Link this, sucker!

Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

Why is this a problem?You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.

"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.

The study projects:

• The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.

• The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray. ...

Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.
"To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics. 

"The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers."

‘We Teeter On The Brink Of Catastrophe’

"The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe."

The Revolution Is Winning
Radicals from the 1960s and 1970s now hold powerful positions in government and academia

Twenty Years A Fool: My Long Journey Home From The Left

Elizabeth Nickson’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood bio pic: A Westmount exile, who rebels against power and privilege, becomes a globe-trotting leftist journalist chronicling the great revolutionary narratives of her time. Then she sets out to discover the awful truth about her patriarchal 400-year-old colonist clan and everything changes. But Hollywood won’t touch her script because what she finds are eternal truths, about love, charity, sacrifice, Christianity and genuine freedom. ...

"The first thing I discovered was that they were Christian. And I mean very, very Christian. This was unnerving since on the intellectual left, faith in God, and particularly Christ, signifies a weak mind. But these people were anything but weak."

Historic Moon Landing Footage Has Been Enhanced by AI, And The Results Are Incredible

That is no exaggeration.

Why Rioters Will Eventually Turn Their Rage On Christianity If Not Stopped
The outrage over statues and the 'white' depictions of Christ is meant to detract us from the real endgame: the 'canceling' of Christianity itself.

The dream of Marxism is to eradicate Western civilization and replace it with itself; its reaction to the legitimate evils that have been committed by Occidentals is not reform but obliteration.

Marxism assumes that because the windows are dirty and cracked, the entire house must be demolished. We see this same hatred today in the insurrections occurring right now. There is no reason for mobs pulling down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or Hans Christian Heg or calling for statues of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator to be removed.

But if Western Civilization is evil, that means all the elements that went into creating Western Civilization must also be destroyed. That includes Christianity.

Connecticut pathologist’s study shows CDC coronavirus test kits generate 30% false positive results
Other issues with the COVID-count include motorcycle fatality classified as COVID-19 death, Rhode Island reporting 113 false positive results, and Florida labs lacking negative COVID-19 results.

Democrats, The Party Of Science (Fiction)
A record going back decades.

Has America 2020 become like Germany's Weimar Republic?

Yet there are some disturbing parallels, or at least echoes, of what happened during the Weimar years. First, the very emergence (or re-emergence) in the US of ideologically inspired rioting, looting, and street violence. Second, the fact that at least some of the violent factions – like Antifa – appear to be systematically organised and funded, with fairly sophisticated recruitment, training, and communications capabilities. Third, there is the truly disturbing fact that violence seems to winked at – if not actively encouraged – by sympathetic office-holders and by the ever-more-politically-one-sided media, in thrall to the political Left.

(In Weimar Germany, too, the political armies represented the political parties, and they were protected by office-holders – and also by the courts – which were sympathetic to them. In the Weimar Republic, it was especially right-wing governments and judges who winked at right-wing or Nazi violence. Hitler, for example, was liable for severe punishment, or even the death penalty, for the Beer Hall Putsch – his attempted coup by armed force in Bavaria in 1923. Instead, after a trial by sympathetic judges, he served less than nine months “fortress confinement” in Landsberg Prison, where he  was accommodated comfortably and free to write, or rather to dictate, Mein Kampf.) 

Politically-inspired rioting, looting, arson; bitter racial and ethnic grievances and divisions; deepening ideological antipathies. Colleges and universities that foster one-sided extemism. (The Nazis were especially strong in the Weimar-era universities.) Public officials and media who minimise or cover for violence – creating an atmosphere of impunity for one side in the political struggle. None of these are healthy symptoms.

History – thankfully – may not repeat itself. It’s worrisome though, or at least rather creepy, when it begins to rhyme.

In progressivism, only some black lives matter

All the links herein are corrected and will work. No thanks to Blogger.

If you call Planned Parenthood and offer to make a donation to fund abortions specifically for aborting black unborn children, they will accept it. If you tell them the reason you will donate is because there are too many black people in the country today, they will still accept it without protest. 
https://www.facebook.com/liveaction/videos/3140269152701373/

But of course, because Planned Parenthood was formed for that very reason, to kill black people. Just google Margaret Sanger, its founder. Or you can just read why Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past.  
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/may/they-have-to-reinvent-her-margaret-sangers-fans-work-to-clean-up-her-racist-past

Then there are these mostly white BLM activists who consent to the claim made to them that some black lives matter and the rest do not. Namely, black people murdered by other black people do not matter. And like Planned parenthood, black persons killed in the womb do not matter.
https://twitter.com/OntWtf/status/1273760666365710338
  

And there is Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, who says that Black Lives Matter  doesn't have a 'd*** thing to do' with saving black lives.  
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/niger-innis-black-lives-matter-agenda-doesnt-have-a-damn-thing-to-do-with-saving-black-lives

More and more black Americans are no longer afraid to speak out publicly against the  real oppressors of black people in America today.  

"These Democrats, and I'm sorry to say this, they hate black people," she continued. "These are the same people who fought to keep slavery in. These are the same people who built the KKK. The Republican Party is the party of the blacks."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/they-hate-black-people-street-preachers-decry-democrats-outside-seattles-chaz 

Once again:

Stuff to keep track of

Are AR-15 Rifles a Public Safety Threat? Here's What the Data Say

In any given year, for every person murdered with a rifle, there are 15 murdered with handguns, 1.7 with hands or fists, and 1.2 with blunt instruments. In fact, homicides with any sort of rifle represent a mere 3.2 percent of all homicides on average over the past decade.

Given that the FBI statistics pertain to all rifles, the homicide frequency of “assault-style” rifles like the AR-15 is necessarily lesser still, as such firearms compose a fraction of all the rifles used in crime.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

According to a New York Times analysis, since 2007, at least “173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s.”

That’s 173 over a span of a decade, with an average of 17 homicides per year. To put this in perspective, consider that at this rate it would take almost one-hundred years of mass shootings with AR-15s to produce the same number of homicide victims that knives and sharp objects produce in one year.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

Speaking of guns, in Texas, 50,000 more babies were killed in the womb in 2017 than by firearms.

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NO POLITICS Initial Analysis of Murders in White Settlement TX Church



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Yeah, as Dr. Phil would say, "How did that work out for you?" From 2004: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

And there were these climate swings and misses from 2010-2019, too. Like our fave alarmist, Al Gore.

Oops. Because actually, We're living in (almost) the best of times. For example:

“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.

Reparations truth

NFL Legend Burgess Owens testified before a Senate committee on the topic of national reparations to black Americans because of slavery.

Wow, Burgess Owens just stunned everyone:

“I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race... Let's pay restitution. How about the Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race..." pic.twitter.com/ZXuwncFreV

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) June 19, 2019

Remember: if reparations becomes a reality, the number of back Americans will triple or more. After all, that which is subsidized, increases - it's the oldest law of economics. Therefore, "If Congress votes reparations, everybody will be black."

Update: Coleman Hughes: The Moment You Give Someone Reparations, You've Made Them Into A Victim -- "Columnist Coleman Hughes expressed his opposition to reparations for slavery at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday. Hughes, a writer for 'Quillette,' said the moment one is given reparations they are made a victim without their consent."

COLEMAN HUGHES: Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery...

Reparations by definition are only given to victims, so the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Not just that, you’ve made 1/3 of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent, and black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner.

Update: Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History, by Mona Charen. "Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it."

Reminds me of the old joke about the sailor's tattoo...

Which ends with his tattoo in honor of his mother having "Mom" misspelled. Well, here ya go:

Dust storm by the hand of God?

Israeli News Network posted video of a large dust storm that appeared almost exactly above the border between Israel and Syria along the Golan Heights. The storm was Dec. 1.

Claims are being made that a biblical storm cloud of dust and rain was 'sent by God' to act as a barrier between Israel and ISIS .

The huge storm allegedly stopped on the border of Syria, and was 'unable' to enter Israel's Golan Heights region. ...

One Facebook user replied: Absolutely the divine intervention of God protecting Israel. Amen!"

Other more cynical viewers disagreed, adding: "Actually, sorry to be boring, but it's simply a weather phenomenon."

But Israel News Online hit back almost immediately, writing: "Yes it is of course. Now do we ask who controls the weather? Whatever the cause it sat between ISIS and Israel and did not enter Israel."

So, an act of God or freak of nature? Let's compare to the famous parting of the Red Sea by Moses when the recently-liberated Hebrew slaves of Egypt were fleeing Pharaoh's pursuing army. Probably this is the most famous cinematic rendition there is, from Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses:



The problem is that that this scene occurs nowhere in the Bible. Yes, Moses did hold his staff over the waters after being so ordered by God, but let's let Exodus 14 speak for itself from then:

21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, 22 and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

Did you read carefully? "... all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind.. ."

The same question applies to the strong east wind as to the Syrian-border's dust storm: was it an act of God or a freak event of nature?

Well, both events were acts of nature, after all, and doubtless can be explained in meteorological ways. But is that all there is to it? Maybe that great theologian Yogi Berra had some insight: "It's too coincidental to be a coincidence."

Hiroshima truth

PJTV - Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True... by dm_507c8d3897e4c

See also my essay, "Atom bombings and contemporary context"

Also:

"The Atom Bombings and Japan's surrender"

"The World Council of Churches Gets it Wrong Again"

More information about the warning leaflets Bill refers to.

At least one woman in Britain gets it

And at Oxford, no less.

1%-2% profit margins?

I posted a couple of days ago why the $15 minimum wage, picking up steam around the country and already mandated in New York and elsewhere, will badly hurt small businesses that depend on high volume sales to make profit. The fast-food industry in particular makes barely any money on each sale, but depends on a high numbers of sales to make a profit.

Burt almost every service industry is subject to the same limitations. So where is the money going to come from to jump more than 100 percent in min wage?

This morning, White Castle's vice president, Jamie Richardson, was interviewed on Fox Business's show, Varney and Company. He pointed out that labor costs account for 30 cents of every dollar of sales income, not including management compensation.

And then the bombshell: White Castle's profit margin is between only 1-2 percent of every sales dollar. So where is the money to pay the massively greater labor costs going to come from?

The Left never asks that question because they really believe that business owners are rolling in money that they should be rightfully giving to employees either as higher wages or in profit sharing. When you insist a Sanders supporter or any other socialist of the modern Democrat party actually answer the question, this is all the detail you will get: "They have the money."

See also, "Benningans CEO sounds off on $15 minimum wage"

Related: "Democrats have lost their minds over the minimum wage" -- but why stop there?

Get ready for the pace to pick up for automation replacing min wage workers.

"The Cruelty of the $15 Minimum Wage" -- It’s designed to keep people unemployed, dependent on the government, and voting Democratic -- Glenn Reynolds. Precisely.

Israel and defensible terrain

From The Jewish Standard:

Post by The Jewish Standard.

Comedy like they used to

They don't do comedy like this any more, and we are all the poorer for it.

Post by Buckaroo Country.

Note no profanity, no scatological "jokes," no insulting others, no political agenda, no sexual innuendos. How were they ever funny back then?

"A world gone mad"

Post by The Israel Project.

Get me a ticket for Yellowknife

Stunning!



More.

Never give up!

Speaks for itself - thanks to US Field Artillery Association, whence the video.

Post by Frank Medrano.

The Zimmerman Show Trial's Inevitable Verdict

There is absolutely no reason for the judge in a felony trial ever to directly interrogate the defendant on any subject. Yet here is Judge Debra Nelson grilling (there is no other word for it) murder defendant George Zimmerman on whether he plans to testify. Note how harshly she overrules defense counsel's entirely reasonable objections. 

You know when a judge should properly learn whether a defendant will testify? When the defense counsel calls the defendant to the stand, that's when. If that does not happen and the defense counsel says, "The defense rests," that's the other answer. There is never any reason for a judge to know in advance whether the defendant will testify.

What possible purpose could this harangue serve other than to influence the jury against Zimmerman? 

The fix is in. Zimmerman will get convicted of something. The six jury members by now surely realize that their lives are at risk if they return an acquittal. As for Zimmerman (whom I do not find an admirable character, btw), this is a capital trial for whom the death sentence will be carried out whether he is convicted (won't live two years, if that, in prison) or acquitted (not even two years). 

And who will suffer if he is acquitted and the post-verdict riots begin? 

I hate that one of the more likely outcomes of the Zimmerman trial is that, like the Rodney King affair, black neighborhoods will end up getting torched and looted – by blacks.

But there will be no acquittal. This is the closest thing to Stalinist show trials America has ever had and like all show trials, the defendant, lawyers and judge are actors playing parts for which the script has already been written.

Update: John Fund:

From top to bottom, the handling of the Zimmerman case was marinated in racial political correctness. [Bill] Lee, the former Sanford police chief, told CNN this week that he faced severe pressure from outside forces to conduct his investigation in an unprofessional way so as to placate the public. “It was [relayed] to me that they just wanted an arrest. They didn’t care if it got dismissed later,” he said. “You don’t do that.”  Lee told CNN that arresting Zimmerman based on the evidence he had collected would have violated Zimmerman’s Fourth Amendment rights. But he said political influence “forced a change in the course of the normal criminal-justice process. . . . That investigation was taken away from us. We weren't able to complete it.”

Here is CNN's interview with Lee:



Update, 12 July - it was reported on a newcast a moment ago that the jury was not present when the judge grilled Zimmerman.

Also, in  Miami some black leaders say there is will be post-acquittal violence and some say there won't. Let us pray that the latter are correct. And since, as I write this, the Seminole County sheriff is live on TV pleading for peace in the community in case of acquittal, followed by the Sanford chief of police (who is black) saying the same thing, it is hardly unwarranted for some observers to say post-acquittal violence is a real possibility.

Finally, since the case has just gone to the jury for decision, I'll leave off with a couple of points. First is that I find Zimmerman, whether objectively not guilty under the law as he is charged, is a person of frankly detestable character. He went out looking for trouble and decided he'd found it when he saw Trayvon Martin (whom police records confirm was not exactly a babe in the woods himself). But trouble found Zimmerman instead and even if under the definition of Fla. law his killing of Martin was legally justified, the fact remains that NY Daily News writer Mike Lupica is right: 

• this was "a case that was all about race from its first moments"
• "if Zimmerman had done what the dispatcher asked him to do and just walked away" no one would have died. "But he didn't."

 

Angry Birds, they are for real

Krauthammer misses the point

Here is a grab from the video below of Charles Krauthammer holding forth on a complete irrelevancy in the gun-control pushes being made by the Democrats.

Here's the vid:

  The normally-astute Charles thinks that the administration's goals in in radical gun-control measures are about reducing gun crimes and killings. Of course it's not (see the update to this post). The objective is to increase government control over the lives of Americans in any way they can. The Obama administration and Democrats generally are best understood as the Totalist Party. "Nothing outside the state" is their real motto.    What happens to the murder rate is beside the point. The point is greater strictures over how you and I live our lives. Sandy Hook just happens to be the latest crisis that they won't let go to waste, but don't worry. There will be another crisis to justify even more control later on, for crisis is the health of the state. This administration doesn't do crisis management. It does management by crisis.   Update: Reason.tv gets into the act and posts a video that is 100 percent true and 100 percent irrelevant:  
  I have explained before that the fundamental error the Right in general has made for more than a half century is that the main contentions with the Left are about policy. They are not. 

The Left is triumphant today because they knew that policy victories were symbolic only, just as way to mark the journey to the sheepling of the American people.
What they set out to do, decades ago, was not simply to change what the law forbade, but to change the way Americans conceived of their personal and national relationship with Government. And if there is anything that Nov. 6 showed, it is that the majority of Americans now believe that the federal government has the right to order the way they live their personal lives and especially to order the economic exchanges of the country.

How long have libertarians or their ideological allies been saying about the mainstream media that the facts don't matter, it's all about the narrative? In the same way, when the Democrats start work on a policy initiative, it is not about the policy, it is about changing the way ordinary Americans think of themselves in relation to government. 
The reason the Right is going to lose the upcoming gun-control fight is because they think the issue is about facts such as Reason explained above. 

Top Bigfoot videos compiled

I have not been terribly interested in the Bigfoot or Sasquatch legends, but I followed a link to this YT video that features the top 21 Bigfoot videos of all time, at least in the vid-maker's opinion. There is some geometrical analysis of the creatures' bodies that seems interesting, especially the shin-stride-angle part compared to human beings.

I can't vouch for any of the information here, of course, and the video speaker's claims that Bigfoot is the species Homo erectus still extant, and that Homo sapiens evolved in North America therefrom, seem pretty, um, bold, to say the least.

Nonetheless, some interesting video, as I said.

"Who's on first" revisited

It's always lots of fun:

Put the plane on the ground!

Pilot drops some parachutists from free-fall altitude, points the plane straight down, levels off just above the treetops and then screams in for a landing a carrier pilot would blanch at.

Why fly like that? Maybe he was showing off for the camera, but more likely it is for the same reasons the pilots at the skydive center I used in college flew like that - well, okay, not really just like that! But they did drop down to land very quickly after we'd jumped.

The reason is that commercial skydive centers make money only when their customers make a jump. Empty, descending airplanes don't make money, only full, ascending planes do. The financial imperative is to make each flight's turnaround as short as possible.

But this seems a bit extreme!