Start from a small number of statements that make up the Net Zero commitment.
The Earth must actually be warming.
The warming must pose a genuine and serious threat to life on Earth.
The warming must be man-made. Specifically, it must be caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere arising from human activity.
The U.K.’s [or anyone’s] NZC policy must bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon. That is, it must either make a significant reduction in its own right, or it must set an example that persuades other countries to reduce their own carbon emissions, to a degree sufficient to stop the warming.
For UK [or anywhere else] NZC to be effective, statements 1-4 must all be correct. If any one of them is false, the policy will fail, either because it doesn’t lead to sufficient carbon reduction, or because the policy wasn’t necessary in the first place.
This dashboard shows the overall daily testing volumes for COVID-19 performed at UW Virology in UW Medicine’s Department of Laboratory Medicine. Greater than 95% of the testing volume reported in this dashboard is performed for individuals whose samples were collected in the state of Washington. We receive test orders from a variety of settings and locations including inpatients, outpatients, employee health, and community health screening settings. This dashboard excludes testing performed for individuals whose samples we have received for research studies.
Inconclusive and positive results are added together to compute the positivity rate.
Information is collected on the battlefield through systematic observation by deployed soldiers and a variety of electronic sensors. Surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance are methods of obtaining this information. The information is then passed to intelligence personnel for analysis, and then to the commander and their staff for the formulation of battle plans. Intelligence is processed information that is relevant and contributes to an understanding of the ground, and of enemy dispositions and intents. Intelligence failures can happen.
UPDATE: This is a terrific interview. Everybody should watch it and learn from it. Macgregor is a very clear speaker and provides deep analysis and specific suggestions. Vlahos talks like an academic, which he is, but at 1:59:40, he describes the American elite and our problem with it perfectly, thereby describing the core of American decline which is near-irreversible and entirely due to that elite which he says has built a “…hermetic, separate political system. Something far less sensitive to the people even than British society in the mid-18th Century, which no one would argue was a democracy.” In what is now normal American parlance, both men speak in code about our elite by entirely ignoring how they got there, who they are, and what their long-term goals are. ABN
[All of the below is Dorsey’s blog on how he thinks Twitter and social media should be operated. I have bolded some sections in addition to the few places he bolded. I completely agree with what Dorsey is saying and hope all readers of ABN and in the world read what he has written. I have taken the liberty of posting his entire blog post here to ensure we have a copy of it. ABN]
There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified.
I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:
1) Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. 2) Only the original author may remove content they produce. 3) Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.
The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here:
jack@jackI do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?12:16 AM – 14 Jan 2021
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has admitted that the social media company’s many failures were his fault – before immediately blaming one of the tech firm’s activist investors.
In a blog post published Tuesday, Dorsey owned up to allowing the company to stray from preserving free of speech, but added that he only allowed that to happen when he ‘no longer had hope’ maintaining it after an unnamed investment group bought up stock in the company in 2020.
Dorsey did not specify which company that was, but he was likely pointing to the Elliot Management, which that year bought a majority share in Twitter for $387million under the direction of managing partner Jesse Cohn, who then set about trying to oust Dorsey.
The former Twitter CEO’s comments come as the new chief twit Elon Musk started releasing internal Twitter files from before his take over, which showed that the company actively tried to suppress the tweets of many conservative account-holders.
Jesse Cohn, a managing partner at the $55billion hedge fund Elliot Management which bought a majority share in Twitter in 2020 for $387million
I have been unable to find Dorsey’s blog. In the linked article, Dorsey makes it clear that he lost control of Twitter to a wealthy investor. According to this article, Dorsey wanted to established 3 rules for Twitter, which he believes should apply to all social media companies:
He said that the first rule for social media companies ought to be ‘resilience to corporate and government control,’ as well as only allowing the ‘original author to remove content they produce,’ and finally relying on ‘algorithmic choice’ to implement moderation online.
The entirety of Twitter File #5 release surrounds this internal Twitter dynamic, carefully avoiding any discussion or sunlight from outside government actors who may have been in direct contact with the senior Twitter team.
Indeed, the documents chosen to provide evidence of the debate and decision to remove President Trump are transparently devoid of any inbound government contact to the Twitter organization.
Thus, at the end of Ms. Weiss carefully written expose’, she concludes with this:
See, it’s only “a handful of people at a private company“…. Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.
Wildlife researchers have completed a study that may settle the question of why, in October 2009, a group of coyotes launched an unprovoked fatal attack on a young woman who was hiking in a Canadian park.
By analyzing coyote diets and their movement in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, where the attack occurred on a popular trail, the researchers concluded that the coyotes were forced to rely on moose instead of smaller mammals for the bulk of their diet – and as a result of adapting to that unusually large food source, perceived a lone hiker as potential prey.
The findings essentially ruled out the possibility that overexposure to people or attraction to human food could have been a factor in the attack – instead, heavy snowfall, high winds and extreme temperatures created conditions inhospitable to the small mammals that would normally make up most of their diet.
“The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,” said lead author Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at The Ohio State University.
“We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,” he said. “And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.”
OffGuardian has been privileged to feature the work of David Ray Griffin several times in our history. So when we heard the sad news of his passing we decided to organize a small tribute to his life.
We asked his close colleague Elizabeth Woodworth to say some words and to name the colleagues and friends she thought David would most have wanted to leave a remembrance of him.
Here, with one or two additions of our own, is that remembrance.
What Orr describes is a parasitic subculture feeding on the university system. If more of us fully understand that cultures and subcultures can and do exhibit savage parasitic behaviors, it will become easier to prevent the ruination they inevitably cause. The extent to which parasitic groups and individuals have infested the West is as plain as day. In nature, parasitism is common and not unusual at all. Throughout history, civilizations have fallen as parasitic subcultures proliferate within them.
In the West, one of our great weaknesses is the credentialization of social status which has conferred authority on the credentialed, who then become mentors who gradually promote only toadies and mediocrities, mentees who do not threaten them, thus causing one generation after another to be weaker than the one preceding it. Bad as that system was and is, it became worse when shortcuts to credentialization were created, diversity being but one of them. This is a huge problem that must be recognized for what it is or Western civilization is done for. ABN
back in july i started tracking some worrying trends in swedish birth rates. this trend seems to be appearing all over the west/OECD but as i said then, sweden seemed a particularly good test subject because:
they provide good data
it goes back 25 years
they did not engage in much lockdown so that is not a confounding factor to the extent it is in most of the rest of the west
they had a high vaxx rate
there has been quite a lot of speculation about whether the covid vaccines are causing fertility issues and i have been, for some months, assessing two competing theories on the unprecedented drops in birth rate.
American Buddhist Net 