What Domination Of The Genetic Lottery Looks And Sounds Like...,

The FBI Had Hunter Biden's Laptop And Kept Silent While .45 Was Impeached

NYPost |  Joe Biden’s campaign said Thursday they had no problem with Twitter and Facebook’s unprecedented censoring of The Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s business dealings — even admitting they were “glad” it happened.

The Future Is Here Already, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

Forbes  |  Mexican drug cartels are using weaponized consumer drones in their latest gang war, according to reports in El Universal and other local news media. 

A citizens’ militia group in Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, formed to protect farmers from the cartel, found two drones in a car used by gunmen belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a group estimated to control a third of the drugs consumed in the U.S. The drones had plastic containers taped to them filled with C4 explosive and ball bearing shrapnel. The militias say that they have heard explosions, and believe that the drones are the latest weapons an ongoing gang war. 

“The CJNG has been involved with such devices since late 2017 in various regions of Mexico,” says analyst Dr. Robert J. Bunker, Director of Research and Analysis at C/O Futures, LLC. “This cartel is well on its way to institutionalizing the use of weaponized drones. None of the other cartels appear to presently even be experimenting with the weaponization of these devices.”

In 2017, Bunker reported on the arrest of four CJNG members with a drone carrying a ‘papa bomba’ (potato bomb) , an improvised hand grenade. In 2018 an armed drone attacked the residence of a senior official in Baja, California. The official was not at home, and the attack seems to have been intended as a warning. Three CNJG drones with explosive were recovered this year , part of an arsenal for use against the rival Rosa de Lima cartel.

Bunker says that suitable consumer drones are now easy to acquire and use, but that the challenge is weaponizing them.

“The limiting factor is not so much the availability of military grade explosives—commercial or homemade explosives can be substituted—but the basic technical knowledge necessary to create improvised explosive devices or IEDs,” says Bunker.

Peggy Gurrrrlll...., That Invisible Knapsack Like Savoir Faire!!!

americanthinker |  Two weeks ago, we learned that Sandia National Laboratories, one of only three National Nuclear Security Administration research and development laboratories in the United States, was mandating that its white, male executives attend anti-white training sessions. Since then, a whistleblower has emerged, describing in detail the anti-white “critical race theory” that Sandia's management is foisting on employees at all levels, even though this racial attacks in the material manifestly violate federal law.

In mid-August, Christopher Rufo published a Twitter thread about a blatantly anti-white seminar at Sandia. To understand how wrong that seminar was, you need to know that Sandia, as a taxpayer-funded contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, must comply with federal anti-discrimination regulations. Thus, Executive Order 11246 Subpart B, sec. 202 states in relevant part:

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. 

Last I looked, white employees ticked off two boxes in the protected classes above: race and color.

Casey Peterson, an electrical engineer, has been unhappy about the direction that Sandia is taking. The seminar described in Rufo’s Twitter thread – as well as the fact that it was required only for white men – struck him as discriminatory. Moreover, Peterson believes that critical race theory is a dangerous form of anti-white discrimination premised up false facts and crackpot theories.

Peterson did something audacious in today’s environment: He pushed back hard, creating a lengthy, detailed, factually-supported video challenging the critical race theory that forms the basis of Sandia’s undoubtedly illegally and contractually-violative race-based discrimination. Christopher Rufo picks up the story:

 

Cautionary Submission In The Context Of The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Predictive Panopticon Proposal

I don't believe it's controversial to state that President Donald John Trump is one of THE WHYTEST WHYDTE MEN IN AMERICA. He's like an exemplar. Whatever else one might opine about the man, he's also a low-level baller, something at least approaching billionaire, and not a No Lives Matter, Left Behind, Little Man like you and I.  That said, these 9% muhuggahs here done put DJT through the ringer and then some, seriously.  The level of sustained, public ni****ization to which he has been subject is unprecedented in U.S. history. If what has been done to Trump is any indication of what the panopticon is willing to do to a political adversary, then TRUST and BELIEVE that you and I don't have even the barest iota of a prayer.

Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey and everyone who signed the Carter Page FISA application also be indicted for perjury? They signed a FISA application and made representations to the secret FISC on the basis of false information. Shouldn't representations to FISC need double verification since the accused has no opportunity to defend themselves or confront their accuser?

An average American doesn't get the option of saying I signed under penalty of perjury but I didn't know what I was signing.

What about James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress? The same crime for which Roger Stone was indicted and convicted.

And the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had no idea that they were involved in anything out of the ordinary? As long as they crossed the i's and dotted the t's this was just a routine case like hundreds of others and how could they have known the thing was a fix? Poor trusting souls, misled so badly by such bad people. 

Utter bullshit. They were only dealing with what must have been the most explosively sensitive issue ever to come before them. We're expected to believe they were innocents misled? 

Sometimes not asking the right questions, and searching questions too in such a high profile case as this, shows complicity just as much as if they'd been assisting.

McCabe's wife was an out-of-the-blue candidate who ran for public office (VA State Senator) in 2015, during which she reportedly received over $650,000 in support from Clinton crony, then VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Her candidacy was suspicious in that she had no previous political experience (she's a physician who was on record as having voted in a Republican primary!) and it was promoted over the local VA Democratic Party's recommended candidate, a well-known retired Army colonel, attorney and party activist.

And yet McCabe, during this same time, was rapidly promoted to #3 in the FBI and didn't recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email scandal investigation until one week before the 2016 election (and months after the infamous Comey press briefing in July when he declared Clinton would not be prosecuted), after the $650,000 donation came to light.

It's obvious why there are some who would think the very generous political contribution to McCabe's wife was in fact a backdoor bribe to her husband.

turcopelier |  I will be very clear up front--I have no inside information about what John Durham is going to do. But if he is simply following the facts and the evidence, Andrew McCabe will be one of the first to fall in the probe into the failed coup to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump. The record on this is indisputable. He lied in three separate instances--1) He lied to FBI investigators, according to Michael Horowitz, 2) He lied to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and 3) He lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

McCabe's record of lying starts with questions put to him by FBI investigators about leaks of sensitive FBI evidence to the media in the fall of 2016:

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe faced scorching criticism and potential criminal prosecution for changing his story about a conversation he had with a Wall Street Journal reporter. Now newly released interview transcripts show McCabe expressed remorse to internal FBI investigators when they pressed him on the about-face. 

In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal broke news about an FBI investigation involving then-candidate Hillary Clinton, describing internal discussions among senior FBI officials.

The apparent leak drew scrutiny from the bureau’s internal investigation team, which interviewed McCabe on May 9, 2017, the day President Donald Trump fired James Comey from his post as FBI director. The agents interviewed him as part of an investigation regarding a different media leak to the online publication Circa, and also asked him about the Journal story. 

In that interview, McCabe said he did not know how the Journal story came to be. But a few months later, his story changed after he reviewed his answer. 

McCabe's actions as an Artful Liar did not result in a prosecution. The Trump Justice Department reportedly decided to take a pass on that front, conceding that McCabe might prevail by insisting he just misremembered.

But subsequent statements by McCabe before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expose him as a terminal liar.

Nick Bostrom Proposed A Preposterously Butt-Licking Design On Your Future Little Man...,

Have one AI with godlike powers monitor everyone at all times but only interfere if a little man commits a thought crime that poses an existential risk. Bostrom imagines that you little men could easily get used to living in such a world, particularly once you  realize that it doesn't make any noticeable difference. 

Many little men already believe that there is literally a conscious being who watches everything they do - and - they're cool with that. All Bostrom is suggesting is that the status quo establishment implement an unconscious mechanism that monitors everything that you little men think, express, and potentially do. 

Think about it, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, that doesn't seem like it's worse, does it?

Here's Bostrom in conversation with Chris Anderson, the head of TED. Bostrom suggests implementation of a system of mass government surveillance in which each little man is fitted with necklace-like “freedom tags” with multi-directional cameras. 

Information gathered by these “freedom tags” would be sent to “freedom centers”, where artificial intelligence monitors the data, alerting human officers if they detect signs of a possible “black ball” idea. 

We are at greater risk from societal collapse arising from poorly functioning social systems.  We are at VASTLY greater risk from our subjugation to the corporate profit seeking egregoric structure and the specific extractive interaction with the environment that this demonic construct demands. (our economizating virtual reality)  than from some sort of Pandora's box technological black ball. 

We seem spastically incapable of eliminating fission and fusion weapons while struggling to implement and benefit from superior and safer thorium fission power generation technology. Rather than using improvements in photovoltaics and batteries to raise the resilience of individuals and small communities to natural disasters, we are using them to make the overall electrical power distribution system less resilient. 

Fermi's Paradox doesn't pivot on black ball technologies, rather, it pivots on primitive status seeking within a perversely incentivized archaic material culture. Intelligent species self-destruct because they fail to achieve their own possible psychological development.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

Why Exactly Is Eric Weinstein Caping Up For Bari Weiss?

Mayor Lucas Still Tryna Secure Funding From A Central Authoritay That Has Abandoned Him...,

indymedia |  Being a god on Earth is a natural human desire, and saving someone else is the closest we’ll ever come to achieving it. All Greek mythology and every major religion that followed has really been devoted to that single premise: the hero who leads the way is half god and half human, fueled as much by pity as by power.

When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that meant ‘Dies Trying’ or ‘Massacres Bad Guys.’ They went with ‘heros’---"protector." Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.

Conservatives frequently say that socialists want to have everything handed to them---that instead of complaining, they should be buckling up, showing up to work every day, and achieving something the "hard way." This seems a bit odd, considering that, all in all, achieving a complete and revolutionary overhaul of long-standing economic and social structures against the wishes of all the world’s centers of power is probably harder than, say, becoming a reasonably successful middle manager with two cars.

Our idea of what a revolution is like, how it is carried out, and who it is carried out by has been warped by our own cultural propaganda, and by the romantic Marxist propaganda of the twentieth century. We have this idea that revolutions are led by rational-minded, tea-sipping men in three-pointed hats who discuss the rights of man while burning the candle at both ends. Or we’re warped by the Marxist ideal of revolution: a rational, inevitable historical process in which the most enlightened, most sympathetic, least overdressed human beings team up with the Historical Trend itself to effect a glorious, clean revolution. In fact, revolutions are messy, ugly, gory affairs. Nowhere in our popular notion of revolutions are such factors as stupidity, bad luck, unintended comedy, and revolting madness allowed in. Yet most of the time revolutions are ‘led,’ by people we would call nutcases and who indeed were considered nutcases during their time---and in all likelihood were nutcases. While time and distance provide a romantic view of revolutions, at the time when they actually occur, they usually seem bizarre, uncalled-for, frightening, and evil to their contemporaries, which is why they almost always seem snuffed out at their inception.

Our lives and our movements today are as shaped by the political prisoners who still sit behind concrete walls as the prisons themselves invisibly shape the landscape of the world we seek to make more just. Many have had their lives either ended by the state or have been tried, convicted, and jailed for nothing more than the crime of loving their people enough to attempt a revolution in the United States.

They remain behind walls, often isolated, and at times tortured for their political beliefs. To accept this fact is to ask what ideas can be so dangerous that those who hold it in their heads must be hidden from us? To understand that these people and their circumstance do indeed exist is a necessary first step for a country whose cloak of democracy keeps us in denial. Americans believe political prisoners are a fact in countries like China, Iran, and Cuba but live the lie of the US government’s denial of the existence of US political prisoners within its borders.

We could live in a sustainable, just, free, and peaceful world. And yet we are descending into a world of perpetual wars; slavery; ignorance; overwork side by side with unemployment; vacant homes side by side with homelessness; specialization; crass materialism; contaminated food, water, and air; destitution; despair.

Since the men in the shadows are not about to change, the only hope is their removal from power---by any means necessary. Unfortunately, given these men’s cohesiveness and organizational skills, given their power over our minds, given their ability to convince the vast majority to act against its convictions and interests, given their success in establishing cross-generational dynasties, such removal presents humanity with a herculean task.

That Mixing Process Called REASSORTMENT Is One Of Two Ways Pandemic Viruses Are Created

ctvnews |  The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.

And an official of the World Health Organization's European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International's research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.

"At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present," medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark.

 "But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau."

The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn't die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.

Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a "serious error" on Baxter's part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company, Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of information it has released about the event.

On Friday, the company's director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

"It was live," Christopher Bona said in an email.

The contaminated product, which Baxter calls "experimental virus material," was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine -- including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly -- at a facility in the Czech Republic.

People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences.

Was Coronavirus A General Use Weapon Sellable To Any High Bidder - No Questions Asked?

nyu |  1.1.  What is a GPT?

So, what are these “fundamental” features of GPTs that would allow us to compare one to another? And more generally, what criteria can one use to distinguish a GPT from other technologies? 

Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1996)argue that a GPT should havethe following three characteristics: 1.Pervasiveness– The GPT should spread to most sectors.

2.Improvement– The GPT should get better over time and, hence, should keep low-ering the costs of its users.

3.Innovation spawning– The GPT should make it easier to invent and produce new products or processes.

Most technologies possess each of these characteristics to some degree, and thus a GPT cannot differ qualitatively from these other technologies. Note, too, that the third property is, in a sense, a version of the first property if we phrase the latter to say that the GPT should also spread to the innovation sector. Moreover, this list can be expanded to include more subtle features of GPTs, a subject that we consider in Section3.Yet we find these three basic characteristics to be a useful starting point for evaluating and com-paring the impact of various technologies through history. Investigating how Electricity and IT measure up on these three dimensions is the focus of Section2.

The "Because It's Legal" Open Thread

Counterpunch |  Well, the harsh truth about the integrity and fortitude of billionaires is finally out in the open for all to see, and the results are repugnant: Billionaires are gutless, chicken-hearted cowards. The proof is found in the pudding as several Silicon Valley billionaires purchase massive underground bunkers built in Murchison, Texas shipped to New Zealand, where the bunkers are buried in secret underground nests.

All of which begs this question: What’s with capitalism/capitalists? As soon as things turn sour, they turn south with tails between their legs and hightail it out of Dodge. However, they feast on and love steady, easy, orderly avenues (markets) to riches, but as soon as things heat up a bit, they turn tail and run.

History proves it time and again, for example, FDR rescued capitalism, literally rescued it, from certain demise by instituting social welfare programs for all of the citizens as capitalists fled and/or jumped off buildings.

Then during the 2008 financial meltdown capitalists were found curled up in the corners of rooms as all hell broke lose. Taxpayers, “Everyday Joes,” had to bail them out with $700B in public funds, and even more after that. All public funds! Taxpayers, average Americans, bailed them out!

Capitalists can’t take the heat as well as gritty American industrial workers that ended up bailing them out of the “jam of the century.” As explained by Allen Sinai chief global economist for Decision Economics, Inc, discussing Milton ‘laissez-faire’ Friedman’s free-market dogma vis a vis the 2008 economic meltdown: “The free market is not geared to take care of the casualties, because there’s no profit motive.”

The chicken-hearts from Silicon Valley already have Gulfstream G550s ($70M each) readied at a Nevada airstrip for the quickie escape journey to NZ.

Escape, from what?

Well, of course, the 99%, you silly!

Trump In Dallas Tomorrow...,

abcnews |  President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will both speak at the National Rifle Association convention in Dallas on Friday.

A White House official said Monday that Trump will attend the group's annual meeting. Trump has been a strong supporter of the NRA and enjoyed their backing in his 2016 campaign. Pence had already been scheduled to address the group.

After a deadly shooting in February at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump suggested he was open to new gun control measures. He held a meeting with senators, declaring that he would stand up to the gun lobby and calling for a "comprehensive" bill.

But Trump later backpedaled from those sweeping statements, offering a more limited plan. After he advocated increasing the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon to 21, Trump tweeted there was "not much political support" for the idea.

Your Views On Marijuana Legalization?

WaPo |  Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”

He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.

So if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week, that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they represent. He’ll show them.

WaPo |  Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum — known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own party’s governing values.

Sessions’s decision empowers U.S. attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.

This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.

Wandered Into A Still Working Time Machine Yesterday

Forty years on and functioning relatively well - not yet ruined by the Morlocks....,

Morlocks broke and killed every other time machine hereabouts...,

Space Is White

opendemocracy |  Fundamental to this process is the recognition that space is a potential destination for everyone. Contemporary Afro-futurist Denenge Akpem has attempted to spark this discussion through, “The MARS Project – Teaching Afro-futurism as Methodology of Liberation.” Akpem, a performance artist and sculptor who has taught at both the School of the Art Institute Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, invites her students to imagine the first mission to, and settlement of Mars through the lens of Afro-futurism and diversity.

In contrast, Mars One, a private Dutch initiative to settle Mars by 2026, has raised eyebrows for seeming to select its astronauts using a format akin to reality TV. And while National Geographic’s upcoming docu-drama miniseries MARS features an internationally, racially and gender diverse crew in 2033 aboard the Daedalus, it’s noticeable that they are led by an all-American white male mission commander who will “be the first to walk on Mars”.

In addition, if we are to colonize Mars or any other planet or space station for that matter, then genetics and population dynamics call for the largest and broadest sample of who we are to be included among the settlers. As Sun Ra highlights, the worlds of art, music, philosophy, science and literature are created by all of us. In space as on Earth, there is a deep value to embracing and maintaining the plurality of our existence: it celebrates our empathy and love for one another.

As Ra presaged, Space Is The Place for us to take this love—the best of Earth’s legacy—to Mars and beyond.

Subrealist Theology of a Red Door

So..., having meditated for quite a long time on degeneracy this year, I was more primed and ready to explode on the #MeToo trope than little Rocket Man's spanking new MIRV.  Not that I sincerely give a rat's nasty little flea-ridden patootty about the foolishness and phuckery of peasants - or even middle and upper class strivers peasants with a couple of nickels to rub together for that matter - I don't.

Above the gossipy fray, I don't care about the underlying gender/power disparities, or, virtue-signalling intersectional alliance with the oppressed either.  It's simply not part of my psychic constitution to care about the high-minded retelling of what amount to high-school style antics. The nekkid goings-on of chronologically grown-folk whose psychological development can best be described as de-evolutionary arrested, is of little interest to me.

Simple critter that I am, at the reptile-brain level of engagement, it all comes down to my very weakly resisted inclination to wallow in schadenfreude. I am a glutton for the vicarious enjoyment of watching other despicable apes get ripped to shreds on the plains of the popular-cultural serengeti by various and sundry wildly enflamed letgo beasts. I've been needing to go to confession six times a day for the past couple of months because of the obsessive and compulsive nature of my abiding and overarching enjoyment of this spectacle.

On the meta-level, i.e., philosophically above the sticky fray, what I care most deeply about is individual sovereignty and the associated requisite science and methodology of asymmetrical violation of the established order. If you haven't figured this out about me yet, if you haven't identified my "chief-feature" as it were, let me spell it out for you. I have a profound, all-consuming, and irrational problem with authoriteh.

This has not only been my career-limiting professional modus operandi, pared of all guise and dissimulation, it is truly my religion. It has been this way for me since about the age of eleven, when a phenomenal sunday school teacher encouraged me to question any and everything. This encouragement was permanently crystallized and violentized in my psyche at twelve when I first rebelled against peer authoriteh and beat the literal shit out of an arrogant neighborhood bully. (I would link to this buffoon, but I see he's still alive and never made it out of Wichita)

Anyway, as best I can gather, this current, energetic eruption of rule-breaking in polite society all started when the late Si Newhouse decided to go laughing to his grave by profoundly deviating  from the established behavioral norms of the Trans-American Protectorate (now archived) - by publishing Ronan Farrow's expose on the disgusting degenerate rape-pig Harvey Weinstein. Publication of that story in The New Yorker amounted to detonation of a nuclear grenade of asymmetric, unintended consequences. 

Said grenade has cracked an American cultural dam. Not only did it unleash the pent-up gender-flood from the oppressed and long-offended feminine-striver masses in entertainment/media/politics - it also unexpectedly unleashed the genuinely oppressed rage of the deplorables still rightfully and righteously angered over the cultural and moral pass given to serial rapist William Jefferson Clinton. 

Now, which camp will keep the very hot fires of this cultural moment burning - remains to be seen.  Whether the fires rise up to the Impyrian heights of the multi-billionaire TAP elites who are earnestly warring among themselves remains to be seen. That it's forced its way onto teevees all across America and is the hot potato that will determine the outcome of the Alabama senatorial special election - does not yet give us a clear indication of whether this moment will engulf, scorch, and shred all the really big killer-apeswho fundamentally have no game and need to get righteously burned. Meanwhile, I'll continue wallowing in schadenfreude and enjoying every single instance of yet another despicable ape getting shredded and scorched out'chere on these fields of dystopian sorrow....,

The Secret Service and the Intelligence Community Exposed Malia Obama to Harvey Weinstein

NewYorker |  Harvey throttled someone. Harvey called an employee a fucking moron. Harvey threw the shoes, the book, the phone, the eggs. Harvey went to work with his shirt on inside-out and no one had the courage to tell him. If you fucking say anything to him, the assistant said to the other assistant, I’m dead. Harvey would eat the fries off your plate, smash them in his face, and wash them down with a cigarette and a Diet Coke. He belittled and berated: You can’t name three Frank Capra movies? What the fuck are you even doing here? He was funny; he was grotesque, a boisterous, boorish, outrageous, gluttonous caricature of a man, a Hollywood type. A “man of appetites”; a philanderer; a cartoon beast, surrounded by beauties. Years later, the people who worked for him—survivors, they called themselves, of Miramax and the Weinstein Company—still met regularly to tell stories about Harvey Weinstein. “I always thought it was interesting that a lot of people who left Miramax either ended up running shit in Hollywood or became social workers,” an alumna of the company told me.

Harvey stories have a new valence now, in the aftermath of revelations by the Times and by The New Yorker, and the term “survivors” must be reserved for those who have alleged intense sexual harassment, assault, and rape. (Through a representative, Weinstein has denied all accusations of non-consensual sex.) The stories aren’t funny anymore, because now we know the story behind them. Weinstein was not a philanderer, with inordinately, unaccountably attractive “girlfriends”; he was, apparently, according to the forty-some women who have come forward so far, including many of Hollywood’s most visible celebrities, engaged in quid-pro-quo harassment that, in certain cases, involved coercion and physical force. But, unlike Donald Trump, our show-biz President, a bully who has boasted of sexual assault and been accused of sexual misconduct numerous times, Weinstein is finally being condemned and punished for his treatment of women. (Trump denies all allegations of sexual misconduct.)

Workplace sexual assault, according to the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, is “dominance eroticized.” More than misplaced desire, she writes, it is “an expression of dominance laced with impersonal contempt, the habit of getting what one wants, and the perception (usually accurate) that the situation can be safely exploited in this way—all expressed sexually.” Among the many painful ironies of Weinstein’s public activities (the professorship in Gloria Steinem’s name that he helped endow, his support of Hillary Clinton), the one I find the most brutal and defeating is that he made movies with substantial and three-dimensional parts for women, and it was this rare commodity that he is said to have used to exploit the women who wanted those roles. Their desire for professional advancement demeaned them—even after he’d made some of them into stars. (He never let them forget it: who made them, who owned them.) There were rumors, yes, of the did-she-or-didn’t-she variety. Because the actresses were ambitious, they were seen as “ambitious,” and his predation went on, hiding in plain view. No one ever asked, Did he? That was the given, and it is only now that the abuse is being called by its true name. The company’s reputation for artistic integrity and highbrow fare was a disguise that Harvey Weinstein wore, his version of the black-ski-mask cliché.

Why We Want to Change the World?

medium |  Humans have always been a social, cooperative species. According to Oren Harman of The Chronicle of Higher Education, this trait may be what’s propelled us to the top of the food chain:

“Developing the biological and cultural mechanisms that suppressed disruptive within-group competition and fostered empathy and trust, our ancestors became the sole primate.”

Ridley, and other evolutionary biologists, theorize that humans are designed to pass on their genes. However, preserving oneself is not the only way to replicate one’s genes. Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “By behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce.”

David and Edward Wilson described the adaptive strategy behind this paradox more succinctly:

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups”

While altruism may be a cost to the individual, it comes with the benefit of increasing the likelihood that others with the group will survive. In other words, while altruism may not help us as individuals, it may help our kinsmen. Or, as Ridley says, “Selfish genes sometimes uses selfless individuals to achieve their ends.”

The power of reciprocity

Our ancestors cooperated on important functions such as hunting, gathering, protecting the tribe, and raiding others for their resources. This cooperation is helpful to the group and to the individuals within that group, writes Christopher Bergland of Psychology Today:

“Social behaviors — including altruism — are often genetically programmed into a species to help them survive…Even if you are feeling ‘selfish’, behaving selflessly may be the wisest ‘self-serving’ thing to do.”

Bergland explains the benefit to this strategy: “Acting selflessly in the moment provides a selective advantage to the altruist in the form of some kind of return benefit.” A paper published in the Annual Review of Psychology describes these reciprocal benefits more specifically: “Signaling that one is generous can lead to benefits for the person signaling, such as being chosen as an exchange partner, friend, or mate.”

If you help a friend pay of their credit card debt, they may be more likely to help you pay off your debt in the future. If you help a friend move into a new apartment, they’ll be more likely to help you when you move. When you are known as a person who helps others, people want to be your friend. By giving, we receive.

NYMZA and the Second Reich

HoustonPress |  In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art history student at the University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron of the O.K. Trading Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the scrapbooks. 

At the university art department, Victor was working for art patron Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous for her eye for surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor promptly told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the junk dealer. Soon after, the heiress paid Washington $1,500 for four of the earliest notebooks. 

"Dellschau for her was an eccentric," recalls Steen. "She had a wonderful affinity for eccentrics." Half joking, she told Steen she was especially drawn to the coded phrase "DM=X" scrawled across the top of many drawings. She thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil." And the rest somehow equaled her own death. 

Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks, she exhibited some of their leaves in "Flight," a University of St. Thomas show on the subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro, one of the most dogged investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered the aeros. 

Navarro, a Houston commercial artist, was intrigued by UFOs, especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings near the turn of the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings. Navarro read about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the breakfast table. And when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt there had to be a connection to the sightings. 

Ufologists believe that between November 1896 and April 1897, thousands of Americans in 18 states between California and Indiana saw a curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward. No physical evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but newspapers such as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Daily Express and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the sightings. In this century, authors Daniel Cohen and William Chariton have published books on the subject. 

The mysterious craft was first spotted on November 17, 1896, by R.L. Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California. According to various newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward. In spring, it was spotted in Texas. 

At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend J.W. Smith saw what he thought was a shooting star in the night sky of Childress, Texas, then decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually he recognized it as the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship. 

Four days after Smith's UFO sighting, the Houston Daily Post gave a lengthy account of his and other spottings of the same airship, a 30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with revolving wheels and sails. 

Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas, recalled glimmers of red, green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam of white light" that shone directly in front of the airship. In Belton, a crowd witnessed the same vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots spoke loudly as they flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so great, their words were lost in the wind. 

According to other newspaper accounts, witnesses managed to talk with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came upon the crew members, who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous machine and were willing to chat. 

In 1972, three years after de Menil bought her four notebooks, Pete Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks were collecting dust at Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so Navarro gave the dealer $65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned and offered $500 more for the remaining seven. 

Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks to de Menil; she chose not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the work in her own notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest notebooks and believed that they included his best work. As the artist aged, his works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil seems to have preferred his earlier precision.  

 

But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't about artistic quality; they were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited Helen and Tommy Britton, cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to find more books and pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's old house, but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro also talked to Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died. Now in his 80s, he may be the last living relative who remembers Dellschau. (Britton couldn't be reached for this story.) 

After culling a vast number of such press clippings, Navarro created an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and wrote several papers. Some are on file at the Houston Public Library's Texas archive; others are available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com. In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau," co-written with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a connection between Dellschau's clandestine society and a mysterious pilot named Hiram Wilson mentioned in an article by the San Antonio Daily Express on April 26, 1897, about a local airship sighting. The article identifies the airship's occupants as Wilson, from Goshen, New York; his father, Willard H. Wilson, assistant master mechanic of the New York Central Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J. Walsh, an electrical engineer from San Francisco. 

In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged to witnesses that his airship design came from an uncle. Navarro believes that the uncle could have been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member Tosh Wilson mentioned in one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro, Dellschau's coded messages say that Tosh searched seven years to rediscover suppe, the lost fuel, and finally succeeded. 

Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram Wilson residing in Goshen. But he does offer evidence of his presence at 1897 airship sightings in Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles, Louisiana (on April 19); near Beaumont, Texas (April 19); Uvalde, Texas (April 20); Lacoste, Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24). 

On April 28, the Galveston Daily News ran the headline "Airship Inventor Wilson." The article reported the inventor's encounter with one Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle Pass. Akers told the newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated man about 24 years of age and seemed to have money with which to prosecute his investigations." 

Based on such reports, Navarro proposes several scenarios. Perhaps the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown by both Hiram and Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his own airship across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance from one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who identified himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of these Wilsons was the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the Sonora Aero Club. In that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving the glory days Dellschau could only illustrate in his notebooks.

To confirm the aero club's activities, Navarro has traveled to Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers and even visited all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says, he couldn't help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.

Eventually, whether the Sonora club was a dream or real stopped mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being absorbed by a passage inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver, you will unriddle my writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and his brother, Rudy, "were weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau, "Maybe we had similar minds."

To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code, Navarro enlisted the help of his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke German. He says the effort took only one month, but he won't release the key or a literal translation.

Navarro will talk only about the same phrase that enchanted de Menil: "DM=X." To Navarro, it stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for a secret society that controlled the Sonora club's doings. Based on Navarro's papers, some ufologists have speculated that NYMZA was controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro doesn't buy that theory.

Navarro explains that he's saving his best stuff for his collaborator, Dennis Crenshaw, who's writing a book called The Secrets of Dellschau. But Steen, at the Menil, isn't convinced that Navarro really deciphered the symbols. Steen once asked Navarro to translate the code; Navarro would tell him the meaning of only a couple of sentences.

Navarro is clearly torn between showing off and keeping secrets. He's compiled a voluminous scrapbook titled "Dellschau's Aeros." He proudly showed it to me. It's full of wild code translations and weird exegeses on the aeros and oddments that Dellschau just stuffed, unbound, in the notebooks: cartoons, a photocopy of Dellschau's marriage certificate, letters, maps, clippings and more clippings about all manner of harebrained inventions. There's even a picture of Otto, Bavaria's Mad Monarch.

The Sonora Aero Club

theatlantic |  It was the time of Gold Rush, and people of every nationality were pouring into California in search of that earth that would make them rich.

The settlement of Sonora, about 130 miles east of San Francisco, was booming. It was there, in the saloon of one of the local boarding houses, that a group of men would get together every Friday night and talk of dreams. Well, just one dream, really: human flight.

They called themselves the Sonora Aero Club and, over time, they counted some 60 members, possibly many more. Their ranks included great characters, such as Peter Mennis, inventor of the Club's secret "Lifting Fluid," later described as "a rough Man, whit as kind a heart as to be found in verry few living beengs," despite being "adicted to strong drink" and "Flat brocke." The Aero Club's rules: Roughly once a quarter, each member had to stand before the gathered group and "thoroughly exercise their jaws" in telling how he would build an airship.

On one night in 1858, a man by the name of Gustav Freyer stood to present his invention: the Aero Guarda, an airship surrounded by a sort of hamster-wheel cage that would protect its passengers upon landfall. Freyer was a highly educated mechanic, and he waltzed up to the blackboard, took the chalk in hand, and began.

"Brothers," he said. "You all know I am not quite a professor." He looked at his fellow airship enthusiasts and continued: "I give you a nut to crack. My idea is to put a guard fence all around the machine to fall -- land -- easy and always safe, to keep some of you smarties from falling out." His contraption, he argued, would somersault upon hitting water, in such a way that the passengers would always "stay perpendicular, I mean head up on the floor of the hold."

He drew a sketch on the board and declared his work done.

"Well," he concluded, "now some of you have to pay the treat for me. Tell ya the truth, I am busted and dry as a fish!" And they bought him a beer, lifted up their glasses, and toasted his good health.

Or perhaps they didn't. Perhaps Gustav Freyer never stood up among his comrades and proposed this ridiculous design. Perhaps there was no Gustav Freyer, no Friday nights at the saloon talking about flight, no clink of the glasses to celebrate a new-fangled airship design.

Perhaps the Sonora Aero Club never existed at all.