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2021-


2021-08-05 j
THE BILL GATES CON
(Does he mean it? Or did his PR lackeys tell him to say that?)


Bill Gates: "It was a huge mistake" to spend time with Jeffrey Epstein "
https://t.co/g8wOeu4byi

— Axios (@axios) August 5, 2021


2021-08-05 i
THE DEMOCRAT CON
(Democrat = Electocrat = Psychopath)

2020 Election Integrity: Arizona – Senate Forensic Audit – New Commentary from
the AZ GOP Chairwoman Dr.
@kelliwardaz

America’s Audit Has Drawn Out The “Electocrats” | AZ GOP – https://t.co/FtvIwjmZjR

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) August 4, 2021


See also: https://azgop.com/articles/elections-are-too-important-to-be-left-up-to-bureaucrats

*

4.5% of the adult population are psychopaths.

Forewarned is forearmed https://t.co/C3jAc17PIP

— P. D. Mangan Health & Fitness Maximalist (@Mangan150) August 5, 2021


2021-08-05 h
THE CORI BUSH CON
(Is that a terroristic threat? Does she have congressional immunity?)

Rep. @CoriBush, who took part in trespassing on the McCloskeys’ property, threatens
the family after they received a gubernatorial pardon: "Mark McCloskey is an absolute
liar. He has spat on my name. And because of that, his day will come."

pic.twitter.com/XEe5DNOxKM

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 4, 2021


2021-08-05 g
THE PC CON

I agree that in recent years “political correctness” has turned into some sort of infectious mental disease. There are some hopeful signs, however, that the infectious agents, i.e. the incubators of such ideas, have overplayed their hands by now. The doctrine has reached such levels of absurdity in the meantime, that even the most docile people are regularly put into a state of disbelief and an increasing number of people actually begins to consider the whole shebang as nothing but a cruel joke. Even if the peak of mental insanity may have been reached, however, to really defeat the disease its root cause, i.e. its fundamental intellectual error, must be identified and eliminated.

The fundamental error, propagated relentlessly by the ruling elites all across the Western world is its egalitarian world view. They do not recognize, or rather they do not want to recognize what should be obvious to anyone with eyes to see: that every person is unique, different and unequal to all other persons, and that the same is true for every group of persons as compared to any other group. Moreover, each of these naturally different people and groups of people is faced with and must act under different external circumstances that they have inherited from and that have been shaped by their various different ancestors. Given this point of departure, then, it should be expected as perfectly normal and natural that the outcome of all this should be different as well: that is, that the achievements, the successes or the failures, of different people and different groups of people in life should be different, too.

In the egalitarian view, however, this natural, predictable and to-be-expected phenomenon of widespread and remarkable inequality represents a scandal. For if one assumes – against all empirical evidence – that all people and all groups of people are essentially equal, then the empirically observed, often massive and profound actual differences in the achievements of different persons and groups of persons and their respective ancestors must have some un-natural, i.e., morally questionable, causes that they, the ruling elites, must eliminate in order to restore mankind somehow to its allegedly original and natural state of human equality. From the egalitarian viewpoint, then, inequalities, in particular but not solely of income and wealth, do not arise from differences of personal achievements and the accumulation of such achievements through successive generations of biologically and genealogically related people, but either from cosmic luck of circumstances or by means of exploitation and discrimination and are accordingly “underserved.” And it is the “noble” task of the ruling elites, then, to rectify such inequities and injustices by means of income- and wealth-redistribution and various affirmative-action or non-discrimination laws. As well, it is up to the ruling elites to determine which differences, out of a countless number of observable differences between various individuals and groups of individuals, are to count as relevant and actionable or not, and how then to do the corrective “equalizing.” And in this endeavor, the Western power elites have concocted in the meantime a truly remarkable, and indeed remarkably perverse, rank order of people and groups of people, from the most “undeserving” and in most urgent need of making amends, all the way down to the most “disadvantaged” and entitled to the most generous compensation. There is occasionally disagreement among the reigning power elites regarding the exact location of some particular person or group of persons in this rank order. Sometimes a tie appears, and there is disagreement how to untie it. But there is almost unanimous agreement regarding the two extremes: the most deserving and the most undeserving.

The top spot of the most undeserving people is supposedly occupied by white men, and in particular white heterosexual men; and the top rank of the most deserving people is occupied by blacks, and in particular by black women and above all black lesbian women. That is: what we are essentially told to believe is this: Those people and groups of people and their respective ancestors that have apparently made the greatest contribution to human civilization, that have demonstrated the greatest ingenuity, enterprise and productivity and boast the largest amount of capital accumulation, general prosperity and common civility and thus offer the most attractive places for people to stay or go – precisely those people are supposedly in greatest need to make amends and offer compensation to all other people. And the most generous compensation they owe precisely to those of all people or groups of people, who have made the least contributions to human civilization, who show the greatest amount of social pathologies and who inhabit the least desirable locations. And why? Because the former allegedly do not deserve their superior position on account of their and their ancestors’ superior achievements, but they owe this position instead solely to cosmic luck, white privilege and exploitation; and likewise, the latter peoples’ inferior position is not the result of a lack of talent and achievement on their and their ancestors’ part, but solely the outcome of bad luck and victimhood: the victimization of blacks through conquest, colonization and discrimination by whites. – And on top of all this we are told that all biologically normal people, i.e. all heterosexual males and females, are supposed to apologize, bow down to and make amends to everyone of a different, anomalous sexual orientation.

(Incidentally: according to this view, the earlier mentioned ongoing mass migration of blacks and browns into territories dominated by whites is not a hostile invasion, then, but rather constitutes some long overdue restitution and reparation by white oppressors to their long suffering black and brown victims.)

Moreover and above: We are asked to believe all of this egalitarian nonsense by a ruling elite that is itself made up overwhelmingly of white heterosexual males and that, all the while diligently working on the destruction of their own, Western civilization with their equalizing redistribution policies, are themselves enjoying huge, highly unequal privileges and living in great, highly unequal comfort.

These elites have been amazingly successful in dumbing down their own people and managed to make them hold many patently foolish beliefs. But there are limits to the gullibility even of dull people. To ask their people to believe what the “politically correct” doctrine says about their position, rank and location in the global social fabric, is simply asking too much. It is too absurd to be believed. Indeed, it is so absurd that even many if not most of the allegedly most deserving beneficiaries of the ruling elites’ redistribution policies do not believe it.

As stated at the outset, then: Faced with increasing public opposition: of ridicule, defiance and resistance vis-a-vis the commandments of political correctness, and so as not to endanger their own legitimacy, I expect the ruling elites to retrench a bit from the current ideological frontier and tone their egalitarian message somewhat down from its present heights of absurdity. I would not even rule out a short “populist” interlude in reaction to the present state of mental derangement and insanity. But I expect any such relief to be only temporary. And I do not expect a return to normality, then, but rather the quick resumption of egalitarian causes, themes and narratives in ever new and innovative tunes and variations Because egalitarianism, and the compulsory re-distribution of income, wealth and social position, i.e. a policy of divide et impera, is part and parcel of what it is and requires to be a ruling class in control of a State.

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe


2021-08-05 f
THE CLIMATE CON
(I recall a conversation years ago where I learned the collapse of the Gulf Stream indicated the inception of glaciation. Planet Earth is still in the Pleistocene. Throughout the Pleistocene, the Earth has been in glacial periods 90% of the time. Interglacials, like this one, are the exception. You might want to move south if you live north of the terminal moraine in North America.)

Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

A shutdown would have devastating global impacts and must not be allowed to happen, researchers say

["allowed to happen"? You fools. Humans have no say in this matter.]

Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points.

The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said.

“The signs of destabilisation being visible already is something that I wouldn’t have expected and that I find scary,” said Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who did the research. “It’s something you just can’t [allow to] happen.”

It is not known what level of CO2 would trigger an AMOC collapse, he said. “So the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible. The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere”.

Scientists are increasingly concerned about tipping points – large, fast and irreversible changes to the climate. Boers and his colleagues reported in May that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink, threatening a big rise in global sea level. Others have shown recently that the Amazon rainforest is now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs, and that the 2020 Siberian heatwave led to worrying releases of methane.

The world may already have crossed a series of tipping points, according to a 2019 analysis, resulting in “an existential threat to civilisation”. A major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due on Monday, is expected to set out the worsening state of the climate crisis.

Boer’s research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, is titled “Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the AMOC”. Ice-core and other data from the last 100,000 years show the AMOC has two states: a fast, strong one, as seen over recent millennia, and a slow, weak one. The data shows rising temperatures can make the AMOC switch abruptly between states over one to five decades.

The AMOC is driven by dense, salty seawater sinking into the Arctic ocean, but the melting of freshwater from Greenland’s ice sheet is slowing the process down earlier than climate models suggested.

Boers used the analogy of a chair to explain how changes in ocean temperature and salinity can reveal the AMOC’s instability. Pushing a chair alters its position, but does not affect its stability if all four legs remain on the floor. Tilting the chair changes both its position and stability.

Eight independently measured datasets of temperature and salinity going back as far as 150 years enabled Boers to show that global heating is indeed increasing the instability of the currents, not just changing their flow pattern.

The analysis concluded: “This decline [of the AMOC in recent decades] may be associated with an almost complete loss of stability over the course of the last century, and the AMOC could be close to a critical transition to its weak circulation mode.”

Levke Caesar, at Maynooth University in Ireland, who was not involved in the research, said: “The study method cannot give us an exact timing of a possible collapse, but the analysis presents evidence that the AMOC has already lost stability, which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think.”

David Thornalley, at University College London in the UK, whose work showed the AMOC is at its weakest point in 1,600 years, said: “These signs of decreasing stability are concerning. But we still don’t know if a collapse will occur, or how close we might be to it.” (read more)

2021-08-05 e
THE TWITTER CON
(The first tweet is still available; the following two are not. We wouldn't want to validate stereotypes, would we?)

passenger leaning out of a Cadillac holding
                        an AK47

On 7/11/2021, During an illegal exhibition of speed event at Barneveld & McKinnon, a
passenger leaned out of a Cadi holding an AK47; see photo. SFPD Traffic Company
personnel worked up a case, and seized this particular vehicle today.
@SFPD @sfmta_muni
@SFPDPerea pic.twitter.com/4disQpzziY

— SFPDTrafficSafety (@SFTrafficSafety) August 5, 2021

*

This Tweet is unavailable.

More totally normal behavior

pic.twitter.com/7xqIOPGjnm

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) August 2, 2021

*

This Tweet is from a suspended account.

When you forget to lock the Amazon van in the wrong neighborhood……
pic.twitter.com/Xyn7lf9MgR

— Femme (@RealBasedMAGA) June 27, 2021


2021
-08-05 d
THE COVID-CON IV

How [Can They Claim] the Delta Variant Spreading If There is No Direct Delta Variant Test?

[...] So how does the testing occur? It apparently requires some rather sophisticated laboratory analysis:

Although there are no direct Delta variant tests, PCR tests that are positive for SARS-CoV-2 can undergo genetic analysis such as ‘genomic sequencing’ which tells us if it is the Delta (or another) variant. This means it is possible to accurately identify if someone is unwell with the Delta variant of Covid-19.

While it is “possible” to identify that someone may have the DELTA variant, THERE IS NO DIRECT TEST.

So, I repeat my question–how the hell do we know that most of the new cases are “DELTA” when there is no DIRECT test?
(read more)

Editor's Note:
Delta, Shmelta. They are flat out LYING. You know no one is doing the genomic sequencing for thousands of unreliable PCR tests every day. There aren't enough labs or technicians or time or funds to run such sophisticated tests. Wake up, people. The Covid-Con is unraveling; that's why the fear-mongering has been dialed up.

I have heard the government's vaccination totals are grossly inflated. In some states, divide government vaccination totals by TWO to get a more realistic number. If they claim 3,000,000 have gotten the jab, the actual number is 1,500,000. I know they are going to throw away a significant number of expiring Pfizer vaccine vials this month. Good job, folks. Those of you on the right side of the intelligence Bell Curve are possibly avoiding ADE (Antibody Dependent Enhancement), blood clots, heart inflammation and an early death.


2021-08-05 c
THE COVID-CON III

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responds to illegitimate Biden regime:

“If you are coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I’m standing in your way – and not letting you get away with it.  If you are trying to deny kids a proper in-person education, I’m standing in your way” … “If you are trying to restrict people and impose mandates; if you are trying to lock people down; I am standing in your way and standing for the rights of the people in Florida” … “Why don’t you do your job, why don’t you secure the border, and until you do that – I don’t want to hear a blip about COVID from you.”
(video)

2021-08-05 b
THE COVID-CON II

Rand Paul slams 'obscene' op-ed on unvaccinated, calls Fauci's advice 'very dangerous'

Paul sent a letter to the DOJ asking for a criminal investigation of Fauci

Sen. Rand Paul slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci for "very dangerous" advice on the coronavirus, in his latest rebuke of the government's leading infectious-disease expert.

"Dr. Fauci needs to be away from government, away from advice, because almost all of his advice had been wrongheaded. But some of it's actually very dangerous," Paul, who is also a doctor, told "Fox & Friends" host Brian Kilmeade Thursday morning.

The remarks came amid a discussion on an op-ed from the Atlantic titled, "Unvaccinated People Need to Bear the Burden," which advocated for allowing only vaccinated individuals to fly on domestic flights.

"Obscene," Paul said in response to the op-ed. "You know that if we now disagree in our personal medical decisions with the left, they're going to declare that we're a terrorist and that we can't fly. But even on the practicality of it, even if you said okay, we're going to do this -- even the CDC says you're not supposed to get vaccinated if you've been infected within three months. So what going to do, tell people they can't fly for three months, even according to the CDC? I, and other doctors, actually think that your immunity from being infected is going to last a lot longer."

He went on to say that there’s no correlation between a mask mandate and incidents of the virus. 

"This idiot would have us not flying for three months," he continued on the op-ed. "So it makes no sense, it's complete collectivism. And all of these people are the same people who hooted and hollered and said Trump is leading us to authoritarianism. What could be more authoritarian than a no-fly less for people who disagree with you."

The interview comes after Paul and Fauci have had repeated fiery exchanges during Senate hearings regarding the virus in the last year, including last month when the two traded accusations of "lying" over gain-of-function research at a Wuhan lab floated as the origin of the coronavirus.

Paul has also sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for a criminal investigation of Fauci, "because he has lied to Congress," months after he slammed the doctor as  a "left-wing advocate for elitism" and a "TV pundit."

Fauci’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment on Paul’s Thursday remarks. (read more)

2021-08-05 a
THE COVID-CON I

Sen. Rand Paul: Mask mandates and lockdowns from petty tyrants? No, not again. Choose freedom

Resist. They can’t arrest us all. They can’t keep all your kids home from school

Resist.

They can’t arrest us all. They can’t keep all your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed – although I’ve got a long list of ones they should.

We don’t have to accept the mandates, lockdowns, and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and feckless bureaucrats. We can simply say no, not again.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi — you will not arrest or stop me or anyone on my staff from doing our jobs. We have all either had COVID, had the vaccine, or been offered the vaccine. We will make our own health choices. We will not show you a passport, we will not wear a mask, we will not be forced into random screening and testing so you can continue your drunk with power rein over the Capitol.

President Biden — we will not accept your agencies’ mandates or your reported moves toward a lockdown. No one should follow the CDC’s anti-science mask mandates. And if you want to shutdown federal agencies again — some of which aren’t even back to work fully — I will stop every bill coming through the Senate with an amendment to cut their funding if they don’t come to work.

No more.

Local bureaucrats and union bosses — we will not allow you to do more harm to our children again this year. Children are not at any more risk from COVID than they are for the seasonal flu. Every adult who works in schools has either had the vaccine or had their chance to. There is no reason for mask mandates, part time schools, or any lockdown measures.

Children are falling behind in school, and are being harmed physically and psychologically by the tactics you have used to keep them from the classroom last year. We won’t allow it again.

If a school system attempts to keep the children from full-time, in-person school, I will hold up every bill with two amendments. One to defund them, and another to allow parents the choice of where the money goes for their child’s education.

Do I sound fed up to you? That’s because I am.

I’m not a career politician. I’ve practiced medicine for 33 years. I graduated from Duke Medical School, worked in emergency rooms, studied immunology and virology, and ultimately chose to become a surgeon.

I have been telling everyone for a year now that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials were NOT following science, and I’ve been proven right time and time again.

But I’m not the only one who is fed up. I can’t go anywhere these days — from work, to events, to airports and Ubers, restaurants and stores, without people coming up to me thanking me for standing up for them.

For standing up for actual science. For standing up for freedom. For standing against mandates, lockdowns, and bureaucratic power grabs.

I think the tide has turned, and more and more people are willing to stand up. I see stories from across the country of parents standing up to teacher unions and school boards.

I see members of Congress refusing to comply with Petty Tyrant Pelosi.

We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children?

Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom.
(read more)

2021
-08-04 g
UNTANGLING MEDICAL TYRANNY

You have always been free.
(image source)

Those who would enslave you are mental munchkins.

2021-08-04 f
UNTANGLING TYRANNY

Missouri governor pardons gun-waving St. Louis lawyer couple

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson announced Tuesday that he made good on his promise to pardon a couple who gained notoriety for pointing guns at social justice demonstrators as they marched past the couple’s home in a luxury St. Louis enclave last year.

Parson, a Republican, on Friday pardoned Mark McCloskey, who pleaded guilty in June to misdemeanor fourth-degree assault and was fined $750, and Patricia McCloskey, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment and was fined $2,000.

“Mark McCloskey has publicly stated that if he were involved in the same situation, he would have the exact same conduct,” the McCloskeys’ lawyer Joel Schwartz said Tuesday. “He believes that the pardon vindicates that conduct.”

The McCloskeys, both lawyers in their 60s, said they felt threatened by the protesters, who were passing their home in June 2020 on their way to demonstrate in front of the mayor’s house nearby in one of hundreds of similar demonstrations around the country after George Floyd’s death. The couple also said the group was trespassing on a private street.

Mark McCloskey emerged from his home with an AR-15-style rifle, and Patricia McCloskey waved a semiautomatic pistol, according to the indictment. Photos and cellphone video captured the confrontation, which drew widespread attention and made the couple heroes to some and villains to others. No shots were fired, and no one was hurt.

Special prosecutor Richard Callahan said his [highly partisan] investigation determined that the [trespassing] protesters were peaceful.

“There was no evidence that any of them had a weapon and no one I interviewed realized they had ventured onto a private enclave,” Callahan said in a news release after the McCloskeys pleaded guilty.

Several Republican leaders — including then-President Donald Trump — spoke out in defense of the McCloskeys’ actions. The couple spoke on video at last year’s Republican National Convention.

Mark McCloskey, who announced in May that he was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri, was unapologetic after the plea hearing.

“I’d do it again,” he said from the courthouse steps in downtown St. Louis. “Any time the mob approaches me, I’ll do what I can to put them in imminent threat of physical injury because that’s what kept them from destroying my house and my family.” He echoed those comments in a statement issued Tuesday by his campaign and added: “Today we are incredibly thankful that Governor Mike Parson righted this wrong and granted us pardons.”

Because the charges were misdemeanors, the McCloskeys did not face the possibility of losing their law licenses or their rights to own firearms. (read more)

2021-08-04 e
TANGLED TYRANNY
(Feds accelerate Great Replacement)


BREAKING: Federal Judge BLOCKS TX executive order restricting transportation
of illegals from being implemented; issues restraining order

US Judicial system proves once again – States only have the right to ignore
immigration law(sanctuary cities), not the right to enforce it
pic.twitter.com/rb87iHmory

— Julian Conradson (@JCConradson) August 4, 2021

*

BREAKING: The city of McAllen has started constructing emergency shelters for illegal immigrants released by Border Patrol. The city says the federal government is releasing “an alarming number of immigrants into McAllen, and that the feds aren’t testing them for COVID. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/hy9TbKtgCM

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 4, 2021

*

Migrants are beginning to arrive at the emergency tent shelters the city of McAllen constructed overnight. The city says the Feds have been releasing an “alarming” number of migrants into their city, untested for COVID, & leaving hundreds stranded on the streets. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/OrL1FQxPLf

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 4, 2021


2021-08-04 d
TANGLED ROOTS III
Editor's Note:
(Selected Answers)

Neanderthals, Denisovans and bearers of the "ghost archaic" DNA became extinct, though some of their genes live on in the three lineages of humans. Their demise occurred because they were not "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Survival of the fittest applies even to hominids and the genus Homo. I have theorized that Australian Aboriginals and Sub-Saharan Africans survived into the historical period only because they were isolated by ocean or desert barriers from those with Neanderthal genetics.

The early Australians, like their progeny, would likely have been unable to build seaworthy vessels, maybe just log canoes. They also could have walked, waded or clung to trees dislodged by storms or tsunami from SE Asia across numerous islands to New Guinea and eventually to the Cape York Peninsula of northern Australia. This migration (or flight from attackers) could have taken hundreds of generations during the latest glacial period when sea level was about five hundred feet lower and latter they became landlocked as sea level rose.

The eventual Sub-Saharan Africans probably came south along the Atlantic coast during the Eemian Interglacial from the Iberian Peninsula (where much older stone tools have been found). The Eemian was warmer and more hospitable to early man than the Holocene, our current interglacial. With the coming of glaciation, aridity returned to block that route. I surmise they interbred with the existing African population that contributed the "ghost archaic" DNA. The much older "ghost archaic" DNA population diverged from our family tree before the separation of Homo sapiens sapiens from Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. I tentatively call them a form derived from Homo erectus

The Neanderthal admixture produced humans with advantages, including larger brains and better immune systems. Unlike the Australians and Africans, they eventually became agriculturists and domesticated animals. They invented the wheel and could count beyond 3 or 5. They also invented writing.

The Neanderthal admixture humans would have out-competed the Australian Aboriginals as well as the Sub-Saharan Africans, just like they out-competed Neanderthals and Denisovans and Homo floresiensis from Indonesia (and the bearers of "ghost archaic" DNA if they had encountered them).

It bears repeating that no humans outside of Sub-Saharan Africa had "ghost archaic" DNA. Australian Aboriginals do not have any trace of that admixture. Also, no Sub-Saharan Africans had any Neanderthal genetics. The three human lineages have been distinct for a long time.

2021
-08-04 c
TANGLED ROOTS II

Re-Examining the Out-of-Africa Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids). Part 2. SNPs, Haplogroups and Haplotypes in the Y Chromosome of Chimpanzee and Humans

Abstract

Our consideration of human haplogroups, and our analysis of the dynamics of the Y-chromosome nucleotide flow from primates to humans during the evolution of genus Homo has shown that a common ancestor of the majority of present day human males, both African and non-African, lived approximately 160,000 years ago. The haplogroup of this common ancestor has been identified as the α-haplogroup, which is equivalent or close to haplogroups A1/A1b in the current phylogeny. The archaic lineages (currently summarily designated A0) descend from an ancestor who lived no later than 180,000 years ago, and probably much earlier. The α-haplogroup and the A0 lineages have significantly different nucleotide patterns, and they certainly did not descend one from another. Furthermore, our research points up the areas of mutations in Y-chromosome in H. sapiens, which allows us to use chimpanzee MSY (the male-specific region of the Y-chromosome) as a proxy for genus Homo’s common α-haplogroup ancestor. When we studied slow mutating 16-marker haplotypes, we discovered that chimpanzees and present day humans had a common ancestor 5.5 ± 0.9 million years before the present. It is clear that, when they are compared to loci in other primates, such as gorillas, orangutans, and macaques, many human Y-chromosome loci have been conserved from our common ancestor. Results of our analysis of haplotypes, conserved (ancestral) nucleotides, and SNPs suggest that there is no reason to believe that ancestors of non-Africans (β-haplogroup, i.e. haplogroup BT and its downstream haplogroups) descended from haplogroups A0, A1a, or any other African haplogroup. The data are adequately described by a model which shows that the African lineages and non-African lineages diverged from the α-haplogroup approximately 160,000 years before the present and that the Y-chromosomes of the two groups have evolved independently (in terms of Y-chromosome) since then. We have no indication of where the common ancestor of the α-haplogroup lived; he could just as easily have lived in Europe, in Asia, or in the Middle East, as in (less likely) Africa. We believe that all the presuppositions posited in support of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis fail to hold up under simple scrutiny. This study shows that the Out-of-Africa hypothesis has not been adequately substantiated. The common assertion that “anatomically modern humans came out of Africa some 70,000 years ago” has never been convincingly calculated or determined otherwise; our research suggests that it is incorrect.
(read more)

2021-08-04 b
TANGLED ROOTS I

Re-Examining the "Out of Africa" Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids) in Light of DNA Genealogy

Abstract

Seven thousand five hundred fifty-six (7556) haplotypes of 46 subclades in 17 major haplogroups were considered in terms of their base (ancestral) haplotypes and timespans to their common ancestors, for the purposes of designing of time-balanced haplogroup tree. It was found that African haplogroup A (originated 132,000 ± 12,000 years before present) is very remote time-wise from all other haplogroups, which have a separate common ancestor, named β-haplogroup, and originated 64,000 ± 6000 ybp. It includes a family of Europeoid (Caucasoid) haplogroups from F through T that originated 58,000 ± 5000 ybp. A downstream common ancestor for haplogroup A and β-haplogroup, coined the α-haplogroup emerged 160,000 ± 12,000 ybp. A territorial origin of haplogroups α- and β-remains unknown; however, the most likely origin for each of them is a vast triangle stretched from Central Europe in the west through the Russian Plain to the east and to the Levant to the south. Haplogroup B is descended from β-haplogroup (and not from haplogroup A, from which it is very distant, and separated by as much as 123,000 years of “lateral” mutational evolution) likely migrated to Africa after 46,000 ybp. The finding that the Europeoid haplogroups did not descend from “African” haplogroups A or B is supported by the fact that bearers of the Europeoid haplogroups, as well as all non-African haplogroups do not carry either SNPs M91, P97, M31, P82, M23, M114, P262, M32, M59, P289, P291, P102, M13, M171, M118 (haplogroup A and its subclades SNPs) or M60, M181, P90 (haplogroup B), as it was shown recently in “Walk through Y” FTDNA Project (the reference is incorporated therein) on several hundred people from various haplogroups. (read more)

2021
-08-04 a

The whole ‘Out of Africa’ myth has its roots in the mainstream academic campaign in the 1990’s to remove the concept of Race. When I did my degree they all spent a lot of time on the ‘Out of Africa’ thing but it’s been completely disproved by genetics. Mainstream still hold on to it.

Greg Jefferys

Editor's Note:
Apparently, based on reactions, too many of you believe the Out-of Africa or African Eve theories of human origins. Those theories were always rather speculative but the Academic Left and popular press treat them as etched in stone for ideological reasons. Currently, one group claims the common ancestor of Sub-Saharan Africans and Caucasians lived at least 125,000 years before the present (around the time of the Eemian Interglacial). Others think the common ancestor dates to 160,000 years before the present. Either way the two groups are so distinct that in any other field, taxonomists would place them in different subspecies or even different species.

Now, don't tell me interspecific hybrids are not possible. The mule is an interspecific hybrid; so are lion/tiger crosses and horse/zebra crosses.

Not only is race real, our biological/genetic differences go far beyond race and are best described as specific or subspecific differences. Yes, that statement makes many uncomfortable, but facts are facts. Modern humans are best understood as belonging to three distinct genetic lineages:
1. those with Neanderthal admixture - Europeans and Asians
2. those with Denisovan admixture - Australian Aboriginals
3. those with "ghost archaic DNA" admixture - Sub-Saharan Africans

See the origin of the popular myth:
Allan C. Wilson and Rebecca L. Cann, "The Recent African Genesis of Humans," Scientific American, April 1992: 68.

2021-08-03 i
BEAUTIFUL EXAMPLE OF HOW TONE-DEAF DEMOCRATS ARE
(I hope that site crashes due to 1¢ and 6¢ donations or some other sort of hacker mischief.)


My dear friend @BarackObama is turning 60 tomorrow. For his birthday gift,
I'm asking you to chip in $6 or $60 to help us bring the Obama Presidential
Center to life in Chicago. Donate at http://obama.org/60-for-60/
#HappyBdayObama


Valerie Jarrett @ValerieJarrett August 3, 2021

*

Couldn't say it better myself... The only people giving them $ are complete suckers
and or rich folks with more then they need anyway.


GPinTN @GPinTN1 August 3, 2021


*

LOL.

He is throwing a party with 700 people on a private beach in Martha’s Vineyard
but please peasants, remember to give whatever is left in your savings accounts
to his causes and remember— we’re all in this together!


Candace Owens @RealCandaceO August 3, 2021


2021
-08-03 h
AI IS BEAUTIFUL!  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN DETECT RACE (BLACK VS. WHITE) IN MEDICAL IMAGES.

OF COURSE IT CAN.  RACE IS REAL.  SUB-SAHARAN AFRICANS ARE DISTINCT FROM ALL OTHER HUMANS. 

ONLY AFRICANS HAVE UP TO 19% "GHOST ARCHAIC" DNA, LIKELY FROM HOMO ERECTUS.


The goodwhite scientist Luke Oakden-Rayner is, in effect, saying:
"The ghost in the machine is wearing a sheet and a white hood."



AI Can Detect Race from X-Rays Even When Humans Can't

People used to worry that robots were getting so smart that they’d soon start secretly plotting to take over the world. But now experts worry that AI is getting so smart that it could be secretly plotting to do racism to Black people:

However, our findings that AI can trivially predict self-reported race — even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images — in a setting where clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging: if an AI model secretly used its knowledge of self-reported race to misclassify all Black patients, radiologists would not be able to tell using the same data the model has access to.

From a new preprint on arXiv:

Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient’s Racial Identity In Medical Images

Imon Banerjee, Ananth Reddy Bhimireddy, John L. Burns, Leo Anthony Celi, Li-Ching Chen, Ramon Correa, Natalie Dullerud, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Shih-Cheng Huang, Po-Chih Kuo, Matthew P Lungren, Lyle Palmer, Brandon J Price, Saptarshi Purkayastha, Ayis Pyrros, Luke Oakden-Rayner, Chima Okechukwu, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Hari Trivedi, Ryan Wang, Zachary Zaiman, Haoran Zhang, Judy W Gichoya

Background: In medical imaging, prior studies have demonstrated disparate AI performance by race, yet there is no known correlation for race on medical imaging that would be obvious to the human expert interpreting the images.

Methods: Using private and public datasets we evaluate: A) performance quantification of deep learning models to detect race from medical images, including the ability of these models to generalize to external environments and across multiple imaging modalities, B) assessment of possible confounding anatomic and phenotype population features, such as disease distribution and body habitus as predictors of race, and C) investigation into the underlying mechanism by which AI models can recognize race.

Findings: Standard deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple imaging modalities. Our findings hold under external validation conditions, as well as when models are optimized to perform clinically motivated tasks. We demonstrate this detection is not due to trivial proxies or imaging-related surrogate covariates for race, such as underlying disease distribution. Finally, we show that performance persists over all anatomical regions and frequency spectrum of the images suggesting that mitigation efforts will be challenging and demand further study.

Interpretation: We emphasize that model ability to predict self-reported race is itself not the issue of importance. However, our findings that AI can trivially predict self-reported race — even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images — in a setting where clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging: if an AI model secretly used its knowledge of self-reported race to misclassify all Black patients, radiologists would not be able to tell using the same data the model has access to.

From the blog of one of the authors:

AI has the worst superpower… medical racism.

AUGUST 2, 2021 ~ LUKEOAKDENRAYNER
Is this the darkest timeline? Are we the baddies?

… instead I wanted to write something else which I think will complement the paper; an explanation of why I and many of my co-authors think this issue is important.

One thing we noticed when we were working on this research was that there was a clear divide in our team. The more clinical and safety/bias related researchers were shocked, confused, and frankly horrified by the results we were getting. Some of the computer scientists and the more junior researchers on the other hand were surprised by our reaction. They didn’t really understand why we were concerned.

So in a way, this blog post can be considered a primer, a companion piece for the paper which explains the why. Sure, AI can detect a patient’s racial identity, but why does it matter?

Disclaimer: I’m white. I’m glad I got to contribute, and I am happy to write about this topic, but that does not mean I am somehow an authority on the lived experiences of minoritized racial groups. These are my opinions after discussion with my much more knowledgeable colleagues, several of whom have reviewed the blog post itself.

A brief summary

In extremely brief form, here is what the paper showed:

AI can trivially learn to identify the self-reported racial identity of patients to an absurdly high degree of accuracy

AI does learn to do this when trained for clinical tasks

These results generalise, with successful external validation and replication in multiple x-ray and CT datasets

Despite many attempts, we couldn’t work out what it learns or how it does it. It didn’t seem to rely on obvious confounders, nor did it rely on a limited anatomical region or portion of the image spectrum.

Now for the important part: so what?

An argument in four steps

I’m going to try to lay out, as clearly as possible, that this AI behaviour is both surprising, and a very bad thing if we care about patient safety, equity, and generalisability.

The argument will have the following parts:

Medical practice is biased in favour of the privileged classes in any society, and worldwide towards a specific type of white men.

AI can trivially learn to recognise features in medical imaging studies that are strongly correlated with racial identity. This provides a powerful and direct mechanism for models to incorporate the biases in medical practice into their decisions.

Humans cannot identify the racial identity of a patient from medical images. In medical imaging we don’t routinely have access to racial identity information, so human oversight of this problem is extremely limited at the clinical level.

The features the AI makes use of appear to occur across the entire image spectrum and are not regionally localised, which will severely limit our ability to stop AI systems from doing this.

There are several other things I should point out before we get stuck in. First of all, a definition. We are talking about racial identity, not genetic ancestry or any other biological process that might come to mind when you hear the word “race”. Racial identity is a social, legal, and political construct that consists of our own perceptions of our race, and how other people see us. In the context of this work, we rely on self-reported race as our indicator of racial identity.

Before you jump in with questions about this approach and the definition, a quick reminder on what we are trying to research. Bias in medical practice is almost never about genetics or biology. No patient has genetic ancestry testing as part of their emergency department workup. We are interested in factors that may bias doctors in how they decide to investigate and treat patients, and in that setting the only information they get is visual (i.e., skin tone, facial features etc.) and sociocultural (clothing, accent and language use, and so on). What we care about is race as a social construct, even if some elements of that construct (such as skin tone) have a biological basis.

Secondly, whenever I am using the term bias in this piece, I am referring to the social definition, which is a subset of the strict technical definition; it is the biases that impact decisions made about humans on the basis of their race. These biases can in turn produce health disparities, which the NIH defines as “a health difference that adversely affects disadvantaged populations“.

Third, I want to take as given that racial bias in medical AI is bad. I feel like this shouldn’t need to be said, but the ability of AI to homogenise, institutionalise, and algorithm-wash health disparities across regions and populations is not a neutral thing.

AI can seriously make things much, much worse.

… In medical imaging we like to think of ourselves as above this problem, particularly with respect to race because we usually don’t know the identity of our patients. We report the scans without ever seeing the person, but that only protects us from direct bias. Biases still affect who gets referred for scans and who doesn’t, and they affect which scans are ordered. …

But it is true that, in general, we read the scan as it comes. The scan can’t tell us what colour a person’s skin is.

Can it?

Part II – AI can detect racial identity in x-rays and CT scans

I’ve already included some results up in the summary section, and there are more in the paper, but I’ll very briefly touch on my interpretation of them here.

Firstly, the performance of these models ranges from high to absurd. An AUC of 0.99 for recognising the self-reported race of a patient, which has no recognised medical imaging correlate? This is flat out nonsense.

Every radiologist I have told about these results is absolutely flabbergasted, because despite all of our expertise, none of us would have believed in a million years that x-rays and CT scans contain such strong information about racial identity. Honestly we are talking jaws dropped – we see these scans everyday and we have never noticed [Editor's Note: BECAUSE YOU NEVER LOOKED OR BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT PHYSICAL OR FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGISTS.].

The second important aspect though is that, with such a strong correlation, it appears that AI models learn the features correlated with racial identity by default. For example, in our experiments we showed that the distribution of diseases in the population for several datasets was essentially non-predictive of racial identity (AUC = 0.5 to 0.6), but we also found that if you train a model to detect those diseases, the model learns to identify patient race almost as well as the models directly optimised for that purpose (AUC = 0.86). Whaaat?

Despite racial identity not being useful for the task (since the disease distribution does not differentiate racial groups), the model learns it anyway? …

But no matter how it works, the take-home message is that it appears that models will tend to learn to recognise race, even when it seems irrelevant to the task. So the dozens upon dozens of FDA approved x-ray and CT scan AI models on the market now … probably do this^^? Yikes!

There is one more interpretation of these results that is worth mentioning, for the “but this is expected model behaviour” folks. Even from a purely technical perspective, ignoring the racial bias aspect, the fact models learn features of racial identity is bad. There is no causal pathway linking racial identity and the appearance of, for example, pneumonia on a chest x-ray. By definition these features are spurious.

By definition!

They are shortcuts. Unintended cues. The model is underspecified for the problem it is intended to solve.

However we want to frame this, the model has learned something that is wrong, and this means the model can behave in undesirable and unexpected ways [Editor's Note: Naughty model! Bad, bad model. Now go stand in the corner.].

I won’t be surprised if this becomes a canonical example of the biggest weakness of deep learning – the ability of deep learning to pick up unintended cues from the data. I’m certainly going to include it in all my talks.

Part III – Humans can’t identify racial identity in medical images

… The problem is much worse for racial bias. At least in MRI super-resolution, the radiologist is expected to review the original low quality image to ensure it is diagnostic quality (which seems like a contradiction to me, but whatever). In AI with racial bias though, humans literally cannot recognise racial identity from images^^^. Unless they are provided with access to additional data (which they don’t currently have easy access to in imaging workflows) they will be completely unable to appreciate the bias no matter how skilled they are and no matter how much effort they apply to the task.

Part IV – We don’t know how to stop it  [Editor's Note: Remember HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey?]

This is probably the biggest problem here. We ran an extensive series of experiments to try and work out what was going on.

First, we tried obvious demographic confounders (for example, Black patients tend to have higher rates of obesity than white patients, so we checked whether the models were simply using body mass/shape as a proxy for racial identity). None of them appeared to be responsible, with very low predictive performance when tested alone.

Next we tried to pin down what sort of features were being used. There was no clear anatomical localisation, no specific region of the images that contributed to the predictions. Even more interesting, no part of the image spectrum was primarily responsible either. We could get rid of all the high-frequency information, and the AI could still recognise race in fairly blurry (non-diagnostic) images. Similarly, and I think this might be the most amazing figure I have ever seen, we could get rid of the low-frequency information to the point that a human can’t even tell the image is still an x-ray, and the model can still predict racial identity just as well as with the original image!

Damn their eyes!

Performance is maintained with the low pass filter to around the LPF25 level, which is quite blurry but still readable. But for the high-pass filter, the model can still recognise the racial identity of the patient well past the point that the image is just a grey box 😱

This difficulty in isolating the features associated with racial identity is really important, because one suggestion people tend to have when they get shown evidence of racial bias is that we should make the algorithms “colorblind” – to remove the features that encode the protected attribute and thereby make it so the AI cannot “see” race but should still perform well on the clinical tasks we care about.

Here, it seems like there is no easy way to remove racial information from images. It is everywhere and it is in everything.

Perhaps Disraeli was right when he had the character who was his mouthpiece in his novels explain, “All is race.”

An urgent problem

AI seems to easily learn racial identity information from medical images, even when the task seems unrelated. We can’t isolate how it does this, and we humans can’t recognise when AI is doing it unless we collect demographic information (which is rarely readily available to clinical radiologists). That is bad.

There are around 30 AI systems using CXR and CT Chest imaging on the market currently, FDA cleared, many of which were trained on the exact same datasets we utilised in this research. That is worse.

I don’t know about you, but I’m worried. AI might be superhuman, but not every superpower is a force for good.

The line between superheroism and supervillainy is a fine one.

It’s almost as if race does exist. But of course we’ve been told over and over that that can’t possibly be true. But did anybody tell Artificial Intelligence that? It’s almost as if AI isn’t a True Believer in the conventional wisdom about the scientific nonexistence of race. Something must be done to inject the natural stupidity of our elite wisdom into Artificial Intelligence. (read more)

2021-08-03 g
IT GETS EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL
(electoral fraud unraveling)

How do you refuse to comply to a subpoena? https://t.co/P1uwKgzUvp

— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyMMA) August 3, 2021

*

“Our whistleblower had access to the Election Management System servers.
Our whistleblower had access to the Adjudication Clients.
Our whistleblower had access to the ImageCast Central Workstations.
Our whistleblower had access to the SUPERVISOR PASSWORD.”
https://t.co/x2E8LgDDMC

— Thierry Baudet (@thierrybaudet) August 3, 2021


*

The 1487 request to the Arizona Attorney General has been filed against the
Maricopa Board of Supervisors by
@SonnyBorrelli on behalf of the Arizona Senate.
I support this and hope the
@GeneralBrnovich lays the smack down.
Throw the book at them!
pic.twitter.com/vJkfoTvozp

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) August 3, 2021


2021-08-03 f
HOW BEAUTIFUL. CUOMO, THE GRANDMOTHER KILLER, IS FINALLY ASKED TO RESIGN.

Comment from Albany County District Attorney David Soares Regarding NYS
Attorney General Final Report on Governor Cuomo ⬇️
pic.twitter.com/aSVBNzhebf

— Albany County District Attorney’s Office (@AlbanyCountyDA) August 3, 2021

*

BREAKING: Asked if he stood by his March statement to @GStephanopoulos that
Gov. Cuomo should resign if an investigation bolstered claims of sexual harassment,
Pres. Biden says, “I stand by that statement.”

“Are you now calling on him to resign?”

“Yes.” https://t.co/A4C7lVCcvu pic.twitter.com/qNQQoFVdg7

— ABC News (@ABC) August 3, 2021

*

Pelosi asks Cuomo to resign… pic.twitter.com/Z36fDYyBBx

— 92.5 FOX News (@925FMFOXNews) August 3, 2021

*

NEW: Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand of New York: “No elected official is above the law.
The people of New York deserve better leadership in the governor’s office. We continue
to believe that the Governor should resign.”
https://t.co/5dySC4CJmI
pic.twitter.com/zZeo9UHU27

— ABC News (@ABC) August 3, 2021


2021
-08-03 e
WILL AUDITS & DOMINION WHISTLEBLOWER PROVE TRUMP'S BEAUTIFUL LANDSLIDE?

Should stolen elections be considered treason?

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) August 2, 2021

*

I would like to know if we have enough solitary confinement cells in Arizona
available for the entire Maricopa Board of Supervisors and the execs at the
fraud machine company. We are going to need a lot.

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) August 2, 2021

*

Stand by. https://t.co/K2KOYEbMBO

— Sonny Borrelli (@SonnyBorrelli) August 2, 2021

*

Wendy Kelly and Borelli ACTIVATE. @AZKellyT @SonnyBorrelli
pic.twitter.com/iuLLMcUFSO

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) August 2, 2021

*

.@POTUS45:

“The irregularities and outright fraud of this election are an open wound to
the United States of America. Something must be done—immediately!”

FULL STATEMENT: pic.twitter.com/zA459H9J38

— Natalie Harp (@NatalieJHarp) August 3, 2021

*

President Trump: “These numbers are overwhelming, election-changing, and
according to Keshel, could be even bigger in that they do not account for cyber-flipping
of votes. They show I won the election—by A LOT!”

WATCH Capt. Keshel breaks it down here👇pic.twitter.com/aWfmnzHEqw

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) August 3, 2021

*
Dominion Voting Systems whistleblower sent Admin Password and data to CodeMonkeyZ:

Our whistleblower is not from Arizona.
Our whistleblower is from one of the many other states that used the Dominion software.
Our whistleblower went to excruciating effort to detail and archive everything possible.
Our whistleblower was trusted enough to be given instructions on how to modify the BIOS.

The whistleblower reached out with footage filmed of the Dominion Election Management System inside an election center in one of the states that used Dominion software and hardware (not Arizona).

As you will see in the video, the whistleblower initially discusses with a Dominion employee about who holds the BIOS password and it is discovered that the STATE is keeping the password – not Dominion, and not the county.

Later, the whistleblower asks the Dominion employee about connectivity and whether or not the machines can be connected to the internet…

With just 1 minute and 17 seconds, we expose their most egregious lie.

FRAUD VITIATES EVERYTHING.

CodeMonkeyZ

2021-08-03 d
HOW BEAUTIFUL, THE PENTAGON WAS ON LOCKDOWN

NOW – Pentagon on lockdown over reported shooting outside.
pic.twitter.com/uPc4gpF7KW

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) August 3, 2021

*

Pentagon on lockdown after multiple gunshots fired at nearby Metro station.
(AP)
https://t.co/AmdOY06FPc

— WBAL-TV 11 Baltimore (@wbaltv11) August 3, 2021

*

The Pentagon currently is on lock down due to an incident at the Pentagon
Transit Center. We are asking the public to please avoid the area.
More information will be forthcoming.

— Pentagon Force Protection Agency (Official) (@PFPAOfficial) August 3, 2021

*

The scene right now at the pentagon. @Newsy NCIS says the threat is down.
Trying to find out if that means a suspect was shot or not.
@DeptofDefense
pic.twitter.com/HWo4DstxUl

— Terace Garnier (@TeraceGarnier) August 3, 2021

*

The Pentagon has lifted the lock down and has reopened. Corridor 2 and the
Metro entrance remains closed. Corridor 3 is open for pedestrian traffic.

— Pentagon Force Protection Agency (Official) (@PFPAOfficial) August 3, 2021


2021-08-03 c
SURE WISH WE HAD TRUMP'S REMAIN IN MEXICO POLICY AND HIS BEAUTIFUL BORDER WALL
(Please, give ALL of those illegal aliens the spike protein gene therapy jab BEFORE releasing them. That will give them a firm expiration date and limit the damage to the U.S.)

Great work and Incredible footage @BillFOXLA – add to it – in the LAST 24hrs,
RGV had 3,002 encounters – an increase of 655% comp to FY20… over the weekend
(Fri/Sat/Sun) the total was 8,144
https://t.co/RAhtuV677k

— Griff Jenkins (@GriffJenkins) August 2, 2021

*

We are witnessing the mass release of migrants in downtown McAllen today.
Border Patrol buses and vans are pulling up every 15 minutes. Agents tell us it’ll be
happening all day long. Hundreds released so far. Most going to the McAllen
bus station. BP overwhelmed.
@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/kStwQOV2NI

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 2, 2021


*

NEW: Large groups of migrants being walked to McAllen Central Bus Station by a
local Catholic Charity after they were dropped off & released by Border Patrol. This is
happening every hour. Migrants are given bus tickets wherever they want to go.

@FoxNews
pic.twitter.com/7LilR9DCae

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 2, 2021


*
Washington, D.C. (August 3, 2021) – A Center for Immigration Studies’ analysis of the reported July border apprehension numbers show an increase in illegal entries into the United States for the sixth consecutive month of the Biden administration. The number of illegal immigrants encountered by CBP reached 210,000 during the month of July, an average of 6,770 a day, defying the decline typically recorded during the hot summer months.

The Center for Immigration Studies


2021-08-03 b
JUDGE ON FOX NEWS WAS TRYING TO ATTRACT BEAUTIFUL YOUNG MEN
(Judge Napolitano, a Roman Catholic, was caught imitating a Catholic priest.)

Judge Andrew Napolitano Ousted by Fox News Following [Homo]Sexual Harassment Allegations

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal contributor for Fox News, is no longer employed by the network following allegations of sexual harassment.

In a complaint filed on Monday, a 27-year-old Fox News associate producer alleged that Napolitano has “sexually harassed numerous young male employees during his tenure at Fox News.” The plaintiff, whose name is John Fawcett, claims that he reported Napolitano’s misconduct to Fox News’ human resources department but they did not take any immediate action against him.

In a statement to Variety, Fox News said that upon learning of the allegations, the network “immediately investigated the claims and addressed the matter with both parties.” Napolitano has not appeared on air at Fox News for several months.

“The network and Judge Napolitano have since parted ways. We take all allegations of misconduct seriously, are committed to providing a safe, transparent, and collaborative workplace environment for all our employees and took immediate, appropriate action,” Fox News said in the statement. Representatives for Napolitano did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment. (read more)

2021-08-03 a

"In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."

Michel Foucault


2021
-08-02 g
STONE AGE THINKERS claim really ugly dude is a "trans"woman

Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is out of the Olympics after failing on her
3rd snatch attempt.

Read more on how letting athletes compete according to their gender identity
harms women’s sports:
https://t.co/NRN5ll41jq pic.twitter.com/3HufrWKyE9

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 2, 2021


2021-08-02 f
STONE AGE THINKERS employ a double standard

The Obama bash — taking place after a nearby Delta outbreak in Provincetown,
as millions face evictions after Obama presided over a massive foreclose crisis
— sounds great!

Interesting how every major US politician finds vast oligarchical wealth after
leaving office.💰
pic.twitter.com/FAhP3HjEz7

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 1, 2021

*

REMINDER: None of the people lecturing you about masks and “we’re all in this
together” and lockdowns have had to make a single adjustment to their lives. None of them.

The pandemic of the haves and have nots. https://t.co/nq4TV15MF9

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) August 2, 2021


2021-08-02 e
STONE AGE THINKERS claim classical music is racist (because it is a pillar of Western Civilization and some Bantu-Americans are envious and Neo-Marxist troglodytes destroy the good, the true and the beautiful)

Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1)

Succumbing to specious charges of racism, America’s orchestras, opera companies, and conductors are abandoning the Western canon.

Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.

Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.


The campaign against classical music is worth examining in some detail, for it reveals the logic that has been turned against nearly every aspect of Western culture over the last year. The crusade began within days of the [fentanyl overdose] death of George Floyd in late May 2020. Floyd died during an arrest in Minneapolis; cell-phone video captured Officer Derek Chauvin (since [wrongly] convicted of murder) keeping his knee on the prone Floyd’s neck and back for nearly eight minutes, while Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe.” [Orchestrated] riots against police brutality broke out across the U.S.; institution after institution pledged to fight the structural racism that Floyd’s death supposedly represented.

The classical music profession deemed itself implicated in Floyd’s [fentanyl overdose] death. On June 1, 2020, the League of American Orchestras issued a statement confessing that, for decades, it had “tolerated and perpetuated systemic discrimination against Black people, discrimination mirrored in the practices of orchestras and throughout our country.” The League was “committed to dismantling” its “role in perpetuating the systems of inequity that continue to oppress Black people” and expected its member orchestras to respond in kind.

That response was immediate. The Hartford Symphony Orchestra apologized for its “history of inaction to effectively confront the racist systems and structures that have long oppressed and marginalized Black musicians, composers, and communities.” The Seattle Opera announced that it would “continue to prioritize” antiracism and “make amends” for causing harm. Opera Omaha sent a message to its “black community”: “We know that you are exhausted and recognize we will never fully understand the depth of your suffering. We know that part of your exhaustion comes from the heartbreak of our silence, inaction, and half-measures.” Every communication that the opera sends out now concludes with the tagline: “We will listen more than we speak, but will not be silent in the face of injustice.”

Black musicians produced manifestos complaining of their mistreatment at the hands of white administrators and conductors. Weston Sprott, a trombonist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, along with three musicians from three other ensembles, declared in the New York Times that the reason there are not “more Black artists in orchestras” is “racism.” Six black opera singers made a YouTube video about opera racism at the invitation of the Los Angeles Opera. L.A. Opera’s president, Christopher Koelsch, introduced the discussion. “I come to you today as the white male leader of this institution,” he said, staring dazedly at the camera. L.A. Opera was committing “anew to self-examination and . . . to do our part to heal wounds that are hundreds of years old.” Most of the discussion centered on Floyd’s [fentanyl overdose] death, but tenor Russell Thomas also told of being rebuked for routinely showing up late and for talking on his cell phone during rehearsals for an unnamed opera. “They were putting me in my place,” Thomas said, though his behavior was the result of his uncle dying in a car accident, he maintained. Only a black singer would be denied “a basic amount of consideration.”

Professional disappointments were likewise chalked up to racism. Soprano Lauren Michelle claimed that the reason she has not had a more prominent career in the United States was that she was black. “The truth is I am an award-winning international opera singer who has only been hired once at an A-house in the United States,” she wrote on her blog. Michelle did not address why her contemporaries, such as Angel Blue, Pretty Yende, Eric Owens, and Lawrence Brownlee, have sung in “A-houses.”

Music conservatories admitted their racial backwardness. The Juilliard School’s president, Damian Woetzel, and Juilliard’s Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Initiatives pledged that the school would become a “community that not only rejects racism, but that is actively anti-racist, working to tear down systemic racism and injustice.” As part of that “work,” the school created a blacks-only Zoom “space for healing.” Juilliard’s head of music theory wrote his colleagues that “it’s high time the whiteness of music theory is examined, critiqued and remedied.”

The classical music press, presiding over an art form whose salience shrinks by the year, produced a torrent of commentary explaining to readers why they should view classical music as culpably white. In September 2020, New Yorker critic Alex Ross apologized for being a “white American,” writing about a world that is “blindingly white, both in its history and its present.” The love of classical music on the part of nineteenth-century American patrons and performers was a smoke screen for white supremacy, Ross suggested. For good measure, he invoked a standard from the student gripe portfolio to buttress his argument for classical music racism: Mozart’s portrayal of the Moor Monostatos in The Magic Flute.

The lead reviewer for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, urged that orchestra auditions no longer take place behind a screen, in order to address the “appalling racial imbalance” in orchestral ranks. Currently, musicians’ identities are concealed by a screen through most, if not all, stages of an orchestral audition to prevent favoritism or bias (a process known as a “blind audition”). But colorblindness is now regarded as discriminatory, since it favors merit over race.

Fellow Times critic Joshua Barone called for reforming “opera’s culture” by placing “anti-racism front and center.” A Washington Post critic alleged that systemic racism “runs like rot through the structures of the classical music world.” Vox explained that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was a symbol of white male “superiority and importance.” BBC Magazine columnist Tom Service also purported to deconstruct the alleged greatness of the canonical repertoire: “The link between patriarchal power in the West and the fact that the classical canon is made of lookalike faces of Great Men is more than coincidental.” Slate complained that referring to well-known composers only by their last names exacerbates classical music’s exclusionary practices. The Louisville Orchestra, for example, had advertised the performance of a Beethoven symphony and the debut of a composition memorializing [drug dealer] Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” To assume that Davóne Tines and Igee Dieudonné need to be “full-named,” whereas Beethoven does not, replicates classical music’s “centuries of systematic prejudice, exclusion, sexism, and racism,” according to Slate. (Note to readers: if you have not heard of Tines and Dieudonné, you are not alone.)

Classical music radio announcers and executives instructed their audience to hear inequity in the cascade of human feeling coming from their speakers. Garrett McQueen, then an announcer for American Public Media, told a Composers Forum roundtable in June 2020: “You are complicit in racism every time you listen to Handel’s Messiah.” (Handel held stock in a slave-trading company.)

Academia, the source of today’s race obsession, weighed in with gusto. The Music Library Association decried its complicity in the “marginalization and extrajudicial killing of people of color, particularly Black and indigenous individuals.” A music theory professor from Hunter College, Philip Ewell, received widespread acclaim for his denunciations of classical music racism.

Ewell has whiteness on the brain. During the Floyd [pretext] riots, Ewell compiled a glossary of music-related euphemisms for whiteness: “authentic, canonic, civilized, classic(s), conventional, core (‘core’ requirement), European, function (‘functional’ tonality), fundamental, genius, German (‘German’ language requirement), great (‘great’ works), maestro, opus (magnum ‘opus’), piano (‘piano’ proficiency, skills), seminal, sophisticated, titan(ic), towering, traditional, and western.” Since everything is about race, according to Ewell, any time you seem not to be talking about race—referring to someone’s piano skills, say—you are actually talking about race by dint of ignoring the topic. (Connoisseurs of deconstruction will recognize the rhetorical technique here of turning an “absence” into a supposed “presence.”)

Ewell also engaged in the mandatory Beethoven takedown. The only reason we deem the Ninth Symphony a masterpiece is Beethoven’s whiteness and maleness, he wrote on his blog. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is “no more a masterwork than Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells,” Ewell insisted. Spalding is a jazz singer; Twelve Little Spells is an album of experimental jazz numbers about 16 body parts and functions. The texts (“Our eyeballs are hollow but presently hold shape/ Around a gooey filling”) are not the equivalent of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” To place Spalding’s slight compositions at the same level of complexity, emotional force, and historical significance as the Ninth Symphony is objectively ludicrous.

Ewell backed up his aesthetic relativism with an attempted logical refutation of Beethoven’s greatness: “To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet Earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active as a composer, which no one does.” Judgments of greatness imply no such encyclopedic knowledge, however. We may deem a meal great, for example, without implying that we have eaten every other meal available on the planet at that moment.

Ewell’s whiteness obsession is standard in music departments now. What catapulted him to iconic status was his denunciation of the early twentieth-century music theorist Heinrich Schenker. Schenker developed an influential system of analysis that identifies the most important elements of a musical phrase in order to explain the phrase’s emotional impact and its role within a work’s thematic development. In a keynote address at a November 2019 music theory conference, Ewell argued that Schenker’s ranking of notes and harmonies within a composition is merely a stand-in for a white supremacist ranking of the races. The “white racial frame” of Schenkerian analysis has kept blacks from becoming music theorists, Ewell maintained.

Ewell’s speech was ecstatically received. Alex Ross’s September 2020 article on racism and classical music amplified Ewell’s “white racial frame” thesis further. And when a few music theorists dissented from that thesis, Ewell became a symbol of the field’s oppressive whiteness, as will be discussed below.

With such near-unanimity regarding classical music’s racial sins, it is no wonder that the demands issued to compensate for those sins have been breathtaking in ambition. Those coming from the influential Sphinx Organization were typical. Sphinx has been advocating for race consciousness in classical music since 1997. It holds separate competitions for young black and Hispanic musicians, supports minority-only ensembles, and provides color-coded training and financial assistance. Since the Floyd [pretext] riots, it has been churning out a series of diversity demands more extensive than any it had previously proposed.

Its first set of demands opened with a call for orchestras, opera companies, and conservatories to “examine the supremacist logic embedded in traditional Western art and music/repertoire.” After impugning the Western music tradition, Sphinx then laid down racial quotas for that allegedly white supremacist activity: at least 20 percent of soloists each concert season should be black and Latinx; 40 percent of candidates for auditions and administrative jobs should be black and Latinx; and 20 percent of the repertoire performed each season should be “reflective [sic] of Black and Latinx composers.” At least 10 percent of every musical budget should be spent compensating for past racial inequities in programming (what such compensation might mean was not explained).

Sphinx’s next set of demands was published in the New York Times in September 2020. The numbers had changed, suggesting a certain arbitrariness in how they were computed. Sphinx president Afa Dworkin, writing with Anthony McGill, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, now insisted that 15 percent of a music organization’s budget (up from the previous 10 percent) should go toward “addressing systemic racism” (what that meant was again left unspecified). This 15 percent reallocation should continue for the next decade. The diversity component in every audition was down to 25 percent from 40 percent, but if an orchestra or conservatory did not rustle up the requisite diversity quotient, it could not select a winning candidate, no matter how qualified the finalist.

In January 2021, Sphinx issued more audition guidelines. Traditionally, if a musician is of a known high caliber, having played with another prestigious orchestra, say, he may skip the early stages of an audition and go right to the semifinals or finals (which may still be blind). Sphinx now proposed that those automatic advancements include a whopping 25 percent or more of “Black and Brown” musicians. This is mathematically impossible, and Sphinx should know it, since it has been decrying the low numbers of minorities in orchestras for two decades. Blacks make up 1.8 percent of all orchestral musicians, which includes noncompetitive community ensembles. The larger and more competitive the orchestra, the fewer blacks it has. Filling at least 25 percent of all automatic advancement slots with minorities from top-ranked orchestras is not doable, even assuming that there were so many automatic advancements in each audition to be able to set aside 25 percent of them for any type of quota.

Sphinx’s January audition guidelines suggested selecting musicians on nonmusical grounds, as Anthony Tommasini had recommended. Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop “extra-musical evaluation” criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.

Board members also found themselves in the crosshairs for being too white, with the added infraction of being too rich. Simon Woods, head of the League of American Orchestras, apologized for his whiteness during a discussion at the Peabody Institute in February 2021, and then lamented that non-diverse board members were given power to help define the “vision” of orchestras. Anyone in the classical music business today should be down on his knees in gratitude that there remain wealthy donors who want to contribute to the “vision” of orchestras. Supporting social and racial justice organizations confers a thousand times more prestige, as the stampede of New York’s wealthiest to the galas of the antipoverty Robin Hood Foundation demonstrates. But the pressure is now enormous to find “diverse” board members, no matter their connection to music or their ability or willingness to help finance struggling ensembles. Few cultures, however, have embraced philanthropy as vigorously as the Anglo-American one.

Even in the best of financial circumstances, the racial demands would have been startling in their scope. But at a time when every classical music budget has been blown apart by the coronavirus lockdowns, such ambition requires considerable confidence in one’s bargaining power. The bet paid off. Orchestras and opera companies rushed to adopt racial hiring benchmarks and to take on costly new diversity bureaucracy.

Long before 2020, the Metropolitan Opera had been running in the red. The coronavirus blackout put it on the ropes, eliminating $150 million in earned revenues. In December 2020, Metropolitan General Manager Peter Gelb told his employees that financial cutbacks were a life-and-death matter: “What we’re trying to do is keep the Met alive, and the only way to achieve that is to reduce our costs.” In a letter to the stagehands’ union, Gelb wrote: “The health crisis has compounded the Met’s previous financial fragility, threatening our very existence.”

In February 2021, Met musicians were nearly a year without pay, and the stagehands’ union was locked out of the house. Yet that month, the Met’s first chief diversity officer started work. The new position was necessary in order to ensure that the Met is an “organization that is adamantly opposed to racism,” as a Met spokesman put it in an e-mail. Otherwise, there would apparently be some suspicion that the Met, populated by immaculately progressive staff in the most liberal big city in the country, might favor racism.

The Met’s new chief diversity officer, Marcia Sells, had been the dean of students at the nation’s highest-paying law school—Harvard. Her six-figure Harvard salary doubtless will have been increased to cover the move to New York. Sells would likely also have been promised her own staff. Sells has no background in music, much less opera. Yet she is now entrusted with creating “artistic pathways” at the Met for “people of color,” according to a press release.

Presumably, the Met would have compiled a firm empirical basis for this new financial commitment, given the sacrifices that it is asking its existing employees to make. Has the Met in recent years failed to hire the most qualified musician because of his skin color or otherwise denied opportunities to minorities? I asked the spokesman. The query was ignored.

In March 2020, the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra agreed to a 20 percent pay cut in the hope of reducing an estimated $15 million deficit by year-end. That projection was arrived at before anyone imagined that Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center would remain dark for the next 12 months. Yet in October 2020, the orchestra created a new vice presidency position for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access. “Diversity is excellence,” explained Philadelphia Orchestra President and CEO Matías Tarnopolsky in announcing the new title. Philadelphia’s vice president of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access, Doris Parent, also has no musical background. Her two bachelor’s degrees are in psychology and family studies; her master’s degree in business administration is from the University of Phoenix. She will nevertheless be “shaping” the orchestra’s future, according to Tarnopolsky.

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has announced its first chief diversity and inclusion officer but has not yet hired someone for the role. It is sending its musicians, board, and staff to diversity training. Ideally, the orchestra would be “reflective of Cincinnati”—i.e., 40 percent black—executive director Jonathan Martin has said. For now, short of that ideal, it is putting a black composer on every live-streamed performance this season.

The Juilliard School recently announced a pandemic-related tuition increase, prompting student protest. Perhaps the school should have held off on bulking up its diversity bureaucracy instead. It has hired a new Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Program Manager, to supplement its existing Director for EDIB Initiatives. Its new Bias Response Deputies are steeped in “trauma-informed practices” so that they can understand how Juilliard’s systemic bias “manifests” and how to mitigate it. Faculty are being trained to recognize their racial biases. All aspects of the school will now be examined “through the lens of inclusion,” Juilliard’s provost announced in September 2020.

In light of such changes, the evidence for current discrimination in the classical music field must be overwhelming. In fact, it does not exist.

The primary fact adduced to prove systemic bias is the underrepresentation of black orchestral musicians. Blacks’ 1.8 percent representation among the nation’s orchestral musicians is up slightly from 1991, when they were about 1.6 percent of orchestra members. Meantime, the proportion of Asians rose nearly threefold from the early 1990s to 2014, from 3.4 percent to over 9 percent (and more in some top orchestras), though Asians, too, are nonwhite in an allegedly white supremacist field. When Asians began their conquest of Western classical music in the second half of the twentieth century, there were fewer Asian instrumentalists and composers to serve as ethnic role models than there were black instrumentalists and composers to serve as role models for blacks.

The official explanation for that steady underrepresentation of blacks in orchestral ranks is racism. Suggesting that there aren’t enough competitively qualified blacks in the audition pipeline is taboo. Anthony Tommasini briefly considered that supply-side explanation before calling for the deblinding of auditions. But he gave the last word to Sphinx president Dworkin, who insisted, in Tommasini’s words, that the “pipeline is not the problem, and that talented musicians of color are out there and ready.”

Conductors and members of audition committees disagree. Leonard Slatkin has served as music director in Detroit, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, London, and Lyon, and has served as principal guest conductor in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. Filling Sphinx’s quotas for auditions would be “impossible” at the present time, he wrote by e-mail. “There are not enough black and other minority musicians studying at music schools or conservatories, let alone in the audition pool.” By one estimate, the combined black and Hispanic student population at conservatories ranges from 5 percent to 8 percent, but that estimate represents students in all arts programs at a school, which may include theater and dance. At Juilliard, blacks make up 8 percent of the total student body in music, drama, and dance. The drama division is nearly 50 percent black. Asians make up 28 percent of the total student body. The school would not provide the breakdown for the music division alone.

At the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, black audition entrants are rare, though there is no minimum experience requirement, says someone who oversees the process. Even if the screen were removed, there are very few black musicians to hire. Proponents of the racism narrative never explain why conductors, perfectionist by nature, would turn down the most qualified musician in favor of someone more likely to maul an exposed solo, just because that inferior musician was white.

In fact, conductors want “the best possible player for the best possible concert because you will be blamed otherwise,” says a former music festival leader. “I’ve never observed someone not getting the job because he was black.”

Zubin Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962 to 1978 and then went on to direct the New York Philharmonic for another 13 years. There was “never” any racial component to auditions, Mehta said in a phone interview. Nor have boards discouraged the hiring of black musicians, as is alleged. “No one ever told me you can’t engage someone because he’s black,” Mehta says. Dorothy Chandler, for decades Los Angeles’s premier arts philanthropist, welcomed Mehta’s hiring of Henry Lewis as assistant conductor in 1961.

Pianist Emanuel Ax replied: “Of course not!” when asked if he had seen racism in the field, though he added that he would have “no idea about auditions.” No black pianist has asked Ax to teach him (which is how Ax gets students), though he would welcome such a request.

Violinist Joseph Striplin played with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Opera’s touring orchestra. When the Grosse Pointe Symphony Orchestra’s conductor fell ill, Striplin was asked to fill in. He now leads that orchestra. There was discrimination in the past, but it’s not the 1940s anymore, Striplin says: “Orchestras would be more than happy to have more blacks.”

Both of John McLaughlin Williams’s parents were pianists who passed on to him their love of classical music. His father’s hopes for a musical career were dashed by mid-century racial attitudes. But the classical music industry is “not racist now, by any means,” says Williams, a conductor, violinist, and pianist. Williams has never witnessed someone not getting a job because of the color of his skin. But after hundreds of years of discrimination, blacks assume—and understandably so, Williams says—that if they are not picked for something, it is because of their race.

In July 2020, in the New York Times, bassoonist Monica Ellis accused the orchestral profession of protecting a “white framework built to benefit white people.” To the contrary, the field has been obsessed with diversity for decades. Since the early 1970s, fellowship programs for black and Hispanic musicians have poured forth, including from the New York Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Typically, these programs allow the grantees to play with the orchestra, train them for auditions, and give them priority in tryouts. At present, more than a dozen of the country’s top orchestras provide fellowships for black players, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, while many others give stipends to minority musicians as audition support. Orchestras have also sent their musicians into public schools in the hope of creating more minority players.

Music schools have encouraged black enrollment, though they now lambaste themselves as exclusionary. In 1986, Juilliard established the Aaron Diamond Foundation Fellowships for Minority Students, endowed with millions of dollars. Rather than requiring minority students to come to New York to audition for entrance to the school, Juilliard set up regional auditions across the country. Minority applications rose fivefold, but minority admissions stayed low, since most applicants were not qualified. The school needed to start earlier in the process, then–Juilliard president Joseph Polisi told funder Irene Diamond. So the conservatory brought local black and Hispanic elementary school students to the New York campus for individual tutoring and group lessons. The school provided each student with an instrument to play at home and one to play at school. It reached out to parents in the hope of involving them in their child’s music education. Today, the Music Advancement Program serves about 100 students a year.

So prized have been black students and musicians that they are treated with kid gloves. Violinist Earl Carlyss was a member of the Juilliard Quartet for 20 years and a teacher for even longer. In the 1960s, Carlyss helped determine whether students at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore would continue into their next year of study. One violinist played so poorly that Carlyss mentioned him to the dean. “We know,” came the answer, “but no one has had the nerve to boink him.” At Michigan State University, Carlyss tried to correct a student’s sloppy playing. Two weeks later, nothing had changed. Have you practiced? Carlyss asked. “I don’t have to,” the student responded. “I’ll always have a job.”

Prejudice tragically limited black musical opportunity in the first half of the twentieth century. But even in that cruel period, some black musicians were recognized and elevated, complicating the monolithic story of oppression that the classical music profession is now telling about itself. These musicians included bassist Charles Burrell, cellist Donald White, and double bassist Henry Lewis—who became music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in 1968 and eventually conducted nearly every other major American orchestra, sometimes accompanying his then-wife, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne. More recently, the late conductor James DePreist was mentored by Leonard Bernstein. Michael Morgan, conductor of the Oakland Symphony, received a Tanglewood fellowship at 19, the youngest such recipient. Morgan became Leonard Slatkin’s assistant at the St. Louis Symphony at 23. Starting in 1986, he worked for seven years as assistant conductor at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.

Since at least the 1970s, performing ensembles have sought new works from black composers. George Walker’s numerous commissions came from the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, among other groups. Walker’s Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in honor of a black tenor, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996. Walker received fellowships from the Fulbright, Whitney, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Koussevitzky, and MacDowell foundations.

And yet we are to believe that music ensembles, having commissioned pieces from black composers, then turned around and suppressed those same composers out of racial bias. If few contemporary, black-composed works entered the regular repertoire, the reason is the same as that affecting new works by white composers: audiences continue to reject post-tonal idioms, no matter how many honors the academy confers on their practitioners.

Today, black musicians are welcomed with open arms. One musician with a major orchestra marvels at the oppositional stance taken by some of his fellows, such as clarinetist Anthony McGill and his brother, flutist Demarre McGill. “The business has handed these guys opportunity after opportunity. To turn around and say: ‘It’s a racist industry!’ I want to shake them. They should be ambassadors!” Another leading player notes that the McGills “aren’t the exception; they are the rule. People fall over black students to give them every opportunity to have a shot. I did it, too. Since 1990, at least, black privilege has been in effect in classical music.” Opera singers—such as Pretty Yende, Angel Blue, and Julia Bullock, all enormously talented in their own right—have enjoyed an extra boost to their careers from being black, according to a former opera executive.

If, before 2020, being black was an asset in a field already agonizing about diversity, going forward, it will provide jet propulsion. Commissions are pouring in to black composers, and many orchestras are putting a black-authored work on every program. Expect a rash of new [Only] Black Lives Matter–themed works, such as Carlos Simon’s “An Elegy: A Cry from the Grave,” dedicated to Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and others “murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power,” and Jonathan Woody’s “Nigra Sum Sed Formosa—I Am Black but Beautiful (A Fantasia on Microaggressions),” a madrigal sung to microaggressive comments that black singers have allegedly been subjected to, such as “I bet you sing spirituals very well” and “When you stood up, I was shocked, you should play in the NFL.”

Black musicians are highly sought after for consultancy jobs and newly created fellowships. Small performing ensembles seeking philanthropic support to stay alive during the pandemic are now grilled on their racial makeup. If their musicians, staff, or board are too white, they can forget about a grant. Many are going under.

Even early-music ensembles, a rarefied subspecialty of music, are feeling the post-Floyd heat. The Continuo Foundation now conditions its grants to early-music groups based on their programming of works by “women and people of color” and on the “diversity” of their performers and administrators. But there were virtually no black composers in medieval and Renaissance Europe, since the continent was overwhelmingly Caucasian. Female composers were rare (thus the eternal fuss over Hildegard von Bingen). As for performers, blacks have only recently started going into the early-music field. There are not enough of them now to seed every period-instrument group that desperately needs financial support—i.e., every period-instrument group.

Conservatories are creating separate programs for blacks. The Manhattan School of Music announced in October 2020 a new Artist Scholars program, peopled exclusively by black “performers, educators, activists, directors, choreographers, and administrators.” In November, one of its Artist Scholars gave a Zoom lecture on the American minstrel tradition; it was incoherent. The Artist Scholar congratulated himself repeatedly on his “very Brechtian theatrical technique,” which consisted of superimposing the original lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” onto Paul Robeson’s cinematic performance of the song. This intervention was a major theatrical coup of “Brechtian-Weillian irony and dissonance,” according to its author. The school’s provost thanked the Artist Scholar afterward for his “spectacular presentation.”

If institutional support and encouragement of black musicians have been unequivocal for decades, why has their percentage in orchestras barely budged? Because over the last 60 years, two of the three main sources for exposing a child to classical music—circumambient culture and music education—have dried up. Violinist Joseph Striplin had a “classic inner-city mother,” he says, but he had the good fortune to come of age in the 1940s and 1950s, when “music was vibrant in the country and at school.” Classical music themes were ubiquitous on television shows and in the movies. Every junior high and high school in Detroit had its own orchestra; students were taken to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Young People’s concerts at the Masonic Temple and the Ford Auditorium. “We heard and we saw; the orchestra was massive to my young eyes,” he says. Striplin attended the prestigious Cass Technical High School and played in its orchestra with students who had had lessons since they were young. “I loved this music and knew I needed to find out how to play like that,” he says.

Since then, music education has been decimated, and classical music has disappeared from the public sphere. From 1962 to 1989, the percentage of high schools with orchestras fell from 67 percent to 17 percent, according to Billboard. Seventy-seven percent of schools polled in a University of Illinois study dropped piano instruction; 40 percent dropped string instruction. If a child’s home is not exposing him to classical music, he is likely not being exposed at all.

Today, blacks are not being pushed out of classical music; they are not being pushed in by their families at a rate necessary to compete. “Unless you start the violin at age seven, you won’t be auditioning for the New York Philharmonic when you’re 25,” says Emanuel Ax. And it is overwhelmingly Asian families who insist on such early discipline, placing the same emphasis on mastering an instrument (or two) as was once found in Jewish homes. Parents sacrifice for private lessons; the household stays quiet when a child is practicing.

Without home transmission, the best hope for creating more black classical musicians is to restore widespread music education. The antiracism advocates have said little about that imperative, however. It’s easier to extract racial quotas from compliant organizations than it is to engineer a change as profound as exposing students to a vanishing musical aesthetic. Packing off every opera and orchestra administrator to implicit bias training will not produce a single competitively qualified black musician. Nor will potential students be inclined to pick up the violin after learning that its repertoire belongs to a white supremacist tradition. But more power is to be gained by pushing the racism line than by pursuing the unlikely rebirth of public school music training. So the search has been on to find racial scapegoats. (read more)

2021-08-02 d
STONE AGE THINKERS exaggerate dangers to eviscerate freedoms

Anthony Fauci Claims With COVID There Are No More Individual Rights

I’m more worried about what is happening behind the scenes in the non-COVID universe while everyone is distracted by the purposeful weaponization of the healthcare institutions.  It’s the other thing, the unseen activity, that is most troublesome when the leftists are this entrenched on a singular narrative.

In this clip from Anthony Fauci on ABC This Week Sunday [Rumble Link], the Director [for Life] of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, claims that individual rights no longer exist during the era of COVID-19When you consider the mindset of the far-left, his opinion on communal rights -vs- individual rights is right in line with the collectivist perspective.  These people are dangerous.

“The fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person who may be vulnerable … So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights.”

It appears from the visible evidence, the Delta variant of COVID-19 may well be more transmissible; perhaps even more transmissible due to increased shedding from people who are vaccinated carriers of the virus.  However, the death rate is lower than the traditional flu.

All of these extreme mitigation efforts appear constructed to protect against something that just doesn’t carry the scale of risk that would match the severity of alarm we are bombarded with.   If you turn off the television, disconnect from corporate media and tune-out these alarmist proclamations, life appears to be carrying along just fine.

Full Interview is available here
(read more)

2021-08-02 c
STONE AGE THINKERS sometimes apologize

German newspaper APOLOGIZES for pushing COVID lockdown hysteria and harming society

For its contributions in spreading Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) lies that led to mass lockdowns, mask mandates, and psychological and physical torture by power-hungry government officials, the German news outlet Bild has issued a formal apology.

The paper put up a video – you can watch it here – specifically addressing the youth of Germany, who have arguably suffered the most from all the tyranny. Bild says it made a mistake by supporting Chinese Virus authoritarianism, which has completely destroyed society.

“To the millions of children in this country for whom our society is responsible, I want to express here what neither our government nor our Chancellor dares to tell you: we ask you to forgive us,” the paper now says.

“Forgive us for this policy which, for a year and a half, has made you victims of violence, neglect, isolation, and loneliness.”

Bild went on to express regret for ever covering any of the government’s fake news about the Fauci Flu, which the paper says was “like poison,” making people feel like they “were a mortal danger to society.”

“You are not a danger to society,” Bild now says. “Don’t believe this lie. It’s up to us to protect you. What happened to our children, many people and Bild denounced it.”

“Nothing happened. Merkel organized a summit for children? No! Instead, we persuaded our children that they were going to murder their grandma if they dared to be what they are: children. Or if they met their friends. None of this has been scientifically proven.”

The medical fascists took advantage of innocent children, using them as pawns to push more tyranny

Since children are unable to fight back and oftentimes do not even know they are being lied to by adults or authority figures they have been taught to trust, many were forced into masks or told they needed to get injected with a Trump Vaccine in order to avoid spreading illness.

This destroyed countless children’s mental health, and many are now traumatized, possibly for life, because of Fauci’s lies.

“It was easy to force that on the children,” Bild says. “They can’t defend themselves and they don’t vote. When a state steals the rights of a child, it must prove that by doing so it protects him against concrete and imminent danger. This proof has never been provided.”

Just about everything that was spread like wildfire over the past year concerning the Wuhan Flu was government-schemed propaganda. And to this day, that propaganda continues to be spread, demonstrating itself to be the true virus.

“It has been replaced by propaganda presenting the child as a vector of the pandemic,” says Bild about the government’s lies, which come in the name of “science.”

“Those who wanted to contradict this propaganda were never invited to the expert table. Our policies would do better to open schools and sports halls rather than polling stations, otherwise they will have on their conscience, and will leave in the history books, a multitude of innocent souls.”

These are powerful statements from Bild, and we commend the paper for having the bravery to speak out. You are unlikely to find any similar humility from any American fake news outlets, which have chosen to double down in spreading their plandemic lies.

The latest media schtick, in fact, involves blaming the “unvaccinated” for the sudden “surge” in new cases of the so-called “delta variant,” which the Biden regime says will kill everyone unless there is full compliance with getting a Trump Vaccine. (read more)

2021-08-02 b
STONE AGE THINKERS persuade with propaganda

“That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is”

A quick and dirty guide to regime propaganda

Gaslighting getting you down? Feel like the regime has dialed the Megaphone up to, and past, eleven? You’re not crazy. It’s definitely happening and likely to get worse as our masters’ ability to cope with reality further worsens—or worse, they gain the complete and absolute control they seek. They’re both scornful and terrified of dissent, which explains why they incessantly shriek at us and lie to our faces.

So, to help you navigate the twitstorm, I present a guide to seven of the regime’s most common, oft-deployed lies. This is not meant to be comprehensive. I’m sure there are tactics they use that either I haven’t crystalized or that aren’t front-of-mind at the moment. I encourage others to expand the catalogue with their own observations. The better we can understand how they try to manipulate us, the better we can resist and counter it all.

Let’s start with the Unholy Trinity of ruling class horse manure. These first three are similar, but subtle differences determine the ways they’re used in differing circumstances.

The Law of Merited Impossibility

The coinage is Rod Dreher’s and goes back to the early debates on homosexual marriage. As Dreher formulates it, the Law of Merited Impossibility holds: “That will never happen, and when it does, boy will you [homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, whatever] deserve it.”

This Law is used, first, to disarm resistance to the latest leftist enthusiasm. Whatever the innovation is, it will have no adverse consequences. None! Puberty blockers and disfiguring surgeries have no downsides whatsoever. How dare you suggest they might!

Its second purpose is to dismiss out of hand “slippery slope” arguments—despite, or because of, the fact that every single such argument over the last twenty years at least has proved true. Worried that allowing people to “self-identify” as whatever sex they want will lead to pervy 50-year-old men exposing themselves to’ tween girls? Insist, loudly and indignantly, that that will NEVER happen and anyone who suggests it might is an alarmist bigot with a heart full of hate.

The third purpose is to enforce the new caste system. Those who get to impose fresh irrational indignities on the rest of us are the upper caste. Those who object, or even have reservations, are lower. The latter are not allowed to harbor, much less express, any doubts. Whatever humiliation the upper caste has planned for us, we deserve and must meekly accept. Hence when said pervy 50-year-old actually does start waving around “her” equipment in the girls’ locker room, if any parent dares object, let ’em have it with both barrels. That thing that ten seconds ago you said would “never” happen? Now it’s righteous punishment for the retrograde.

The Law of Merited Impossibility has done wonders for the Left in helping to ram through a wide variety of radical societal changes and cow into silence all opposition. It’s currently busy destroying girls’ and women’s sports, an outcome that we were assured would “never” happen. Though one wonders what the ladies did do to deserve it.

The Law is a bit passé, though, because our rulers rarely any longer feel the need to reassure normie Americans that everything will turn out OK, that the things we most fear won’t happen. Mostly, the holders of the Megaphone just skip to the second half, the angry insistence that we deserve it

The Celebration Parallax

A parallax is the apparent difference in position of the same object seen from different vantage points. For instance, an analogue speedometer that reads sixty miles per hour to the driver, but fifty to the passenger—even though the needle itself is only in one place.

The Celebration Parallax may be stated as: “the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it.” In contemporary speech, on any “controversial” topic—or, to say better, regime priority—the decisive factor is the intent of the speaker. If she can be presumed to be celebrating the phenomenon under discussion, she may shout her approval from the rooftops. If not, he better shut up before someone comes along to shut him up.

Note also that the key distinction here is celebration versus non-celebration, not support versus opposition. One need not actually, clearly oppose the subject under discussion in order to be blameworthy. Declining or neglecting to celebrate it forcefully enough is enough. As in Stalin’s Russia, lack of enthusiastic clapping is regarded as opposition. The legitimacy of one’s right to state the same identical fact, in the same identical language, depends on who one is and what one thinks of it. Since the left presumes that all persons of color approve of the phenomena covered by the Celebration Parallax, the Parallax is really a test to distinguish allies from Deplorables.

To the best of my recollection, the origin of the Celebration Parallax arose from the need to defend “affirmative action,” a very unpopular policy since its inception. The party line therefore goes like this: People of color must be granted explicit preferences to overcome America’s “legacy of racism” so that we may “diversify” America’s power centers and end white male dominance, a move that—in addition to being necessary to address the country’s inherent racism—improves those institutions by infusing them with different and hitherto neglected points of view. Also, kids of color need “role models” who “look like themselves.”

But there is no such thing as “reverse discrimination,” which is itself a racist term, and there are no “quotas” (another racist term) whatsoever, but only “timetables,” “goals,” and measures to evaluate applicants and candidates “holistically.”

On no subject is the Parallax more prevalent than immigration. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the demographic transformation of the United States is either a glorious trend that portends a permanent Democratic majority and a more “vibrant” future, or else a “conspiracy theory” that is not happening in any way at all, no-how.

The Left insists that concerns from certain quarters that immigration policy in America (and Europe) amounts to a “great replacement” is a “dangerous,” “evil,” “racist,” “false” “conspiracy theory.” But a leftist New York Times columnist can write an article entitled “We Can Replace Them” and … nothing. Same fundamental point, except she’s all for it and her targets aren’t. A U.S. Senator can exult that demographic change will doom Republicans. Joe Biden himself can refer to an “unrelenting stream of immigration.” Except they’re celebrating it and calling for it. Anyone on the Right who uses the exact same words will not merely be denounced; the very fact pattern that is affirmed when Biden says it will be denied when the Rightist repeats it.

The Law of Salutary Contradiction

Which brings us to the Law of Salutary Contradiction, whose formulation is: “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is.” While the Law of Merited Impossibility applies to the future, this one is about the present. It’s what the ruling class immediately switches to after what they insisted would “never” happen is happening before everyone’s eyes.

Is the NSA spying on Tucker Carlson? That’s an insane conspiracy theory … which is also warranted by Tucker’s treasonous contacts with Russian officials as he seeks an interview with Putin.

Is the Biden Administration inviting in illegal immigrants, then putting them on military planes and shipping them to the heartland? Absolutely not … and these future Nobel Prize winners deserve their shot at the American Dream.

Once you learn to recognize this pattern, you see it everywhere. It is the cornerstone of ruling class rhetoric in the current year.


Turning from the Unholy Trinity, we see that the ruling class condemns all of us as entitled boors. In their eyes, we deserve nothing. We have no reasonable wants nor any just complaints. Our only role is to accept getting nothing and learning to like it.

Our masters bleat about “democracy” but have redefined the word to mean “getting exactly what we”—i.e., they—“want.” Any ostensibly “democratic” outcome that might result in us getting what we want is ipso facto illegitimate. Border wall? Fascist! Immigration enforcement? Racist and fascist! Law and order? Double racist and fascist! Better trade deals? Economically illiterate! An end to endless wars? Catastrophic! And also, somehow, “anti-Semitic.” Penis-free girls’ bathrooms? Transphobic!

No matter is too small, too local, too private, or too inconsequential to escape their gaze and slip their punishment. Bake the cake, bigot.

Mostly what they bleat, though, is anti-American, anti-white, anti-conservative, anti-Christian, anti-rural, anti-Southern, anti-Red-state, anti-redneck, anti-working-class hate. Every media organ and cultural citadel blares this message loudly and incessantly.

The purpose is hard to figure. On one hand, it’s demoralizing, which certainly serves ruling class ends, and it fires up their coalition. On the other hand, if you’re trying to boil a frog, it’s best not to tell him the plan, as he might try to jump out of the pot.

Which brings us to:

The Lie-Back Imperative

This tactic, and the next one, are related to what Steve Sailer has called “The War on Noticing.”

The regime knows it’s in a difficult rhetorical position. The heart of its argument is that some people are inherently innocent and good while others are inherently guilty and bad and must be treated accordingly. To ears insufficiently attuned to this new understanding of justice, this can sound unjust. Tying moral worth to circumstances of birth? Not treating people equally? Punishing the living for the sins of the dead?

Why all this is—contrary to appearances, logic, and common sense—“just” requires considerable explanation. To the extent that people “get it,” they will sharply divide between those who say that the “advantaged” have it coming and those who object “No, I don’t.”

The problem for the regime, therefore, is that while its message is very effective at egging on its own side, it can be equally effective at alarming and rousing its targets. The ideal solution would be to come up with a public message that rallies the regime’s base while lulling its targets, but this turns out to be very difficult, if not impossible.

Another option is to forbid the targets from speaking up—hence the Celebration Parallax.

But the regime’s preferred mode is not merely to allow its targets to speak, but to require it—so long as the targets deny the regime apparatchik said what she said. Hence the response to “You are evil and deserve what’s coming to you” must be “You don’t think ill of me and wish me no harm.” Every punch in the face must be publicly rationalized, by the victim, as a massage. The purpose is partly to bully the frog into staying in the pot and partly a matter of humiliation. In the oft-quoted words of Anthony Daniels [a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple], “a society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

A great many “conservatives” are not merely willing but eager to play along. Indeed, whole institutions of the establishment “Right” do little else but reassure their ostensible constituency that the Left not only doesn’t mean its proto-genocidal rhetoric but isn’t even saying it.

It is an odd feature of the current year that calling an avowed enemy a liar—publicly insisting that her plain words could not possibly mean what they plainly say—not only fails to provoke an angry denial but is welcomed by the liar herself. Anything to keep the regime’s targets somnambulant for as long as possible. The more Americans who wake up and realize that contemporary leftism is a revenge plot with themselves as its targets, the more will object and try to stop it. This is what the regime, at present, most fears and is trying to prevent.

The Enmity Counteraccusation

This one is perhaps the most brazen. As I put it elsewhere, “the enemy calls you its enemy for recognizing its enmity.”

As regime hacks spew vile, borderline—and sometimes explicitly—violent rhetoric at you, they will immediately wheel and counterattack if you dare object. Don’t appreciate being called evil because of your race? Then you are “divisive”! Dare put up your hands to block an incoming punch? That’s violence! You’re just supposed to take it.

They’re enemies who treat you like enemies while they insist that you treat them as friends. At least, though, unlike the housebroken “Right,” they stab you in the front.

A related point is that if you so much as speculate as to where their insane vitriol might lead the country, you will be accused of wishing for that outcome. It’s entirely possible that decades of anti-American, anti-white, anti-Christian animosity, coupled with nation-destroying trade, immigration and foreign policies, will not lead to civil war. Then again, it’s entirely possible that they might. If they do, the ruling class and the Left will bear the blame. Naturally, though, they will blame us.

Indeed, they already are. Attempts to head off such a conflict by warning about it are treated as provocations intended to produce said conflict. One can be forgiven for wondering if their plan is to start it and then say we started it, sort of like insisting Poland triggered the Second World War by shooting back.

“You’re worthless, baby;
and if you even think of trying to leave me, I’ll kill you”


Which brings us to the last. Deplorable Americans are loudly and incessantly said to be the worst people in the history of the planet, pure unadulterated evil, with no legitimate concerns, interests or grievances.

Well, OK. Then why live with us? Why treat as anathema even the most moderate, banal, attempt to allow some measure of federalism and local control?

There can only be two answers: either our masters know (or intuit) deep down that we can live without them but they can’t live without us, or else they want to keep us around to administer what they view as deserved punishment.

Being neither a psychiatrist nor a theologian, I could not say whether the roots of this behavior are psychotic or demonic*, but in this layman’s judgement, it exhibits key characteristics of both.

But understand this: they hate you and want you cancelled and ostracized, or at least utterly subservient and obedient. You owe them no consideration. Their every argument, every sentence, every word are proffered in bad faith. As Mary McCarthy said of Lilian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie—including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

The regime is powerful, which means we must calibrate our resistance carefully. But to think clearly, our minds must be free. Which requires understanding its rhetoric and seeing through it. I hope this short guide is useful in that effort. (read more)

Editor's Note: * Demonic, is the unequivocal answer from Christians. See:
John 8: 44 (addressing the Pharisees/Talmudists)

2 Corinthians 11: 3, 13 - 15

Ephesians 2:2

Ephesians 6: 12

1 Peter 5: 8b

Revelation 9: 11

2021-08-02 a
STONE AGE THINKERS
employ brute force

“The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind and is always sure of finding new and unforeseen allies in continuing its martyrology.”

— John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Lord Acton


*

“All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”

— Hannah Arendt


2021
-08-01 l
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION XII


Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society:
by Lawrence Auster

The worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctess in covering up for that group.

First Corollary: The more egregiously any such group behaves, the more evil we are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s bad behavior.

The First Law and its corollary are intrinsic to liberalism. Once the equality of all human groups is accepted as a given, any facts that make a minority or foreign group seem worse than the majority native group must be either covered up or blamed on the majority.
 
2021-08-01 k
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION XI
(I cannot stop laughing. The Fatosaurus was robbed by his black pets.)

Police Scanner: Illinois Democrat Governor Pritzker's residence in Illinois robbed by
two black males with backpacks

— CarolinaGirl (@Carolin15161363) August 1, 2021

*

JUST IN – Governor Pritzker's residence in Illinois robbed:
Scanner
pic.twitter.com/GbE2GrBSon

— Disclose.tv  (@disclosetv) August 1, 2021


2021-08-01 j
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION X
(peak stupidity and a load of feces)

Sex should be removed as a legal designation on the public part of birth certificates,
the American Medical Association (AMA) said Monday.
https://t.co/U9w38qvwtV
pic.twitter.com/NeIPafpv3T

— WebMD (@WebMD) July 31, 2021


2021-08-01 i
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IX
(surge peaks and fecal spread)

U.S. research firm Fundstrat highlighted that the U.K.’s delta surge peaked after around 45 days, similar to the 50-day mark seen in India, where the strain was first detected…. lags in the system could mean the situation continues to change. “But, it is hard to argue against the idea that the current Delta wave in the U.K. is turning out to be much, much milder than we anticipated,” (source)

*

Potential intestinal infection and faecal–oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41575-021-00416-6

Prolonged viral shedding in feces of pediatric patients with coronavirus disease 2019//
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32276848/

Shedding of SARS-CoV-2 in feces and urine and its potential role in person-to-person transmission and the environment-based spread of COVID-19
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32836117/

Infectious SARS-CoV-2 in Feces of Patient with Severe COVID-19
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/8/20-0681_article


2021-08-01 h
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VIII

I have honestly never seen more in-fighting among people skeptical or critical of the
ruling class than I see now. It's time to build bridges and realize that there's about to
be a boot on all of our necks, regardless of what you think about vaccines, masks, etc.

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) July 30, 2021


2021-08-01 g
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VII
(Would you rather live in Florida or California or New York? It's not just the Covid-Con; Florida is one of the few states without a state income tax.)


1. Cuomo sent COVID patients back to nursing homes, killing thousands, &
covered it up; DeSantis didn't.


2. Cuomo: 10 sexual harassment accusers. Ongoing impeachment probe.

3. COVID deaths per million: NY 2,757, USA 1,868, FL 1,820.

4. Unemployment: NY 7.7, USA 5.9, FL 5.0.
Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank August 1, 2021

 
*

Florida has a lower COVID death rate than California in every age bracket.

Max "Google Slavitt Ingenix" @MaxNordau August 1, 2021



2021-08-01 f
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VI
(Mask 'mandates' are pure theater - a cynical con of the worst sort.)

Rep. @chiproytx: “We have a crisis at our border and we’re playing footsie with
mask mandates in the people’s house… This sham of an institution is doing nothing
for the American people.”
pic.twitter.com/gjgIo0nSV1

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 28, 2021

*

EXCLUSIVE: Not 24 hours into the indoor mask mandate she imposed on DC,
Muriel Bowser officiated an indoor wedding in Adams Morgan and stayed to fete
with *hundreds* of fellow maskless guests.


Tiana Lowe @TianaTheFirst August 1, 2021


*

Thread: The Idiocy of Mandates

I’m going to explain why further C-19 restrictions and mask mandates are counter
productive to the point of being dangerous

Our health officials are playing stupid games at this point because it’s obvious there
is no objective to be achieved

1 pic.twitter.com/7hMQeZkg3p

— Gummi Bear (@gummibear737) July 30, 2021


2021-08-01 e
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION V

🚨Breaking AZ Audit Update: Senate recount is officially finished!

Truck just pulled in to take ballots back to the state, W/ PROPER CHAIN OF
CUSTODY DOCUMENTATION from their time at the audit.

County officials still HAVE NOT complied with Supoenas

Report expected soon👀 pic.twitter.com/fzDzKPphFX

— Julian Conradson (@JCConradson) July 29, 2021

*

To Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger:

You should stop taking your lying points, I mean talking points, from your
friend Stacey Abrams.

1. SOS doesn’t make laws.

2. Your mass absentee mailing deal with Stacey is the reason GA’s election
out of control.


3. Yes you’ll be in court after audits, get a defense lawyer.
https://t.co/SVFJk2UwkX

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) July 31, 2021


2021-08-01 d
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IV
(Nightmare? You want to see a real nightmare? Just wait for election audit results to be announced.)


After today’s press conference senior Biden staffers were referring to him as
“The Nightmare on Elm Street” per WH official

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) July 30, 2021



2021-08-01 c
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION III

Eviction Eve is a good time to review this megathread.

If you’ve been following, you know exactly what comes next and why 
https://t.co/8LLx3y9tLt

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) July 31, 2021


2021-08-01 b
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION II



*
The U.S. agency leading the fight against Covid-19 gave up a crucial surveillance tool tracking the effectiveness of vaccines just as a troublesome new variant of the virus was emerging.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped comprehensively tracking what are known as vaccine breakthrough cases in May, the consequences of that choice are only now beginning to show. (source)

*
Recently, a 'Big Lie' from the Alzheimer in Chief:

PRES. BIDEN: "You're not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
pic.twitter.com/5x1xfQryIX

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 22, 2021


*
Statement from the Leftist idiot destroying the California economy:

NEW: CA will have the strongest state vaccine verification system in the US and
will require state employees & healthcare workers to provide proof of vaccination—
or get tested regularly.

We’re experiencing a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Everyone that can get vaccinated—should.

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) July 26, 2021



2021-08-01 a
THE STATE OF THE DISUNION I
(Current best guess how the synthetic bio-weapon infects human cells.)

How the coronavirus infects cells — and why Delta is so dangerous

Scientists are unpicking the life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 and how the virus uses tricks to evade detection.

The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.

“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.

Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?

Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).

In Amaro’s simulation, when the RBD lifted up above the glycan cloud, two glycans swooped in to lock it into place, like a kickstand on a bicycle. When Amaro mutated the glycans in the computer model, the RBD collapsed. McLellan’s team built a way to try the same experiment in the lab, and by June 2020, the collaborators had reported that mutating the two glycans reduced the ability of the spike protein to bind to a human cell receptor — a role that no one has previously recognized in coronaviruses, McLellan says. It’s possible that snipping out those two sugars could reduce the virus’s infectivity, says Amaro, although researchers don’t yet have a way to do this.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been developing a detailed understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells. By picking apart the infection process, they hope to find better ways to interrupt it through improved treatments and vaccines, and learn why the latest strains, such as the Delta variant, are more transmissible.

What has emerged from 19 months of work, backed by decades of coronavirus research, is a blow-by-blow account of how SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells (see ‘Life cycle of the pandemic coronavirus’). Scientists have discovered key adaptations that help the virus to grab on to human cells with surprising strength and then hide itself once inside. Later, as it leaves cells, SARS-CoV-2 executes a crucial processing step to prepare its particles for infecting even more human cells. These are some of the tools that have enabled the virus to spread so quickly and claim millions of lives. “That’s why it’s so difficult to control,” says Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London.

Barbed and ready

It starts with the spikes. Each SARS-CoV-2 virion (virus particle) has an outer surface peppered with 24–40 haphazardly arranged spike proteins that are its key to fusing with human cells. For other types of virus, such as influenza, external fusion proteins are relatively rigid. SARS-CoV-2 spikes, however, are wildly flexible and hinge at three points, according to work published in August 2020 by biochemist Martin Beck at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues.

That allows the spikes to flop around, sway and rotate, which could make it easier for them to scan the cell surface and for multiple spikes to bind to a human cell. There are no similar experimental data for other coronaviruses, but because spike-protein sequences are highly evolutionarily conserved, it is fair to assume the trait is shared, says Beck.

Early in the pandemic, researchers confirmed that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins attach to a familiar protein called the ACE2 receptor, which adorns the outside of most human throat and lung cells. This receptor is also the docking point for SARS-CoV, the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). But compared with SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 an estimated 2–4 times more strongly, because several changes in the RBD stabilize its virus-binding hotspots5.

Worrying variants of SARS-CoV-2 tend to have mutations in the S1 subunit of the spike protein, which hosts the RBDs and is responsible for binding to the ACE2 receptor. (A second spike subunit, S2, prompts viral fusion with the host cell’s membrane.)

The Alpha variant, for example, includes ten changes in the spike-protein sequence, which result in RBDs being more likely to stay in the ‘up’ position. “It is helping the virus along by making it easier to enter into cells,” says Priyamvada Acharya, a structural biologist at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in Durham, North Carolina, who is studying the spike mutations.

The Delta variant, which is now spreading around the world, hosts multiple mutations in the S1 subunit, including three in the RBD that seem to improve the RBD’s ability to bind to ACE2 and evade the immune system.
(complete PDF version)

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2021 ARCHIVE

January 1 - 6

January 7 - 13

January 14 - 20

January 21 - 24

January 25 - 28

January 29 - 31

February 1 - 4

February 5 - 10

February 11 - 21

February 22 - 24

February 25 - 28
March 1 - 9

March 10 - 17

March 18 - 23

March 24 - 31
April 1 - 8

April 9 - 14

April 15 - 18

April 19 - 24

April 25 - 30

May 1 - 5

May 6 - 10

May 11 - 15

May 16 - 22

May 23 - 26

May 27 - 29

May 30 - 31
 
June 1 - 5

June 6 - 8

June 9 - 12

June 13 - 19

June 20 - 24

June 25 - 30
July 1 - 6

July 7 - 10

July 11 - 17

July 18 - 23

July 24 - 28

July 29 - 31
August
September
October

November

December


2020 ARCHIVE

January
February March
April 1 - 15

April 16- 30

May 1 - 15

May 16- 31
 
June 1 - 15

June 16- 30
July 1 - 15

July 16- 31
Aug 1 - 15

Aug 16 - 31
September 1 - 15

September 16 - 30
October 1 - 15

October 16 - 23

Ocober 24 - 31
November 1 - 8

November 9 - 15

November 16 - 21

November 22 - 30
December 1 - 7

December 8 - 12

December 13 - 16

December 17 - 20

December 21 - 27

December 28 - 31

-0-
...
 News and facts for those sick and tired of the National Propaganda Radio version of reality.


- Unlike all the legacy media, our editorial offices are not in Langley, Virginia.


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-
Close the windows so you don't hear the mockingbird outside, grab a beer, and see what the hell is going on as we witness the controlled demolition of our society.


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No Thanks
If you let them redefine words, they will control language.
If you let them control language, they will control thoughts.
If you let them control thoughts, they will control you. They will own you.

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