is Réunion, which although a part of France, is very isolated (per capita €22,970.) Though, obviously, it has better demographics than Haiti.
Small islands are different. It is multi factor. More beaches=more tourism. They are more attractive targets for offshore banking, which has a large per capita effect. Lastly, there are HBD factors, revolving around which place got first pick of slaves and in which place murderers could be easily caught vs. hiding inland in difficult terrain and having many sons.
Humorously true, to a large extent.
https://twitter.com/AqBoga/status/1441477424009519106?s=20
https://twitter.com/AqBoga/status/1441479556599218176?s=20
https://twitter.com/AqBoga/status/1441475093956333575?s=20
What does this mean, please?
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/go-for-gold-%20where-to-hike-drive-to-see-the-best-displays-of-yellow-aspens-fall-foliage-in-colorado
Are there tree-ologists who dissent from that internet-fact that an aspen grove is one organism of perfect clone trees?
Beautiful pictures of the Colorado Rockies in your link.
I think it is technically true that aspen groves are single organisms but it doesn’t matter much. Aspen trees obviously have their own independent growth and shape like any other tree.
Well hunter gatherer people were kidnapped in the 18th century, sold to other kidnappers, and thrown onto seismically dangerous island thousands of kilometres from home, and lost their ancestral language, culture and religion.
After rebelling against the authorities representing the people (from thousands of years in the future) that kidnapped them, these disenchanted hunter-gatherers, never had probably a plausibly optimistic prospects in terms of economic development – they don’t have the colonial elite and stable politics and law of places like Bermuda.
Their best strategy now would be probably to try to become a tax haven, with some protectorate agreement of a developed country – perhaps USA, UK, France, etc. Recycle any money generated to strict security, that would allow it become popular tourist destination.
I wonder if there was a single intelligence analyst in China or Russia who predicted that the US would turn gay and become black-worshipers way back in the early 1990s or before.
I feel like there were some definite signs, but, even if some genius foresaw it, he probably would not have wanted to expose himself to the risk of making such a crazy prediction. And I tend to think that they didn’t give much thought to the trends in Hollywood. Like, I’m pretty sure they weren’t paying attention to how many TV movies about gays there were, or how many times a scientist in a movie was black.
Surely, they were agriculturalists?
Buchanan!
If their ancestors came from West Africa that’s likely.
Haven’t read any early Buchanan, but I get the sense that he was a sort of optimist back in the early ’90s. Or at least when the Soviet Union collapsed, he predicted/hoped that the US would pull back from global empire. (based on a video segment of the Mclaughlin Group, I remember seeing). Not sure where he was on domestic trends back then.
I do remember people calling him a Nazi over 20 years ago, though.
1972 if they had been clever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Certain_Summer
https://www.azquotes.com/public/picture_quotes/8a/94/8a941594c610a96dfd8a58ca9a96318f/adolf-hitler-427300.jpg
Here’s some more:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777361459130138627/892270598921809950/Hitler_Quotes_-_Singh_Ending.pdf
Someone’s utopia is someone else’s dystopia. The liberal utopia is the socialist dystopia, the social utopia is the liberal dystopia. The tradcon utopia is the woke dystopia, and the woke utopia is the tradcon dystopia. Spiritualists and materialists see each other’s thought lacking.
The problem is, we are all anchoring our anticipations on striving for one ideology or another, when no one can agree on whether a single ideology is right or wrong. Moral relativism and action leads to dissension and inevitably to suffering of the other. The only way out is to go above all those (Buddhist) and see light and darkness as complementary (Taoist). You can’t totally create a perfect world and eliminate Evil.
He probably felt the first half because he was a keen cinephile.
Not sure about the second half. Don’t think there were as many clues back then, Civil War aside.
A possible future is where, instead of turning to eugenics, we increasingly turn to technology to accelerate dysgenics.
So, for example, using nanobots developed in Germany to help move “lazy” sperm into the egg.
Eventually, propagating horrible, ape-like mutants that need machines to “live” might be the reason for being for AI and automation.
Interesting to consider what sort of investment would be necessary in order to turn Haiti into a popular tourist destination.
Like, China supposedly has one camera per seven people. How many does Haiti have? And what other things would you need, in order to make it safer?
And if it were safer, (say Japanese level) if you had robot policemen, would that be enough? Or would the aesthetics of the place still be too bad? Would you need robot street-sweepers? And robots to build and maintain aesthetically-pleasing buildings?
An alternative to exiling progressives would be to try to moderate their harmful behavior with a social credit system, which would aim to force them into the prole class, whenever they misbehaved.
Making a blank-slatist comment about race would mean that you are banned from Starbucks for a year and must buy your coffee at McDonald’s. Making one about the sexes would mean that you have to buy all your clothes at K-Mart.
Supporting open borders would mean that your children would need to be sent to a majority black school. Or for those without children, that they could only see black doctors, watch BET, and listen to rap.
So who are going to be promoted to the “middle class”? Or do you want to homogenize all classes (elites, middle class, proles) onto the same based redneck worldview?
I’d assumed all those “high social credit” options will be extinguished quite soon since everyone outside of a ultra-based few are being demoted to bare survival, including libertarians who’re repulsed by social credits more than the woke. The way CCP does it, the punishments aren’t as extreme and are largely nuisances for most of the punished, with only quite few (still sizeable given China’s sheer scale) really ruined by them. But given the CCP’s bureaucratic slowness, you’re stuck with the status for years, decades, or maybe the rest of your live.
But (and it’s the grievous thing for me because I tolerate political opposition) it is likely to be used by future conservative/populist administrations/regimes since the woke cultural establishment’s gloves are off.
I apologize for putting you on the ignore list. You might be a bit argumentative and clinging to your Trumpist worldview, but at least you’re trying to contribute unlike some other trolls (and often my quips are more trollish than yours).
I’m not totally in favor of doctrinaire ChiCom pandering, but I definitely support a solid Chinese leadership who can assert itself (even in a somewhat suboptimal manner), and in broad stroke Xi can do some of what Biden is failing to and Trump should have done. No leader is perfect.
Haven’t given a lot of thought to positive reinforcement, but I do have a few other scattered thoughts about social credits:
I feel very passionately that normal people should have convenient access to clean public bathrooms. Of course, this would require banning sub-normal people, which is a process that still needs to be worked out.
It may not be necessary to discourage all progressive behaviors. Some are quite amusing and do no harm, if properly contained. Like the idea that they should all give up cars and eat bugs. Maybe, some of these could even be encouraged somehow, with a progressive-specific social credit system that rewarded them when compared to other progressives, but without elevating them above non-progressives.
It might be possible to make the Third World more functional with social credits. Probably could be done for a fraction of the cost of entitlements that the First World already pays to the Third World. And I think it would probably be a good idea for any resettlement plan to include such a system, assuming that a hard break is politically impossible, and that we can’t simply choose isolation.
Not my cup of tea (I’d better leave the Periphery alone in their apparent chaos), but it sounds good enough for your type who wants action. The CCP might export their system to Africa tho for Chinese expatriates at least, if they get more serious in their neocolonial adventures.
How about unwilling because he wants to put pressure on Western Europe to allow Nord Stream 2 to be put in operation, either ASAP or period? Note the western terminus is in Germany which just had an election and their Green Party wants to stop it from ever operating, along with the USA and I don’t know who else besides the Eastern European countries that currently provide transit for Russia.
Reminding everyone why natural gas is not optional at all if you don’t want to starve (provides hydrogen for the Haber process to fix nitrogen from the air, plus carbon dioxide is a byproduct and is much more heavily used in the food industry than I realized), suffer blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t helping much, or at all at night, especially if you turn off your nuclear plants and/or don’t replace them or build new ones (France managed to destroy its ability to do that economically, an interesting feat…), as well as freeze during the winter … well, I suspect doing this in advance of fall really hitting is concentrating some minds.
And was Russia previously considered to be a reliable source of natural gas? I seem to remember it having disputes with Eastern European countries Nord Stream 2 bypasses that resulted in Western Europe not getting the gas they needed. So Putin could make a case that Nord Stream 2 will allow for reliable supplies absent for example US sabotage (we did it during the Cold War).
Such systems need enforcement that can’t be bypassed with a bit of money to the friendly policeman or because you’re Nth cousins, or from the same clan or tribe etc.
There aren’t many proposed solutions to Third World problems that don’t ultimately reduce to people problems, and it’s the people in Third World countries that make them Third World, as well where the live when they migrate to the First World. Does Second World Russia have such problems??
One difference that might possibly help explain this is religion.
Black churches are fundamentally about blackness. They might as well be called “The Church of Anti-racism” or “The Church of Guilt-tripping Euros.” But Euros have no equivalent organizations. And, what can be said of black churches, I think can also be said of synagogues or mosques – there’s an ethnic identity/advocacy that seems to be entirely missing from mainstream churches.
PBUYT (Peace be upon you too)
I actually missed it when I had your name in the ignore list.
But first of all, Democrats aren’t exactly Nazis/fascists even if they employ underhand and sometimes dictatorial tactics, if I get your thinking right. They are a coalition of “progressives” and establishment political operatives, with BLM/Antifa serving as their radical paramilitary arm, and some backing from globalist and moneyed interests. The analogy is there in the power composition, but 3 things separate the 2 political ideologies: You’re not calling a dementia patient their paramount leader, their progressive & woke wings pretend to read Marx and Frankfurt school while the moderates are much like RINOs, and giving them the epithet of a semi-competent party would be an overestimation of their real capabilities.
2nd, the CCP is the sole predominant party in China and the rest having token power. What’s a more apt comparison and appropriate in terms of institutions would be Putin & Navalny.
It’s of course right and good if you contest the results. No problem with that. If you dismantle the Democrat political machinery, you will end up with a dominant party (GOP), which you might want to maintain in power, but you’re replacing a Uniparty (nominally bipartisan) with another Uniparty (your own).
Credit to you for not actually killing your opposition. What you’re suggesting sounds like Pinochet or Franco, if you’re into their style of politics, but look at what happened after they’re gone. More deeply, American “Republic” has deteriorated enough to foster such kind of mutual hate and rot even after the Democrats are gone. The problem is, you are on one side of the divide and them another, and the gap is ever widening. You might suggest forceful de-Democratization, but they’ll take it as evidence of MAGA ideological ambitions to permanently eliminate “Progressiveness” and “Social Justice”. Last time this happened, it was the War of Southern Secession (“Civil War”). The North/Democrats are enforcing objectionable politics from your standards, so you have a right to resist and chart your own way away from them. Maybe it’s time to think about a national divorce so you won’t have to worry about “De-Nazification”, the Union isn’t that important. Make your own state bases great again first, and let them wallow in their own ideological filth. The Confederates wouldn’t have grabbed Northern states if they had succeeded, and remember their example. (And remember there were a capitalist West Germany and communist East Germany after the Nazis were gone – secession based on ideology works.)
What I thought of was a really extremist approach much closer to Nazism than whatever the Democrats themselves (alone) can dream up. It’s a bad joke and a figment of distorted imagination in the minds of the #Resistance. No offense to your upstanding MAGA ideologues. But things can go downslope if you let your “De-Nazification” drive go out of hand.
It can’t possibly work.
Sure, that sort of thing works for Nevis and the Virgin Islands, but the population of Nevis is 11,000 — and the year-round permanent population is probably even lower than that. Haiti has literally >1000x more people, and correspondingly greater and more intractable problems.
Besides, the reputation of the old British colonies is that they’re well run. You can start a business there, hide some money away, and you won’t need to worry much about it. Their legal systems are better than the American legal system. (A low bar, but still.) The reputation of Haiti, on the other hand, is such that you’d have to be insane to trust them to any extent.
So Haiti is not only larger and poorer, in every respect, than the tax haven nations — it will never be able to attract a fraction of the money, corporate offices, and direct investments that places like Nevis have (deservedly) attracted.
Haiti will need to get very creative.
Honduras has recently opened a “charter city” called Prospera — a state within the state — which is supposed to function as a tech and trade hub: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/prospera-in-honduras-a-private-tech-city-now-open-for-business
Haiti should go a step further and sell the one thing that money, today, cannot buy: Sovereignty.
They should simply sell off portions of their country, in exchange for vast sums of money, and promises of continued mutual aid and support. (Which can amount to a de factotax — but not de jure. Legally, they would be treaties between sovereigns.)
There is coastal land in south Haiti that is not densely occupied — and, in some locations, is not occupied at all. The government can also utilize their powers of eminent domain to free up more land. Anyway, Haiti has only one thing that is priceless — and, besides that one thing, they have nothing to offer. They should find a way to sell portions of it.
Ok my historical ignorance is visible – they seemed to not kidnap the hunter-gather tribes in the region, and the slaves were kidnapped from groups like Bantu nationalities.
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3669
These nationalities had agriculture, and were in some level of early state formation. Nonetheless, they were certainly as if people kidnapped from an epoch many centuries, if not millenia, in the past.
And then in process of being kidnapped, removed from their continent and then multigenerations of slavery – they have also lost the native culture, religion and language that had structured their societies. It’s possibly the effect will be like throwing a people even further backwards in time.
I haven’t read anything about Haiti before. But from Wikipedia, Haiti seems like a laboratory experiment for the worst case scenario, as the enslavers themselves are then expelled and this country creates a kind of surreal parallel of France with various Napoleonic leaders that use a vocabulary of republicanism and French Enlightenment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Dessalines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Boyer
They’re all fundamentally united by trying to uplift their members & gain status.
Ethnic or religious minorities need outright advocacy, while mainstream has existing culture.
Analyzing stuff from a perspective of victimhood ignores power, and is gay||
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/640459736919048202/892478432053723216/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Dominican Republic is climbing to the lower middle income level, despite extreme corruption and bad management.
Simon Whistler made a kind of lazy video about them in YouTube.
Tl;dr he claims it is a very corrupt country, with a very successful tourism industry.
Perhaps Haiti might be able to repeat something similar, considering Dominican Republic is at least developing a popular tourism industry even with its corruption and bad management.
My knowledge is only from YouTube. Obviously Haiti is a very beautiful looking country, so it should be a tourism mecca if they managed it competently.
But looking at the YouTube peoples’ view, it seems like Port-au-Prince is too poor and dangerous to become attractive for the causal tourism at the moment.
Sometimes these dangerous countries can be slightly safer if you have the same external appearance as the local people, so the criminals at least don’t see you as a wealthy tourist from hundreds of metres away.
Maybe African American tourists could be a potential market for slightly more safer tourism there – although the nervous YouTuber still is scared of a kidnap and sometimes holding his phone like he is a secret undercover journalist.
Gazprom supplies as much natural gas as they are supposed to according to their contracts.
As noted in a newer thread, there is currently a good reason not to increase natural gas exports to the EU.
The unreliable side here is the German side who increased Polish involvement in the NS2 project despite the well-known fundamental Polish opposition to the new pipeline.
https://twitter.com/wjakobik_en/status/1440710350161125387
Yes, I think it probably would appeal more to black Americans, who would not feel so out of place or be put off by the history. But it seems surprising that Haiti is not cheaper. I wonder how it compares to Africa, say Gambia.
It’s worth observing that black slaves in tropical regions such as Haiti had deeper connections to Africa than US slaves did, because the death rate was far higher in tropical regions and therefore the black population there needed to be constantly replenished by importing new slaves. The US black population was self-sustaining from the beginning and grew rapidly due to natural increase (just like the white population). Thus by 1800 the average US black was far enough removed from Africa as to have little memory of it, while the average Caribbean black might have been born in Africa or only one generation removed.
This is why you see things like voodoo in the Caribbean but very little of the sort in the US except by way of Caribbean migrants.
Shouldn’t the obvious contrast to Haiti be Jamaica?
HBD can explain much of Haiti’s (GDPPC: $1,000) underperformance relative to the DR ($8,000), but I think the difference from Jamaica ($5,000) has to be mostly a matter of culture/institutions. Though Jamaica also has a smaller population and a proportionally longer coastline due to not having a land border, so Jamaica probably has more per capita tourism potential. But still, a 5x difference in incomes is a lot.
Why haven’t Haiti?
Not saying whether I know anything about your post.
But I believe that in music, some of the wonderful and brilliant partly African American originated genres like jazz, blues and boogie-woogie, may not always have so much connection African native music as can be claimed by the journalists.
Often in jazz, the music journalists can talk about a connection of the sophisticated polyrhythms of jazz, to the complex rhythms used in many native African music genres. These historical African genres are interesting and inspiring in themselves, and there is a strong and not disputed influence of these historical African music in e.g. Cuban music.
But it seems to me in jazz (unlike Cuban music, etc), always there had been greater influence of military band drumming. It’s not that far from US military drums, to Philly Joe Jones.
There is also just an influence of the sounds of modern American life.
Lewis (as other boogie woogie pianists basically create modern rock music), lived as a child in Chicago next to a train. And so his most famous song, hybridized blues singing with old train sounds.
Could be good. But you need to convince Constitutionalists why the Republic need not be electoral, and find someone smarter than Trump.
Maybe starting from places which are Democrat strongholds (New England + NY & CA + Pacific Northwest).
You can try demilitarize the Blue states for a decade or two.
The Spanish Republicans stopped sharing the common vision of Spain and only Franco’s one of conservatism wad good. Get thr analogy?
They will send much of their money and assets overseas before leaving, and that’s good for you. You should hand the appropriated businesses to Trumpist cronies. Can’t wait to see Andrew Torba taking control of Twitter and censoring all the wokes.
My suggestion for you would be really studying Putin’s example. There’s still a Communist Party in Russia and it’s the largest permanent opposition.
In 1970 Jamaica had a GDPPC of $6,135 vs $2,488 in Dominican Republic & $1,567 in Haiti. But that’s partly because of Bauxite processing and more advanced import substitution. If Jamaica had kept its course it would have been 2x as wealthy.
In Cuban music, the not lost much of their rhythmic traditions across the centuries.
The major tourist destination in Haiti seems to be a peninsula fenced off from the rest of Haiti. Doesn’t exactly seem to be a sign of confidence.
I suspect that Jamaica may have benefited from a special trade relationship with the UK (in addition to institutions). Interestingly, there was a poll in 2011, where 60% of Jamaicans surveyed thought the country would be better off, if still ruled by Britain. Though that did not stop a recent drive to demand reparations from the UK.
Seems crazy to me. I mean, they got a 10,990 square km tropical island. What is that worth? If they want money they should consider selling it.
No need to sell the island if they can ask Britain for foreign aid and more comprehensive institutional & economic integration.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/640459736919048202/892658616081997864/unknown.png
Exactly. Besides sovereignty over some stunning tropical real estate, they have absolutely nothing worth a damn. So if they want money, and if they want better lives, they should sell that land — free and clear, so that the land is independent of any claim Haiti might have upon it — to charter cities and other moneyed interests.
This would BTFO seasteading, which is impractical, and could open up a new frontier.
My favorite alternative to sea-steading is building cities on the coast of the Namib desert. Coast has a very mild climate. It is very sparsely populated in general, and very isolated, so there is a low military/migration threat. On the downside, depending where they were located, it would probably require a lot of desalinization. And the interior gets very hot in summer, so not much room to build inward, unless it is with the idea of air-conditioned tunnels connecting buildings, or evaporative cooling of limited outdoor spaces. Though, the coast is plenty long.
Also really like the idea of 100 year leases to build cities in the Third World. I genuinely think that this would greatly benefit Africans, if they allowed it to be structured in a non-PC way, that made them attractive places. Like, say that it was such a scale that they could allow ethnic neighborhoods – areas where you could have your own cultural identity, your own schools, and parades. Stuff people aren’t allowed in America anymore.
What would be some of the benefits for Africans? Well, many of the elite travel like 5,000+ miles for medical care in Singapore. Many opportunities for common people too. Jobs, courts. Maybe, the lease could be paid for in services, like electrical generation or internet, charity hospital care, or schools.
And at the end of the period, the infrastructure could be available for resettling migrants, though truthfully told, I’d rather not wait 100 years.
I tend to agree with the premise of the book “Dead Aid”, (that aid does harm to the average person) even though it was written by a African lady, who is probably a Conservative, Inc. shill.
BTW, I actually don’t think a modern return to colonial administration would work out well, unless it was radically re-imagined. Otherwise, who would be put in charge would be the lesbos and fellow blacks. Though, maybe, there is some room for some indigenization, if paired with IQ testing and social credits to discourage corruption.
Neo-serfdom. So once again “inferior” races who “are destined to be subservient” will be validated.
Roald Dahl’s Wikipedia entry makes him seem a lot more based than I remember him being in elementary school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl
Though, I believe accusations about his criticism of fat women ring humorously true.
However, I guess Dr. Seuss has come under fire recently, and I would consider him to be pozzed. That is, putting aside his early caricatures of blacks.
Actually good, which is why Germans & Boers started planting their flags over it back at the start of the 20th century. Genocides of the Namib indigenes came later.
Totally agreed. But a single nitpick: ethnic neighborhoods is already a form of PC spatial configuration. You can just have ethnically homogenous settlements like those old Italian or German-Brazilian rural towns, and attract the most adventurous of many of the ethnicities.
I imagine a somewhat inclusive Euro identity, as being the most practical for Euros, at least to start. But when I say “neighborhoods”, I am imagining other people, like Chinese or possibly Indians. I think there is potentially a lot of utility in different combinations.
Anything ethnically specific enough might have a genuine cultural value, like the potential to generate tourist dollars, through cultural attractions, or be a film backdrop for cultural productions. Plus, specific allows for easy re-integration, at the end of the lease. But there might be value in combinations too. Having two or three neighborhoods might be a way to prevent domination by any single group. I would also suggest more cosmopolitan models as possibly be more attractive to progressives.
But I think that one can go too cosmopolitan. Might not matter in a place like Brazil, but if there is a loss of identity through miscegenation, then people might see the place as their home, and it might be difficult to get them to leave.
Finally a comment I can mostly agree on. But are you seeing that 100-year leasing as temporary settlement, not permanent colonization? I don’t think anyone needs to leave if no one else wants to assert their claims to the land (and Blacks reserve this right)
What does that mean in terms of Western European government regulations of utility companies? Here in the US a lot are not allowed to make contracts at firm prices for more than say half their projected usage because if they bet wrong, their retail customers will pay more than if they had bought it on the spot market.
That of course totally fails in crisis shortage situations, see the US polar vortex that reached down to Texas last winter. In the middle of the nation consumers are now going to have to pay thousands of dollar spread out over many years, just to cover what utilities had to pay on the spot market, in the case of the electrical ones above Texas just to keep their grids in good enough shape to do rolling blackouts.
Can’t use “Thanks” because cookies but Karlins Substack rescued this post.
Also thanks.