April 17, 2024
Here's the new NPR CEO Katherine Maher (and former chief executive of Wikipedia) explaining that "the truth" is an outdated concept.
Everyone can have their own truth:
"Perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. Now, that is not to say that the truth does not exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn't important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things. But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one of the things we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles of the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge that there are many different truths."
- Katherine Maher, new CEO of NPR
Tim adds:
The Truth is not a democratic system. Something is true or false. This kind of relativism is at the very heart of everything wrong with Western society.
And this illustrates plainly what is wrong with our current incestuous corporate system. These people move from corporation to corporation carrying the same intellectual plagues from one businessto another. How does being CEO of Wikipedia (a crowd-sourced encyclopedia) qualify her to run NPR? Once you get inside at one place you can go anywhere and get top paying jobs and make the same mistakes over and over and never pay the price. They show up, infect the corporation with their idiotic ideas, then move on. Like a smallpox outbreak. And amazingly performance doesn't enter into it.
Civilization is crumbling in no small part because corporate America has sold it's soul and gleefully embraced morons like this woman.
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A tactic that is an extension of hunting, will be chosen by the men and rather consistently; while the women wonder what the hell is the matter with them.
A skill that is an extension of hunting, will be mastered by the men. While the women struggle to play catch-up. These are generalizations, so of course there are exceptions.
And it's reversed when it comes to keeping order in a workspace or living space. Chicks beat dudes in remembering where they put things. I'm not a chick so I'm pretty bad at this. I can be looking high & low for something when I had it in my hands two minutes ago.
We hear that men are worthless, because of technology. Nobody's hunting anymore. We're all watching videos, ordering groceries and tracking appointments on our 'smart phones'; and, the chicks are beating the dudes at these tasks, slightly. Said tasks have more to do with keeping order in a kitchen than hunting.
It's thousands and thousands of generations of evolution that made us this way.
But how did we get the tech to make the smart phone?
Tim adds:
It's not that women have an edge these days so much as that society has decided to value what they do more highly. The hunting virtues are still absolutely critical to the survival of civilization; what would we do without men going down in the sewers to repair them, or linemen working up on a line during an electrical storm when power is out and those smart phones running out of juice?
Let's face it, many women do those jobs too but always have to be backed up by men (or almost always). Women cops ultimately are good at ticket giving but not so handy in a bar fight.
And as Morgan K. Freeberg says, who invented all the tech? Women would spend too much time fussing over organizing the information and not messing up a perfectly good palm pilot to make it into something better. The hunter spirit is what drives innovation. You have to be willing to experiment and break things to innovate. I know; my wife is always yelling at me for messing with stuff and breaking it. To her one shouldn't risk making a mess despite the possible rewards.
Gatherers gather. There is a reason why the gatherers did NOT become the farmers. The hunters did, because it was a major innovation and required lots of experimentation. Women took up gardening and the like only after the field was plowed and ready to go.
Society values feminine traits more than masculine, and so many men are on board because it's the line of least resistance. Feminism made for lots of angry chicks and men will do ANYTHING to avoid an angry woman. Adam was willing to go to HELL to avoid pissing Eve off.
We live in a Matriarchy now, even if nobody says it. Little boys are told to be little girls (and are thus putting on dresses and asking to be called she and our society is encouraging that.) Little boys see their roles are not only not valued but discouraged. They either have to rebel or submit and become soy boys. Most submit and just do the dirty, nasty jobs for low pay and little reward. But fewer want to and so are either becoming street thugs or trying to become women.
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It started with Dubai seeding clouds to make it rain.
More than 4.7ins of rain has already fallen today - the typical yearly average in the city - with more expected in the coming hours.
Nearly 50 flights in and out of Dubai have been cancelled since this morning, with shocking video showing several jets cutting through murky water at Dubai International Airport, the busiest for international travel.
Flood water cascaded through luxury underground malls while shoppers in designer clothes waded through water.
Above ground, howling winds blew furniture off tower-block balconies
while the skies turned black with apocalyptic videos showing lightning
strikes every few seconds.
Unstable weather conditions are expected to continue in the region through to Wednesday, UAE's National Center of Meteorology said.
Tim adds:And yet these big tech guys want to "geo-engineer" the entire global climate. The modern world is full of hubris.
I would remind everyone of the children's song about the old woman who swallowed the fly.
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April 16, 2024
H/T Joseph Fournier, LinkedIn
D.R. Feldman et al's 2015 publication served as one of the first long term measurements and confirmation of the spectroscopic changes occurring along the characteristic absorption / re-emission spectral lines of atmospheric CO2.
The authors refer to these changes as a "radiative forcing or RF", which in physics is different than "radiative feedbacks". For while a forcing can induce a change, a feedback can only alter the rate (+/-) of change.
These authors quantified the RF from the 22 ppm rise in CO2 over the measurement period to be a mere 0.2 Wm-2decade-1.
The white elephant in the room seen in this plot is the fact that the strong seasonal cycle influence on the intra-annual RF.
From the influence of the seasonal cycle we see the RF rapidly rise in the Spring and then decline in the Fall. Note the slopes (+/-) here are much greater than the longer term RF of 0.2 Wm-2decade-1.
Note that there is no allowance in mainstream climate debates for CO2 to be anything more than a RF, while skeptics such as myself continue to argue that CO2 like H2O may simply be a feedback.
Note that the rise in CO2 in the spring is the only empirical evidence of where it LEADS changes in temperature. In the seasonal cycle in the Northern Hemisphere, CO2 concentrations peak in April, while temperatures peak in July.
No one would say that in this scenario, CO2 is causing the surface to warm, as we all know that orbital dynamics and changes in sunshine are responsible.
Likewise, we all know that CO2 peaks in April given the rates of photosynthesis at this point in the seasonal cycle begin to outpace the rates of decay and that the true RF here is from visible light (aka sunshine).
In conclusion, while this pivotal paper definitely shows a small rise in long term RF from rising CO2 of only 0.2 Wm-2decade-1, more importantly it shows that CO2 is also a feedback in response to change sunshine intensity as modulated by orbital dynamics (aka seasonal cycle).
The phrase "orbital dynamics" is used purposefully, as there is ample evidence that longer term changes in CO2 are also induced by orbital dynamics. In my view, Milankovitch Cycles down to the ENSO cycle, can be collectively viewed as orbital dynamics.
http://asl.umbc.edu/pub/chepplew/journals/nature14240_v519_Feldman_CO2.pdf
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For every $1 Tril spent by Biden, it is an additional $3,000 in tax burden for every man, woman, and child.
Biden's $2 Tril bill cost each American $6k in taxes in his first 100 days alone.
The national debt is $34 tril and growing. That translates to roughly $252,500 per taxpayer.
Let the good times roll!
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Published on the same day.
Melting ice caps slowing rotation is NBC News.
Speeding of rotation on CBS News
These two stories were published on the same day a few weeks ago
notthebee.com
Tim's 2p
I think the word both of them were searching for was RATINGS, not rotation.
Frankly I think both of 'em are just plain dizzy.
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In 1961 Kennedy said, "We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”
As president, Biden has projected American weakness in a Carter-esque fashion, starting with his chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, which a State Department report said suffered from "constantly changing policy guidance,” and a top general described as a "strategic failure.” Israel deserves the kind of American resolve demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis of Kennedy's time. But, Biden is no Kennedy. He’s a husk. Currently, the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight. Biden isn’t just a national disaster, he’s a global catastrophe. The destabilization in the Middle East is directly attributable to his ignoring one of Trump’s great achievements — the Abraham Accords. Democrats push the hands of the Doomsday Clock ever closer to midnight, as they weakly play their partisan small ball, while the rest of the world burns.
Added note of disgust: The administration of leftist President Joe Biden did not move to renew expiring sanctions in Iran’s drone and ballistic missile production at the United Nations in October, shortly after the Iran-backed massacre of an estimated 1,200 people in Israel and Saturday’s unprecedented direct missile assault by Iran on the country.
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It's too bad we've forgotten all of that. We are now an oligarchy ruledbythe force of arms and the law is a weapon to impose the will of the oligarchs.
Chester McAteer
WHAT DID THE FOUNDERS CREATE?
A COVENANT!
"The
compound government of the United States is without a model, and to be
explained by itself, not by similitudes or analogies”
-James Madison
The Constitutional Convention's deliberate choice of words is telling. By calling it 'The Federal Government of These States', they emphasized the decentralized nature of the government they were creating, rather than a centralized national authority.
Additionally, the fact that this name was given after the Convention was fully formed and the Constitution had been entirely finished, demonstrates their commitment to a collaborative and thoughtful approach to federalized rather than centralized governance.
John Adams wrote of the Constitution:
"Men of learning find nothing new in it. Men of taste, many things to criticize. And men without either, not a few things which they will not understand. It will, nevertheless, be read and praised, and become a powerful engine in forming public opinion.”
Madison argued that the Confederation was inadequate for the governance of the United States, as it lacked the fundamental principles of a political constitution. Instead, it was a treaty between independent states, which could not be relied upon for punctual and unanimous obedience to federal acts. This led to rampant treaty violations, which could have had disastrous consequences had it not been for the intervention of other nations.
The central objective of the American political system was to establish an effective government that would maintain order, provide security for property, and safeguard the hard-won liberties and the spirit of liberty that had become the pride of independent Americans. Madison's strategy was to introduce significant and far-reaching reforms that were shaped to the new spirit of self-governing men, without destroying in radical fashion the continuity of political institutions.
As Madison’s
meticulous Notes on the Debates demonstrate, the bedrock principles of
representation and freedom, intricately woven into the fabric of the
Convention, resonated deeply with the delegates. Whether hailing from
the commerce- and fishing-oriente
To ignore the connection between the Federal Convention and the iconic words penned by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, which explicitly outlines the right of a free people to establish a new government based on principles and a form that ensures their Safety and Happiness, is a peculiarity that only those who deliberately distort the Constitutional Convention into a false antithesis to the spirit of '76 should be tasked with explaining.
On the contrary, as explicitly stated in the Notes document, the ultimate source of political authority and power resides unfailingly with the people, expressed within the framework of their Sovereign States and it is this principle that forms the bedrock of democratic governance; furthermore, the Constitution, with its intricate system of checks and balances, including bicameralism, separation of powers, and federal division of functions between the national and state authorities, remains a shining example of republican governance at its finest.
The idea that government should be based on the consent of the governed is the fundamental principle of legitimate government, as it eradicates the prescriptive subordination of individuals in society. Madison's articulation of a Republic in various contexts highlights his intention to create a democratic republic, or a representative democracy, where the will of the people is represented through elected officials.
Madison noted that America was the sole country to have taken the concept of popular government through elected representatives
The Federal Convention Debates offer a unique perspective on the challenges of self-governance
"As the
weakness and wants of man naturally lead to an association of
individuals, under a common authority whereby each may have the
protection of the whole against danger from without, and enjoy in
safety within, the advantages of social intercourse, and an exchange of
the necessaries & comforts of life: in like manner feeble
communities, independent of each other, have resorted to a Union, less
intimate, but with common Councils, for the common safety agst powerful
neighbors, and for the preservation of justice and peace among
themselves.”
-James Madison
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the US lying about Ukraine & bio-weaponry with Covid, and it is where they deleted their original posts: https://web.archive.org/web/20170130193016/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kharkiv-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210511164310/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-luhansk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506053014/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-vinnitsa-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207122550/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kherson-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170223011502/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-ternopil-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210505061606/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-dl-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201004446/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-rdvl-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20161230143004/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-eidss.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506212717/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-pathogen-asset-control.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207153023/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-rdvl_eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170211022339/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/kiev-ivm-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
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According to a Penn-Wharton study: Biden's new student loan plan will cost taxpayers another $84B, bringing total to $559B.
The biggest winners are 750,000 people with 20 years in repayment.
Their average debt relief is $25,500+ and average household income is $312,000+.
Great. The 67% of the population without degrees and has an average income below $100k/yr is paying off higher education costs for people who cannot manage their own loans at $313k/yr.
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Sorry for the gap in posting; I was seriously under the weather for a few days. But I'm feeling better now and will be back on the horse.
Cheers!
Tim
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April 13, 2024
More Abuse of Power by the FBI.
FBI Interrogated Trump’s Valet Driver without Trump’s Knowledge – And Turned Ambush Interview Into Perjury Trap: Court Docs
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/fbi-interrogated-trumps-valet-driver-without-trumps-knowledge/
And yet Mike the teenie little Johnson pushed his caucus to reauthorize FISA which will allow the FBI to continue in this Stalinist abuse of power.
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Sooo.....
The national guard was in fact approved by Donald Trump to restore order on January 6, top brass will testify, in contradiction to the J6 committee and their lies.
From the Daily Mail:
* D.C. National Guard officers on duty on January 6, 2021 will testify in the House
* Wednesday hearing will examine why National Guard deployment was delayed
* READ: Former Acting Defense Sec. Christopher Miller tells DailyMail.com he felt 'threatened' into silence by the Jan. 6 Committee
[...]
Whistleblowers from the Washington D.C. National Guard will tell Congress that Donald Trumpdid want them deployed during the Capitol riot and the Army delayed telling them to mobilize in a bombshell hearing next week.
DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal that at least three officers will appear Wednesday before a House subcommittee to claim their stories were also ignored by the Democrat-led January 6committee, because it didn't fit their narrative.
The hearing will aim to further prove that Acting Defense Secretary at the time Christopher Miller did give advance approval of D.C. National Guard deployment at the direction of then-President Donald Trump.
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The ultimate hypocrisy.
Yes, Democrats really ARE complaining about Republican efforts to deny Joe Biden ballot access after having done the very same to Donald Trump.
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Jerome Powell doesn't want to be remembered as a man who protected and helped guide the American economy through hard times. No. He wants to be remembered as the man who held the line against Donald Trump.
I kid you not.
The O'Keefe Media Group (OMG) revealed that the Fed Chair believes it is his solemn duty to save America from MAGA.
Also, he has been heavily involved in using the Fed to promote DEI and other woke causes like global warming.
This has all come out in conversations with Aurel Hizmo, chief economist at the Federal Reserve.
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The Ruling Class is wargaming a Reichstag fire aka a Deepfake crisis.
Practice makes perfect!
They are preparing another nasty surprise to spring on Trump and Middle America.
FTA:
That might be a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that most of those involved appear to have a strong bias against Donald Trump, raising serious questions about whether they would use a future deepfake event to benefit Joe Biden.
One of the event’s participants was Kathryn Boockvar, a Democrat who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state during the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s campaign sued Boockvar’s office in 2020, alleging that the state and local officials violated election law.
Another participant was MSNBC anchor Alex Witt, an outspoken Trump critic.
Further, one of the key groups behind the effort is a nonprofit organization called Issue One. Issue One’s CEO participated in the war game and is also working across the country to develop better "election integrity” laws.
Although Issue One sells itself as "bipartisan,” it has directly opposed Trump on numerous occasions. Many of the Republicans affiliated with the group are openly opposed to Trump as well.
On its website, Issue One bragsthat it "helped lead the congressional push to establish a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.” It also lauds its Count Every Vote initiative, a "campaign to defend the integrity of the 2020 elections.”
Another key figure in the growing deepfake election network is Miles Taylor, an organizerof the March event. Taylor is a rabid opponent of Trump, one who has strong connections to the national security industry. Taylor served as the chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. While still in that position, he anonymously published an infamous op-ed in theNew York Times titled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
In the Times article, Taylor painted a bleak picture of Trump and his motives, routinely hurling insults at his boss while hiding behind his anonymous byline.
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The Republican-led House of Representatives just reauthorized the FISA law allowing our national security apparatus to spy on Americans - and to use it as a weapon against Americans speaking their minds.
We all remember the misuse of FISA during and after the election of 2016 by the FBI and CIA. They pursued President Trump with it for years, and the charges were all lies.
Now Biden has this weapon back in his arsenal. Don't be surprised if some new "blockbuster" doesn't appear as the FBI resumes spying on Mr. Trump and manufacturing fake news to utilize against him.
Time to declare the Speaker seat vacant again.
Mike Johnson is going to have to answer for this, if not in this life then in the next.
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Here is an essay about long-term interest rates - very long term; going back to the 14th century.
The upshot of the argument is that interest rates have been slowly declining over the past eight hundred years and so we shouldn't be alarmed about the current interest rate rise under Joe Biden.
I think this is largely worthless, a case of comparing apples and oranges.
It should come as no surprise that interest rates have declined; Christianity forbade usury prior to the Renaissance and so much less money was available to buy. Jews and Muslims were the only lenders back then.
And also the explosion of the Europeans onto the world scene and colonization meant an explosion of debt, making interest rates cheaper based on high demand (banks became big deals and multiple banks opened to meet said demand.)
This is just another attempt to lull the public into the lethargy that has kept us mired in the same mindset for decades now. Everything is fine, nothing to see here!
FTA:
As the economist Maurice Obstfeld has pointed out, the result is that they look like mere "blips” from a long-term historical point of view.
To put it another way, modernity triggered an inexorable decline in the long-term price of money, and was doing this well before we started to fret about ultra-low rates in the 21st century.
Why? Previously economists have blamed this on issues such as productivity, demographics and capital flows. Ben Bernanke, former Fed governor, famously pointed to a savings glut in China and elsewhere, while Summers worries about an era of secular stagnation.
However, even more interesting (and counter-intuitive) is Rogoff et al’s failure to find a statistical correlation between real rates and fundamental economic trends. That might reflect the limitations of their data, but the trio offer another explanation. The real reason, they say, for falling borrowing costs is not economic shifts, but an issue economists often ignore — the nature of finance. A combination of modern capital markets, risk analysis and innovation around using collateral to back loans has made money more efficient.
Proving this is hard, but the idea rings true to me. Call this the "against the gods” effect, to cite Peter Bernstein’s seminal book of the same name. A key distinction between modern and premodern societies is that innovations ranging from double-entry book keeping to computers have left us believing that we can predict, manage and price future risks, without relying on gods, as our ancestors did.
In reality, this confidence is all too often misplaced. But justified or not, the cultural shift that accompanied it has made money more abundant and fluid, thus cutting its cost. This is good news.
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Over 8,000 Christians were openly slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria in 2023 but no one is maeching in the streets over that. Over 10,000 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped, raped, tortured and forced to ‘marry’ ISIS Muslims and no one marched. Over 2700 are still being held. No one marches in the streets. The hypocrisy in the West is beyond belief. The world’s media pick and choose the winners…and as a result deservedly choose their own demise too.
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Home grown terrorists and more entering the US through Biden’s open borders. It is not if, but when will people die from a major terrorist attack?
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