Signalling Back At These Untermensch

WaPo |  Growing up, guns were a thing to be feared. They intersected with my life only as characters in narratives of pain: the reason the boy from gym class was in the hospital, the thing that stole the life of a friend’s cousin or father. My life has known no fear greater than in the handful of times my eyes have found the opening of a gun’s barrel.

It’s a fear that is present for many black Americans. That same Pew poll found that 49 percent of us see gun violence as a “very big” problem in our local communities, compared with 29 percent of Hispanics and a fraction of as many whites — 11 percent. While 20 percent of whites and 24 percent of Hispanics say they — or someone in their family — have been personally threatened with a gun, that number jumps to 32 percent for black Americans. And while 43 percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics say they know someone who’s been shot, it’s 57 percent among black Americans.

It was a similar fear that in 2015 prompted Stephen Yorkman to launch the Robert F. Williams Gun Club in Prince George’s County, Md., which is named for a civil rights activist who advocated armed self-defense and now has about 150 members.

“For me, it started with the shooting of Tamir Rice,” Yorkman, 48, explained, referencing the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot by police while playing with a toy gun at the playground of a public park. “We need to create a different, better perception of black people with guns so that in an open-carry state the image of a black person with a gun doesn’t so alarm a police officer. And we need to make it so it’s no longer a sin in the black community to be a gun owner, but that it’s more accepted.”

This new crop of black gun clubs aims to educate members on the history of black gun ownership and the centuries of attempts to suppress it and to host pragmatic conversations about the way their members will be perceived, and the dangers they will assume, as black people who chose to be armed — services often abdicated by the leaders of mainstream gun culture.

Gatekeeping and Permitted Discourse Productions Will NEVER Promote a Militant New Negro!!!

CounterPunch |  The July 4 meeting at which The Voice appeared came in the wake of the vicious white supremacist attacks (Harrison called it a “pogrom”) on the African American community of East St. Louis, Illinois (which is twelve miles from Ferguson, Missouri). Harrison again advised “Negroes” who faced mob violence in the South and elsewhere to “supply themselves with rifles and fight if necessary, to defend their lives and property.”  According to the New York Times he received great applause when he declared that “the time had come for the Negroes [to] do what white men who were threatened did, look out for themselves, and kill rather than submit to be killed.”  He was quoted as saying: “We intend to fight if we must . . . for the things dearest to us, for our hearths and homes.”  In his talk he encouraged “Negroes” everywhere who did not enjoy the protection of the law to arm in self-defense, to hide their arms, and to learn how to use their weapons.  He also reportedly called for a collection of money to buy rifles for those who could not obtain them themselves, emphasizing that “Negroes in New York cannot afford to lie down in the face of this” because “East St. Louis touches us too nearly.” According to the Times, Harrison said it was imperative to “demand justice” and to “make our voices heard.” This call for armed self-defense and the desire to have the political voice of the militant New Negro heard were important components of Harrison’s militant “New Negro” activism.

The Voice featured Harrison’s outstanding writing and editing and it included important book review and “Poetry for the People” sections. It contributed significantly to the climate leading up to Alain LeRoy Locke’s 1925 publication The New Negro.

Beginning in August 1919 Harrison edited The New Negro: A Monthly Magazine of a Different Sort, which described itself as “A Magazine for the New Negro,” published “in the interest of the New Negro Manhood Movement,” and “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races — especially of the Negro race.”

In early 1920 Harrison assumed “the joint editorship” of the Negro World and served as principal editor of that globe-sweeping newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (which was a major component of the “New Negro Movement”).

Global Beta Test: UK Fitna Clampdown On Ungovernable Open Source Culture

Independent |  Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.

"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet," it states. "We disagree."

Senior Tories confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online.

The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims.

It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers' browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like WhatsApp so that messages can be read.

The manifesto makes reference to those increased powers, saying that the government will work even harder to ensure there is no "safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online". That is apparently a reference in part to its work to encourage technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted messaging services – which gives the government the ability to read terrorists' messages, but also weakens the security of everyone else's messages, technology companies have warned.

 The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn't published, the manifesto suggests.

The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.

The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. "We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," the Conservatives write.

Interwebs Grinding Out the Seth Rich Whodunnit!

iBankCoin |  Reddit and 4chan have been hard at work trying to connect the dots surrounding Rich’s murder.

To that end, a user in Reddit’s ‘the_donald’ forum has found Seth Rich’s Reddit account – ‘MeGrimlock4’ (a Transformers reference) revealing much about the slain DNC staffer. For the most part, Rich seemed like a regular kinda guy – into football, dogs, patriotism, riding his bike, fun clothes, and volunteering at the Washington Humane Society.

Seth Rich’s twitter is @panda4progress, which follows @Reddit, which led us to believe he was in fact a redditor. That seems consistent with this reddit account, in that they’re both in DC and have an interest in bicycles. Edit: not JUST bicycles. A company named “split” which this account is talking about here @Panda4Progress talks to them here. Also /u/MeGrimlock4 is posting about Nebraska football.

Rich was from Omaha. No cornfed midwestern kid from Nebraska isn’t a Huskers fan. THIS IS DEFINITELY SETH RICH’S ACCOUNT

#WikiLeaks informer Seth Rich murdered in US but 🇬🇧 MSM was so busy accusing Russian hackers to take notice. pic.twitter.com/0XVezTyfHM

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) May 19, 2017

Here’s where it gets interesting: /u/pandas4bernie and a tumblr by the same name ALSO stopped posting at the same time as this account. If that’s Rich, then that proves motive. Rich was a BernieBro.

———-

Which may be why Rich gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails – after they false flagged Bernie…

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) uses an outside software partner “NGP VAN,” founded by Nathaniel Pearlman, chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Their ‘VoteBuilder’ software was designed for Democratic candidates (Bernie, Hillary, etc.) to track and analyze highly detailed information on voters for the purposes of ‘microtargeting’ specific demographics.

On December 16th, 2015, NGP VAN updated the Votebuilder with a patch that contained a bug – allowing the Sanders and the Clinton campaigns to temporarily access each other’s proprietary voter information for around 40 minutes. Lo and behold, the Sanders campaign National Data Director, Josh Uretsky, was found to have accessed Clinton’s information and promptly fired.

Uretsky’s excuse was that he was simply grabbing Clinton’s data during the window of vulnerability to prove that the breach was real.

Bernie cried false flag!

Sanders claimed that Uretsky was a DNC plant – “recommended by the DNC’s National Data Director, as well as a former COO of NGP VAN.”

Of note, Seth Rich was not the National Data Director. According to the DNC’s 2016 roster, Seth Rich was the DNC’s “Voter Expansion Data Director” while Andrew Brown was the National Data Director – who Bernie said referred Uretsky.

So Seth Rich, a Bernie supporter, would have known people involved in the ‘hack’ Bernie says was meant to frame him…

It’s easy to speculate how Seth Rich could have become disgruntled after witnessing the DNC attempt to sabotage the Sanders campaign. As such, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Rich – a guy with access  to sensitive emails and technical skills, did in fact communicate with Wikileaks in order to expose and root out the DNC’s misdeeds.

When Memes Fail You

p2pfoundation |  I know this has been a rough time for a lot of you, and I hope you are doing well. In brief: Yes, there has been a major electoral upheaval, and it seems there are many confused people out there working under some pretty strange assumptions. But no, this isn’t as much of a shift as it may seem.

If anything, this is the legacy of the 20th Century coming back to haunt us. In an effort to counter the propaganda of our political enemies, American social scientists (Bateson and Meade, to be exact) proposed a world of screens they called “the surround.” Their idea was that if people had the experience of choosing different things – or of looking at whichever screen they wanted to – they wouldn’t care so much that all the choices were for essentially the same thing.

In short, looking at a screen – any screen – was more important than what a person learned or came to believe, other than that he or she was experiencing real autonomy and choice. That was supposed to be America: the land of choices. The supermarket offers us fifty different laundry detergents to choose from – even though they are almost all the same, and are distributed by the same two or three corporations. You can choose whichever one you want, as long as you choose (and pay for) one of them.

An array of TV channels gave us a similar experience of choice. But Bateson and Meade probably never imagined a world with quite as many screens as ours now has. Or as much of a direct connection between our experience of screen choice and that of democracy. American Idol and other reality programs made the connection discrete. And thus Donald Trump’s migration from reality TV to electoral politics was seamless. Social media and smart phones took screens to the next level of illusory user-control, while they simply reduced the array of possibilities to a narrow beam of sensationalist, algorithmically assembled, self-affirmation.

But the underlying techniques for influencing people through all those screens? That’s magic. Or at least the approach to magic practiced by Hitler and his propagandists in WWII, before it was utilized by the British and American advertising agencies after the war. It’s the subject of the graphic novel I released last week – Aleister & Adolf – about the occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler at the end of WWII. I hadn’t meant it to be quite so prescient, but it’s a great way of understanding how we got where we are. The social media landscape is the ideal space for sigils and memetic engineering because we are utterly untethered from grounded experience. Those who succeed at these techniques are the ones who successfully tap into existing hidden agendas in popular culture. They just jump into the unacknowledged standing wave of society, and it carries them along for the ride. It’s not the subject or surfer that matters so much as the wave itself, and one’s willingness to surrender to it entirely. That’s why celebrities or candidates who adopt this strategy end up seeming to have no coherent goal.

how could non-haplo-diploidy humans comprise a superorganism?

ufla.edu  |  Insects exhibit several levels of social organization. Many species live in groups for some portion of their lives, but not all of these groups are truly social. For instance, chimney bees, 

Anthophora abrupta, do live in groups for periods of time, but they are nevertheless solitary bees. Female chimney bees build nests in large aggregations, giving the impression that they are social, but in fact each female builds and provisions her own nest. In contrast, some insects, ants, for instance, live in complex societies called colonies and depend on continual social interactions to survive. Members of these social species cannot survive as individuals; they must live as a part of a colony.

Three characteristics define the levels of sociality observed in insects. These characteristics are: 1) reproductive division of labor: most individuals are non-reproductive and specialize in colony growth, maintenance, and defense while only a few reproduce; 2) cooperative brood care: individuals within the colony care for offspring that are not their own; and 3) overlapping generations: offspring contribute to colony labor while their parent(s) (at least their mothers) are still alive and inside the colony. Species that express all three of the above characteristic are highly social or eusocial. The most common eusocial insects are bees, wasps, ants, and termites (Table 1).

Honey bees (Hymeoptera: Apidae: Apis) meet all three of the criteria described above and are therefore eusocial:

• Reproductive division of labor—Each honey bee colony consists of a queen (reproductive female), workers (non-reproductive females), and drones (males). Each caste has a clearly defined role that is not performed by any other caste.
• Cooperative brood care—Workers care for the queen’s offspring. In most cases the queen’s offspring are sisters to the workers who are rearing them.
• Overlapping generations—Honey bee queens can live several years and coexist in the colony with their offspring (workers and drones).

Contagious Mizzou Mandingoism Pinching Plutocratic Pocketbooks...,

Forbes |  It is starting to look like disrespecting the country during the national anthem is accomplishing what the concussions, domestic violence and deflategate could not do–drive down television ratings for the National Football League. 

Through two weeks of football the NFL’s television ratings are down across the board. The drop in ratings and viewership is unprecedented in recent years and has occurred during the protest of the national anthem, started by San Francisco 49ers backup QB Colin Kaepernick.  Just last year some opined that the league’s ratings had no ceiling. That appears to be false.

To summarize Sports Business Daily: NBC’s three primetime games, which includes the NFL Kickoff game, have averaged 23.7 million viewers, down 12% from the same period last year. ESPN also is seeing a 12% decline for its three “MNF” games to date. While CBS CBS -0.02% and NFL Network have only one Thursday night game to date, that lone game (Jets-Bills, 15.4 million viewers) was down 27% compared to the opening “TNF” game last season. Looking at Sunday afternoons, Fox is off (-0.2%) through two weeks, averaging 20.9 million viewers. CBS is averaging 17.3 million viewers through the same point, down 5%.

While some suggest that the drop in ratings may be due to the lack of “marquee” match ups, I don’t buy it. For starters, none of the recent PR debacles, such as drugs, beatings or concussions, creating something like #boycotnfl. Two, Kaepernick is the most-disliked player in the NFL. Three, I challenge anyone to look at the comments on stories about the NFL national anthem protests and tell me the anecdotal evidence does not strongly suggest many, if not most viewers are fed up either because they are against the protests, or just don’t want politics of any kind to interfere with their football.

the masses are treated like asses because they can be...,

dote |  I want to explain a few things. As regular DOTE readers know, I don't believe that humans are exercising "free will" because there is no such thing. Thus I am a determinist. Now, when we think about "free will" we (and researchers) naturally think about individuals—his brain, or her brain or, more rarely, my brain.

On the other hand, I've also arrived at the conclusion that the most important stuff going on in the unconscious mind is social in nature. Social instincts (like harmonizing) are hard-wired and therefore wholly automatic, just like fight or flight, negativity bias and many other processes. Thus it might be more appropriate to think in terms of groups rather than individuals in so far as humans naturally and mindlessly form strong social bonds. It is therefore more appropriate to investigate free will questions at the level of large populations or social groups.

There is a great deal of superficial variation at the level of individuals; at the large group level, there are only predictable behaviors because the unconscious mind has free rein, unencumbered by weak and ultimately deceptive "deliberative" processes in individual minds.

This makes politics the best way to observe human instinctual (unconscious) behaviors. Politics is simply inter-group conflict writ large. This year has been very interesting in this regard. I've written a couple posts lately (here and here) on the Brexit which have a theme similar to many things I've written before. The simplified world view of those posts asserts that there are our ruling elites on the one hand, and basically everybody else on the other.

This simplified view is a caricature of reality, but it's a useful one. 6000 years of historical data makes it apparent that social stratification (hierarchy) in large complex human societies is built right in, so these two broadly defined groups will always exist. By definition, one of those groups (ruling elites) exercise broad but onerous control over the other (everybody else). If that control becomes too oppressive—if there are here & now existential threats—everybody else, if they are feeling threatened or pinched, rebels against the political order.

That is the situation we have reached today in Western societies. And this is where predictable large group behaviors kick in (beyond a more fundamental social stratification). Let's list a few of the things we've been able to observe on a large scale in 2016.

brexit not inevitable, but the removal of self-serving pompous political leaders may be...,

theintercept |  “In voting to leave the EU, it is vital to stress that there is no need for haste,” Johnson said, “and indeed, as the prime minister has just said, nothing will change over the short term, except that work will have to begin on how to give effect to the will of the people and to extricate this country from the supranational system.”

Given that the popular mandate his side had just won was summed up in a single word on the backdrop behind him, “Leave,” it seemed odd that Johnson made no mention of the fastest way to get that process started, by pressing for an immediate Article 50 declaration.

That fact did not escape observers in other parts of Europe, like the former foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt.

The reason could be that Johnson has something very different in mind: a negotiated compromise that would preserve most of the benefits of EU membership for British citizens and businesses but still satisfy the popular will to escape the attendant responsibilities and costs.

In this context, it is important to keep two things in mind. First, it was Johnson himself who suggested, when he joined the Leave campaign in February, that a vote to depart could be used as a stick to negotiate not a full departure from the EU, but a better deal for the UK. “There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says ‘No,'” Johnson wrote then. “It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements.”

Second, as the legal blogger David Allen Green has explained clearly, the measure Britons just voted for “was an advisory not a mandatory referendum,” meaning that it is not legally binding on the government. No matter who the prime minister is, he or she is not required by the outcome to trigger Article 50. And, despite what senior figures in the EU and its other states might say, there is no way for them to force the UK to invoke Article 50.

What all this means in practice is that, while it would be political suicide for any leader to try to avoid acting to satisfy the popular will expressed at the ballot box, there is some wiggle room for a new government to try to find a compromise arrangement that would satisfy a larger share of the population than just the slim majority of voters who demanded separation.

As he makes up his mind on whether to seek the premiership, and considers how to appeal to the nearly half of the British population that wanted to stay in the EU, Johnson did not have to go far to get a sense of the seething outrage in parts of the country, like London, that voted overwhelmingly against leaving. Walking out of his home on Friday, Johnson was booed and jeered by some of his neighbors, who chanted, “scum” and “traitor.”

morality, stereotypes, and scientists—the anatomy of science denial

physorg |  Individuals tend to group others based on their perceived morality, often employing stereotypes to describe individuals or groups of people beliveved to have different morals or values. According to Fiske et al., stereotypes are well described using two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth (or lack of it) refers to the perceived positive/negative intent of another person, while competence refers to the other person's capacity to achieve their intent. Using this terminology, the ingroup, or the group that you belong to, is both warm and competent, and thus trustworthy. Stereotypes with high perceived competence and low perceived warmth, including stereotypically wealthy individuals, are often not trusted because perceived intent is either unknown or negative. Similarly, scientists have unclear intent due to their perceived amorality, and they are not trusted.

I believe that in order to incur more trust from the public, scientists must cultivate more warmth from the public.

I propose two ways to achieve this goal. First scientists need to make their intentions clear. Social psychologist Todd Pittinsky, mentioned in the introduction, has some terrific ideas on how to clarify intentions. One strategy is open access to data and methods, which is readily achieved through open access publishing. Scientists also need to treat misconduct by other scientists more seriously so that people don't, for example, deem that all vaccine science is fraud due to one case of misconduct. Finally, we need to treat science denial without disdain and acknowledge uncertainty properly when describing scientific results.

Second, scientists need to move into the ingroup sphere by imitating those already in the ingroup. Kahan et al. point out that an individual's established ideology greatly influences how they process new information. I would suggest scientists frame their findings in a way that fits with the audience's ideology, thus promoting "warmth". For example, the Pew report that reveals 37% of the public thinks that GMOs are not safe, which violates the individual foundations. Highlighting how certain crops can be genetically engineered for health (e.g. rice that is genetically engineered to produce beta carotene) shows how GMOs can be compatible with individual foundations. Behaving like an ingroup can then move scientists into the ingroup sphere.

Battling misinformation is definitely an uphill climb, but it is a climb scientists must endeavor to make. Climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement threatens the future of scientific progress, and while the danger cannot be ignored, we should not belittle non-scientific ideas. Scientists can build goodwill through increased transparency and communicating the significance of their findings to the public. By taking other worldviews into account, we can find common ground and create open dialogue and perhaps find solutions to benefit everyone.

the consensus reality of plutocrats, politics, and the media didn't include the Left Behind...

Move over Rat Pack and Brat Pack Here comes the Snap Pack

counterpunch |  It is probably a truism that you do not know people you do not hang out with very well. Maybe you read about them but if you happen to be the person who is hired to write about them, they probably do not get written about. You know why. Because they are not the people, you know very well or at all.

Let us say we have the sort of generous plutocracy where about 20% of the population, most of them the professional/gentrified class and a few at the very top, the Equestrian/Patrician class. First, let me say, that one fifth of a population of over 300 million is enough to keep the Dow Jones doing its ups and downs. Also, members of this top 20% keep the 80% informed, not about the 20 people who have wealth equal to 50% of the population or about the consequences of this. Now the 80% who do not know fuck all about Wall Street’s dark dealings have suddenly, in the eyes of the 20%, emerged to push the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

For the gentry, whether Democrat or Republican, this is like your hired Nanny telling you to shut up, or a bunch of hooligans busting through the gates of your “community” and wanting to do something other than clean your pool. Somebody has shown up at the electoral dinner party who wasn’t invited and whose name is unknown. This is not exactly like Nat Turner showing up in a bloody rebellion but the sheer unexpectedness of it is something like what 20% of the country is now facing with the populist explosion in both parties.

So how come almost no one who represents what is going on knew this would happen? Simple answer: they did not know these people were there because they were not reporting anything about them and they were not reporting anything about them because they were invisible to them. Look at it this way: no one had been campaigning the bottom 40% hard since…never. We have thrown into that group blue collar workers, the once unionized manufacturing working class, the “salaried” class, and now all, The Underclass. The classless, ungentrified. They have less shopping power than the top 20%, they do not usually vote, they have no one lobbying for them, they are not needed as laborers except for jobs that cannot be sent out of the country, and they have almost no leverage in a plutocracy. Right now, we have a burgeoning plutocracy still tied to an electoral, representative democracy and so “one person one vote” remains the solo bargaining chip of plutocracy’s “negative assets,” how The National Review refers to Trump’s followers.

them deep Q-networks though...,

wikipedia |  Q-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, Q-learning can be used to find an optimal action-selection policy for any given (finite) Markov decision process (MDP). It works by learning an action-value function that ultimately gives the expected utility of taking a given action in a given state and following the optimal policy thereafter. A policy is a rule that the agent follows in selecting actions, given the state it is in. When such an action-value function is learned, the optimal policy can be constructed by simply selecting the action with the highest value in each state. One of the strengths of Q-learning is that it is able to compare the expected utility of the available actions without requiring a model of the environment. Additionally, Q-learning can handle problems with stochastic transitions and rewards, without requiring any adaptations. It has been proven that for any finite MDP, Q-learning eventually finds an optimal policy, in the sense that the expected value of the total reward return over all successive steps, starting from the current state, is the maximum achievable.

Delayed Q-learning is an alternative implementation of the online Q-learning algorithm, with Probably approximately correct learning (PAC).^[11]

Because the maximum approximated action value is used in the Q-learning update, in noisy environments Q-learning can sometimes overestimate the actions values, slowing the learning. A recent variant called Double Q-learning was proposed to correct this. ^[12]

Greedy GQ is a variant of Q-learning to use in combination with (linear) function approximation.^[13] The advantage of Greedy GQ is that convergence guarantees can be given even when function approximation is used to estimate the action values.

Q-learning may suffer from slow rate of convergence, especially when the discount factor  is close to one.^[14] Speedy Q-learning, a new variant of Q-learning algorithm, deals with this problem and achieves a provably same rate of convergence as model-based methods such as value iteration.^[15]

A recent application of Q-learning to deep learning, by Google DeepMind, titled "deep reinforcement learning" or "deep Q-networks", has been successful at playing some Atari 2600 games at expert human levels. Preliminary results were presented in 2014, with a paper published in February 2015 in Nature.^[16]

is the hon.bro.min on the cusp of a Trump endorsement?

infowars |  Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to limit Muslims entering the United States has attracted support from an unlikely ally – Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Republican frontrunner’s plan, which called for a temporary halt on Muslim immigration until refugees could be properly vetted, led to over half a million UK citizens signing a petition to ban Trump from entering the country.

However, in an exclusive interview with Alex Jones, Farrakhan said that Trump was “wise” to call for such measures.

Farrakhan drew attention to the Obama administration’s disastrous policy of arming jihadists in Libya and Syria, noting that the blowback had, “created a refugee crisis that is destabilizing the countries in Europe.”

“So when Mr. Trump said we can’t allow these Muslim refugees into America, a lot of people were upset with him, but I know the hatred for America in the Muslim world is building,” said Farrakhan, adding that U.S. foreign policy had united Islamists against the west.

“So in this way I think Mr. Trump is wise to vet anyone coming from that area into America because the hatred for America is in the streets now,” asserted Farrakhan, adding that if the U.S. wasn’t careful about the vetting process, it might be inviting its own “destruction”.

Farrakhan put Trump’s success in the polls down to a heightened environment of political correctness that has caused frustration amongst white people who can’t say what they really feel.

“Mr Trump says ‘to heck with that’ – I’ll tell you what’s really on my mind and that is freeing a lot of people that like what he’s doing,” said Farrakhan.

The Nation of Islam leader went on to compare establishment politicians to prostitutes.

“They parade themselves before rich and powerful people to get money apparently for their ideas that the rich agree with, but the moment that they become what they’re looking to become they find that the rich have an agenda for them, that the rich have something to ask of them like the john asks of the prostitute,” said Farrakhan, adding that he admired Trump because, “he told them all – I don’t want your money.”

what's the matter with all of these children?

thedailybeast  |  University dining halls aren’t exactly famous for serving gourmet dishes, but Oberlin students say their meals aren’t merely bad—they are racially inauthentic, and thus, a form of microaggression.

It’s one thing to quietly gripe about the quality of dorm food (students have likely been doing that for centuries). It’s quite another to accuse the dining room staff of stealing from Asian culture because they didn’t prepare the General Tso’s chicken with the correct sauce.

And yet, here’s what one Oberlin student had to say about the dining hall’s sushi bar:

“When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture,” student Tomoyo Joshi told The Oberlin Review. “So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.”

Cultural appropriation, readers will recall, allegedly occurs when people borrow the traditions of another ethnic or religious group. Liberal students at a Canadian university, for example, recently shut down a free yoga class for disabled students because yoga has its origins in Hinduism, meaning it doesn’t belong to white people and they shouldn’t practice it. This kind of thinking is actually bafflingly illiberal—who’s to say that culture itself belongs to anyone?—and yet it’s usually left-leaning students waging weirdly nativist campaigns of forced isolation on foreign cuisines and customs.

The culinary critics at Oberlin, however, aren’t just mad that the cafeteria has appropriated their culture—they’re mad that it’s been appropriated poorly.

“It was ridiculous,” student Diep Nguyen told The Oberlin Review (the “it,” in question was a Banh Mi sandwich with the wrong bun). “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”

For one thing, the Banh Mi sandwich is itself the product of the blurring of cultural boundaries: French and Vietnamese.

For another, there’s something deliciously ironic about Oberlin students—some of the most privileged people in the world, as evidenced by the $50,000 they pay annually in tuition—whining about the bun-thickness of meals prepared by lowly paid cafeteria workers.

the problematique of the problematique...,

plausiblefutures |  (When I use “politics” or “political” in this post, I simply mean “one coercing another” in the broadest sense. To “coerce” is to compel one to act in a certain way — either by reward or punishment.) 

In 1972, the Club of Rome (COR) rocked the world with a study called LIMITS TO GROWTH. The COR called the multitude of environmental problems facing future inhabitants of planet Earth the “global problematique”.

In the years since 1972, science has made great progress in understanding the natural world. Obviously, the problematique ensemble is a hierarchy of problems. The fundamental problem in the problematique ensemble is “H.Sapiens” (or the “critter”).

The critter is an especially important player in this drama because not only has its activity caused the problematique, the critter is also called upon to solve the problematique. Therefore, understanding the nature of the critter is THE prerequisite to solving the problematique.

In recent years, evolutionary psychologists and microbiologists has made tremendous progress in understanding the scientific nature of the critter. Nevertheless, activists still have made little (if any) progress solving the problematique [1]. This is partially due to the fact that activists do not want to hear the scientific truth about themselves, and partially because they can do little — if anything — about it anyway.

When confronted with the truth about themselves and about their unimportance in the political hierarchy, [2] activists will either become constructivists (take the science lightly, change it, or abandon it entirely when it becomes necessary) or fundamentalists (deal with troublesome science through psychological denial and/or political repression).

So now we have a nested problem: the “problematique of the problematique”. In other words, the “truth” concerning the problematique can be provided by science and political realism, but it is not the “truth” that activists are looking for. What kind of “truth” are activists looking for? Science can answer that question too.

Over millions of years of evolution, the critter has emerged as the apex “political predator” — NOT the engineer, NOT the problem solver, but THE political predator. When confronted with a social problem the critter first resorts to “politics” to insure and enhance its “inclusive fitness”. In fact, “politics” is the reason why we have such large brains:

“The social intelligence hypothesis posits that the large brains distinctive cognitive abilities of primates (in particular, anthropoid primates) evolved via a spiraling arms race in which social competitors developed increasing ‘Machiavellian’ strategies.” [3]

In short, our innate goal is genetic reproduction and our most important tool is “politics”. This is easily seen in other social animals. The dominant male eats first and has his pick of the females.

In our society, “money” is interchangeable for political power. And as Kissinger noted, “power” is the most powerful aphrodisiac. This because women who were attracted to powerful men were more likely to see their children live to reproduce their genes.

So the “real reason” (i.e., the “genetic reason” instead of the “rationalization”) why activists on this list will not accept the truth from science and political realism is not because it’s wrong, it’s because it doesn’t lead to more personal political power. In other words, the scientific truth about the critter does not increase the “inclusive fitness” of the activists themselves.

So activists keep searching for the “other truth” — the Santa Claus or the Good Tooth Fairy “truth” that will get them laid. Unfortunately, Santa Claus and Good Tooth Fairy don’t exist — what you see is what you get. However, I am going to put on my Nostradamus hat and make a prediction.

When blackouts sweep the country (probably < 5 years, certainly < 10) the political environment WILL change radically, but not in the way most people hope it will. One day we will wake up and suddenly the scientific truth WILL serve the political agenda of the ruling elites. [4] Let’s call that looming revolutionary day the “Pythagorean Revolution” in honor of the man who discovered that the Earth was spherical, and thus finite, approximately 2,500 years ago. [5]

After the Pythagorean Revolution occurs, instead of selling “negawatts”, environmental groups will be selling “negapeople”. “Gosh! Why didn’t we see it before? It’s either tigers or people, what choice do we have? Kill ’em all and let God sort them out!” Instead of “importing” people for labor, we will be “deporting” people to labor camps — if not “illegals” to their own countries, then “overbreeders” and undesirables to internal concentration camps for the next “Final Solution”:

your passport and transport ready and right or are you going to stand and fight?

theatlantic | Liberty University’s motto is “training champions for Christ.” Apparently, the training offered by the evangelical college will now include a free concealed-weapons course for its students.

At Liberty’s convocation service on Friday, the school president, Jerry Falwell Jr., responded to the San Bernardino shooting, saying, “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.” He encouraged students to enroll in the university’s gratis certification course and said he was carrying a weapon “in my back pocket right now.” He concluded by saying, “Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”

Falwell’s comments are the latest in a string of proclamations by conservative Christians appealing to religious authority and yet apparently devoid of biblical reflection. Can they claim the Bible as their chief authority if they ignore it when politically expedient?

Falwell Jr. inherited the leadership of the school from his better-known father, but Liberty (my alma mater) has remained a popular stop for conservative politicians. Former Republican Senator Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, spoke in chapel prior to Falwell’s comments, which included a criticism of President Obama’s push for more gun control. While the school claims to put Jesus at the center of its curriculum, its president never referred to the Prince of Peace’s teachings in his remarks about gun violence. The absence is unsurprising. It’s hard to imagine how the Jesus’s teachings could support his case. 

the gulf between what Toynbee called the "dominant minority" and the "internal proletariat" is widening...,

HuffPo |  Here's a brief, non-exhaustive list of things that a new poll says Americans don't have much faith in: the government, businesses, the economy, the power of their vote and the future of the United States.

The overall mood of the country is one of "anxiety, nostalgia and mistrust," according to the 2015 American Values Survey, which was released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.

"Fear is not an emotion that you see often in public opinion polls, but it was clearly there in the fall of 2008 and early 2009" after the economic collapse, said Karlyn Bowman, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, during a Tuesday panel discussion of the survey. "Americans aren't confident that we've fixed what went wrong."

Many, in fact, see the country as on the decline. The poll found that 53 percent of Americans say the nation's culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. Forty-nine percent now say America's best days are behind it, up from 38 percent who said the same in 2012. Democrats remain more bullish, while Republicans and tea party members are the most pessimistic. 

A sense of nostalgia isn't unique to the present day: Back in 1939, most Americans thought "the horse-and-buggy" days were happier than their era. (Granted, those people had just lived through the Great Depression and were heading into World War II.)

But Americans today are deeply worried about their economic prospects. Nearly three-quarters believe the country is still in a recession, unchanged since last year. An increasing majority -- now nearly 80 percent -- say the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, with even more agreeing that corporations do not share enough of their success with their employees. A rising number also say they're troubled that not everyone in the U.S. gets an equal chance in life. 

There's also a growing antipathy toward people perceived as outsiders. In the survey, which was taken well before the Paris terror attacks, 56 percent say that the values of Islam are at odds with American values, up 9 points in the past four years. Forty-eight percent say they're bothered when encountering immigrants who speak little or no English, up 8 points since 2012.

And many Americans feel personally disenfranchised. Nearly two-thirds say their vote doesn't matter because of the influence that wealthy individuals and big corporations have. Fifty-seven percent say the federal government doesn't really look out for people like them.

The pessimism, though, isn't equally shared across demographic lines.

"net energy decline cues" = impossibility of status gain - impel low-ranking members to seek status elsewhere...,

marketwatch |   Islamic State’s coordinated assault in Paris last week has brought even more attention to the terror group’s frighteningly rapid global growth, and where around the world it has found traction — not just in terms of territory gained, but in support.

A study out of the Brookings Institution used Twitter to shine some light on this, comparing the countries where tweets from ISIS supporters originate. The study dealt with a sample size of 20,000 and found that Saudi Arabia is the top location claimed by Twitter users supporting ISIS in 2015. Syria follows, Iraq rounds off the top three and the U.S. takes fourth place.

The number of foreigners joining the conflict in Syria and Iraq has continued to rise in 2015, though this data doesn’t track these fighters to Islamic State, specifically. Nonetheless, the data paints a rough picture of where around the world ISIS is finding success in recruitment.

The number of fighters joining from Saudi Arabia is between 2,000-2,500, the largest total number, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. Per capita, that represents 107 fighters per million people. On a per capita basis, Jordan tops the list, with an estimated 315 fighters per million people.

Belgium has the highest number of fighters per capita of any Western nation. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-born senior Islamic State operative, is suspected to be the key mastermind behind the Paris attacks. He was killed in a raid Wednesday, according to published reports.

France is the biggest source of fighters in Europe, contributing 1,200, or 18 per capita. Government figures have put the number of fighters closer to 1,600.

The U.S. is very low on this list — only about 100 fighters have come from the U.S.

An estimated 1,700 fighters have come from Russia, most of whom are thought to be from Chechnya and Dagestan, according to Russia’s Federal Security Service.