#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Labels: gun control, media
About 100 Google U.S. employees concerned about cyber bullying inside the company have organized into a group proposing new policies for conduct at the unit of Alphabet Inc, five people involved in the effort said in recent interviews.That sounds pretty reasonable, I have to say.
Three current employees and two others helping to organize the group said it formed last fall. They said that among its proposals, which have not previously been reported in detail, are that Google should tighten rules of conduct for internal forums and hire staff to enforce them.
They said they want to stop inflammatory conversations and personal attacks on the forums and see punishment for individuals who regularly derail discussions or leak conversations. The group also wants Google to list rights and responsibilities for accusers, defendants, managers and investigators in human resources cases.
The group also desires greater protection for employees targeted by what it views as insincere complaints to human resources used as a bullying tactic and goading. The organizers said Google should be more attuned to when people seeking to stir animosity or expressing views opposite the company’s stated values try to take over discussions about race, gender and other sensitive subjects.Wait a minute...
“My coworkers and I are having our right to a safe workplace being endangered,” said staff site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, one of the lead organizers. She said employees experience stress and fear of physical reprisal when internal conversations are leaked to media, sometimes with writers’ names.Oh. It's just the usual suspects crying to the media again.
Labels: SJW, technology
In April of 2017, I published a podcast with Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial (and endlessly misrepresented) book The Bell Curve. These are the most provocative claims in the book:It's mildly amusing that Harris is only discovering now that the media in general, and Ezra Klein in particular, is disingenuous and utilizes character assassination as its stock tool-in-trade. Imagine what it is like for those who can be disemployed as well as discredited, Sam!
At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—though taken together, they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists. That remains the case today. When I spoke with Murray last year, he had just been de-platformed at Middlebury College, a quarter century after his book was first published, and his host had been physically assaulted while leaving the hall. So I decided to invite him on my podcast to discuss the episode, along with the mischaracterizations of his research that gave rise to it.
- Human “general intelligence” is a scientifically valid concept.
- IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring it.
- A person’s IQ is highly predictive of his/her success in life.
- Mean IQ differs across populations (blacks < whites < Asians).
- It isn’t known to what degree differences in IQ are genetically determined, but it seems safe to say that genes play a role (and also safe to say that environment does too).
Needless to say, I knew that having a friendly conversation with Murray might draw some fire my way. But that was, in part, the point. Given the viciousness with which he continues to be scapegoated—and, indeed, my own careful avoidance of him up to that moment—I felt a moral imperative to provide him some cover.
In the aftermath of our conversation, many people have sought to paint me as a racist—but few have tried quite so hard as Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large of Vox. In response to my podcast, Klein published a disingenuous hit piece that pretended to represent the scientific consensus on human intelligence while vilifying me as, at best, Murray’s dupe. More likely, readers unfamiliar with my work came away believing that I’m a racist pseudoscientist in my own right.
After Klein published that article, and amplified its effects on social media, I reached out to him in the hope of appealing to his editorial conscience. I found none. The ethic that governs Klein’s brand of journalism appears to be: Accuse a person with a large platform of something terrible, and then monetize the resulting controversy. If he complains, invite him to respond in your magazine so that he will drive his audience your way and you can further profit from his doomed effort to undo the damage you’ve done to his reputation.
Well, you do not cease to amaze… “Junk science” is in the title of the article, and I “fell for it” (subtitle), because I didn’t do my homework (the thrust of the entire piece). Whereas in reality, you have been shown ample evidence that the science is mainstream, that I represented it accurately, and that your authors were cherry-picking it for ideological reasons.Unfortunately for Sam, he has discovered how little interest those on the Left have in either the truth or in science, whether they are editors, reporters, or readers. The Narrative has moved on and Sam has been left behind, much to his surprise.
Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.It sounds like Sam very much needs to read SJWs Always Lie.
Many readers seem mystified by the anger I expressed in this email exchange. Why care so much about “criticism” or even “insults”? But this has nothing to do with criticism and insults. What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine, is nothing less than the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data. Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field and declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion in my and Murray’s defense—all to the purpose of tarring us as racists and enablers of racists. This comes at immense personal and social cost. It is also dishonest.
According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media. Some have questioned whether Facebook has been transparent enough with its users and with journalists, said the employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many are also concerned over what might leak next and are deleting old comments or messages that might come across as controversial or newsworthy, they said.I have no doubt that the so-called "Ugly Memo" is neither the last nor the worst thing we're going to see coming out of the Facebook internal messaging boards.
Labels: technology
Friday’s demonstrations mark the beginning of the Palestinians’ return to all “Palestine,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in a speech at the scene of the mass protests in the Gaza Strip.How can Israel possibly deny itself the manifold benefits of these millions of New Israelis, who are every bit as Jewish and Israeli as every current inhabitant of Israel? All they are seeking is a better life for themselves and their children, after all.
“We are here to declare today that our people will not agree to keep the right of return only as a slogan,” he said. Haniyeh said that the March of Return was also aimed at sending a message to US President Donald Trump that the Palestinians will not give up their right to Jerusalem and “Palestine.” There is no solution without the right of return, he added.
The Palestinians “will never recognize the Zionist entity and will never give up on Palestinian land, and on Jerusalem; [the city] is ours and there is no solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] without the ‘right of return,'” Haniyeh said, according to a Hebrew translation by the Walla news site.
Haniyeh was speaking during a mass demonstration along the Gaza security fence with Israel, ahead of a planned six-week tent protest. Dubbed the “March of Return,” it coincides with Land Day, when Palestinians commemorate the Israeli government’s expropriation of Arab-owned land in the Galilee on March 30, 1976, and ensuing demonstrations in which six Arab Israelis were killed.
At previous peace talks, the Palestinians have always demanded, along with sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Old City, a “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees who left or were forced out of Israel when it was established. The Palestinians demand this right not only for those of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are still alive — a figure estimated in the low tens of thousands — but also for their descendants, who number in the millions.
The 'Great March of Return,' orchestrated by Hamas, draws thousands of Palestinians to the Gaza-Israel border; riots ensue, prompting IDF snipers to shoot at main instigators; Defense Minister Lieberman warns anyone who approaches security fence is putting his life in jeopardy.For shame! The Israeli border guards have killed
Labels: immigration, Zion
David Hogg is predictably still calling for boycotts of Ingraham's advertisers, calling her apology inadequate. It's a shame she didn't read your book.At this point I can safely state, without any sense of exaggeration or modesty, that if you have anything to do with the media or politics and you do not read SJWAL, you will fully merit the treatment that you're going to get from SJWs sooner or later. Conservative commentators continue to demonstrate that they never learn anything from the various defenestrations that preceded their own, as they insist on demonstrating every single time one of them comes in for targeted public criticism.
Advertisers – including TripAdvisor, Nestle, Wayfair and Hulu – are dumping Laura Ingraham after she slammed Parkland survivorBut there is a more important point here than the obvious question of "what part of 'never apologize' did you fail to understand?" If you live by advertising from converged corporations, then you can safely expect them to cut you off the moment someone complains that you are violating the current Narrative.
TripAdvisor will pull its advertisements from right-wing television host Laura Ingraham's Fox News program.
In a tweet, Ingraham mocked a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in February that left 17 students and adults dead. The survivor-turned-activist, David Hogg, responded on Twitter by calling on his followers to contact Ingraham's top advertisers. Ingraham later tweeted her apologies "for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland."
Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how "poised" he was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion.
What a brave opinion leader! The complete spinelessness and stupidity demonstrated by the hapless Ingraham aside, this episode demonstrates how fragile the Right is when it relies upon the Left's infrastructure. Even a not-very-bright high school student can effectively take down a major conservative media figure with nothing more than a well-targeted tweet.
Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”This is not Christianity. These are not Biblical teachings. In fact, this is not even religion. This is John Lennon's Imaginism elevated and amplified by an extremely silly and not particularly intelligent man who has accidentally revealed his true thinking.
Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
On the first Holy Thursday, Judas betrayed Christ. And of Judas the Lord said, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man shall be betrayed; it were better for him if that man had never been born.”
Did the soul of Judas, and those of the monstrous evildoers of history, “just fade away,” as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said of old soldiers? If there is no hell, is not the greatest deterrent to the worst of sins removed?
What did Christ die on the cross to save us from?
The Vatican swiftly issued a statement saying the pope had had a private conversation, not a formal interview, with his friend, Scalfari.
The Vatican added: “The textual words pronounced by the pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”
Sorry, but this will not do. This does not answer the questions the pope raised in his chat. Does hell exist? Are souls that die in mortal sin damned to hell for all eternity? Does the pope accept this belief? Is this still the infallible teaching of the Roman Catholic Church?
Labels: Christianity, religion, trainwreck
I was reading some of your earlier threads and I noticed you had questions as to how the Smoot-Hawley Tariff came to be associated with causing the Great Depression.Of course, this also explains why creditor nations such as Germany and South Korea are so inordinately terrified of what are, in reality, very small and modest tariffs. It's not just their massive export sectors that are potentially at risk, but the huge financial Ponzi schemes that have been constructed on top of them. The various camels we call economies are overloaded with debt and there are an awful lot of things that look like straws these days.
The idea was first proposed by Jude Wanniski in his book “The Way the World Works.” Specifically, it is in Chapter 7, “The Stock Market and the Wedge.”
I recently read the first 10 chapters of Jude’s book and I can say it is excellent overall and well worth reading, but the conclusions are vastly different from the normal interpretations of Smoot-Hawley. Basically, Jude was tracking the reportage of the Smoot-Hawley legislation as it was winding its way through Congress. Every time the legislation experienced a setback, the stock market would rally. Every time it experienced a success, the stock market would decline. When Hoover finally signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff into law, the market took a massive dive. Thus, you have the evidence of the Smoot-Hawley tariff causing the Great Depression.
This is good as far as it goes, but it begs the question as to why the market was so concerned about the tariff to begin with. Was the market really worried about reciprocal tariffs or a decline in economic activity? It turns out that the evidence in Jude’s chapter points to a different reason:
The stock market was tracking the tariff legislation because it was worried about a bond market dislocation. This is my analysis piecing together the evidence presented in chapter 7 of Jude’s book.
Basically, before WWI, America was the world’s biggest debtor nation, importing capital from all over the world to build and invest in the United States. During and after WWI, America became the world’s biggest creditor. Out of the national income of $30 billion, Woodrow Wilson lent $11 billion to England and France to fight WWI. After the war, America lent an additional $14.7 billion for private and public investment, a lending boom that continued to grow throughout the roaring 20’s. This means that during probably the biggest boomtime in US history up to the period, where the economy grew to $100 billion before the crash, the United States was accumulating a massive bond portfolio where a sizeable percentage of assets were concentrated in foreign bonds.
Because the US was on a gold standard where $20 bought an ounce of gold, the only way for foreign entities to pay for their dollar-denominated debts was to sell to the United States, exchange goods for cash, and then meet the terms of their bond agreements. To guarantee that they could sell goods, gain cash and pay debts, European firms were dumping product in the United States.
The dumping was at first concentrated in the agricultural sector and it was wreaking havoc on farmers. Because farmers accounted for 25% of the population, they managed to push the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922, a tariff of not only 34.8%, but with a Tariff Commission whose duty was to equalize production costs as a condition for any tariff removal. Yet, throughout the 1920’s, not only did the dumping continue, it moved upmarket. Wisconsin Senators, by the late 1920’s, were complaining about Belgian cement undercutting Wisconsin cement companies.
Jude’s book provides great insight into what was going on in the 1920’s American economy. Warren Harding ran on a campaign of “returning to normalcy” by repealing the high income taxes of the war years. This caused the US economy to boom. By 1925, the top marginal tax rate was reduced to 25% and the US economy was roaring along.
Unfortunately, the malfeasance of the Wilson administration led the United States to lend enormous amounts of money to the rest of the world, a practice that continued among private sector banks throughout the 1920’s. JP Morgan would lend money to Belgian cement makers that would then export government-subsidized cement to the US, sell it, and then service the bonds, which reflected in higher stock prices for JP Morgan and Belgian cement companies, but would wreak havoc on local businesses that then lobbied for tariff protection. This process was repeated across hundreds of different industries.
The stock market was not worried that the drop in international trade would tank the US economy. International trade was small as a percentage of the US economy, roughly 4% total. But, that 4% of international trade was servicing the accumulated lending that amounted to anywhere from 30-50% of the value of the entire US economy. The tariff meant that firms would not be able to service the money lent to them by Americans and, thus, lead to massive bond defaults.
What happens to the value of company stock if the company defaults on its bonds? The stock goes to zero.
That is what the market was paying attention to and why it was reacting the way it did to the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
We can see why today tariffs will not have the same effect that they did in 1929: the US is not the world’s biggest creditor. Our debtor status means that we are not vulnerable to a bond-market dislocation. Other nations are. We can safely go back to raising tariffs and building the United States.
Carefully reading and re-reading Zuckerberg’s words puts me ill at ease. Of course, simply complaining that Facebook’s CEO sounds well-rehearsed won’t do. He’s a pro at managing a major crisis. Persphinctery statements are part of the fare (from the NYT interview):Once more, sociosexual analysis provides useful insight. Remember, the Zuckerbot is not merely a Gamma, it is a Super King Gamma Emulation. And what do Gammas always believe? That their ludicrously transparent deceptions are impenetrable, of course.
“Privacy issues have always been incredibly important to people. One of our biggest responsibilities is to protect data.”
But we quickly get to the misrepresentations.
“… someone’s data gets passed to someone who the rules of the system shouldn’t have allowed it to, that’s rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar.”
Here, Zuckerberg glosses over the pivotal fact that researcher Aleksandr Kogan accessed data in a manner that was fully compatible with Facebook’s own rules (see below). It appears that the rule-breaking started after he put his mitts on the data and made a deal with Cambridge Analytica.
Next, we’re treated to the resolute statements. Facebook now realizes what transpired and will make sure it won’t happen in the future:
“So the actions here that we’re going to do involve first, dramatically reducing the amount of data that developers have access to, so that apps and developers can’t do what Kogan did here. The most important actions there we actually took three or four years ago, in 2014. But when we examined the systems this week, there were certainly other things we felt we should lock down, too.”
Three rich sentences, here. And a problem with each one…
First, an admission that Facebook’s own rules allowed developers overly-broad access to our personal data. Thanks to Ben Thompson, we have a picture of the bewildering breadth of user data developers had access to:
(Thompson’s Stratechery Newsletter is a valuable source of insights, of useful agreements and disagreements.)
Of course, developers have to request the user’s permission to make use of their data — even for something as seemingly “innocent” as a game or psychological quiz — but this isn’t properly informed consent. Facebook users aren’t legal eagles trained in the parsing of deliberately obscure sentences and networks of references and footnotes.
Second, Mark Zuckerberg claims that it wasn’t until 2014 that the company became aware of Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook’s Open Graph (introduced in 2010). This, to be polite, strains credulity. Facebook is a surveillance machine, its business is knowing what’s happening on its network, on its social graph. More damning is the evidence that Facebook was warned about app permissions abuses in 2011:
“… in August 2011 [European privacy campaigner and lawyer Max] Schrems filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission exactly flagging the app permissions data sinkhole (Ireland being the focal point for the complaint because that’s where Facebook’s European HQ is based).”
Finally, Zuckerberg tells us that upon closer examination Facebook realizes that it still has problematic data leaks that need to be attended to (“So we’re going ahead and doing that” he reassures us).
The message is clear: Zuckerberg thinks we’re idiots. How are we to believe Facebook didn’t know — and derived benefits — from the widespread abuse of user data by its developers. We just became aware of the Cambridge Analytica cockroach…how many more are under the sink? In more lawyerly terms: “What did you know, and when did you know it?”
On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth.Zuckerbot doesn't care at all about its "fellow humans". And it's simply grotesque parody when it tries to pretend it does.
“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it,” VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth wrote.
“So we connect more people,” he wrote in another section of the memo. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.
“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
Labels: technology, trainwreck
The proverbial sky seems to be falling on Facebook (FB), with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreeing to finally answer questions from Congress in the coming weeks.I wonder where all those new users came from.... Seriously, though, if you're not on Idka yet, give it a whirl. We're going to establish a new Voxiversity group there later this week.
Lawmakers will be pushing Zuckerberg about the company's privacy controversy, but the issues go deeper for Facebook. The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting episode has exposed Facebook to two risks that aren't getting much attention: One is the possibility, slight as it might be, that Facebook is newly vulnerable to competition. The other very real risk is Facebook's ability to retain and recruit top talent in hypercompetitive Silicon Valley. The biggest names in the Valley routinely poach workers from one another.
First, those plucky competitors. I need not look further than my email folder. Idka, an advertising-free social network, on Wednesday announced its subscription-based platform would be free to new users through October 2018. The company, which has vowed not to sell or share user data, claims a 50% increase in new users and an 800% increase in website visits in the past week.
Labels: technology
Psychologists conducted brain scans on a total of 93 adults (first they studied 48 Caucasian adults, 58% of whom were female, and then replicated the effects with 45 adults from diverse ethnic backgrounds, 67% of whom were female) and found that the size of the bilateral amygdala, which governs emotions, survival instincts, and memory, was strongly correlated with support for the existing social order.This is why you simply cannot fix SJWs. It's no more possible than trying to make them taller, or smarter. Their shrunken, tiny little brains are the problem.
This mindset is known as “system justification,” and is highly correlated with conservatism, says Jay Van Bavel, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. “A system-justifying psychological orientation favours the social, economic, and political status quo, and may promote vigilance to social hierarchy and a preference for ideologies that characterize extant inequality as legitimate and necessary,” explain the authors in the paper, published in December in Nature Human Behavior. The study evaluated this by the system justification scale, which poses questions such as, “In general, you find society to be fair,” and “Everyone has a fair shot at wealth and happiness.”
Earlier research (notably one paper co-authored by the actor Colin Firth) found a link between conservatism and the volume of the right amygdala, with higher volume linked to conservatism. Van Bavel says his research found that system justification, more than specific political ideology or the tendency to legitimize economic inequality under capitalism, was the strongest indicator of variations in the size of the amygdala.
The authors followed up with 20 participants and found that those with larger amygdalas were less likely to take part in protests. “Although the sample size was small, this link between amygdala volume and protest behaviour provides initial evidence that the amygdala may not only be related to beliefs about society but also willingness to take action to change certain aspects of the social system,” note the authors.
Newly uncovered text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page suggest a possible coordination between high-ranking officials at the Obama White House, CIA, FBI, Justice Department and former Senate Democratic leadership in the early stages of the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to GOP congressional investigators on Wednesday.There will be far more than this coming to light. But just this would be enough to land some very high-ranking government officials - and former government officials - in prison.
The investigators say the information provided to Fox News “strongly” suggests coordination between former President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and CIA Director John Brennan — which they say would “contradict” the Obama administration’s public stance about its hand in the process.
Labels: conspiracy, politics
Labels: conspiracy, politics, technology
During a recent forum at Marquette University, students and faculty members enthusiastically agreed that the university’s seal is a “microaggression” because it depicts a white explorer being guided by a Native American. “According to one professor at the forum, the seal shows how Marquette’s namesake, French explorer Fr. Jacques Marquette, ‘took advantage of an economic disparity to have a Native American as his guide.'”On behalf of my people, I accept the good professor's gracious and historically sensitive offer. This will take Voxiversity to a whole new level!
I agree. Shut down Marquette and give the land back to the Indians.
Corey Feldman has been hospitalised after being stabbed by a man in what he claims to be a 'revenge attack' after his allegations about sexual abuse in Hollywood.Now, Feldman is shady enough that one can be excused for being a little suspicious about the nature of the attack. I certainly would not put it past him to stage something like this for attention. But if it was a legitimate attack, then it is a clear message being sent to all the young actors and actresses who were abused by people in Hollywood.
The actor tweeted two pictures of himself in a hospital bed and revealed the attack happened while his security guards were distracted.
Three men approached him while he was out in public, before another man pulled up in his vehicle.
Desperate for more funds, this former child/teen actor who was mostly in movies is resorting to cheap publicity stunts to try and raise more money from what he hopes is a gullible public. Those vacations aren't going to pay for themselves.I think it's safe to assume the reference is to the unfortunate Mr. Feldman.
Labels: conspiracy, freakshow, movies
Japan escaped the boom and bust cycles of many other pre-modern human civilizations and managed to create a stable and relatively prosperous society. Of course, that doesn't mean that Edo Japan was Paradise on Earth. It was a tightly regulated society where individual freedom and individual rights were unknown concepts. Social inequality was also very pronounced and political power was concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy landlords.What can we reasonably conclude from this in light of the current situation? Among other things, this: the neo-liberal world order, which increasingly depends upon globalization, international migration, and multiculturalism, is unsustainable, unstable, and intrinsically fragile. Nationalism is the solution, which is why both progressivism and conservatism are irrelevant and the Alt-Right is inevitable over time.
Still, we can learn a lot from ancient Japan on how to create a society that doesn't overexploit its resources and maintains the natural wealth of its territory. The Japanese interpretation of the concept of sustainability made it possible for them to develop a remarkably sophisticated society. The skills of the Japanese craftsmen are still legendary today, while Japan attained achievements in poetry and figurative art that are a cultural heritage of all humankind: from Hokusai's prints to Basho's sophisticated poetry. In comparison, it is truly heartbreaking to note how the cultural treasures that Ireland had produced during its long history were destroyed by the greed and the carelessness of the foreign rulers of Ireland.
So, how could the Japanese attain sustainability whereas Ireland couldn't? It is, of course, a complex question, but I can list here the main factors that differentiated Japan and Ireland during the ninetieth century.
- Japan had a strong national government. Ireland was governed by a different country.
- Japan had a well-developed commercial system and a national currency. Ireland had neither.
- Japan was isolated, practicing no commerce with other countries. Ireland was integrated with the British worldwide commercial system.
- Japan is a country of steep mountain ranges and low coastline. Ireland is mainly flat, with high coastlines.
Labels: nationalism
Obviously, the larger the Gini coefficient, the larger the income inequality. The case of perfect equality has Gini = 0 since the area of A is equal to zero. The opposite case would be when only one person owns all the wealth while all the others own nothing. This condition would generate a Gini coefficient equal to 1. Both conditions are obviously improbable and coefficients measured for different countries range, typically, from 0.2 to 0.7 (sometimes given in percentiles, that is from 20 to 70). Some countries are less egalitarian than others: for instance, South-American countries have normally high Gini coefficients, with Brazil perhaps at the top with around 0.6. On the opposite side, European countries are rather egalitarian, with income coefficients in the range from 0.2 to 0.4, especially low in Scandinavian countries. About the United States, it had seen a trend toward lower inequality that started in the ninetieth century and that accelerated after the end of the second world war, thus making the US trend similar to that of most European countries. But the trend changed direction in the 1960s-1970s, to arrive today at values of the Gini coefficient between 0.4 and 0.5, typical of South American countries. This phenomenon is part of the series of economic changes in the US economy that was termed “The Great U-Turn” when it was noted for the first time by Bluestone and Harrison.Actually, something else happened right between the 1960s and 1970s, in 1965, as a matter of fact, that just might have had a little something to do with the lower-income classes suddenly facing more competition and more pressure on their wages, and the higher-income classes benefiting from larger corporate profits.
There is no general agreement on what happened to the US society that caused such a change in the trend of the income distribution. What we know is that a lot of money flew away from the pockets of middle-class people to end up it in the pockets of the wealthy. As you may imagine, we have here another one of those problems where the large number of explanations provided is an indication that nobody really knows how to answer the question. For instance, there is no lack of conspiracy theories that propose that the rich formed a secret cabal where their leaders collected in a smoke-filled room to devise a plan to steal from the poor and give to the rich. Recently, I proposed that the “U-Turn” may be related to the peak in oil production that took place in the US in 1970. At that moment, the US started a rapid increase in the imports of crude oil from overseas. The result was that the money that the Americans spent on foreign oil returned as investments in the US financial system, but from there it never found its way to the pockets of middle-class people. But I am the first to say that it is just a hypothesis.
The rich, apparently, can even defy entropy by following a wealth distribution that ignores its effects. But what exactly makes a person rich or poor? An interesting feature of the thermodynamic distribution model of incomes is that being rich or poor is purely casual; the rock-paper-scissors is not a game of skill (nor is the second principle of thermodynamics!). Certainly, in real life, skill and grit count in one's career, but it is also true that most rich people are the offspring or rich families. As you may imagine, the idea that wealth is inherited rather than earned is not popular with the rich but, for some reason, they seem to be the ones who are most active in dodging and opposing inheritance laws.If only we could identify a highly networked group of people, concentrated primarily on the financial sector, who were not particularly influential in the United States before the 1960s, we might be able to understand who were the primary benefits of this massive shift in income inequality as well as how they took advantage of it. But since it is clear that no such group of people exists, this leads me to conclude that Signor Bardi is most likely correct with regards to his hypothesis about the socio-economic effects of the rapid increase in the imports of crude oil from overseas.
Still, that doesn't explain why the rich seem to live in a world of their own in which thermodynamics laws don't seem to apply. Perhaps we can find an answer noting that power-laws tend to appear when we look at the evolution of highly networked systems, that is, where each node is connected to several other nodes. The Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics may be seen to apply to a “fully connected” network in the sense that each molecule can interact with any other molecule. But it is also true that, at any given moment, a molecule interacts with no other molecule or, at best, with just one in the kind of interaction that, in physics, is called “pairwise.” In a gas, molecules bump into each other and then they leave after having exchanged some kinetic energy; these pairwise interactions don't affect other molecules and so don't generate feedback effects. And, as it is well-known, there do not exist phase transitions in the gas phase; only solids (and, rarely, liquids) show phase transitions as the result of feedback effects Something similar holds for the kind of economic interactions that most of us are involved with: we get our salary or our income from an employer and we spend it buying things in stores, and we pay our taxes to the government, too. These are, mostly, pairwise interactions, just like molecules in a gas and it is not surprising that the resulting distribution is the same. The rich, apparently, are much more networked than the poor and their many connections make them able to find and exploit many more opportunities for making money than us, mere middle-class people. So, they don't really play the Boltzmann game, but something totally different....
Today, salaried people engaged mostly in pairwise economic transactions may have become much more common. So, it may be that over time there has been a sort of financial phase transition where some money “sublimated” from the rich to move to the poor, an interpretation that is consistent with the trend for lower inequality that has been the rule during the past century or so. As times change and the trend is reversed, the rich may regain their former 100% of the distribution, leaving the poor totally moneyless; maybe as a result of the “negative interest rates” that seem to be fashionable today. But that, for the time being, is destined to remain pure speculation.
It is said that Scott Fitzgerald said, once, “The rich are different from you and me” or “The rich are different from us.” To which Ernest Hemingway replied: “Yes, they have more money." But, maybe, Fitzgerald had hit on something that only much later the physicist Yakovenko would prove: the difference between the rich and the poor is not just the amount of money they have. It is in how they are networked.
Labels: Book Review, economics
Nickelodeon and prolific TV producer Dan Schneider have opted to end their longtime partnership.Translation: someone is about to get Weinsteined and
"Following many conversations together about next directions and future opportunities, Nickelodeon and our longtime creative partner Dan Schneider/Schneider’s Bakery have agreed to not extend the current deal," the Viacom-owned cable network said Monday in a statement. "Since several Schneider’s Bakery projects are wrapping up, both sides agreed that this is a natural time for Nickelodeon and Schneider’s Bakery to pursue other opportunities and projects."
Bombshell Dan Schneider info on @ROTCRadio w/ @GabeHoff of @AnOpenSecret
3 actresses, names "everyone would know"
2 are 100% ready to talk, other not sure b/c of career
Gabe confirms "major child sex abuse scandal at Nickelodeon"
Labels: freakshow
Parents of a Texas high school student who was reported missing in late January had abused their daughter after she refused an arranged marriage, leading her to run away from home until she was found in mid-March, police said."Texas teen." Sure. What happened to Miss Al Hishmawi sounds like something that might have just as easily happened to any other true blue Texas family from the Lone Star State, does it not? What an unfortunate and unexpected fate for a Southern belle!
Maarib Al Hishmawi, 16, was reported missing on Jan. 30 after she was last seen leaving Taft High School in Bexar County. She was located in mid-March when she was taken in by an organization that cared for her after she ran away, KSAT reported.
Authorities on Friday said Al Hishmawi’s parents — Abdulah Fahmi Al Hishmawi, 34, and Hamdiyah Saha Al Hishmawi, 33 — had allegedly beaten their daughter with a broomstick and poured hot cooking oil on her when she refused to marry a man in another city.
Labels: immigration, philosophy
Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.Rarely in my lifetime have I seen such a rancid diaper-load of rhetorical diarrhea as Justice Stevens presents in The New York Times. He piles falsehood upon falsehood, lie upon lie, in a futile attempt to build public support for a direct assault on the 2nd Amendment and the unalienable American rights it was written to protect.
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
Labels: gun control, law
An 85-year-old woman who as a child narrowly escaped France’s most notorious wartime roundup of Jews has been murdered in Paris, and the authorities are calling it a hate crime.No, she was killed because her fellow Jews have been aggressively pushing open immigration into the West for nearly 100 years. There is certainly an amount of irony involved, but it isn't the irony that the media wishes to perpetrate.
The body of the woman, Mireille Knoll, was found on Friday in her apartment in the city’s working-class 11th arrondissement. She had been stabbed to death, and her body was partly burned after her attackers apparently tried to set fire to the apartment.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday that Ms. Knoll had been killed because of the “membership, real or supposed, of the victim of a particular religion” — a roundabout way of saying she was killed because she was Jewish....
Francis Kalifat, the head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, said, “This makes one feel something absolutely terrible. She escaped the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but in the end her destiny followed her because she was killed because of anti-Semitism.”
There is nothing wrong, as Weisman counsels, with Jews standing shoulder to shoulder with those most damaged and threatened by tribalist populism, as Jews like Abraham Joshua Heschel did in the heyday of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, though, what is needed is an aggressive defense of those things that not so long ago could be taken for granted in America, and under which Jewish life has prospered to a degree unique in the world: the integrity of the democratic process, the protections of the Constitution and the preservation of the ideal of a “nation of immigrants,” a phrase just deleted from the Immigration Service’s mission statement.Yes, there is something absolutely wrong with it, (((Mr. Schama))). There is something more than wrong with it, as it is literal treachery if we are to take your pretenses to citizenship at face value. And speaking as an American Indian, I can testify with authority that the USA was never a “nation of immigrants”. That is self-serving 20th-century (((immigrant))) propaganda. So, shed no tears for the deceivers who sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Labels: Clash of Civilizations, immigration, Zion
Labels: conspiracy, gun control, media
Nevada's 2nd U.S. House District Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Carson City, said on Nevada Newsmakers Monday that Rep. Paul Ryan may soon resign as Speaker of the U.S. House.That is certainly interesting, in light of other rumors we have been hearing.
Amodei said he was repeating a rumor that's around Capitol Hill.
"The rumor mill is that Paul Ryan is getting ready to resign in the next 30 to 60 days and that Steve Scalise will be the new Speaker," Amodei said.
Labels: cuckservative, politics
Labels: conspiracy
In 1920s Chicago, the criminal underworld is more than vice, racketeering, and bootlegging.10. I think these are my other thoughts of the week:The irony of the owner of a New England team called "the Patriots" funding the transportation of dozens of anti-2nd Amendment activists to Washington DC in order to protest the Constitutional rights of Americans should not be lost on you, and makes clear the obvious difference between Americans and Fake Americans like (((Kraft))). I emailed Mr. King in response to his foray into gun control activism, and would encourage you to send him a similar message.
a. Highlight of Saturday, for me, was this incredible performance and message from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Drama Club and student choir, singing a song they wrote called “Shine.”
b. “We’re done with all your little games. We’re tired of hearing we’re too young to ever make a change.”
c. Play that song. Turn it up.
d. What kids. What young adults. They are just awesome.
e. And you, Gregg Popovich. You’re a great example of a smart man with a lot on the line saying the heck with it; I’m going to say what needs to be said for the good of the future of our country. On Sunday, he said, “I’m sure most everybody’s got to be unbelievably proud and excited about those students and what they’ve done, because our politicians have certainly sat on their thumbs and just hidden. It’s almost like a dereliction of duty.” Almost? No. It is. Bravo, Popovich. Bravo.
f. Story of the Week: What Hope Hicks Knows, by Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine. Great inside story of the White House communications director’s life in the White House.
g. “Hope! Hopey! Hopester!” What a memorable scene.
h. Political Story of the Week: an op-ed column in the Washington Post, by the summarily fired FBI veteran Andrew McCabe. A detailed first-person from one of the casualties of the implosion of our political system.
i. Gesture of the Week: Patriots owner Robert Kraft providing his team plane to fly students and families from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to Washington on Thursday, and then back home, after Saturday’s massive rally against gun violence.
j. No matter your politics, that’s a wonderful thing Kraft did. Because no matter what your politics, it is downright insane that semi-automatic killing machines, such as the kind that killed 17 people at the Florida high school, can be owned by average American citizens.
In response to your public support for violating American rights, I remind you of the words of Samuel Adams.“You are not one of us” and “you have to go back” are two of the most effective rhetorical killshots you can utilize against an SJW, because they weigh on the SJW's constant subconscious fear of being rejected. It's not a coincidence that these are considered to be some of Sam Adams's most memorable words.
“We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Go to Mexico. Go to Canada. Go and live somewhere else, because you are not an American. There are literally dozens of other countries without the 2nd Amendment. Go live in one of them if you fear Americans exercising their unalienable rights, because you are not one of us.
Labels: gun control, media
Labels: economics, free trade, Voxiversity
This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.I'm not at all surprised by this sort of thing. I expect even worse violations will be uncovered. It's why I removed What's App from my phone the day that I heard Facebook acquired them. Facebook simply doesn't understand or accept normal human concerns as legitimate, because it is run by an autistic alien robot whose "hello, fellow humans" act is about as convincing as the average 36-year old Pakistani immigrant claiming to be a Syrian child refugee.
This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us—my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 2015 and 2016, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.
In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts."
The spokesperson pointed out that contact uploading is optional and installation of the application explicitly requests permission to access contacts. And users can delete contact data from their profiles using a tool accessible via Web browser.
Facebook uses phone-contact data as part of its friend recommendation algorithm. And in recent versions of the Messenger application for Android and Facebook Lite devices, a more explicit request is made to users for access to call logs and SMS logs on Android and Facebook Lite devices. But even if users didn't give that permission to Messenger, they may have given it inadvertently for years through Facebook's mobile apps—because of the way Android has handled permissions for accessing call logs in the past.
If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook's installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API, so Facebook API could continue to gain access to call and SMS data by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October 2017—the point at which the latest call metadata in Facebook users' data was found. Apple iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.
Labels: law, technology
HAPPY 104TH BIRTHDAY, NORMAN BORLAUG: If you don’t know who Norman Borlaug was, it’s high time you learned. His claim to fame: Saving over a billion people from starvation. Yes, that’s a “b” for “billion,” but even if it were an “m” for “million,” it would be a staggering achievement. When others are teaching their children and grandchildren to act like a ruthless killer (“Be like Che”), teach yours to “Be like Norman.” Make his memory eternal.Oh, I think his legacy will be remembered, all right. Not even Mao and Pol Pot managed to lay the foundation for a bloodbath of the sort that will one day be known as having taken place on a Borlaugian scale. Let's just say I very much doubt the world will ever see 3 billion sub-Saharan Africans, let alone 4 billion.
Labels: immigration, trainwreck
Labels: Vibrancy is our strength
Let's start from the beginning...with the people who were contemporary to the collapse, the Romans themselves. Did they understand what was happening to them? This is a very important point: if a society, intended as its government, can understand that collapse is coming, can they do something to avoid it? It is relevant to our own situation, today.The tragedy of the cassandra is that he has the ability to see the collapse coming, but no ability to do anything to stop it. I have been able to see the collapse of the USA coming since 1995, once the implications of the 1986 immigration amnesty became clear to me, but even I had no idea until fairly recently that this inevitable collapse was likely to be part of a larger civilization-wide event. It's not merely the USA that is in bad shape, but the secondary powers of China, Russia, and Europe as well.
Of course, the ancient Romans are long gone and they didn't leave us newspapers. Today we have huge amounts of documents but, from Roman times, we have very little. All that has survived from those times had to be slowly hand copied by a Medieval monk, and a lot has been lost. We have a lot of texts by Roman historians - none of them seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Historians of that time were more like chroniclers; they reported the facts they knew. Not that they didn't have their ideas on what they were describing, but they were not trying to make models, as we would say today. So, I think it may be interesting to give a look to documents written by people who were not historians; but who were living the collapse of the Roman Empire. What did they think of what was going on?
Let me start with Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who lived from 120 to 180 A.D. He was probably the last Emperor who ruled a strong empire. Yet, he spent most of his life fighting to keep the Empire together; fighting barbarians. Maybe you have seen the movie "The Gladiator": Marcus Aurelius appears in the first scenes. The movie is not historically accurate, of course, but it is true that Aurelius died in the field, while he was fighting invaders. He wasn't fighting for glory, he wasn't fighting to conquer new territories. He was just fighting to keep the Empire together, and he had a terribly hard time doing just that. Times had changed a lot from the times of Caesar and of Trajan.
Marcus Aurelius did what he could to keep the barbarians away but, a few decades after his death, the Empire had basically collapsed. That was what historians call "the third century crisis". It was really bad; a disaster. The empire managed to survive for a couple of centuries longer as a political entity, but it wasn't the same thing. It was not any longer the Empire of Marcus Aurelius; it was something that just tried to survive as best as it could, fighting barbarians, plagues, famines, warlords and all kinds of disasters falling on them one after the other. Eventually, the Empire disappeared also as a political entity. It did that with a whimper - at least in its Western part, in the 5th century a.d. The Eastern Empire lasted much longer, but that is another story.
Here is a piece of statuary from Roman times. We know what Marcus Aurelius looked like.
Now, if it is rare that we have the portrait of a man who lived so long ago, it is even rarer that we can also read his inner thoughts. But that we can do that with Marcus Aurelius. He was a "philosopher-emperor" who left us his "Meditations"; a book of philosophical thoughts. For instance, you can read such things as:
Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.
That is the typical tune of the book - you may find it fascinating or perhaps boring; it depends on you. Personally, I find it fascinating. The "Meditations" is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn't right; of course.
But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.
Now, I'd like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, "Of matters of war" because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative - clearly - you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn't lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.
Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen-based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what's happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.
“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries."
Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you: "circumlatrantium" which refers to barbarians who are, literally, "barking around" the empire's borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking - they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of "Of matters of war" is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.
Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is "De Reditu suo", by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means "of his return". Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the "official" disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie "The Last Legion". Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire - it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus' report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let's move on.
Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn't possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call "France" today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title "of his return". He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:
"I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward."
Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. "Sic transit gloria mundi" , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.
But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can't understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible. He can only interpret what is going on as a temporary setback. Rome had hard times before but the Romans always rebounded and eventually triumphed over their enemies. It has always been like this, Rome will become powerful and rich again.
There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse "from the inside". Most people just don't see it happening - it is like being a fish: you don't see the water.
Our Druids may be better than those of the times of the Roman Empire, at least they have digital computers. But our leaders are no better apt at understanding complex system than the military commanders who ruled the Roman Empire. Even our leaders were better, they would face the same problems: there are no structures that can gently lead society to where it is going. We have only structures that are there to keep society where it is - no matter how difficult and uncomfortable it is to be there. It is exactly what Tainter says: we react to problems by building structure that are more and more complex and that, in the end, produce a negative return. That's why societies collapse.This also explains why the globalists feel fully justified in their Neo-Babelism. They believe that they are constructing a new civilization that will rise from the ashes of the old one, a secular Byzantium to Christendom's Rome. That is why the phoenix is one of their favorite symbols. What most of them do not realize is that what they are building is not a new world order, but a very old one.
Labels: decline and fall, history, religion
