Category Archives: Weird Stuff

A Very Tall Moron

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I always had a soft spot for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Maybe it is is freakish physique or his weird demeanor. I don’t know. He’s just a weird dude in so many ways I can’t help but like him. John Derbyshire talks about old weird America from time to time and Kareem is part of old weird America. He’s one part black guy, one part California weirdo, one part famous athlete and one part crazy philosopher. Lately Time Magazine has been letting him express his crazy side.

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?
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The answer can be found in May of 1970.

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

That’s not true at all. There was a big showy commission that addressed both Jackson State and Kent State. The Jackson State incident was due to the students trying to burn down the university and the cops being put into a situation for which they were unprepared. They basically threw a bunch of cops into the middle of a riot and they panicked. But hey, who has time for details?

And, unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare.

By focusing on just the racial aspect, the discussion becomes about whether Michael Brown’s death—or that of the other three unarmed black men who were killed by police in the U.S. within that month—is about discrimination or about police justification. Then we’ll argue about whether there isn’t just as much black-against-white racism in the U.S. as there is white-against-black. (Yes, there is. But, in general, white-against-black economically impacts the future of the black community. Black-against-white has almost no measurable social impact.)

Then we’ll start debating whether or not the police in America are themselves an endangered minority who are also discriminated against based on their color—blue. (Yes, they are. There are many factors to consider before condemning police, including political pressures, inadequate training, and arcane policies.) Then we’ll question whether blacks are more often shot because they more often commit crimes. (In fact, studies show that blacks are targeted more often in some cities, like New York City. It’s difficult to get a bigger national picture because studies are woefully inadequate. The Department of Justice study shows that in the U.S. between 2003 and 2009, among arrest-related deaths there’s very little difference among blacks, whites, or Latinos. However, the study doesn’t tell us how many were unarmed.)

This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.

And that’s how the status quo wants it.

Poverty is simply not an issue in modern America. I see a lot of poor people. Way more than Kareem does out their in Malibu. Most of the poor are fat. Most of them have plenty of drugs and booze. It’s not a life I want to live, but it beats starving or shivering in the cold. The poor have it better than any poor people on the planet.

The rest of it is more of the same nonsense he picked up from TV. Like I said at the start, I’ve always had a soft spot for Kareem. I wish him no harm. He would be better off just enjoying is remaining years and feeling good about having lived a better life than all but a handful of humans in the history of man. Kareem had a great life.

Advice From Madmen

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Karl Denninger has been kicking around paleocon and paleo-libertarian circles for a long time. He used to turn up on radio programs hosted by old school paloes, but most of them have died off now. Denninger is right about a lot of things, but he has a lot of weird ideas too. You got the sense it takes a maximum effort to will himself into a zone within striking distance of normal. At any moment, the string could snap and he would spiral into lunacy.

Example.

I’ve posted a handful of locked-comment Tickers lately (yes, I still do add features once in a while to the software, and this is one of the recent additions — the ability to pre-lock a submission so it’s read-only.  Fancy that.) and have had a couple of people ask via an invite-only BBM channel I set up “what’s dat.”

The software he uses is awful. The comments appear way down the page, so you would not know they exist if you did not scroll well past the post. Denninger is terribly thin skinned so the comments are heavily regulated and salted with his rantings about comments he does not like. His obsessing over it is very weird. The fact that he has an invite-only Blackberry channel is hilarious. It’s like grown men building a tree house for his friends and no girls allowed.

The rest of the post has nothing to do with the first graph so maybe his meds kicked in at that point. If you look at his bio on Wikipedia, there is a summary of his business career. Like Mark Cuban, Denninger got rich from the free money era, without ever creating much of any value. Further, his company could only exist because he got a government contract. Now he is a retired guy ranting about the excesses of government and the excesses of money creation.

Denninger would not be the first person driven mad by the realities and contradictions of his own life. Denninger knows how government awards contracts and he knows how fake money works. His insights, therefore, are useful. On the other hand, it is hard to be a critic of those things if you have befitted from them. It’s not impossible, but it requires a mental discipline and degree of self-awareness that he clearly lacks.

Wolf Of Wall Street

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I used to know a guy who had dealings in Hollywood. He was an attorney and specialized in entertainment contracts. Beyond that I have no idea what he actually did for a living. He knew a lot of famous people and hung out at the trendy places. Movie stars and famous directors are the part of the iceberg we see. There’s a vast supporting structure under the waterline. He was a part of that world. Hollywood is a factory town and there are a lot of people working on the assembly lines.

This guy had a lot of good stories and gossip about famous people. The one thing he told me that I recall is that pure chance picks the stars. There are hundreds of people with the looks, talent and desire to be a bankable star. Dumb luck plucks a few out of the pile and makes them into household names. Dumb luck plucks even more and makes them working actors, who have a nice living playing bit parts.

I don’t know enough about Hollywood to know if it is true. I’ve seen bad acting so I know it takes some skill and practice to be good at acting. I suspect that once you get past the awful stage into the plausible stage, that’s enough. Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves are not very good at acting and they make millions as super star actors. They just have a look that works for the roles popular in their era.

Anyway, I watched Wolf of Wall Street and I can’t help thinking that dumb luck really is what rules the business. The director is a famous guy with all sorts of great films to his credit. How did he make this god-awful piece of crap? How is it that a talented director made such a horrible film? Similarly, how did the actors, all famous, not see this turkey coming a mile away? They have people to read the scripts for them. These people are supposed to know a good script from a bad one.

Now, I may be the one with bad taste. I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and it got good reviews. I don’t get it. The acting was fine, but the story was so stupid and childish I wanted to run from the room screaming. It just looked like an excuse for everyone to have a bunch of hookers on the set running around naked. I like naked women as much as the next guy, but I don’t need movies to show me nudity. I can indulge that interest from a dozen PC’s I have around me all the time.

Anyway, the movie sucked.

Visiting the Hive

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Here we go again. The last time they got caught coordinating their “news reporting” it was very entertaining. Tucker Carlson really enjoyed tormenting them with their own e-mails. While there’s nothing wrong with members of the same club buzzing together on-line, these are the folks constantly tisk-tisking about ethics in journalism and all that nonsense. It looks like some of them did not learn their lesson.

A prominent CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine, a producer for Al Jazeera America television, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, and approximately two dozen Huffington Post contributors are among the more than 1,000 members of Gamechanger Salon.

Founded by leftwing activist Billy Wimsatt, the group is a secretive digital gathering of writers, opinion leaders, activists and political hands who share information, ideas and strategy via a closed Google group.

The group’s existence was discovered by Media Trackers through an open records request filed with a University of Wisconsin professor who happened to be a member of the network.

There’s something deeply weird about people in a competitive racket like the media going in for something like this. The reason these liberal personalities blend together on the screen is all of them say the same things. Talk radio guys love doing montages of them using the exact same phrasing. It’s good radio. If your career depends on being a draw on TV or on-line, blending in with the blob seems odd.

But, I’m not a member of a cult.

Related is a very weird post on Wonkette.

Pity the poor wingnuts. They worked so hard to bust ACORN into a million pieces and salt the earth so no part of it would ever grow back. Little did they know that the Progressive Menace was just using ACORN as a distraction while it rebuilt the most fearsome of all anti-American organizations dedicated to spreading leftist propaganda like the Ebola virus: JournoList, which has been reconstituted as a closed Google Group called Gamechanger Salon. And the conservative website Mediatrackers.org is ON IT.

First, a disclaimer: Despite our impeccable leftist credentials, yr Wonkette is not now, nor has it ever been, a member of the Communist Party secretive anti-American group Gamechanger Salon. Nor would we join a group with such a stupid name. Seriously, you guys couldn’t come up with something better? The wingnuts are going to find it scary no matter what, so go all out. Call it Mao’s House of Propaganda or All Hail Pol Pot or HITLER! (The all caps with exclamation point is so they know you’re serious.)

Another coo-coo for cocoa-puffs site I used to like trolling was FireDongLake. All of these lefty sites popped up in the middle of the Bush years and most were founded by women or homosexuals. In other words, people with hormonal imbalances seem to be drawn to this form paranoid stuff.

From the Mailbag

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The comment feature of this WordPress template is not the best. I chose this template because it is plain and easy to navigate. I hate overly complex sites with loads of web scripting. National Review and the Daily Caller are horrible to navigate because of the ridiculous scripts they have running, all intended to jam ads in your face. I went for simple and that means the commenting space is limited.

Readers have made some points I’d like to address so I figured a post addressing some of the comments would be worthwhile. Here are a few:

fodderwing writes:

There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers.

Satisfactorily to whom? It seems that millions of people have had no trouble finding the answers Fred says are elusive. John Derbyshire has addressed all of his points hundreds of times. Further, these answers are more than satisfactory to the people interested in evolutionary biology. They are, in many cases, axiomatic.

fodderwing continues:

I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to his “black box” concept, absolutely none of which seemed sincere or for that matter particularly well thought out. As for my easy questions, those are the ones that really frustrate people as the usual responses can probably best be summued up as “why can’t you just believe, man, like the rest of the smarter set? There is such overwhelming evidence, so many libraries full of books … “

If someone keeps asking you to explain why water is wet and ice is cold, you will begin to think that they are uncommonly stupid, have an agenda, or are passive-aggressively challenging your aptitude. If it is the first case, there’s only so many ways to explain something. Once you have exhausted them all, you give up. The world needs ditch diggers and hod carriers too.

If it is the other two, then you are dealing with a dishonest person. In both cases they are concealing their agenda, which is to sow doubt in your mind about your knowledge of the subject. This form of argumentation is common with the anti-science crowd, which makes it a campaign to spread ignorance. It is why the response from science these days when asked these sorts of questions is this.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it again. I have no quarrel with creationists or intelligent design people. These beliefs are not science, but the world will not spin off its axis of people believe that stuff. We get enough oogily-boogily from the Left and their war on science and reason. Christians would be wise to not follow their lead.

Bones writes:

Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others.

Fred has an excellent command of the English language. He is making writing mistakes these days because he was hit in the face with shrapnel in Vietnam and his eyesight has deteriorated. He is now blind in one eye as the result of his latest eye surgery.

You may not like Fred or the stuff he writes. He may or may not know what he’s writing about. But ‘phoney’ is no more than name-calling

It is name-calling and I’m proud of my ability to use nouns. Without name calling, we would still be riding those big things in that place or whatever. I think Fred is a big phony and I have no qualms about saying it. At least you know where I stand.

I could be all wrong on that. Maybe his act is harmless and sincere. We all don a mask in public and maybe that’s just how Allah made him. I don’t know and I can’t know. All I can go on is what I see and my own sense of these things.

james wilson writes:

There are several factors. Jews, especially the ones you are describing, have no great affection for the country (I am increasingly sympathetic to that state of being). That being so they always have an exit strategy and a tradition of using it, so they continue to indulge their opinions–which are life itself to them–without restraint. And if the block is busted, well, they’ll once again be the first to sell. This strategy has worked well for them in recent times except for that miscalculation of 1933-45. But Montaigne wrote that even opinion is of force enough to make itself be espoused at the expense of life. No one contributes more to opinion than Jews, with less regard for the consequences.

A couple of points here. Steve Sailer points out frequently that Jews dominate certain industries and are wildly over represented in the millionaire and billionaire clubs. The thing is, Jews dominate transactional industries like the entertainment business, retail and the law. You don’t see a lot of Jews in construction, agriculture, mining or manufacturing. These are industries that require planning and investment to mitigate events currently over the horizon.

Is that cultural? Maybe. The old line was that Christians did not let Jews own property so they had no choice but to go into banking and commerce. That was always nonsense. Jews in Europe left the farm for the village 2,000 years ago. It is more likely the result of being a distinct minority that has often needed an exit strategy. Loading up the furniture and money is a lot easier than packing up the cattle or the fame land.

The other point is the Jewish relationship with the state. This has often been the justification for persecuting Jews. They were accused of dual loyalties, with loyalty to the tribe overriding all else. If you look at the world today, that seems like a shrewd position. Being an American citizen carries little value. Abroad it is a burden and home it is becoming a liability. We treat illegal alien invaders better than our own poor.

The Jews seem to have it right. Governments and countries come and go. Why sacrifice for a concept that has so little utility? America may have been a special place long ago, but today it is just a slab of land with a bunch of people living in it. It’s every tribe for himself, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Only a fool clings to his patriotism these days.

Deck writes:

The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Put another way, the natural process is for the complex to decay into the simple. The final result is complete randomness.

This is a popular misappropriation of physical science to biological science. This line of argument has been addressed many times in many places. Here’s one I found just by entering “second law of thermodynamics” in a search engine. The fact that it remains popular with creationists underscores my point about Fred Reed. There’s no amount of facts and reasoning that will ever satisfy the creationist. Therefore, why would I or anyone else bother trying?

Boobies

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According to this story in the Guardian, French women are not going topless at the beach anymore. How one measures this is unsaid, but the young researchers sent off to the beach to count bare boobies probably enjoyed their work.

Is topless sunbathing over? It certainly is in France, according to French Elle, if the coverline on its new summer issue is to be believed: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” – which translates, verbatim, to “Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”

According to the magazine the answer is “yes”, and the reasons are threefold. First, an increased concern over health and the dangers of skin cancer; second, the “pornified” perception of topless women (indeed Elle suggests the death of the monokini – ie swimming briefs – was linked to the idea that topless women are seen as “loose”); and third, the rise of breast-affiliated activism – chiefly Femen, who use their naked breasts as a means of attracting attention to various causes, and Free the Nipple, a recent campaign that encourages women to go topless to end the stigma surrounding female bodies. “Topless sunbathing was seen by women as a new freedom in St Tropez in the 1960s,” says Elle. And now that they’re covering up? It’s a “worrying sign of a regression in the place of women”.

The skin cancer excuse makes some sense. Maybe people are doing less sunbathing than in the past. Too much time in the sun, especially just lying around, tends to make the skin look old. In our youth obsessed culture, that’s not good.  Alternatively, the women may be lying. In the age of feminism, not offending the homely girls is the most important thing, so maybe the homely girls are now opposed to this.

The “pornified” angle is interesting. The West is becoming more uptight regarding fun stuff like sex and looking at naked ladies. Drugs, boozing, sex, eating, smoking and jokes about minorities have been ruled off-limits to some degree. The sort of women going to St Tropez probably think it is horrible to look like a girl now. Of course, in a world with unlimited porn at your fingertips, women showing their lady parts off in public is no longer much of a statement.

The last one is the puzzler. What in the world is “femen”? It turns out to be naked protesting. This line from the Wikipedia entry is amusing:

The organisation describes itself as “fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion”[12] and has stated that its goal is “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights”

This is what passes for feminism these days. They call it Third Wave Feminism. Again, from Wikipedia:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity that over-emphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women. The shift from second wave feminism came about with many of the legal and institutional rights that were extended to women. In addition to these institutional gains, third-wave feminists believed there needed to be further changes in stereotypes, media portrayals, and language to define women. Third-wave ideology focuses on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality.[3] In “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Joan W. Scott describes how language has been used as a way to understand the world, however, “post-structuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world”[4] Thus, while language has been used to create binaries (such as male/female), post-structuralists see these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain the power of dominant groups.

Got that?

The simpler definition is we have upper-middle class white women at universities with way too much time on their hands. No one takes their courses or cares about what they have to say, so they make a nuisance of themselves chasing the white eunuchs around the faculty lounge, calling them racists.

One last bit from the story:

Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”

Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless.

It is one of the great ironies of the technological revolution. The old line about having 57 channels, yet nothing good is on TV. All of this technology that was supposed to free us from our chains is doing the opposite. Whip off your top on vacation and you end up getting fired because your boss saw your boobies on Facebook. With cameras everywhere, ready to publicize your moment of indiscretion, everyone has to stop having fun and no one gets to see boobies on the beach.

The World’s Luckiest Man

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His name is Maarten de Jonge:

A Dutch cyclist has revealed how he twice cheated death after changing his plans to fly on both the Malaysia Airlines passenger jets involved in international aviation disasters over the past four months.

Maarten de Jonge, 29, has to travel around the world to compete for Malaysia’s Terengganu cycling team – and in doing so has now had two extraordinary near misses.

Speaking to the Dutch public broadcaster RTV Oost, De Jonge said he had been due to travel on flight MH17, the Boeing 777 that was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday killing all of the almost 300 passengers on board.

The cyclist said that he only decided to swap flights at the last minute, after discovering that travelling via Frankfurt today would prove cheaper.

Once again, being flinty proves to be the prudent course.

During his interview with the local broadcaster, the cyclist revealed something even more remarkable – that he had also been planning to travel on flight MH370, the Malaysia jet which vanished on 8 March and which remains missing somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

De Jonge had been due to compete in a race in Taiwan, Marca reported, and decided to take a different flight an hour earlier that did not include a stopover in Beijing.

He told RTV Oost that having changed his flight plans at the last minute he actually spoke to a number of passengers who were waiting to board MH370 – and who have not been seen since.

“I could have taken that one just as easily,” De Jonge said in an interview with RTV Oost. “It’s inconceivable. I am very sorry for the passengers and their families, yet I am very pleased I’m unharmed.”

Since hinting at his close calls on Twitter, the cyclist said he had been “overwhelmed” by the international response to his story.

I suspect the main reason is no one will want to be at the same airport with him, much less scheduled to be on his flight.

 

Conspiracy

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This is a story that should get more interest. The Miami Herald is a far Left outlet, so they are not the sort to engage in right-wing conspiracy. Of course, organized corruption in the FBI is not really a Left or Right thing inside official politics. Both sides go out of their way to praise the FBI as the paragons of virtue, despite the fact their entire history is one of corruption and incompetence. Bungling the 9/11 stuff, but being praised for it is par for the course. Anyway, this seems like a big deal.

It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans.

At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport.

According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight-to-fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa., took flying lessons.

This intriguing tale and at least one other are contained in a batch of partially redacted documents released this past week as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by the online news site BrowardBulldog.org. The suit, filed in 2012, seeks the FBI’s files from a once-secret investigation into a family of Sarasota Saudis who left the country abruptly about two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.

The main figures in the family were Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.

The report of the Bradenton incident is in some way linked to the al-Hijjis’ saga, although precisely how is unclear. The link might be spelled out in one of the many redacted passages. Nor is it clear in the unredacted portions who the man was or whether he was detained. An FBI letter accompanying the documents says the redactions have to do with national security and other exclusions.

The documents — the fourth batch released in response to the Broward Bulldog lawsuit — were located via court-ordered text searches using the names of the al-Hijjis and Ghazzawi. U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch in Fort Lauderdale is currently reviewing more than 80,000 pages of 9/11 records.

“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety,” said Miami attorney Thomas Julin, who represents BrowardBulldog.org. “It’s startling that after initially denying they had any documents they continue to find new documents as the weeks and months roll by. Each new batch suggests there are many, many more documents.”

“There needs to be a full-scale explanation of what’s going on here,” Julin said.

The thing about lies and cover-ups is there is usually something lurking behind the lies and cover-ups that is worse than the lies and cover-ups. What’s strange about this stuff is we seem to know the general outlines of that thing in the shadows. Official Washington turned a blind eye to a lot of stuff, including Saudi funding of terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, there was a scramble to cover that reality up. Lying about this stuff now seems to make little sense.

A second FBI document released last week, dated Feb. 2, 2012, is similarly tantalizing — and similarly murky.

On that day, according to the document, FBI offices in Tampa and Charlotte, N.C., received information from Washington stamped “secret” stating that a “person of interest” in the FBI’s massive 9/11 investigation had returned to the United States.

The person, whose name is redacted, was reported to be “traveling to Texas and LA for business/tourism.” The person apparently told authorities upon entering the country that he could be reached in Charlotte. He provided a telephone number “associated with furniture manufacturers in North Carolina,” the report states.

Details about that were blanked out. But the report also states, “Tampa is notified that a person of interest to Tampa regarding the PENTTBOMB investigation has a valid visa for re-entry into the U.S.” PENTTBOMB is the FBI’s code name for its 9/11 investigation.

Whether this person was ever detained, interviewed or allowed to go about his/her business is unclear in the unredacted passages.

In all, the FBI released 11 pages. They contain statements reiterating that the al-Hijjis had departed the United States in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.”

Those statements flatly contradict the FBI’s public statements that agents found no connection between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 plot.

Yet they dovetail with the account of a counterintelligence source who has said investigators in 2001 found evidence — phone records and photographs of license plates snapped at the entrance to the al-Hijjis’ Sarasota-area neighborhood — that showed Mohamed Atta, other hijackers and former Broward resident and current al-Qaeda fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji home.

None of that information, or even the fact that an investigation in Sarasota took place, was disclosed by the FBI to Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the attacks or to the 9/11 Commission, according to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham. Graham co-chaired the joint inquiry.

Maybe this is all there is to it. The FBI lies to Congress a lot.  It is one of the things everyone knows and no one really says much about. It goes back to Hoover. Read enough about Watergate and you realize that the FBI and to a lesser extent the CIA operate outside the control of the elected government. They are part of the permanent state. The FBI covered this stuff up because they did not want to both own up to being asleep at the switch and then lying about it.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy

Mensa Dating

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It appears Mensa and Match.com are teaming up to build a genius dating site. Most likely it is a publicity stunt for both side. Match gets some discussion in the news cycles and Mensa gets some applicants. Dating sites mostly cater to women and women would like some assurances they are seeing high quality males. Men, of course, are good at faking this, so maybe the idea is to have Mensa sort the low-IQ sociopaths from the the regular horny guys.

Online dating site Match.com is teaming up with Mensa, a high-IQ membership organization, to connect really, really smart people.

Only users who fulfill Mensa requirements by testing in the 98th percentile on an IQ test can sign up for the exclusive dating website launched this week.

Mensa Match members will be linked up with other Mensa members, as well as with other Match members, said John McGill, national marketing director for American Mensa.

Interesting. The geniuses will also get matched with the lunkheads and, of course, the lunkheads will get a crack at the geniuses. That is, after all, the only way such an arrangement could work. Otherwise, you have to exclude the geniuses from the lunkheads and vice versa. Male geniuses will want to have a shot with the dumb hotties for obvious reasons. The dumb hotties will want to see the nerd boys, because they most likely have good jobs and make a good salary.

“Meeting people at a higher intellectual level can really enhance your relationships,” McGill said.

American Mensa has more than 57,000 members and an estimated 6 million Americans are eligible for membership, according to the organization’s website.

Scott Porter, who has signed up for Mensa Match, said he joined the organization to meet people, and Mensa Match seems like a natural extension of that.

“I’ve hit walls in relationships where I got to the point of, What are we going to talk about next?” said Scott Porter, who has signed up for Mensa Match.

He said he’s noticed that intelligent people are generally curious. “If you get someone who’s curious, you can probably always find something to talk about.”

Brainpower is important to most, according to Match, which reports 80% of singles said dating someone of the same intelligence is a “must have” or “very important.”

I don’t think there’s much in the way of science to support any of this. Males want women who will be good mothers. If they are older and no longer having children, then they are primarily interested in women who have not let themselves fall to pieces. In general, men want women who will bear and raise their children and help elevate their status. Take away the kids and you’re left with women who elevate status. Dating a fat granny is not doing that for you.

On the other hand, women are wired to seek out high status males. In this age, high IQ is going to correlate to higher status and higher income. My bet is more women use dating sites than men so it would explain why Match is doing this. That said, most middle-aged women will take a good looking lawyer over a dumpy genius. Women are far more pragmatic in their mating habits than men.

Then there’s the other side of the equation. Adults who are into Mensa are probably unpleasant to be around for normal people. When I was a kid, I joined Mensa because the adults around me thought it would help me get into college one day. One meeting and I was pretty sure I did not want to turn out like those weirdos. Maybe things have changed, but I would not be surprised if the members are even more annoying and weird in this age of the fake nerd. Giving them a place to meet and find mates is probably a potential money maker for Mensa.

The Threat of VGM

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Anything to do with the climate now has such a bad odor that most people just assume all of it is a hoax. Years of lying to people about global warming have discredited the field in the eyes of the public. That and the true believers are nut. It turns out that the real threat was never humans. It is volcanoes!

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

We have always been at war with Volcanic Global Warming.