The Next Meeting of the Dr. Fauci Anti-Fan Club Begins Here

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Trump's Warning That Biden Would 'Abolish the Suburbs' Isn't Racist, and It Isn't Hyperbole, Either

President Trump began highlighting Joe Biden’s horrific housing policy in a speech on July 16. The president is framing the policy in stark language by letting voters know that Joe Biden wants to "abolish the suburbs.” It would be great if this were hyperbole, but it is not.

As Trump mentions, Biden’s policy will put local zoning in the hands of federal bureaucrats. To receive HUD grants and highway funds, communities will need to agree to eliminate zoning for single-family housing. The president then correctly draws the conclusion that housing values will go down in areas where this policy is implemented.

He repeated these comments when he conducted a tele-rally for Wisconsin voters. Now the media is trying to cast his remarks as dark and imply racist motivations. Twitter lit up with this inference last night because Trump argued that these policies would bring "who knows into your suburbs.”

A glimpse of Biden’s policy

Again, the president is correct. Some of us got a glimpse of what this can do to a community following the housing crash. The phrase "who knows into your suburbs” has nothing to do with race. It has to do with a complete revision of the social contract in these communities, by which — I would assert — the minority neighbors in my subdivision would be as appalled as I am. Let me explain.

Following the housing crash, my suburban Chicago subdivision saw record foreclosures and a drop in housing values. It was a neighborhood of about 1,500 homes that was a planned community with an elementary school in the middle that all the neighborhood children attended. There were also parks and pools for the residents to use.

With the decline in housing values, large rental companies came in and bought up the smaller homes in the development. In the six years we lived there, several things happened. About 20% of the houses became rental properties. Several streets only contained rentals, and it was apparent. The agencies did not provide lawn and outdoor maintenance on these homes, and neither did many of the residents.

The parks became less populated with children playing unsupervised. The expansive outdoor recreation was one of the reasons we selected that neighborhood. By the fourth year we lived there, it was often the case that my children were the only ones playing at the park I could see from my kitchen window. There were also a lot more children and teens getting ejected from the pool for bad behavior.

About a year before we left, I met with my child’s resource teacher. When I entered her office, I noted she looked tired. She informed me they now had a gang problem in the elementary school. She said it was worse at the junior high, where two of my children were attending. However, it was taking a toll on the school staff and changing the resources they needed to address the problem. That year a school resource officer was placed at the junior high.

When it was time for us to move, we took a significant loss on the sale. Our home had lost over 20% of its value. This loss was despite the market having recovered to some extent. The original purchase was also near what should have been the bottom of the market.

There was no bright-line related to race that divided the renters from the homeowners in this community. It was a fairly diverse neighborhood, to begin with. The "who knows [what] in the suburbs” had more to do with lifestyle and behavior rather than anything else.

It did not involve all the renters. However, it was enough of them to make a difference. Not all the landlords participated in the Section 8 housing program, but some did. These things happened in a single neighborhood full of single-family homes. Biden’s housing policy goes much further by establishing the volume of low-income and multi-unit housing each community must provide.

Please read the rest. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/07/19/trumps-warning-that-biden-would-abolish-the-suburbs-isnt-racist-and-it-isnt-hyperbole-either-n661872 Elections have consequences!

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Facemasks No Value

Timothy Birdnow

Here is something from 2016, well before the plannedemic pandemic and the accompanying politics that have gone with it. Says face masks are of no value.

But we who have been following this already knew that.

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NASA Rewrites Data - Again

Timothy Birdnow

Rewriting scientific history for fun and profit at NASA!

NASA’s Fudge Factory: Goddard Institute For Space Studies Fudges The Data Again!

Today we examine NASA GISS data for the Wellsboro station in Pennsylvania. First we look at the Version 4 "unadjusted” annual mean temperature data and compare it to the new Version 4 "homogenized” data:

Data: NASA GISS

Above we see how NASA scientists simply went back in the old datasets and simply rewrote them so that the hot years of the early 20th century are cooled tremendously – by over two degrees in many years.

Earlier Wellsboro saw a cooling trend. But now since NASA scientists have fiddled with the data, the trend has been forged to fit the AGW theory.

Next is a chart comparing version 3, which starts in 1883 and ends in 2019, to Version 4, which starts in 1882:

Version 4 data source: NASA GISS, Version 3 here.

The earlier Version 3 also showed cooling before NASA rewrote the data and wiped it out. The current Version 4 used to show cooling, but was that too was tampered with and now it shows strong warming.

Many would argue that this is not science, but outright Orwellian scientific fraud.

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The Cooling Earth

Timothy Birdnow

Lookie at this.

Where, oh, where, is that global warming we are told about? Every year the media tells us "hottest year on record" but we've seen nothing but below average.

The recorded global temperature for previous years:

(This is below the thirty year average.)

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For All Debts Public and Private

Timothy Birdnow

This from Mississippi State Senator Chad McMahan:

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Sleep is Racist!

Timothy Birdnow

I didn't know sleep deprivation was a racist tactic and that you could inherit it from your ancestors!

Teen Vogue: Sleeping, Copping Naps Now systemically racist!

"Acosta posited, "We’re dealing with an inheritance of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation was a … deliberate tactic of slave owners to basically make the mind feeble. That same tactic has only evolved.”

"Sosa added, "Slavery is a regime of stealing and extraction: Stolen wages, stolen life, stolen land, but stolen time was one of the main things. We need time. We need time off; we need time out. Our ancestors never got to take a month off for holidays; they never got to take a sabbatical; they never got to take a nap. When you pile all of those together, you see the reparations that need to happen are monetary, but they’re also time and space.”

"Teen Vogue writes, "Acosta and Sosa are calling for rest as reparations. Yes, they’re looking for an ease to the many burdens that might prevent Black people and people of color from sleeping like systemic racism, socioeconomic struggle, and more.” Teen Vogue adds, "This conversation about rest is particularly pertinent now, as people take to the streets to say Black Lives Matter. If Black people keep having to fight for their humanity, how can they ever rest knowing they could be in danger?”

"Sosa said, "We are having to go out in the streets during a pandemic, expending our energy in really huge amounts in order to ask for reparations and rest and energy. It is a … double edged sword to navigate as an activist or organizer. You are putting your body on the line to reclaim it. That creates a lot of burnout. We have people who are 20, 21, they are burnt out. They need time off. They need not only to sleep, but to know their people are going to be ok, to know they’re going to be ok, to know they can take a break.”

Ah, so they HAVE to go out and riot and loot! And it's all Whitey's fault!

Last I checked people were free to go to bed when they chose. If you can't because you have too many kids or whatnot, that is YOUR choice.

Increasingly I feel like Alice having chased that fancy-dan rabbit down that hole; we are in a world completely bereft of logic and dancing in a kaleidoscope of illusion.

I really doubt these idiots believe any of this nonsense; but they think it a good new line of attack, knowing it will be promoted by the media and accepted by privileged white children.

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Hippocratic Oath for Technocrats

Timothy Birdnow

Experts need a hippocratic oath.

If people would understand that they are asked their opinion on specific things, not to "help" those they think too stupid to take care of themselves. Busybody do-gooderism is at the root of so many of our problems. If you are an "expert" stick to what you actually know. Don't hedge your bets "just in case".

Anyway, this article is good. A brief snippet:

Perennially, proposals are made that economists, data scientists, and other individuals with influential knowledge sets should, like medical doctors, have to take a Hippocratic Oath: an oath upholding fundamental ethics.

While the original Hippocratic Oath did not, as it does now, require physicians to "First, do no harm,” the modern reach of technically-skilled elites via the media and policy should unquestionably bring that dictum.

A Technocrat’s Oath would not be restrictive of the mere practice of model building, running simulations, or other present day vaticinations. Rather, it would come into force where and when the forecasts of those methods are passed to policymakers. For one thing, at least three requirements should be met; and all preferably publicly:

1. At least three major sources of inaccuracy– whether found in deficient sources of data, questionable assumptions, or estimates of sensitivity – must be expressed clearly – must be expressed clearly before and after a prediction is made;

2. A discussion of statistical inference must be accompanied by a discussion of causal inference (preferably an interdisciplinary one); and,

3. Any prognostication which does not prominently feature uncertainty as a growing factor over time must be summarily discarded.

If professionals whose judgment can directly impact one person are bound to a strict moral code (in addition to bearing legal and reputational risk), shouldn’t technocrats informing the highest levels of government face considerably more stringent standards of practice?

Perhaps another of the many effects of telling two or three generations of young people that a university degree is of unquestionable value is an undue veneration of the expert class. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents, who had a formidable assemblage of wisdom but only a fraction of our formal schooling, were naturally doubtful in the face of boundless pessimism or optimism – especially when offered free of charge by bureaucrats from lofty heights of the Federal edifice. It was the people who lived through the Great Depression who offered such succinct quips as "You get what you pay for (and less),” and "It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Whether by today’s standards or a medieval one, at a certain level of influence, unqualified prognostication is either ignorant, irresponsible, or deceptive. Pithy epigrams alongside basic skepticism, knowledge of personal hygiene, and a propensity to self-isolate in the face of illness have superintended the human relationship with microorganisms more than massive agent-based models ever will.

A tip of the porkpie to E. Calvin Beisner.

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Follow the Leader, Wherever He May Go

Timothy Birdnow

'We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts’ –

Harold Macmillan

Here is a critique of the divine right of experts by an MP in Britistan.

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The Forgotten Kazars

Timothy Birdnow

Historian Lawrence W. Reed dishes on the Kazars of Eastern Europe/Western Asia.

From the article:

Take Khazaria, for example. It lasted over 300 years (650 to 965 AD) and covered more territory than the combined Scandinavian nations of our time. It spanned the eastern half of modern-day Ukraine, the steppes of the Volga-Don region of present Russia, the entire Crimean Peninsula, and the northern Caucasus. Its southern portion took in most of the shorelines of three seas: the Black, the Caspian and the Aral.

It’s my thesis that for a country to be "successful” for a considerable period—success being defined loosely here as economically prosperous, politically stable, and militarily defensible—it must possess substantial TTD. That’s not a pronounceable acronym, unfortunately, but it stands for trade, tolerance and decentralization.

Each of these three criteria for success is worth volumes of discussion but here’s the nub of it: When economic freedom and private property exist, trade flourishes. And trade is what peaceful humans do to satisfy wants and improve material well-being. Choke it off and living standards plummet. Tolerance is a sign that people appreciate the benefits derived from diversity in personal choices. An intolerant people deprive themselves of what others can offer and waste time and resources fighting instead of collaborating. Decentralizationpreserves the rich identities of local communities and stymies the concentration of authority with its inevitable corruption. Power dispersed is power tamed.

So a successful country is one that can boast a lot of TTD. It encourages exchange, celebrates diversity and avoids top-down, political command-and-control. Almost every "failed state” in history did just the opposite by stifling commerce; stoking racial, ethnic or nationalistic hatred; and/or installing a dictatorship.

Khazaria, to its great credit, practiced remarkable measures of trade and tolerance and enough decentralization to prevent its government from sabotaging either one. In the end, it met its demise not from internal decay but from foreign assault.

A word from Tim:

Near the end the Kazars mostly became Jewish, and many of the Jews in America and Europe are descended from them. Why did they adopt Judaism? Because they were imperiled by Christian Russia to the north and the Islamic Ottomans and so they split the difference, hoping to keep both away from their door. It worked for a while but in the end the Russians destroyed them.

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Illustrating the Parasitic Nature of Public Education

Timothy Birdnow

This is an addendum to my conversation with my cousin Ellen.

Ellen states:

I also find it ironic that for decades homeschoolers have been made fun of and accused of turning their children into unsocialized weirdos (or flat out accused of hiding child abuse), and told that unless they have a teaching degree they couldn’t possibly be qualified to teach their own children. Now socialization is apparently not as crucial as once thought, and parents are negligent if they can’t teach their children.

I add:

When kids have an incentive to not just serve their time but actually get their work done they are prone to doing a lot more than in school, where they want to just fool around with their friends all day and perhaps ignore the teaching. It's about incentive. It's why the state highway department takes years to finish a stretch of road while a private entity can do the job in a week; there is incentive to finish and do a good job. Public schools are collectives while home schooling is more like a small business.

This illustrates the parasitic nature of public school education; it does little to educate, more to indoctrinate. And most of all it serves as daycare for parents.

The churches need to step up on that last. There are a lot of old Catholic schools sitting vacant around town and the Church could convert them to day care facilities to aid parents who have to work. But it would require the cooperation of the state and local governments, as they would have to allow these places to open as day care, and perhaps waive some of the sillier rules in place regulating such facilities. I doubt that would happen, precisely because it would make public schools unnecessary AND would not serve the ultimate purpose of the quarantine, which is to make everyone miserable so they vote for "change" - a change back to the old status quo.

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Too Much Thunderbird!

Timothy Birdnow

The owners of a  wind power startup that promised to revolutionize the green energy industry are being prosecuted for fraud and embezzlement.

From the article:

They pushed an enticing but false narrative of the company’s technology, success and financial potential, authorities said.

They boasted that, like with early investors in tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook, who made enormous profit, investing in Thunderbird had a "virtually limitless potential.”

Siemens, in fact, had not laid eyes on a PowerStack turbine let alone tested one; the company only did number crunching of conceptual data Thunderbird gave it, according to the SEC.

There wasn’t even a turbine to test at the time, as the press releases were issued before work to build a turbine had even begun.

"Without even a prototype wind turbine constructed, and without any physical testing on an actual product, there was no basis in fact for Thunderbird and its officers to make any claims about the operation, production cost and efficiency of any wind turbine,” the SEC documents say.

A message left at Thunderbird’s phone number, on which a recorded message said calls were returned within one hour during the business day, was not returned prior to publication. An email to the company’s email address was returned as undeliverable.

The SEC’s complaint, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, charges Thunderbird, Hinds and Goldstein under the Securities Act rather than criminally.

The SEC seeks the return of "ill-gotten gains,” with interest, and the payment of unspecified civil penalties.

The SEC also wants Hinds and Goldstein banned from being an officer or director of any public company and all three, including van Arem, banned from participating in future offering of penny stock.

The company slogan was "For us, power is a breeze!" No, money was a breeze! I think too many investors had consumed far too much Thunderbird before sending in their money!

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Dam Busting

This from Jassy May:

Record floods testing the Chinese "TVA system" of dams and other "interesting times" in China.

Three Gorges Dam Braces for More Flooding; China Bank Collapse Rumors Spark Bank Runs

Tim observes:

China is falling on hard times, it seems. I think their chickens are coming home to roost. I've always thought they were more a potemkin village than a real superpower.

Jassy replies:

Gordon Chang has been predicting China's collapse for many years. However the scary situation with these dams is the macro systems engineering and the engineering design of individual dams is being questioned by reputable civil engineers. There are satellite images circulating of Three Gorges Dam appearing warped. I have also seen reports that 400 mm people live along the total flood plain so a catastrophic collapse could greatly cripple the whole nation.

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Holding Our Children Hostage

Timothy Birdnow

My cousin Ellen observes:

Gregg and I would thankfully be able to make this work and still keep our jobs (not very well, and some of our kids would probably need tutors in the future to catch up), but this is a real problem for probably the majority of families with 2 working parents (and an absolute untenable nightmare for single parents!). However, if we bring it up it means we think schools are babysitters and we want teachers to die!

In the Covid 19 World You Can Have a Kid or a Job; You Can't Have Both

I add:

So the New York Times wants parents to have kids and live off government's beneficience. Just vote for the Democrats and they will take care of you! BTW Teachers may not like this but they ARE babysitters and have been for a long time. They do more than that, of course, but it certainly is one role they play!

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Tabby's Star

Timothy Birdnow

Here is the story of a rather peculiar star. It dims periodically (and unpredictably.) The article's "hook" is aliens, but the first thing I thought of was dust clouds.

From the article:

For the uninitiated, "Tabby's Star", also known as Boyajian's Star or KIC 8462852 is a cosmic object that is located approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth. As implied in its name, it is, in fact, a star. It has been observed since around 1890, but the name comes from the researcher,Tabetha Boyajian, an assistant professor of astrophysics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who led scientific investigations concerning the star's behavior.

What makes this star so special? NASA's Kepler missionnoticed a number of oddities in the star's behavior, chief of which is that the star exhibits a huge drop in brightness, or flux (by as much as 22%)but with no corresponding drops in infrared emissions, which has not been observed before. The dips in flux occur slowly over time, although some short-term dips have also been noted.

No other stars we have come across appear to behave this way. As Boyajian put it, "This [dimming] behavior was not something we were looking for or had trained our algorithms to find. In fact, we were first alerted to the star's unique activity by citizen scientists participating in the Planet Hunters program."

Tabby's Star has set the internet ablaze, causing wild speculation and theories that would make for excellent science fiction films. Yet, what does science have to say about Tabby's Star? In the last few years, there have been significant developments in the odd case of KIC 8462852. Today we are going to look at what researchers have to say about the oddball star.

The article discusses five possible causes of this odd behavior:

1.A comet swarm.
2. Internal magnetic activity.
3. A glitch in the instruments of the Hubble Telescope.
4. The star is dying.
5. Dust.
6. A Melting Ploonet (a term for an exomoon.)
and
7. Aliens building something big (like a Dyson sphere). I don't take that last the least bit seriously; why haven't we seen any other evidence of an alien civilization? Why no overactive radio waves?

 I disagree with the criticism of the concept though in that they say "This is because an alien megastructure would be opaque to light. Yet, some light is getting through, it is just dimmer."

Well, if you are using the science fiction idea of a Dyson Sphere. That isn't what the late Freeman Dyson (of the presigious Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton) hypothesized.

Dyson's original argument was that a truly advanced civilization would have an exponentially-growing need for energy. After a certain point they would find it necessary to block large swaths of their sun to capture the wasted solar and magnetic energy. In his view the sphere needn't be a solid structure,  it could be discontinuous, and composed of any material. It may be opaque to some degree, if they had a need just to harness certain wavelengths of light. It is very different than the science fiction idea of a habitat that is a bubble around a star.

So, it COULD be a discontinuous structure partially blocking the sunlight. But I really doubt it.

My money is on dust. There's plenty of it around, and I suspect it's just blocking the starlight intermittently.

But it is a fun thing to speculate over.

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3D Printed Heart

Timothy Birdnow

This is incredible! They have used a 3d printer to make heart valves using actual heart cells!

From the article:

These specialized cells are derived from pluripotent human stem cells,cells with the potential to develop intoany type of cellin the body. However, before this study, scientists could never reach enough cell density for the heart muscle cells to actually work.

"At first, we tried 3D printing cardiomyocytes, and we failed, too,” said in a statement Brenda Ogle, the lead researcher on the study and head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. "So with our team’s expertise in stem cell research and 3D printing, we decided to try a new approach."

The team optimized the specialized ink made from extracellular matrix proteins and combined it with human stem cells. They then used the ink-plus-cells to 3D printthe chambered structure. This resulted in the stem cells being expanded to high cell densities in the structure first and then transformed into heart muscle cells.

This means the researchers were able to 3D print the heart muscle cells in a way that the cells could organize and work together. Because the cells were differentiating next to each other, they mimicked the way stem cells grow in the body and then turned into heart muscle cells.

For now, the heart muscle model measures only1.5 centimeters long. It was designed to fit into a mouse for further research and Ogle says it is an invaluable tool for studying heart function.

How long before this is turned into a therapy?

I could use a couple of new heart valves, so this can't come soon enough for me!

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Murdoch Son Donates Big to Biden

Timothy Birdnow

Any wonder why Fox has made a sharp left turn in recent years?

James Murdoch, Wife, Give 1.3 Million to Biden

From the Breitbart article:

James Murdoch, the son of billionaire and Fox Corporation founder Rupert Murdoch, and his wifeKathryn have donated $1.23 million to former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to filings.

New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel, citingFederal Election Commission (FEC) receipts, first highlightedJames andKathryn Murdoch gave $615,000 each last month to the Biden Victory Fund, ajoint fundraisingeffort between the Biden campaign, the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and state parties.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Statistical Anomaly in England

Timothy Birdnow

In England, if you ever had Wuflu and you die you are automatically listed as dying of Covid.

Why No-One Can Ever Recover from COVID 19 in England - a Statistical Anomaly

Everything the authorities are doing worldwide is designed to push this narrative.

Why?

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No Longer Pandemic; Why the Angst?

Warner Todd Huston

CDC Says COVID Mortality Rate Below Pandemic Status — So Why is the Media Still Hysterical?

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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An Angry Starr

Timothy Birdnow

Comet Neowise is spiking a magnificent tail as is usually only seen in the really great comets.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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