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Was Trump Right About Baltimore? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2019

The lesson for black people is that politicians and government handouts are not solutions. If they were, at a public expenditure that tops $22 trillion over the past half-century, black people would not be confronted with today’s problems.

Like I said in another forum – I am having troubling coming with an instance where a government program actually helped poor people.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/walter-e-williams/was-trump-right-about-baltimore/

By

Here’s what President Donald Trump tweeted about Baltimore’s congressman and his city: “Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is far worse and more dangerous. His district is considered the worst in the USA.”

“As proven last week during a congressional tour, the border is clean, efficient and well run, just very crowded,” Trump added. Cumming’s “district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

President Donald Trump’s claims suggesting that Rep. Elijah Cummings’ Baltimore-area district is “considered the worst run and most dangerous” has been called racist. But whether Trump’s claims have any merit is an empirical matter settled by appealing to facts. Let’s look at a few.

In 2018, Baltimore was rated one of the “Rattiest Cities” in the nation by pest control company Orkin. According to Patch Media, although there has been progress in the last few years, Baltimore ranks ninth in rat infestation, down from its sixth position two years ago on Orkin’s list.

What about safety? In 2017, St. Louis had the nation’s highest murder rate, at 66.1 homicides per 100,000 residents. Baltimore came in second, with 55.8 murders per 100,000 people. The unpleasant fact is that predominantly black and Democratic-run cities have the worst records of public safety. The Trace, an independent nonprofit news organization, using 2017 data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program, listed the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates. After St. Louis and Baltimore, Detroit was third, with 39.8 murders per 100,000 people. Other cities with high murder rates included New Orleans; Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland; Memphis, Tennessee; and Newark, New Jersey. With 24.1 murders per 100,000 residents, Chicago ranked ninth in the nation, followed by Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Washington, D.C., was 17th.

What about education in Baltimore? In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. In raw numbers, 3,804 Baltimore students took the state’s math test and 14 tested proficient. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. Money is not the problem. Of the nation’s 100 largest school systems, Baltimore schools rank third in spending per pupil.

Baltimore’s black students receive diplomas that attest that they can function at a 12th-grade level when in fact they may not be able to do so at a sixth-, seventh- or eighth-grade level. These students and their families have little reason to suspect that their diplomas are fraudulent. Thus, if they cannot pass a civil service exam, they will accuse the exam of being racist. When they get poor grades in college and flunk out, they will attribute their plight to racism. The information that these black students have is that they, just as white students, have a high school diploma and the only explanation they see for unequal outcomes is racism. The same story of poor education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations.

The problems that black people confront are immune to who is the president of the U.S. Those problems were not ameliorated when Barack Obama was president. Those problems are not going to be ameliorated by Trump’s presidency, though the black unemployment rate is considerably lower. The lesson for black people is that politicians and government handouts are not solutions. If they were, at a public expenditure that tops $22 trillion over the past half-century, black people would not be confronted with today’s problems.

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How Google Threatens Your Children

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2019

• Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:…

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/08/06/google-and-data-privacy.aspx

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at-a-glance

  • More than half of American K-12 schools use Chromebooks and Google apps, allowing Google to build brand loyalty from an early age
  • Google’s primary business is tracking, compiling, storing and selling personal data. By capturing children at an early age, it will be able to build the most comprehensive personality profiles of the population ever conceived
  • By the time these children have grown into adulthood, every single preference, thought, belief and proclivity will be known about them, which will make them extremely vulnerable to manipulation
  • Google allows hundreds of third-party software developers to access the emails of Gmail users, and they’re not just using software to scan for keywords. In some cases, employees are actually reading the emails
  • By default, Google Chrome allows any and all tracker cookies to follow your every move online

Google is without a doubt the largest and clearest monopoly on the planet. It dominates online searches and advertising,1,2 which in and of itself leads to automatic bias. As noted by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their 1998 paper,3 “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” “… [W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

Google has also infiltrated many other areas of our day-to-day lives, having acquired dozens of other companies4 you might not realize belong to Google or its parent company, Alphabet.

Among the most well-known are YouTube, the largest video platform on the web, and Android, one of the most popular operating systems worldwide.5,6 Google also has significant influence over urban development,7 health care8,9 and childhood education.

Google has become ubiquitous in American classrooms

Google’s influence over young children has been a concern for years. As noted in a 2014 article10 in the International Business Times, “How Google Took Over the American Classroom and Is Creating a Gmail generation”:

“Google apps, services and increasingly, Chromebooks, have become ubiquitous in the American classroom and it’s not hard to understand why: they require no expensive hardware, they never need to be updated, and they’re free, an important consideration for cash-strapped districts …

South Carolina’s Richland School District 2 boasts 22,000 Chromebooks, which covers a student populace nearing 27,000, who also use Google Apps.

That makes for a sizeable student population that will become accustomed to utilizing Google services … ‘Education is at the core of Google’s mission — to remove the four walls of the classroom and make the world’s information accessible to all students,’ a Google spokeswoman said.”

Google will know everything about your child

However, for all its conveniences, Google poses a very real threat to all these children. As noted in a 2017 article11 in The New York Times — which details the strategic moves that allowed Google to take over the American classroom — “schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.”

In 2012, less than 1% of the tablets and laptops used in the U.S. school system were Google Chromebooks. By 2015, more than half the devices sold to K-12 schools were Chromebooks, equipped with a free suite of Google apps and education-specific programs.12

When you consider Google’s primary business is tracking, compiling, storing and selling personal data, by capturing children at an early age, it will be able to build the most comprehensive personality profiles of the population ever conceived — and there’s no opt-out feature for this data gathering.13 As reported by The Washington Post in 2015:14

“… [I]n a filing with the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued Google is tracking nearly everything students are doing when they are signed into their Google accounts and, in some cases, using that information to build profiles and serve them targeted ads in certain Google programs.”

By the time these children have grown into adulthood, every single preference, thought, belief and proclivity will be known about them, which will make them extremely vulnerable to manipulation, not only through targeted advertising15 but also through what might be called customized censorship or targeted social engineering — in essence, the strategy of tailoring the information any given individual can see in order to shape and mold their prejudices and ideas. The Washington Post writes:16

“Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.

Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts — but schools encourage them to do so …

That doesn’t sit well with some parents. They warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children’s school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults …

Unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices or software services, Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising — much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people’s data …

‘Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid,’ said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps.”

Google teaches children to trust the least trustworthy

While most adults are now at least somewhat aware that Google is spying on their every move and selling their personal data, children are simply too young to understand the long-term ramifications of this pervasive data gathering. (To get an idea of the kind of information tracked and stored, see “What Kind of Information Does Google and Facebook Have on You?”)

Children are extremely vulnerable to influence of all kinds, and Google is taking full advantage of this…

• Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:

◦ Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo32 and Startpage33

◦ Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.34 From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy

◦ If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,35 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland

◦ Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives36

◦ If you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts.

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How Google and Amazon are 'spying' on you | Daily Mail Online

 

 

 

 

 

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Mass Shootings and Political Misuse of Them Have Unintended Consequences – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2019

In other words, trust, an important cement in any society, is everywhere being erased. 

When trust is erased, things fall apart. 

When things fall apart, mass violence is the consequence.

The El Paso shooter’s manifesto, kept from you by the sordid presstitutes, is here:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/05/the-el-paso-shooters-manifesto/

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/05/mass-shootings-and-responses-to-them-have-unintended-consequences/

Paul Craig Roberts

The unintended consequences of mass shootings and the attempts to use these shootings for various agendas can be far worse than the shootings themselves and ultimately endanger far more people.

I was listening to NPR this morning prior to President Trump’s 10 AM EST address on the shootings.  NPR set Trump up for blame.  Trump opposes illegal immigration and spoke of the 20,000 person caravan as “an invasion.”  And so forth.  And it wasn’t just NPR.  As USA reported, while joining in the blame trump orchestration, “Media outlets around the country, and around the world, decried his [Trump’s] role in inspiring a shooter who gunned down 20 people.” US Rep. Veronica Escobar (D,TX) said:  “All of this has happened because Hispanic people have been dehumanized. They have been dehumanized by the president, by his enablers, by other politicians.”

Rep. Escobar did not explain why and how a country’s defense of its borders constitutes dehumanization of those that the law requires to be kept out.  Is the President of the United States, who is sworn to enforce the laws and Constitution of the US, supposed to violate the law?  If the American people want open borders, they should inform their representatives and get a law passed that abolishes border controls.  If Hispanics are dehumanized by being kept out, so are Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, and Venezuelans, all people declared to be national security threats to the US which employs a massive armed force to be sure these threats don’t invade us. Just imagine how we dehumanized the Japanese and Germans during World War II by keeping them from invading us…

We are unlikely to discover the real causes as long as shootings are used to advance agendas.  What is important is not the facts but the advancement of agendas.

Whereas the Dayton shooter wants to kill fascists, which presumably includes white supremacists, the El Paso shooter is portrayed as a white supremacist who hates Hispanics.  Even President Trump has bought into this characterization of the shooter.  However, the El Paso shooter’s manifesto doesn’t support this characterization of his motives. He is concerned that the core population of his country is being marginalized and dispossessed by several developments including automation and illegal immigrants and their demands.  It so happens that the current illegal immigrants are from south of the border, but he doesn’t hate them because they are Hispanic.  If they were coming from Asia, or Africa or a different planet, he would see it as the same problem. To the shooter, it is not a problem of hate but of fact. There are more people than there are jobs.

He addresses the issue that his actions will be blasted “as the sole result of racism and hatred of other countries.”  He blames this response on American hypocrites, largely white people, who “support imperialistic wars that have caused the loss of tens of thousands of American lives and untold numbers of civilian lives. The argument that mass murder is okay when it is state sanctioned is absurd. Our government has killed a whole lot more people for a whole lot less.”

One of the El Paso shooter’s concerns with immigration is that “continued immigration will make one of the biggest issues of our time, automation, so much worse. Some sources say that in under two decades, half of American jobs will be lost to it. . . . So it makes no sense to keep on letting millions of illegal or legal immigrants flood into the United States.”  This logical conclusion together with betrayal by America’s white leaders and the damage done to Americans by the corporations are the political and economic reasons he gives for his attack. “My motives for this attack are not at all personal.”  In other words, the attack does not stem from his hatred of Hispanic immigrants but from the adverse consequences for American citizens of mass immigration from wherever.

He also writes in his manifesto that “the idea of deporting or murdering all non-white Americans is horrific.  Many have been here at least as long as the whites, and have done as much to build  our country.”

As for being inspired by Trump to murder immigrants, the El Paso shooter writes: “My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I [am] putting this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.” Truer words were never spoken.

The fact that the El Paso shooter’s manifesto does not support the storyline of the media is the reason the media refuses to publish the manifesto and why the Drudge Report was denounced for posting the manifesto.  The shooter’s manifesto contradicts the controlled explanation of the event… Read the rest of this entry »

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Evil Killing by the US Relies on Willful Indifference – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2019

Truman and his advisors lied to the American public, and withheld the information that Japan offered to surrender much in advance of the bombings.

How can a more informed citizenry continue to hide their heads in the sand, and worship the nation state apparatus and its agents of force in the military? This is a travesty, and exposes the success achieved by the elites to brainwash the public into supporting any kind of butchery and mass murder under the guise that they are protecting the nation from non-existent monsters from afar.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/gary-d-barnett/evil-killing-by-the-u-s-relies-on-willful-indifference/

By

This week marks another horrible anniversary of the two single largest terrorist acts ever perpetrated by any nation against mankind. That nation was the United States, and its victims were Japanese civilians. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, and Nagasaki was bombed on August 9th, 1945. Over 200,000 innocent people, mostly women and children, were immediately obliterated from the face of the earth for a lie. Many tens of thousands more have died since that time due to that murderous event.

How was it possible that hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were burned alive by U.S. atomic bombs, and their cities destroyed, while the U.S. masses remained apathetic to their plight? That apathy remains in place even today.

There is no less guilt for those who do nothing to stop evil acts than there is for those who commit them. Indifference is a most vile trait of human existence, but indifference toward the mass starvation, torture, and murder of innocents for political purposes may be the worst of all.

Indifference is the opposite of love, it is the opposite of good, and it is the opposite of anything of value. It is worse than hate. Apathy in the face of depravity has become common among many around the world, but especially so in this make-believe land of the free called America. This attitude of emptiness breeds despair, but it is important to remember that the evildoers among us can only succeed in their efforts of madness so long as those watching remain silent and do nothing.

Those heinous acts of extreme violence and death like the bombing of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered so that it never happens again. But it does happen over and over, as this country’s ruling class and its military industrial complex continue to murder innocents every day. Truman and his advisors lied to the American public, and withheld the information that Japan offered to surrender much in advance of the bombings. In other words, the bombings were the premeditated murder of innocent women and children just to advance a political agenda.

I have been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and studied what happened there. My wife was raised in Kokura, Japan and her family still resides there. Kokura was the second target for the atomic bomb, but was passed over after multiple attempts, which failed due to adverse weather conditions. Nagasaki was the alternate bombsite on the 9th, and was mercilessly destroyed.

Those responsible for that carnage were evil monsters, and the stated plan was to only bomb civilian cities and targets, cities that were unscathed by previous bombings, so that the massive destruction could be calculated and measured. This was purposeful wickedness beyond the imagination of any decent and moral human being. The elected rulers of America were allowed to do the things they did with total immunity, and with the blessing of the public at large.

Today, much more is known about the intent of the political class and its elitist controllers, but it seems as if there is much more apathy today than at anytime in the past. How can this be? How can a more informed citizenry continue to hide their heads in the sand, and worship the nation state apparatus and its agents of force in the military? This is a travesty, and exposes the success achieved by the elites to brainwash the public into supporting any kind of butchery and mass murder under the guise that they are protecting the nation from non-existent monsters from afar. Societal weakness at this level deserves no respect or admiration whatsoever. It deserves only contempt. There is no excuse for such complicity in acts of war. The truth that must be accepted is that it is not just the government that should be blamed for all its heinous acts, but that each and every citizen who stands silent in the face of that evil committed in their name is fully responsible as well.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were but two unconscionable acts of carnage in a horrible war that saw tens of millions die for the benefit of the powerbrokers that rule the world. But those events solidified in the minds of the weak masses a tolerance for the unspeakable, and a total disregard for humanity. The acceptance of such brazen acts as these set in motion a collective coldness that has allowed for a future of unlimited brutality.

The people of this country who value peace must rise up and fight against the continued slaughter of innocents in order to regain any sanity. Those who do not speak out to force a stop to these aggressive wars and killing, those who continue to blindly support the status quo, will be as guilty as those who prosecute war. They should be left with only shame and humiliation.

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The Myth of Political Inaction on Gun Control | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

https://mises.org/power-market/myth-political-inaction-gun-control

Tho Bishop

One of the many unfortunate consequences of the politicization of America is the natural reaction for political factions to bunker down with dependable talking points in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy. There is perhaps no issue where this is more obvious than gun control, where the political discourse has effectively devolved into sharing mindless memes before even the most basic facts are known. Obviously, the repeated reading of political scripts lends itself to the perpetuation of false conclusions and faulty analysis.

One of the best writers out there correcting the record is our own Ryan McMaken. His work has highlighted there is plenty of evidence that shows that there is simply no correlation between gun ownership rates and gun violence, the misuse of international comparisons to America, and that it’s a general mistake to look at a collective rate of gun violence in the US.

Beyond the issue of gun policy itself, there is another basic fallacy whenever there is a discussion over political solutions to a particular problem — a narrow focus on federal action.

For example, in the aftermath of this weekend’s shootings, there has been a lot of noise regarding the lack of federal responses to past mass shootings. Ignoring the questions of whether any sort of legislative response would be either desirable or constitutional, there is a fundamental problem in viewing the federal government as the only legislative body that creates public policy.

If we consider state governments, for example, we have seen a dramatic rise in gun control measures since the Parkland High School shooting in 2018.

As Pew Research noted in August of last year, 50 different gun-focused bills were signed into law by both Democrat and Republican governors just five months after the tragedy. This trend continued in 2019, with numerous bills working their way across the country, particularly the “red flag” laws that have even won the support of the NRA.

GunControlLineGraph_0.png

Source: Pew Research

(For a handy chart of 2018 legislation passed, click here.)

As one would expect, states have taken dramatically different approaches to the issue, based on their population and ideological bent of the legislature. California, for example, has passed some of the most restrictive laws in the country, including background checks on ammo purchases and a ban on large-capacity magazines that has been the subject of a legal challenge. In contrast, Oklahoma’s governor signed a “Constitutional Carry” bill just this year.

The advantages of this decentralized approach are numerous.

One, there are clear differences in the needs and wishes of a state like California and a place like Wyoming or Montana.

Two, it helps defuse the high-stakes game of political domination that has helped erode American civil society. If half the country views the right to bear arms as a natural right that serves as a vital bulwark against government tyranny, and the other views it as an immoral defense of normalizing weapons of war, there is very little room for compromise. Instead, these political disagreements become a battle of the politically powerful vs. the politically vanquished, with the sides being determined every two years. Control over the senate or the judicial system becomes a matter of self-defense. The result is the saying of “politics as war through other means” taking on a very literal reading.

A third advantage arises when we look at the performance of these state-passed gun laws, allowing the opportunity for unexpected consequences of these policies to play out in real life.

For example, we have seen how red-light laws in Maryland have led to the death of a man never convicted of a crime. Similarly, we’ve seen county-level nullification of tighter gun control laws in Washington state, with rural county sheriffs refusing to enforce laws promoted by urban politicians that they see as unconstitutional infringements on the second amendment (and an example of political decentralization beyond the state level).

A less obvious consequence is that pushing for legislation at the federal level helps feed the political theater of the absurd.

For example, if Republican politicians know that gun control is extremely unpopular with their base, but don’t want to be seen as being indifferent to a national tragedy, their response is to find easier targets to hit. This has played out this weekend with many Republican leaders, including the president, returning to the tired old crusade of ranting about video games and social media as the true villains of this weekend’s tragedies.

Of course, we should not underestimate a politician’s ability to turn obvious absurdity into law. It is easy to foresee there being enough dolts in Congress willing to act on such desperate scapegoating.

In fact, as some forms of gun control manage to win bipartisan support, the best protection against federal infringement of American gun rights is the very political dysfunction often lamented by the press and other “Serious People.”

Any American that values their gun rights should hope some new twitter spat between Trump and “the Squad” can prevent bipartisan cooperation toward the president’s desire to “take the guns first, go through due process second.”

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Nolte: ‘New York Times’ Changes Trump Headline to Appease Far-Left Extremists

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

2) The New York Times is not an independent news organization with principles and integrity. Rather, its business model is comfort food for leftists, a business model it’s not willing to risk under any circumstance.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/08/06/nolte-new-york-times-changes-trump-headline-appease-far-left-extremists/#

by John Nolte

The far-left New York Times caved to the leftist Twitter mob with a major switch in headlines between its first and second editions.

The first print edition’s headline read, “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.”

But after the Blue Checkmark Mafia freaked out, the Times caved with a late edition headline that reads, “Assailing Hate But Not Guns.”

New York Times print editor Tom Jolly tweeted out the original edition.

Within an hour, through, the Times had caved to the left’s demand that President Trump never-ever-ever receive even a neutral headline.

After the original edition was revealed, and even though we are constantly told that criticizing the media is a form of violence, the Times was assaulted through social media by all the usual suspects.

And because there is no appeasing the left, as of this writing, #CancelNYT is still trending on Twitter and still filled with angry and deeply unhappy Trump-haters threatening to either cancel their New York Times subscriptions, or bragging that they already have.

CNN’s Joan Walsh one of those who announced her cancellation.

Even flailing and failing Democrat presidential candidate Paddy O’Rourke got into the dangerous business of criticizing the media.

This all proves three things we already knew…

1) The left is totally fine with threatening and attacking the media … if those attacks come from the left.

2) The New York Times is not an independent news organization with principles and integrity. Rather, its business model is comfort food for leftists, a business model it’s not willing to risk under any circumstance.

3) These bitter Blue on Blue battles are a thing of beauty… 

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‘I don’t smell!’ Meet the people who have stopped washing

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/05/i-dont-smell-meet-the-people-who-have-stopped-washing

A growing number of people are eschewing soap and trusting bacteria to do the job instead – and an entire industry has sprung up to accommodate them

David Whitlock has not showered or bathed for 15 years, yet he does not have body odour. “It was kind of strange for the first few months, but after that I stopped missing it,” he says. “If I get a specific part of my body dirty, then I’ll wash that specific part” – but never with soap. As well as germs, soap gets rid of the skin’s protective oils and alters its pH level. Although Whitlock appreciated gaining an extra 15 minutes a day from soap-dodging, his primary motivation was to encourage friendly microbes to live on him in symbiotic harmony. The bacteria get to feast on the ammonia from his sweat and he gets low-maintenance, balanced skin.

Just as awareness of the importance of the gut microbiome has led to a boom in probiotic and fermented foods and supplements, there is increasing interest in our skin microbiome: the trillions of microbes that protect us from pathogens and keep us healthy by making vitamins and other useful chemicals. In this unprecedentedly sanitised era, in which eczema, acne and problems associated with dry skin are rife, consumers are hungry for solutions. Even the mainstream brand Dove claims vaguely that its products are “microbiome-gentle”.

Sarah Ballantyne, a medical biophysicist turned author and lifestyle guru known as the Paleo Mom, has been an advocate of living in a more “stone age” way since reaching a healthy weight after adopting the Paleo diet. She, too, uses only water to wash, even though she is “at the gym sweating buckets six hours a week”. “I use coconut oil to shave and that’s it,” she says. “Over time, my skin has adjusted. I don’t smell.” She is working on a book about the human microbiome and is convinced her odour-free armpits are a sign that her skin microbiome is healthy.

Jackie Hong, a reporter in Yukon, north-west Canada, has eschewed soap in the shower for nine years. “I use my hands to scrub myself and get any grime off, but I’m sitting in court or at my desk most days, so it’s not like I’m getting bombarded with filth.” She was curious to go without soap after an artist told her that he hadn’t lathered up in 20 years. She says she saves time and money and needs “a lot less body lotion”.

“There’s nothing wrong with just rinsing,” says Sandy Skotnicki, a Toronto-based dermatologist and the author of the 2018 book Beyond Soap. “I’ve talked to people who haven’t used any kind of detergent in years and they’re perfectly fine.” She says that, since 1950, we have gone from bathing once a week to every day. “Has that changed our skin microbiome? I think the answer is yes. And has that caused a rise in inflammatory skin diseases? I think the answer is yes, but we don’t know.”…

Meanwhile, the jury is out on the best way to ensure a healthy skin microbiome. Mother Dirt’s CEO, the biochemist Jasmina Aganovic, says detergents such as sodium lauryl sulphate and sodium dodecyl sulphate should be avoided, so as to protect the sensitive AOB. Even essential oils, such as lavender and tea tree, have antimicrobial capabilities. “It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them, but you need to be careful about how – not all over the body, not super-concentrated,” she says.

Spending time outdoors, and “forest bathing” in particular, has also been shown to be beneficial to the microbiome. But, Aganovic hastens to add: “The tempered approach of the scientist is there’s a lot we don’t know, and we’re excited about the potential, but we must also be careful not to overclaim.”

There is one area where most agree that soap is still useful. Ballantyne continues to reach for soap for hand washing, but opts for a lower pH type. Segre also recommends hand-washing with soap. As Skotnicki puts it: “Washing your hair and your body has very little to do with hygiene. But washing your hands is essential.”

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Alex Tabarrok on Paul Krugman’s Most Evil Idea

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/08/tyler-cowen-on-paul-krugmans-most-evil.html

From an Erik Torenberg interview of Alex Tabarrok: 

…Krugman and I are almost in perfect agreement. Only marginally different. Paul says ‘Republicans are corrupt, incompetent, unprincipled and dangerous to a civil society’. I agree with that entirely. I would only change one word. I would change the word
Republicans to the word politicians. If Paul could only be convinced of doing that, coming over to the libertarian side, we would be in complete agreement. But he is much more partisan than I am and even though I worry about Republicans more than Democrats at this particular point in time I think the larger incentive is that we all need to be worried about politicians rather than any one particular party.

Although I agree with Paul a lot of the time, sometimes he does just drive me absolutely batty. He just says things which I think are so wrong. In his latest column which to be fair was written as a column fifty years in the future so maybe it was a bit tongue in cheek. The column was pretending that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were a hundred years of age and fit and fiddle and still major players in society. And Krugman wrote:
Life extension for a privileged few is by its nature a socially destructive technology and the time has come to ban it.
Now to me this is just evil. This is like something out of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, that it is evil to live longer than your brothers and all must be sentenced to death so that none live more than their allotted time. I think it is evil if we accept even the premise of his argument that these technologies are very expensive. Even on that ground it’s evil to kill people just so that they don’t live longer than average. But perhaps even a bigger point is that I think these technologies of life extension are some of the most important things that people are working on today. And the billionaires are doing an incredible service to humanity by investing in these radical ideas and pushing the frontier and that is going to have spillover effects on everyone. If we are to reach the singularity it will because the billionaires are getting us there earlier and faster and they are the ones pushing us to the singularity and everyone will benefit from these life extension technologies.
So I agree with Paul quite a bit, more than you might expect, but sometimes he just says things which are absolutely evil.

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An “AI Race” Between U.S. and China Is a Terrible Idea

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

The space race didn’t bother China much. They spent their time figuring out how to defend themselves from space. They can blow up satellites. They have few carriers but a reportedly fine carrier killer cruise missile.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/21/ai-race-china-artificial-intelligence/

Perhaps because it lies at the perfect nexus of genuinely-very-complicated and impossibly-confounded-by-marketing-buzzword-speak, the term “AI” has become a catchall for anything algorithmic and sufficiently technologically impressive. AI, which is supposed to stand for “artificial intelligence,” now spans applications from cameras to the military to medicine.

One thing we can be sure about AI — because we are told it so often and at so increasingly high a pitch — is that whatever it actually is, the national interest demands more of it. And we need it now, or else China will beat us there, and we certainly wouldn’t want that, would we? What is “there,” exactly? What does it look like, how would it work, and how would it change our society? Irrelevant! The race is on, and if America doesn’t start taking AI seriously, we’re going to find ourselves the losers in an ever-widening Dystopia Gap.

A piece on Politico this week by Luiza Ch. Savage and Nancy Scola exemplifies the mix of maximum alarm and minimum meaning that’s become so typical in our national (and nationalist) discussion around artificial intelligence. “Is America ceding the future of AI to China?” the article asks.

We’re meant to take this possibility as not only very real but as an unquestionably bad thing. One only needs to tell the public that the country risks “ceding” control of something — literally anything — to the great foreign unknown for our national eyes to grow wide.

“The last time a rival power tried to out-innovate the U.S. and marshaled a whole-of-government approach to doing it, the Soviet Union startled Americans by deploying the first man-made satellite into orbit,” the article says. “The Sputnik surprise in 1957 shook American confidence, galvanized its government and set off a space race culminating with the creation of NASA and the moon landing 50 years ago this month.”

Our new national dread, the article continues, is “whether another Sputnik moment is around the corner” — in the form of an AI-breakthrough from the keyboards of Red China instead of Palo Alto.

Forget that Sputnik was not actually a “surprise” for the powers that be, or that Sputnik itself was basically a beeping aluminum beach ball — “barely more than a radio transmitter with batteries,” the magazine Air & Space once said. There’s a bigger problem here: Framing the Cold War as a battle of innovators conveniently avoids mentioning that the chief innovation in question wasn’t Sputnik or the Space Shuttle or any peacetime venture, but the creation of an arsenal for instant global nuclear holocaust at the press of a button.

Sure, yes, it’s doubtful we could have “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to space travel without having first “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to rocket-borne atomic genocide, but to highlight the eventual accomplishments of NASA without acknowledging that it entailed a very close dance with a worldwide apocalypse is ahistoric and absurd. To use this comparison to goad us into another nationalist tech race with a global military power is outright dangerous — if only because the victory remains completely undefined. How would we “beat” China, exactly? Beat them at what, exactly? Which specific problems do we hope to use AI to fix? At a point in history when cities are beginning to scrutinize and outright ban “AI” technologies like facial recognition, are we sure the fixes aren’t even worse than the problems? Nationalists caught in an arms race have no time to answer questions like these or any others; they’ve got a race to win!

All anyone can manage to do is bark that we need more, more, more AI, more investments, more R&D, more collaborations, more ventures, more breakthroughs, simply more AI. Maybe we’ll worry about what we needed all of this for in the first place once we’ve beaten China there. Or maybe an algorithm will explain it to us, along with the locations of all our family members and a corresponding score that quantifies their social utility and biometric trustworthiness.

The Politico piece is full of worried voices cautioning that we can’t let Americans fall behind in the global invasive-surveillance race, completely unable to explain why this would be a bad thing. “The city of Tianjin alone plans to spend $16 billion on AI — and the U.S. government investment still totals several billion and counting,” despairs Elsa Kania of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. “That’s still lower by an order of magnitude.” Amy Webb, a New York University business school professor, told Politico, “We are being outspent. We are being out-researched. We are being outpaced. We are being out-staffed.”

Of course, it’s not just these researchers, nor is it just Politico: The necessity of absolute American dominance in an extremely unpredictable, deeply hazardous, and altogether hard to comprehend field has made the great leap from think-tank anxiety nightmare to political talking point…

Given the deceptive, reckless, and at times downright vampiric way the likes of Facebook and Google already behave, who could possibly think that the “many legal and ethical issues” Sherman worries about could be properly addressed in the middle of a race? Are we really ready to grapple with Amazon once it’s been handed the mantle of Sputnik and Apollo 11?

Careful consideration demands a slower pace — and a slower pace means, yes, potentially losing a race to the bottom against a national adversary that clearly has no qualms making the bottom as technologically impressive as possible. Rather than clamoring for a dead sprint toward some sort of national AI supremacy, defined however and by whomever, our time might be better spent worrying in earnest about what lies at the finish line.

Be seeing you

now what

Go To Mars…I Guess.

 

 

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CIA Secret Experiments in Mind Control and Assassination – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/charles-burris/cia-secret-experiments-in-mind-control-and-assassination/

By

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate – The CIA and Mind Control — Book by John Marks.

  A ‘Manchurian Candidate’ is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA’s highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide. Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that ‘accomplished what two Senate committees could not’ (Senator Edward Kennedy).

“Perhaps the most compelling, well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever.” (Progressive);

“A comprehensive, detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities.” (Washington Monthly)

I met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.

Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond –– Book by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain

Operation Mind Control –– Book by Walter Bowart

CIA Assassination Manual  — CIA: A Study Of Assassination ( 1953)

A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — Book by by LIsa Pease (Author), James DiEugenio (Introduction)

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