A Uyghur militant group that helped to topple Bashar-al Assad has vowed to take the fight to China.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) threatened Beijing in a video released on Dec 8, the day the Syrian regime collapsed, showing its fighters holding machine guns and wearing military fatigues.
“Now here in Syria, in all the cities here, we fight for Allah, and we will continue to do this in our Urumchi, Aqsu and Kashgar in the future,” said one masked man, listing cities in China’s Xinjiang region, from where the Uyghurs hail. “We will chase the Chinese infidels away.”
Using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for their homeland, he added: “We have fought in Homs, in Idlib and we will continue the fight in East Turkistan.
Researchers have replicated and expanded a prior study to investigate the role of dark tetrad traits in “virtuous victim signaling.” Across three studies,, the findings confirmed that narcissism and Machiavellianism are linked to this signaling strategy. They also revealed that sadism, while unrelated to signaling itself, plays a role in exploiting accusations against others for personal satisfaction. The results were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The dark tetrad refers to a group of personality traits that are socially aversive and often associated with manipulation, exploitation, and harm to others. These traits include narcissism (an inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement), Machiavellianism (a manipulative and cynical approach to relationships and social influence), psychopathy (a lack of empathy and impulsive antisocial behavior), and sadism (a tendency to derive pleasure from causing harm to others). Together, these traits can drive behaviors that exploit social and moral norms for personal gain, often at the expense of others.
Virtuous victim signaling combines the display of two types of signals—victimhood and virtue—to elicit sympathy, aid, or social advantages. A person engaging in this behavior publicly communicates their suffering, disadvantage, or oppression while also projecting an image of high moral character. This dual signaling has been shown to influence others, encouraging resource transfers or leniency while shielding the individual from moral scrutiny.
Virtuous victim signaling also describes one of the most common techniques used by parasitic groups. My somewhat frequent use of the word parasite on this site denotes destructive extractors of resources, control, opportunity, often coupled with sadism. A true human parasite deliberately causes harm, is abusive, sadistic, cruel while also extorting advantages from their hosts, who are decidedly victims of the parasite. I am not talking about interdependence, normal or justified dependence, being lazy, low ambition, eccentric, and so on. A parasite, and much more a parasitic group, is very seriously harmful. We see them proliferating all across the West. In nature broadly, we don’t think of parasites as having a psychology. In humans, parasitic strategies do entail conscious human psychological and physical abuse. ABN
A review published in Biology Letters highlights that harm toward women is perceived as more severe than similar harm toward men, a disparity rooted in evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural factors.
Maja Graso and Tania Reynolds explore this “feminine advantage” in harm perception, examining how societal responses prioritize harm against women while often minimizing harm against men.
The authors trace this bias to evolutionary pressures. Women’s reproductive roles historically made their survival critical for group continuity, fostering norms that prioritized their protection. These norms persist today, shaping moral judgments. For instance, experiments reveal that people are less willing to sacrifice women than men in hypothetical moral dilemmas, particularly when the women are of reproductive age. This tendency diminishes for older women, reinforcing its evolutionary roots.
Cognitive biases, such as moral typecasting, further reinforce the asymmetry. Typecasting associates women with victimhood and men with agency, making women more likely to be seen as vulnerable and men as perpetrators. This cognitive shortcut leads to systemic blind spots: male victimization is often ignored or trivialized, while female perpetration of harm remains under-recognized. For example, women’s use of indirect aggression, such as social exclusion, is perceived as less harmful, while male victims of intimate partner violence are frequently dismissed or ridiculed.
The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the US Maritime Alliance (USMX) have until January 15 to agree on a new contract. This is the result of a temporary deal reached in October.
President Trump announced his support for the workers’ position following a meeting with Harold Daggett, the president of ILA, and Dennis Daggett, the union’s executive vice president.
…the main point that most overlook.
In Asia and Europe, port automation is happening rapidly. However, in Asia and Europe they have rules and regulations against foreign ownership of their ports. In Europe, Asia and particularly China, ports are considered critical national security infrastructure by the politicians who represent the people. In the USA our politicians represent the multinational corporations and as a result we have sold the majority of our ports to Saudis, Qataris, Europeans and Chinese owners.
If Chinese ports are automated in China, they are operated by Chinese owners. If American ports are automated in the USA, they are operated by Chinese owners. It doesn’t take a genius to see the problem.
World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.
The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.
Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.
“The threat we’re talking about is unprecedented,” said Prof Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “Mirror bacteria would likely evade many human, animal and plant immune system responses and in each case would cause lethal infections that would spread without check.”
Sexual jealousy is a major factor in all aspects of life. The jealous harass those whom they perceive as more attractive. Parasites revel in destruction of entire types, using their hatred to advance socially while simultaneously encouraging other parasitic groups to join their envy fray. This is a fundamental reason parasitic ideologies flourish and attract followers even as they clearly make little or no sense. Academia is an example of a large American subculture infested with parasites who enjoy ruining things. Pleasure in destruction is a parasitic trait, a cultural trait of parasitic groups. You can identify them by this trait alone. Since sexual jealousy is such a deep source of hatred, it fuels parasitic groups as much as does greed and lust for power. ABN
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced Wednesday he was stepping down as head of the bureau, just days after Republicans expressed a loss of confidence in him.
Wray, 57, told FBI employees in an afternoon town hall that “after weeks of careful thought,” he had decided to resign in January at the end of the current administration, caving to pressure from GOP senators and President-elect Donald Trump.
The ocean of dark money and power and secret groups that rule USA and the West have moved Wray out of the way. Trump had to have known, if he did not himself direct, that Wray would be pushed aside for Kash Patel or someone else. That same ocean of dark money and power moved some 7 million phantom votes into Biden’s column in 2020. Why exactly, no one knows. It does seem Trump represents a recognition within the dark money comitatus that we the plebs are seriously fed up while also that they the dark money have seriously fucked up. No worries. Change tack and sail on. Wray leaving is surely a good sign, indicating much needed reform will be coming. With the state police probably out of the hands of the Obama wing wingnuts, we probably will not see the sort of obstruction against Trump that we saw in 2017. A serious factor is the incoming public face of the dark money appears cooler, more hip and savvy, smarter, less full of BS, more on the side of we the plebs, better in tune with the reality of history, more grounded in the ocean of awareness that underlies everything and is infinitely greater than the dark ocean of money that merely rules USA in (covert) name only. ABN
American Buddhist Net 