Cognitive Dissident, thinking at right angles to everyone else. Sometimes my thoughts don’t translate well into English.
Australia
Joined October 2017
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The left/right political spectrum doesn’t model reality. What we observe is clusters of ideas; if you hold one idea in the cluster, you’re likely to hold others.
Currently in western countries, there are two major clusters, which I call the Left and the Normal People. You can probably identify the ideas in these two clusters. Note that what you would call Normal are those held by the vast majority of people until the last few decades.
These clusters aren’t stable: ideas become more or less popular and associated to others over time. White supremacy may be an example: widely held to some degree a century ago, it’s now an outlier. The inverse, white racial guilt, is a firm member of the Leftist cluster. This is why, although not all leftists are racist, most racists are leftist.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Got the FOI documents back. The European Commission terminated my supplier contract because I had opinions that are against “EU values”.
The type of contacts I was employed under was illegal (false freelance), and terminating contracts for beliefs is also illegal. This is all according to @EU_Commission’s own rules.
The values I hold that are anti-EU: sex is real and it matters.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
德国 DW 电视台拍过一部关于巴黎郊区移民的纪录片。
镜头对准了生活在同一片区域的两个群体。
一边是大约七万人的法国华人。
在巴黎北郊的欧贝维利耶，他们建起了欧洲最大的服装批发中心。
这批人的生活方式很简单：
起早贪黑，开小作坊、看店、跑货运。
赚了钱继续投入生意，遇到难处自己想办法扛。
平时低调安静，很少向政府伸手要特殊补贴，也不上街制造混乱。
几十年下来，越来越多家庭买了房，把生意做了起来。
另一边，是同样生活在这片街区的北非移民群体。
从整体上看，他们在当地的经济融入相对滞后。
但纪录片捕捉到了一个细微却现实的心态变化：
一种把自食其力者视作威胁的情绪，正在悄悄蔓延。
按片子里的观察，
一些融入受挫的人，习惯以受害者自居，觉得社会欠自己太多。
可当他们转头看到身旁的华人时，心态变了。
他们不仅没有去学怎么做生意，反而把华人当成了竞争对手。
这种敌意到底从何而来？
最现实的冲突在于：华人的日子越过越好，受害者叙事就越难自圆其说。
大家同样是外来者，同样面对异国他乡的壁垒。
甚至华人刚来的时候连法语都不会讲，更谈不上本地人脉。
如果有人靠一天干十几个小时，能把日子一点点撑起来，
那句“我们过不好全怪外界不公”，就很难再理直气壮地说出口。
一个闷头自立的人，往往会让习惯归咎环境的人感到刺眼。
更深层的错位在于对财富的理解。
在很多索取者的认知里，财富是一块固定死的大饼。
他们看不到那些批发店是怎样一箱一箱货物搬出来的，
只觉得华人的店铺赚到了钱，就是占了自己的便宜。
再加上华人素来习惯忍让，遇到纠纷往往选择息事宁人，
这种心态上的失衡，很快就落成了现实中的治安麻烦。
抢劫、尾随、街头袭击，接二连三指向这群只想安分过日子的人。
靠双手养活自己、靠信誉积累财富，放在任何健全的社会都是最基本的尊严。
但如果一个地方习惯了把受害者身份当成通行的筹码，
那个默默把日子过好的人，
往往最先成为被针对的对象。
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
In October 2023, I was invited to the Battle of Ideas. The pro Palestine marches had only just begun.
At one point, on my way there on the first day, some of the marchers spotted the crucifix around my neck and surrounded me, shouting, “After Saturday comes Sunday.”
It was the first time I had ever heard the phrase and I had no idea what it meant.
I know now.
It meant, “When we’ve finished with the Jews, we’re coming for the Christians.”
The following morning, on my way back to the Battle of Ideas, I passed the statue of Boudicca, a woman whose young daughters were raped by an invading army, and who, so enraged by what had been done to them and to her people, raised an enormous Celtic army, marched on Roman London and burned it to the ground.
Her statue now stands on Westminster Bridge, looking towards Parliament, a permanent reminder of what happens when a mother, and a people, are pushed beyond endurance.
That Sunday morning, Boudicca had been covered in flags and graffiti.
I was absolutely furious.
I tried desperately to climb up and pull them down myself, but the statue was simply too high. I asked people passing to help me, and a few tried, but none of us could reach them.
So, in a bit of a panic, I called @LozzaFox and told him what had happened.
Without a second thought he said, “I’ll be there in ten minutes with a ladder.”
And he was.
He didn’t actually have a ladder, as it turned out, so we commandeered one from a nearby stall, and without hesitation he climbed up and started pulling down the flags that had been draped over Boudicca.
I remember feeling physically sick looking at it, because this wasn’t some random statue to me. This was Boudicca, a woman and a mother whose daughters had been violated, who refused to submit quietly, and who became one of the most powerful symbols of resistance in British history.
She is the woman and mother many of us would hope we could become if, God forbid, our own children were ever harmed.
As I now watch what is happening across France, as I see images of Joan of Arc being desecrated, and watch ordinary people fighting against those trying to erase, vandalise and destroy the history and culture around them, I keep thinking back to that morning in London.
I remember the physical revulsion and genuine emotional upset I felt seeing one of our national heroes treated like that.
And I understand exactly why people are angry.
Our statues remind us of who we are and who we need to be. Tearing them down, desicrating them, vandelising them is telling you what they would happily do to you.
Laurence Fox scales monument to tear down Palestine flag | Politics | News | Express.co.uk express.co.uk/news/politics/…
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Let's talk about MISINFORMATION and FAKE NEWS, Anika Wells - Minister for Communication.
You said at the National Press Club - and stated as a position of fact:
"...where a billionaire can buy a platform and strip it of moderation."
This is very clearly a reference to @elonmusk purchasing Twitter.
You are a government minister proposing some of the largest fines in the history of social media - and yet you are beginning your objective from a position of untruth.
Twitter - now X - was NOT 'stripped of moderation'.
X has - and has always had - one of the stricter and more responsive systems of automatic and user-reported community safety guidelines in the industry.
X responds faster to complaints than the government - that's for sure.
None of these systems disappeared. None of them vanished.
To imply that X has been 'stripped of moderation' is to spread misinformation about an individual, their intent, and the company activity for the purpose of justifying a new law with severe financial consequences.
What did Elon Musk do that upset the Australian government so much?
He made public the previously secret 'takedown orders' made during the Covid pandemic which robbed victims of government policy of their voice. The Australian government - quite literally - tried to silence the injured and bereaved. The government tried to silence information and scientists who disagreed with a political policy that cost lives, broke privacy laws, broke human rights norms, and forever crippled the economy.
The government leaned on social media - threatened social media - and made social media complicit in HIDING the serious consequences of their Covid and Climate Change policies.
A relationship they obviously want to re-establish via the coercive force of fines.
In other words, Elon Musk embarrassed the government and exposed censorial demands that go against public expectation. And the government want it stopped.
Elon Musk also removed OVERT POLITICAL CENSORSHIP that had been silencing conservatives online and removing criticism of progressive and left-wing policy and narratives. That is - and in particular - he removed Covid, Climate Change, and biological censorship that was corrupting the truth with political propaganda.
Musk REMOVED a layer of political influence from X and in doing so left-wing governments around the world immediately had an angry public on their hands and the consequences are being felt at elections.
Anika Wells should be forced to RETRACT and APOLOGISE for her comments and the untruth that she said in front of the National Press Gallery while speaking from a position of power.
And if not, let's hope Elon Musk can use this against the Australian government in the future.
This looks like proof on invalid data manipulation by the Bureau of Meteorology.
The hottest day ever officially recorded in Australia, using a standard Stevenson screen at a government weather station, was 125 °F (51.7 °C) on Sunday, 3 January 1909, at Bourke, New South Wales.
For decades this was long recognised as Australia’s hottest day.
However, it didn’t fit the “global warming” narrative. For if, as alarmists assert that “climate change” is causing unprecedented record heat, how could our hottest-ever day have occurred back in 1909?
So just as Orwell described in 1984, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) rewrote history. "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute ….. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
The BOM’s excuse for erasing this record was that the observer at the Bourke Post Office in January 1909 supposedly made a mistake. "Observer error" someone at the BOM decided from a desk in Canberra a century later.
The BOM’s justification for declaring it a “mistake” was the assertion that no nearby weather station recorded a similar temperature spike on the same day, so therefore the 125 °F reading at Bourke must have been an error.
But that claim by the BOM is a LIE.
Before COVID, I personally visited the Australian National Archives to examine the original handwritten meteorological observation books because I no longer trusted the BOM after some of their earlier data manipulations.
The archived observation book from the official weather station at Brewarrina — the nearest official station to Bourke, just 100 km away — recorded a maximum temperature of 50.6 °C (123 °F) on the very same day in January 1909. The hottest temperature ever recorded there.
Thus, we had two official government weather stations only 100 km apart both independently recorded extreme heat on the same day: Bourke 125 °F and Brewarrina 123 °F.
Game, set, match.
The Bourke record must be reinstated and the BOM held accountable for their malfeasance and fraudulent attempt to rewrite our history.
One of my regrets is that the human-rights abuses inflicted upon Australians during the COVID years, along with the malfeasance at the TGA, distracted me from pursuing this matter in Parliament further at the time.
Any organisation that can so brazenly and fraudulently tamper with historical data, as the BOM has done, simply cannot be trusted.
I’d bet London to a brick that the very same people at the BOM who fraudulently altered our climate history have their fingers all over the $100 million of taxpayers’ money they’ve spent “updating their website”.
There should be a full investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology.
I volunteer to head it.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
And remember when the BOM placed a solar panel directly behind the Stevenson Screen - which records Sydney’s official temperatures - and had it at the perfect angle to reflect the afternoon sun back onto the Stevenson Screen to artificially increase the temperature recordings.
This picture was taken by holding the camera high above my head and over the fence - looking in the BOM’s grounds at Observatory Hill.
The BOM have been infiltrated by Climate Alarmists who think it is their job to fraudulently manipulate the temperature records to support the alarmist narrative.
Perceived "Noble cause corruption" is still corruption.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
And remember this trick from the BOM ?
They had this first graph of “Average Number of Very Hot Days" on their website for years.
But the data didn’t fit the alarmist "Global Warming’ narrative; 1953 had the most very hot days and 2010 the least.
So the BOM simply tampered with the data; cooling the past to the create fewer Very Hot Days prior to 1980 and warming the present to create more.
Then they simply swapped the graphs - but when they busted, they attempted to destroy the evidence by de,et ung the graph altogether.
The CSIRO are using cooked data from the BOM.
The BOM were caught red-handed tampering with the data of "very hot days", deleting very hot days of the past from and adding more very hot days in recent years.
For example in the BOM’s orginal data set 1953 had the most number of very hot days, and 2011 the least.
But this didn‘t fit the agenda of the Climate Scammers - so the BOM manipulated the data to fit their agenda, by quietly substituting the graph with the original data with the new graph containing manipulated data.
And when the BOM were busted, they tried to hide the evidence of their data tampering by deleting their altered chart from their website.
And now the BOM have a new graph on their website, with even greater tampered data - now according to this new version of history 2011 had more very hot days than 1953.
And the BOM get away with this, because they know the ABC will cover-up from them and never report this.
And this is the type of skullduggery & malfeasance at the BOM that weak politicians like Blackout Bowen say we can‘t even question.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old.
Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles.
By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming.
Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles.
There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over.
Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing.
Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.
And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them.
Keep that in mind. That's the whole story.
Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3.
So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone."
On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens.
First problem: she doesn't know who wants what.
Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade.
So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want.
Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.
Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye.
Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore.
Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one.
Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym.
Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things.
So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading.
She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion.
And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher.
That's it. You now understand socialism.
Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow.
That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan.
What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought.
Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896.
Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution.
Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that.
His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate.
Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors.
Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together.
The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences.
Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job."
That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone.
And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production.
So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary.
Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them.
And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides.
Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Remember the little trick the Bureau of Meteorology pulled?
They wanted every 50°C record gone. So they quietly dropped Wilcannia’s 50°C reading from 1939, then put out glossy brochures declaring the hottest day ever was only 49.7°.
Next, they opened a string of new stations across far-western NSW — all fitted with small Stevenson screens — hoping one of them would finally record a 50°C “for the first time ever.”
When they got caught, their excuse was that the Wilcannia record “was not yet digitised.”They knew it existed. They just couldn’t find a reason to delete it, so they pretended it didn’t exist— because they hadn’t got around to typing it into the computer.
PURGING HISTORY
Comrade Nikola Yezhov, was a secret police official who oversaw Stalin’s purges. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed.
However inconvenient photo’s existed of Yezhov smiling next to his former boss - so Stalin had his censors rewrite history and photo retouchers removed Yezhov from the photo.
After deleting Bourke’s 51.7°C recorded on 3rd Jan 1909 - the BOM listed 50°C as NSW’s hottest ever day being recorded at Wilcannia in 1939
However, such record heat and a 50°C temperature back in 1939 was inconvenient for the global warming narrative, so just like Yezhov, the BOM disappeared Wilcannia’s 50°C.
And the BOM even produced pretty colour brochures listing NSW hottest ever day as 49.7°C - therefore NSW had never had a 50°C day according to the BOM’s ‘official’ records.
Then the BOM went ‘fishing for a fifty’ opening a series of new weather stations in the outback of NSW, using smaller sized Stevenson Screens, painted black inside, using overly sensitive thermal probes which record temperatures every second.
The warmists became very excited at the prospect of headline; "NSW hits 50°C for the first time ever’’
dailytelegraph.com.au/techno…
However, after I exposed this malfeasance by the BOM (greatly upsetting Chris Bowen) that quietly during the Covid period the BOM finally reinstated Wilcannia’s record.
More ➡️heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andre…
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Here is one of my greatest creations for roleplaying games. I came up with it in the 1980s. As far as I know it has never been published officially anywhere. But it ought to be. It is, of course, the Spot Obvious roll.
In any roleplaying game, there comes a time when you, the gamemaster are rolling your eyes because your players are being idiots. Why can't they see it? Here are four examples:
EXAMPLE ONE: the giant fire elemental stands directly under a loose, cracked water tower held up by rotting wooden pillars. Your players only see a DPS race. They cast spells or hit the elemental with swords, ignoring the environment.
EXAMPLE TWO: the crumbling cavern has a clear stream of water flowing out through a wide crack in the back wall. Your players see only the dead end. They stand their ground and fight waves of infinite monsters.
EXAMPLE THREE: while tossing the bad guy's apartment, they find a calendar with May 3 marked off with the word "Roodmas" in red letters. Now the players wonder when the Big Cult Festival will be? Maybe May 1st? could it be May 10th, Mother's Day, because the cult worships the foul Mother of a Thousand Young? Argh.
EXAMPLE FOUR: there is a stone door with a giant keyhole. On the table is a giant key. The players decide it's a magical puzzle and spend 45 minutes casting Detect Magic, checking for traps, trying to pick the lock with a dagger, and ignoring the literal key. This actually happened to me.
We've all been there. Spot Obvious is my solution to keep play moving. When I am amazed the players are being idiots, I call for a Spot Obvious. The players roll against their INT x5. But here's the trick - THE CHARACTER SUCCEEDS IF HE FAILS THE INT ROLL. In other words, the stupidest characters have the best chance for a Spot Obvious!
My logic here is threefold. First, it matches real life. Often it's the smart guy who overthinks things. Second, it's hilarious. Third, suddenly the character with an INT of 8 becomes useful in the logic puzzle.
Now you may say, "Well Sandy, the GM is partly to blame in these cases because they're used to you typically overthinking puzzles." That's a fair accusation. But even if I screwed up, we still have to get past the obstacle!
You don't have to unlock everything with a Spot Obvious. For instance, say the party just defeated a goblin ambush and they're wondering where the goblins are coming from. I can call for a Spot Obvious and when/if they succeed, I say, "Remember, you actually have a wounded goblin prisoner from the fight." Then they go, "Oh yeah. Let's question him." Then there's roleplaying involved - it's not just handed to them on a silver platter.
Best of all if they all fail the Spot Obvious (it has happened), then I just sit smugly. The players know they are missing something plain and unmistakable and it drives them nuts for a while. Often they can figure it out just from that. Even if they don't, their angst is highly entertaining so we're all having fun.
Go forth and prosper.
If this is real (and I belileve that it is) then it demonstrates what would have recently been an unfathomable abuse of power by the British state.
What happened to me:
I was invited by the Israeli embassy to Israel because of my advocacy and went from 8-15 June last year.
A prevent referral was made because I was “over identified” with Israel (bought bagels and hummus that week) The paperwork sent with my redacted SAR shows that they had rightly said there was no legal reason to investigate me since going to Israel isn’t a terrorist act and caring about Jews isn’t worthy of investigation.
On 23 June my NHS records were changed to declare me a vulnerable adult which is someone with cognitive impairment who by virtue of their severe impairments is at risk of coercion and exploitation. The implication being that the Israelis were exploiting me.
This was done without my knowledge and with no assessment or evaluation. My NHS GP records were then made unavailable to me. This label was removed on 18 May this year also without my knowledge or any assessment.
The prevent people came to my door and asked me about my trip to Israel and whether I’d ever visited Auschwitz, they asked who I knew in Israel and whether I’d ever return.
The reason they could do that and look into me is because they’d designated me an incompetent and the reason they could do that is because I have what used to be known as Asperger’s and (real, not the modern variant) ADHD.
They used my health issues to make me medically vulnerable in order to investigate me for legally travelling to Israel on an embassy visit because I thought killing 1200 innocent people in the name of a KGB inspired propaganda creation “Operation SIG” was wrong.
The fact I had longstanding friendships with Jewish people and would help anyone didn’t matter.
I have been labelled an incompetent by the state in order to allow monitoring by prevent because I support Israel.
When I did the 7.10 speech at the JSOC at Durham University two uniformed police attended to monitor the event for hate speech. It was a memorial to murdered people, I was honouring THEM.
I find it all disturbing and terrifying.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I had not for my entire life been treated like scum by teachers, doctors, midwives and the state because I have Asperger’s and a chronic pain condition.
The truth is I’m a highly competent woman who has always managed genuine health challenges with resilience and determination and I am affronted by the state thinking they can just label me mentally incompetent because I’m a Zionist.
I found this out by accident. As I said my GP notes have been made unavailable to me but I’ve put in requests and complaints to all the relevant organisations because you cannot use my personal data maliciously in order to target me for caring about Jews and Israel. Zionism is a protected philosophical belief and I am a Holocaust scholar. You cannot on one hand have psychological reports from 2021 showing I have verbal reasoning and logical reasoning in the gifted range
and call me a mental incompetent.
This is political targeting and I will not go quietly into that good night and eat my paste like a placid subject.
You’ve done me dirty and I’m deeply aggrieved. The harm that has been done to me over decades by the services meant to protect citizens is a disgrace.
I am a good woman. I am never hateful, I am not incompetent and I will not stop using facts to counter lies.
If you want me to go away then pay for me to leave the country
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Funny. The more I think about that decision, the more sympathy I feel.
I also think that for you, with perfect 20-20 hindsight, to despise a person who had to make such a decision after watching the slaughter of troops on Iwo Jima and Okinawa is, yes, despicable. xitter.cf/souljagoyteller/status…
“Ireland is the Ultimate Victim Nation” – Brendan O’Neill youtu.be/HG216lj6mo4?si=2dwM… via @YouTube
I suspect that this is satirical
I was mid-hip thrust when I found out @Shanemgillis had called me a whore. Technically I found out four hours later, when I reviewed the footage of Saturday Night Live. My tripod was on the bench, my ring light was clamped to the squat rack and my boyfriend Tanner was holding the back-up phone for the side angle. Tanner films all my content. He is not allowed to look at me.
The “joke” was about how women dress at the gym. I know it was about me, because everything is. So I did what any survivor would do. I went to my car and filmed myself crying. It took 11 takes, because the lighting in a Range Rover is unforgiving, and grief is no excuse for a bad shot. In the final cut, you can see a single tear land on my sports bra right over the logo, which clicks through to an affiliate link. My caption: “I’m literally shaking.”
Then I put on the shortest shorts I own, went back inside, and filmed my ass from three angles with the caption, “Does this outfit work for you, Shane Gillis?” I wanted to send him a message that my body is not for men. To make sure Shane got the message, I tagged him. Then I tagged every man I follow. Some people say my response proved his point. These people are rapists.
✍️ @BridgetPhetasy
Article: spectator.com/article/shane-…
Interesting
Силурийская гипотеза: почему мы почти наверняка не узнали бы о промышленной цивилизации, существовавшей миллионы лет назад.
Мы привыкли считать, что Homo sapiens — первая (и единственная) индустриальная цивилизация на Земле. Но доказать это гораздо сложнее, чем кажется на первый взгляд. В 2018 году климатолог Гэвин Шмидт (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) и астрофизик Адам Фрэнк (University of Rochester) опубликовали в International Journal of Astrobiology статью «The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?».
Название — отсылка к эпизоду «Доктора Кто» 1970 года про разумных рептилий-силурианцев. Авторы не утверждали, что такая цивилизация существовала. Напротив, они писали, что «сильно сомневаются» в этом. Вопрос был другим: если бы промышленная цивилизация возникла и исчезла миллионы лет назад, оставила бы она в геологической летописи узнаваемые следы — и смогли бы мы их отличить от естественных процессов?
Почему города и машины исчезнут почти бесследно?!
Прямые артефакты (здания, машины, дороги, инструменты) сохраняются крайне плохо. За миллионы лет работают эрозия, выветривание, погребение осадками и, главное, тектоника плит: значительная часть земной коры субдуцируется и переплавляется. Доля поверхности, доступной для изучения пород старше нескольких миллионов лет, мала. Фоссилизация — редкое исключение, а не правило. Даже динозавры, существовавшие ~150 млн лет, оставили относительно скромную летопись. Цивилизация, существовавшая, скажем, несколько тысяч или десятков тысяч лет, имела бы ещё меньше шансов.
С карбона (примерно 350 млн лет назад) ископаемого углерода уже было достаточно, чтобы питать индустрию, сравнимую с нашей. Но это не делает прошлую цивилизацию вероятной — лишь теоретически возможной в геологическом смысле.
Что реально может сохраниться: геохимические «отпечатки»
Шмидт и Фрэнк смотрели на то, какие следы оставит наш антропоцен через миллионы лет. Это не руины, а изменения в составе пород и осадков:
Изотопы углерода. С середины XVIII века человечество выпустило более 0,5 триллиона тонн ископаемого углерода. Это даёт так называемый эффект Зюсса — снижение δ¹³C примерно на 1 ‰ в атмосфере и поверхностном океане. В геологической летописи это выглядит как резкий отрицательный сдвиг изотопов углерода.
Азот. Процесс Габера–Боша и удобрения меняют изотопный состав азота (δ¹⁵N) в удалённых от цивилизации осадках, увеличивают нагрузку на океаны, расширяют зоны гипоксии и мёртвые зоны, слегка снижают глобальное содержание кислорода.
Металлы. Антропогенные потоки свинца, хрома, сурьмы, платиноидов, редкоземельных элементов и других металлов уже превышают естественные источники и фиксируются в прибрежных осадках.
Синтетика и пластики. Стойкие органические загрязнители (PCB, CFC и др.), синтетические молекулы с неестественной хиральностью, микропластики и пластiglomerates не имеют природных аналогов. Их стабильные продукты распада или сами частицы теоретически могут сохраняться в осадках очень долго.
Ядерные маркеры. Плутоний-244 (период полураспада ~80,8 млн лет) и кюрий-247 (~15,6 млн лет) практически не образуются в природе (кроме редких астрофизических событий). Их присутствие в конкретном слое вместе с другими аномалиями было бы сильным техногенным сигналом. Аналогия — естественные ядерные реакторы Окло в Габоне (~2 млрд лет назад): они оставили характерные изотопные следы деления, хотя трансураны давно распались.
Авторы отмечают, что слой антропоцена в океанических осадках будет резким и многомерным: одновременные пики в нескольких геохимических прокси, биомаркерах, элементном составе и минералогии.
Почему это трудно отличить от природы: пример PETM
Самый близкий природный аналог — Палеоцен-эоценовый термальный максимум (PETM) ~56 млн лет назад. Тогда в систему океан–атмосфера быстро (по геологическим меркам — за несколько тысяч лет, по некоторым оценкам <5–20 тыс. лет) поступили тысячи гигатонн углерода. Глобальная температура выросла на 5–7 °C (оценки доходят до 5–8 °C), произошёл отрицательный сдвиг δ¹³C более чем на 3 ‰ (в некоторых разрезах сильнее), океан закислился, вымерло 30–50 % бентосных фораминифер, усилилась эрозия (рост каолинита), наблюдались всплески некоторых металлов.
Похожие черты есть у океанических аноксических событий (OAE) мела и юры, у некоторых эоценовых гипертермалей и даже у более древних событий (конец перми и др.). Природные катастрофы — вулканизм, выбросы метана из гидратов, изменения орбиты, крупномасштабные окислительно-восстановительные сдвиги — могут оставлять углеродные, температурные и седиментационные следы, перекрывающиеся с индустриальными.
Ключевое отличие, которое подчёркивают авторы и последующие обсуждения: скорость. Современное антропогенное высвобождение углерода происходит на порядки быстрее, чем начало PETM. Кроме того, уникальные синтетические молекулы, пластики и долгоживущие трансурановые изотопы (если они были произведены в значимых количествах) не имеют хороших природных аналогов. Комбинация сигналов важнее любого отдельного маркера.
Зачем это нужно
Гипотеза важна не потому, что кто-то серьёзно ищет «силурианцев» на Земле (авторы в этом сильно сомневаются), а потому, что она заставляет точно сформулировать, какие именно техносигнатуры искать и на Земле, и на других планетах. Прежде чем уверенно говорить об отсутствии промышленных цивилизаций в прошлом нашей планеты или на экзопланетах, полезно понимать, насколько вообще заметны такие следы через десятки и сотни миллионов лет.
Города и машины, скорее всего, исчезнут. Останутся странные химические и изотопные аномалии в породах. И отличить их от естественных катаклизмов — задача далеко не тривиальная. Это и есть суть силурийской гипотезы: не утверждение о прошлом, а вопрос о том, насколько хорошо мы вообще умеем читать геологическую летопись.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
The length this teacher had to go through to remove these two disruptive students from her class was outrageous. It's no wonder public school is so disastrous.
I wonder how long these two kids were allowed to hold the rest of the class hostage to their shenanigans?
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
NHS abandons weird idea that evidence-based medicine is just an opinion.
That and more wonders from the first day of Adam Doyle's evidence to Redvers v NHS Sussex:
genderblog.net/nhs-exec-skew…
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Yo @grok - why in the 60 Years that NASA have been shooting Rockets up to the Moon & back, has not a single one created this effect as you see with Space X all the time?
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
When I was a youthful libertarian in my Ron Paul days I got taken in by the "antiwar" crowd. It seemed to make a lot of sense. If you leave others alone, they'll leave you alone. Non-interventionism seemed to make sense.
I was naive. And deeply wrong.
That schoolyard philosophy doesn't even work on the playground. It ignores the entire human history of conflict. It also ignores American history when we have been attacked without warning and without provocation in dozens of situations. I can give dozens of examples but I've been doing that for years and people rarely change their minds so I won't waste my time here.
I steeped myself in all the libertarian literature and revisionist history from all the leading libertarian authors and economists and believed it. But there was a moment during my readings that started tipping me away from this view, and it was when I started reading some of the revisionist literature on Winston Churchill. Ralph Raico's "Rethinking Churchill." I was eager to listen to some critiques because I thought I was opening my mind to new ideas you didn't hear in mainstream academia. But it turns out there's a reason they don't teach it in academia, and that's because it's hogwash.
I remember specifically riding the bus in NYC in 2012 and reading Raico's description of Churchill as monstrous and a murderer of the Boers, which I was trying to keep an open mind about to expand my understanding of history. But it was the moment that Raico described a young Winston playing with toy soldiers that was meant to be evidence of the famous Brit's bloodlust that turned me off. Who hadn't played with toy soldiers as a young man and dreamed of glory in battle? That's a perfectly normal and healthy instinct for a young man. It impacted me. This was character assassination in purpose of blind ideology, not historical analysis. I started to wonder what wagons exactly I had hitched myself to.
Then in subsequent years I spoke out a little when the Ron Paul institute would blame Ukraine and the West for Putin's wars of expansion, and the violent antibiotic reaction to even the faintest criticism at the time started making me question deeper the true motivations of the antiwar crowd. This wasn't some principled non-interventionism, or else it would be equally applied to Putin's wars of expansion. No, this was anti-Americanism. It was only wrong when America did it. And then I saw a libertarian antiwar rally in DC with Russian flags flying in the background, and after having debated commies on Russia Today and investigated them for several years I had finally figured out what was going on.
The antiwar movement is an anti America movement. And this is why it fits so neatly in with the Pro Palestine leftist activists, and why you'll see so many libertarian "leaders" chumming up to leftists like Kasparian or Uygur or others. They all have the same opinions about the most important issue: America (and Israel) are the great evils of the world (aMeRiCa iS tHe BiGgEsT tErRoRiSts). It's a grift, and when it's not some low IQ podcaster in thrall to foreign interests, it's just someone who wants cache in the cult of Rothbard. It's trite, boring, and relies on sophistry that appeals to the type of people who think Candace Owens is a brilliant crime sleuth.
I'm not prowar or anti war. I'm pro winning wars. Wars are inevitable. It's better to win wars than lose wars, and the United States is powerful because it's won wars. Maybe we could have fewer wars, but also maybe we can't... or maybe we should have MORE wars if that means the American people would be safer, freer, and our rights more protected. That's what matters to me. America First means that our Constitution, our way of life and liberty, and our prosperity comes first. If that can be done without war, then good. If it can't, then so be it.