This is incredible on so many dimensions:
For details read World’s fastest RC aircraft hits a stunning 548 mph – without a motor.
Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.
…
In the post-Trump era, the challenge will be to prevail over the extremism of Trump’s White majority while trying to prevent the politics of whiteness from becoming an increasingly multiracial affair.
Cristina Beltrán
January 15, 2021
To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness
[See also what Ed Driscoll has to say about this.
Just as it was in the USSR there is an ever changing, ever increasing, level of purity required by the political left. Their creativity has no limits. The absurdity is applauded, not scorned, because it allows them to continue their programs of hate and destruction. The exercise of power intoxicates them and they will say and do whatever they must to feed and justify their addiction.
This is our future.
If gender doesn’t depend upon biology then what makes you think whiteness depends on skin color?
Try to keep up comrade. Be thankful that today it is just being doxed and deplatformed. Soon, if you don’t understand these things as they have been revealed, you will be spending time in a reeducation center having things such as this explained to you in much simpler terms.—Joe]
What we are witnessing right now is the final phase of a collapse scenario that was more than a decade in the making, and Biden is about to help finish the job.
Biden will no doubt seek to hyperinflate the dollar in the name of offsetting the losses and keep things afloat for a short time, but the real agenda will be to trigger price spikes in goods as well as eventually killing the dollar altogether. No amount of stimulus will stop the crash that has already been set in motion; the bailout measures from this point on are Kabuki theater, a show put on for the masses to make us believe that the government and the banks “did everything they could” to save us. The elites have no intention of stalling or stopping the collapse; their “great reset” demands it.
One’s initial assumption would be that Biden would then take the blame for the economic crisis, but it appears that the establishment is going to set up a Herbert Hoover narrative and lay all the blame squarely on Trump and conservatives. In the past I have noted that Trump’s trajectory was very similar to Herbert Hoover’s, in that he was a business mogul and Republican that pushed for corporate tax cut policies and also extensive tariff’s.
Brandon Smith
January 20, 2021
Biden’s Presidency Will Be A Catalyst For Secession – And Perhaps Civil War
[I’ve been listening to the book When Money Dies: The Nightmare Of The Weimar Hyper Inflation. There are a bunch of takeaways which I think are relevant to our current situation. The ones I have taken note of so far include:
We live in interesting times.—Joe]
* The capacity of the infrastructure for producing and distributing the currency was exceeded. With the denomination of the bills increasing at an exponential rate even the limits on things like the speed of the design of the bills was exceeded. The ability to produce and delivery the paper to the printers, get it through the printing presses, and distribute it to the banks exceeded the truck transportation capacity.
Via Oleg (of course):
And now we have widespread repression of the speech of political opponents and the President of the United States openly claiming he can and will defeat the nations oldest and largest civil rights organization.
The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create. Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold. MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway. So let’s go all in.” This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas. Not exactly. The credit card has a credit limit.
The Post That Gave The World Bikini Economics: Why MMT Is A Bad Idea.
[It would appear that the U.S. is in the process of testing MMT.
We live in interesting times.—Joe]
A couple of things for people who like to think about political conspiracies.
This first one is via Brother Doug:
If the Dominion election voting systems really can be controlled to produce a desired result then could the controllers of those systems have used them in the 2016 presidential primary? Donald Trump was largely considered a joke. And he didn’t even participate in one of the debates.
Could it have been that the conspirators in control of the voting machines decided Trump was the most easily defeated candidate and rigged the primary voting to get Hillary an easy win?
When the November election was looking like a 90% probability for a Clinton win the conspirators didn’t bother to risk tweaking the results.
By 2020 the same conspirators knew better than to leave it to an honest vote and disposed of President Trump by flipping the cheat switch on the voting machines.
Number two is something I thought up a couple days ago:
Could it be that the whole QAnon thing was actually a ruse by Democrats to make the political right look foolish? An additional benefit would be to lull many on the political right into a false sense of security that things were going to turn out in their favor in a glorious manner. This would leave them far less motivated to get out the vote, donate money, and be prepared for a takeover by the political left.
Discuss and enjoy.
One of Biden’s first Executive Orders should be to prohibit the airing of FoxNews, Newsmax or OANN in any federally owned property or any military unit or installation, and to remove it from any cable plans that are offered in government owned business or housing complexes.
Pam Keith, Esq. @PamKeithFL
Tweeted on January 19, 2021
[This is not some random deranged person. From her Twitter profile:
DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE FL 18th Cong. District, former US Navy JAG, litigator & expert on workplace law. BC Law School Grad.
This is a lawyer and Democrat nominee for congress openly advocating that the U.S. government suppress opposing political opinion.—Joe]
Southern states are not Red States. They are suppressed states. Which means the only way we are going to heal is through the actual liberation of southern states, the actual liberation of the poor, the actual liberation of working people, from economic, social, and racial oppression.
That’s the only way.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
January 13, 2021
[It appears she mistakes (giving her the benefit of doubt as to being stupid rather than evil) seeing people is a state of relative freedom as having that freedom forced upon them rather than having the comfort of a nanny state. And hence, they need to be liberated from that freedom.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four was supposed to be a warning about an impending dystopia instead of an instruction manual:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
I would like to suggest AOC work on liberating her own New York City from such things as the oppressive laws against gun ownership, the size of soft drinks, rent control, and the terrible tax rates.
But that won’t happen. What we view as “features” she sees as “bugs”. There is no common ground between such people.—Joe]
Every Republican now calling for unity is like the abusive husband who beats the shit out of his wife for 4 years, and then, when he’s finally arrested, says, “Baby, if you don’t press charges we can make this work.”
Ellen Meister @EllenMeister
Tweeted on January 9, 2021
[And this, my psychology students, is called “Projection”.
It has been the Democrats who I have been hearing calling for unity.
These people are evil, incredibly ignorant, and/or have severe mental issues.
The Democrats abuse of President Trump over the last four years, and now Republicans in general has been absolutely legendary. And now they want “unity” as they ban dissent, cause Trump supporters to get fired, and deplatform websites that allow the allow free speech?
Good luck with that guys. You’re going to need it.
One measurement of how unified they have made our country are the 10s of thousands of troops in D.C. we have for the inauguration.—Joe]
This is not just an attack on free speech. This is an attack on an entire movement of people with the intent of driving them underground—keeping them from getting jobs, having legal representation, and even cutting them off from legitimate financial transactions.
Tony Perkins
President, Family Research Council
The Conservative Purge Is Only Just Beginning
January 12, 2021
[See also Big Tech declares war: ‘Woke capitalism instead of freedom’ and Why Conservatives Are Being Blacklisted.—Joe]
If you are regular visitor to ARFCOM you probably already know this. But I got some email from someone a little behind the times so I thought I would update everyone here on the story with the GoDaddy deplatforming of AR15.com. Originally I thought GoDaddy was the hosting provider (as they are for this blog) for AR15.com. Hence when I looked up their current, and functional, IP address and found it belonged to Amazon I was concerned they hadn’t take as big a leap as necessary to escape the purge.
I was wrong. GoDaddy was only the domain registrar. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to get your domain registered than it is to change your hosting provider. They quickly changed their domain registrar (to Epik, the same as Gab) and were up and going again quickly.
It is claimed they have backup plans for other possible issues such as losing their hosting provider.
ARFCOM NEWS has all the details:
Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%).
Michal Kosinsk
January 11, 2021
Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
[Via Stanford Scientist Can Tell If You’re A Liberal Just By Looking At Your Face
I have often thought I could tell the difference between gun people and anti-gun people just by looking pictures of them. Self defense instructor Greg Hamilton believes, and teaches, something similar.
The research paper cited above is saying that such a thing is possible.
Now just imagine what big tech/government could do with this technology.
We live in interesting times.—Joe]
Via email from Rolf:
Did the Czechs really build both structures?
Never trust a utopian, of any variety. For the amount of good they think they are going to produce, they’ll built a mountain of skulls.
TIrno
January 16, 2021
Comment to Quote of the day—Goodreads
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Darkness at Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he relives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man’s solitary agony, it asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It is —- as the Times Literary Supplement has declared —- “A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama.”
Goodreads
Darkness at Noon
[I finished listening to this book last Saturday. It was haunting.
If you think Gulag Archipelago, Nineteen Eighty Four, and Animal Farm have something important to say you will find Darkness at Noon at or near the top of that list in the same genre.
It’s a novel, first published in 1940, but it was based on interviews with numerous real people within the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. The main character is a composite of several real people.
There were a couple of things which really jarred me. One was there was a time, early on during the purges, that political criminals were arrested and sent to prisons which were more like resorts of beautiful gardens and lawns where they could be counseled about their errors of their ways. These “prisons” had better living conditions than the environments most of prisoners came from. This reminded me of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler thinking that if he just talked to the rioters they would see the error of their ways, and the similar beliefs of the people behind the “defund the police” movement. Apparently the socialist mind cannot, at least initially, comprehend that people could be opposed to implementing the socialist utopia. The alternative is for me to believe the people of today, instead of independently arriving at the same mindset, have a playbook/script they are following and haven’t read the complete book yet to see how it’s really done.
The other thing that really stuck with me was how they got confessions. The confessions came from interrogations which lasted several days or even a month. The prisoner was confronted with evidence that was mostly true but the interpretation was twisted in some way that perhaps didn’t matter all that much in the present context. After sleep deprivation and hours of grilling the prisoner would sign the confession of the slightly twisted interpretation. Then a new piece of evidence would be presented. Again it would be twisted in the same direction as the previous evidence the prisoner had already signed off on. Eventually they would sign off on that one too. The process would continue like this until a complete narrative leading to the conclusion that the prisoner was such of a mindset that it was obvious they could not have had any other motive than the assassination of “Number 1” when they briefly spoke to the cook at the café where “Number 1” was to get his food a week later.
And, of course, as I have pointed out before, the every tightening of the purity tests that made a loyal, decorated, party member on one day into a saboteur the next week.
Today in our country, the mindset of the political left is racing down the same path as Russia of just over 100 years ago. They may believe they are “progressives” leading the world to new utopia, but that belief and mindset is a regression to that of the turn of the 20th century on a different continent. And, again, the destination is not utopia. It is dystopian nightmare of terror.—Joe]
By allowing incremental transgressions to go unchecked for centuries, the government has grown exponentially. We have had generations of deliberate and incremental miseducation that has created a positive feedback loop. The people literally do have the power to fix it but lack the knowledge and will to do so. I honestly see no way out unless a massive movement of grass roots education on the principals of liberty, virtue and limited government were to rise, which would be nothing short of a miracle. If and when it all collapses, I have zero confidence in anything good rising from the ashes.
Jason
January 14, 2021
Comment to Ghosts of the Constitution, past, present, and future
[I’m an optimist.
I think there is a slight chance something good could rise from the ashes.—Joe]
Via email from Chet (who worked with me at Microsoft on the location services for Windows Phone 7):
It is Big Tech that knows more about you than your spouse and that if they so choose could make your life miserable. As I discussed many times when we were working on location, carrying a device is like having a private detective assigned to you. Fitbit is just another source.
In East Germany they at least had to assign real people. Now, everyone can be tracked and monitored in real time without lifting a finger.
We have invented the tech that will enslave us.
This was in response to an announcement that Fitbit is now officially a part of Google.
He has a point.
But there is another point to be made as well. Intelligence sources, which your phone is, can be manipulated to your own advantage.
If your cell phone location is proof you were at some location then doesn’t your phone not being at some location prove (or at least represent evidence) you weren’t there?
Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have collectively seen $51.2 billion in combined market value wiped out over the last two trading sessions since they banned President Donald Trump from their platforms following the U.S. Capitol breach.
It’s possible they had nothing but good intentions and really did believe they were going to prevent harm to life and property:
User reports of violent content jumped more than 10-fold from the morning, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. A tracker for user reports of false news surged to nearly 40,000 reports an hour, about four times recent daily peaks. On Instagram, the company’s popular photo-sharing platform, views skyrocketed for content from authors in “zero trust” countries, reflecting potential efforts at platform manipulation by entities overseas.
Facebook’s platforms were aflame, the documents show. One Instagram presentation, circulated internally and seen by the Journal, was subtitled “Why business as usual isn’t working.”
Company leaders feared a feedback loop, according to people familiar with the matter, in which the incendiary events in Washington riled up already on-edge social-media users—potentially leading to more strife in real life.
It’s also possible, and this is my hypothesis, they had preconceived notions of the morality of President Trump and anyone who supports him. When they saw an upsurge in chatter that supported him they read any ambiguous, and perhaps even neutral, language as threatening. That is, there was a confirmation bias.
My evidence in support of this comes from the same article quoted above:
By Monday, Facebook said it would prohibit all content containing the phrase “stop the steal”—a slogan popular among Trump supporters who back his efforts to overturn the election—and that it would keep the emergency measures that it had activated the day of the Capitol assault in place through Inauguration Day.
“Stop the steal”? Really? That is the sole basis for banning a Facebook post?
These people need to be taught a lesson. A $51 billion lesson is a good start. Facebook has a Market Cap of about $717 B. Twitter about $37 B. When they’ve lost another combined $200 B (a third of their total value) then I’d be willing to consider the possibility they had learned the lesson.
The next time they come up with an excuse to ban people for engaging in innocent protected speech I would be inclined to see them on street corners holding signs that say, “Will code for food.”
Also, there was a tiny bit of violence. Tell me again about how much you hate violence. Neighbor, after 2020, I am all ears on that one.
Curtis Yarvin
January 8, 2021
The great coup of 2021
[It’s a bit long but I thought he did a good job of summarizing the different sides of the situation with a good bit of psychology.—Joe]
Down through history there has been a number of financial mass hysteria periods as well as political mass hysteria periods. And now we a living through another one.
It did not appear out of the blue. It’s been building over the last four years and even earlier. The warning signs have been around for some time with smaller manias including SJW, Orange Man Bad, Me Too, White Privilege, BLM, the 1619 project and, of course, Guns are Evil – all taking hold and gaining acceptance.
Now we’re canceled! And many on our side are rushing towards the non-existent exits. The questions I have are how deep and wide will this one be? Is there anything that can pop this mass mania that has even a moderate chance of success?
As it became clear that Biden was going to take office, I thought about my guns, taxes, and policies that I object to. I’m now concerned that it is going to be far worse.
Chet
Comment to Quote of the day—Rick Klein
[I’m reminded of a show I used to watch, La Femme Nikita. In the show “canceled” was an euphuism for assassinated or executed.—Joe]