Lithuania is a typical US poodle and vicious attack dog these days. Who care? There are only 2.8 million of them out there, like a small Chinese city.

— Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) September 22, 2021

Over-reaction.

As part of an expired 2011 agreement, vehicles with RKS plates were forced to change plates to enter Serbia while vehicles with Serbian plates entered Kosovo freely.

Now Kosovo implements reciprocity: to enter 🇽🇰, 🇷🇸plates need to be replaced with Republic of Kosovo's plates. pic.twitter.com/3iQp48REp7

— Admirim (@admirim) September 20, 2021

Serbia's autocratic President and drama queen par excellence Vucic calls an emergency session of the National Security Council, now that Kosovo applies reciprocal measures for Serbian plates that his govt has been applying to vehicles with Republic of Kosovo plates for years. pic.twitter.com/fPDJC8YkAQ

— Admirim (@admirim) September 20, 2021

If it is not yet clear that 🇷🇸 is the "bad guy"

W.B leaders today at #UNGA :

🇧🇦 President: Neighboring Serbia wants to destroy Bosnia

🇭🇷 Pres: Vucic has incited war in the 90s, and he is probably proud of that

🇲🇪Pres. about Serbia: retrograde ideas are threatening stability

— kos_data (@kos_data) September 22, 2021

Also from today:

🇦🇱 Assembly Speaker: Let’s work together to let the whole world know about Serbia’s crimes

🇽🇰 Prime Minister: escalating tensions benefits only Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic

— kos_data (@kos_data) September 22, 2021

Due to tension on the administrative line with Kosovo and Metohija, Serbian Army is in the first stage of readiness. pic.twitter.com/gn0iHmVfAD

— Based Serbia (@SerbiaBased) September 23, 2021

Should all be added that this is yet another flagrant Albanian violation of Brussels Agreement with the license plates since ~2012 and that 3 Serbs logging near the “border” have already been beaten up by Albanian “Kosovo police”. Serbs also obviously demonstrating at “border” crossings against this with ~400 protesting for more than a few days.

😂 Weekly Open Thread Humor 😇

A number of funny things happened this week on the way to the forum.

Additional items under [MORE].

PEACE😇

Stock market crashes and property bubbles are always overrated. Money is not wealth, it is a claim on wealth. Goods and services are wealth. The more goods and services a nation can produce, the wealthier it is.

Even if the housing market collapsed tomorrow in China, it wouldn’t be some apocalypse. Housing prices going down wouldn’t ctrl+delete China’s infrastructure, engineering firms, technological expertise, and industrial firms. Those would still be around and they’d still be making goods and services. China would still be the world’s workshop and the whole world would still be dependent on Chinese industrial products.

And for a totalitarian regime like China, it’s not that difficult to overcome financial issues. Most of Evergrande’s debt is denominated in Yuan. The Chinese central bank could simply print Yuan and buy up Evergrande’s debt. They could do the same for the regional banks and corporations that are overleveraged.

It’s just one accounting exercise. The US regime does it regularly for its globohomo corps like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, GM, and Bank of America. Japan could’ve done it in the 90s to save its financial sector but the Bank of Japan deliberately prolonged the recession in order to break up Japan’s cold war, cartel-style economy and remodel it into an American-style neoliberal economy.

They could do the same for homeowners and small businesses as well. But democracies don’t do bailouts for the average guy. No, that’s white supremacist and racist. Only big banks and corporations who can hire congress people as ”consultants” get that privilege.

Our patience has limits- Conservatives for the 1287th time as a black tranny queen pounds him in the ass with a dragon dildo.

Somebody posted in Sailer’s Dune thread this thing about how Herbert used archived Caucasus warfare in writing his books:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-history-of-dune/

* EVERGRANDE. I was a China bull since I started blogging in 2008, but one thing to bear in mind is that most of its more developed neighbors had financial crises around its current level of development. 30 years without a major correction. Tread carefully.

Hopefully you were not long on Evergrande. No one is asking “If” they will fail. It is all about “When?” And “How?” (1)

I’ve been writing about China’s bubble economy for over a decade, from the housing bubble to the Ghost Cities and even ghost collateral. And now China’s entire house of cards appears to be trembling thanks to a company called Evergrande, which owes more than \$300 billion.

China Evergrande Group, until recently the world’s largest property developer, owns dozens of stalled sites like Sunny Peninsula across China. Buckling under more than \$300 billion in liabilities, the company is close to collapse, leaving 1.5 million buyers waiting for finished homes.

That’s \$300 billion, with a B
…
Not only is Evergrande possibly facing complete liquidation, but word came down that the company might make payments on Chinese-owned debt, but stiff foreign debt holders.

But the word this morning is that the Chinese government is now telling them to avoid default on dollar-denominated bonds. After all, if investors worldwide decided that all Chinese debt was potentially toxic, that would leave connected Chinese communists in a world of hurt. And we can’t have that.

The unusual thing about Evergrande is that they owe money to everyone:

It seems to me that what is interesting about Evergrande is not so much the magnitude of its debt problems but their variety. Evergrande owes money to Chinese banks. It owes money to foreign hedge funds, and foreign investors own its stock. It owes money to suppliers, and to Chinese retail investors in those wealth management products. And it owes apartments to buyers. And the retail investors who bought Evergrande wealth management products were often also Evergrande homeowners, because the products were sold at Evergrande buildings.

It even took out short-term loans from its own employees. Also, it’s evidently stopped paying some employees. I don’t know about you, but for me both those would be signs it was time to look for another job.

There is more in this article about:
— Issues trying to resolve Evergrande
— Widespread over valuation & over building in China

The CCP Elites have no good way out. The hunt for the “least bad” option is now underway. The interconnected nature of finance and real estate points to multiple bailouts. What ever is picked for Evergrande will set the pattern for other firms in similar situations.

Anyone betting on a “soft landing” is incredibly optimistic. Expect private firms to wind up as State Owned Enterprises [SOE]. There they will become extensions of CCP central authority.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=49256

“Who care” indeed.

Rafal Smigrodzki, parent of the first polygenically selected child, has some very based views on the mainstream media and acknowledges the 13/50 issue.

Never understood opposition to genetic engineering and ‘designer babies’. Genetic engineering is a perfectly natural process that occurs all the time and will occur regardless of what we think or do. I mean, we all started out as single cell organisms and evolved into Chihuahuas or whatever.

Opposing directed evolution is like opposing showers because you don’t like water falling on your head. Sure, but it doesn’t matter how much you complain – it’s still going to rain. So instead of complaining, why don’t we make something useful out of the fact?

And as far as as winners and losers go, there are always winners and losers in genetic lottery. Directing the process allows us to level the playing field, like pretty much all technology does. So winners can still be winners but losers get a chance to improve their subsequent generations. It’s a wonderful thing.

And ultimately, you can drive evolution far beyond what is currently possible, producing traits such as enhanced radiation resistance and customized immune systems. Why deny humans such gifts?

Unfortunately, I see “bioethicists” locking up human progress on those matters and banning such research. As I mentioned elsewhere, this where deep space science research stations will certainly come in handy – impossible to find or intercept after launch, they can do experiments and genetic sequencing, transmit data back, and there’s nothing anybody will be able to do about it. At least not until it comes back on high elliptic orbit some 20 years down the road.

Well, thanks to our Stunning and Brave Congresscritters, we are going to be sanctioning the Germans after all lol.

The measure authorizes new mandatory sanctions on entities and individuals involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including those that certify the project.

https://www.rferl.org/amp/nord-stream-us-congress-sanctions-russia/31474034.html?__twitter_impression=true

Listening to my conservative talk show this morning, here in California, I heard a federally-sponsored public-service message explain that I should not try to scoot ahead of the train at a railroad crossing. Another message explains that I should yield for the ambulance. Of course, I wondered why they thought that the electricians and dentists who constitute the audience for this program need to be chastised with such messages. But my main wonder is whether such messages exist in, say, Russia.
I suspect that this train-scooting is a metaphor for a uniquely US impetuous idiocy.

Anatoly, have you read Jean-François Gariépy’s book The Revolutionary Phenotype? If so, would you consider reviewing it? JF is in favor of banning gene editing technologies like CRISPR, embryo selection, etc.

Rafal Smigrodzki, parent of the first polygenically selected child, has some very based views on the mainstream media and acknowledges the 13/50 issue.

He went through all that trouble but then didn’t take the much easier and more basic step of selecting for a son? Makes me question how based he can possibly be, especially in the USA where having a daughter is a recipe for all kinds of headaches, diversity related and otherwise.

Weren’t you on JF’s show at one point? Based on your response, I assume you have a low opinion of JF Gariépy in general. Do you have any counterarguments to the sorts of things JF Gariépy believes?

Concerns the ECHR claim on among other things Litvinenko:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/09/23/putin-poisoner-more-doubts-over-attempts-to-delegitimize-russia-leader/

Well, thanks to our Stunning and Brave Congresscritters, we are going to be sanctioning the Germans after all lol.

The measure authorizes new mandatory sanctions on entities and individuals involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including those that certify the project.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

This action is a rare victory for European Christians and a defeat for SJW “Open Borders” Globalism.

Of course the DNC passed it for the wrong reason. They are still locked into their Russia, Russia, Russia mythology. Defending traditional Christian values is anathema to DNC leaders, like Ilhan Omar & Rashid Tlaib.

PEACE 😇

I read this cool quote of Deng Xiaoping from 1977.

“Deng Xiaoping, May 24, 1977

The key to achieving modernization is the development of science and technology. And unless we pay special attention to education, it will be impossible to develop science and technology. Empty talk will get our modernization programme nowhere; we must have knowledge and trained personnel. Without them, how can we develop our science and technology? And if we are backward in those areas, how can we advance?

We must recognize our backwardness, because only such recognition offers hope.

Now it appears that China is fully 20 years behind the developed countries in science, technology and education. So far as scientific research personnel are concerned, the United States has 1,200,000 and the Soviet Union 900,000, while we have only some 200,000. The figure for China includes the old, the weak, the sick and the disabled. There are not too many who are really competent and can work regularly.

As early as the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese began to expend a great deal of effort on science, technology and education. The Meiji Restoration was a kind of modernization drive undertaken by the emerging Japanese bourgeoisie. As proletarians, we should, and can, do better.”

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2010-10/15/content_29714580.htm

Bourgeois streets of New York like Greenwich Village definitely have an almost European atmosphere – number of outdoor cafes looks closer to Italy than the stereotypical American city.

I vaguely recall Foundation being pro-atom, as indeed Asimov himself was, and a lot of scifi from that era. I wonder if that will come through – guessing not.

At any rate, I have no desire to watch some progressive prolefeed TV show, where some black lady works to save civilization. Maybe, if they took the opposite tack, and updated the story based on America and Western Europe’s decline, and the population explosion in Africa.

European Christians like expensive heating bills?

I wonder if the career of actor Michael Caine represents general dysgenics in the UK. Were they fetishizing the working class just as blacks in America were fetishized?

I mean, I remember watching “The Man Who Would be King” and thinking, “He’s harder to understand than Connery, why have they made his character seem smarter?”

What Lithuania has revealed is a lot more insidious that you may realize, Xiaomi has built a general censorship system, not limited to a set list including “宗教虔信者阵线”, “Front of religious believers,” it self-updates based on the last time.

I suspect these clinics would make sure that your children are all pozzed.

Deng Xiaoping was saying this after untold numbers of scientists were purged, sometimes killed, by the Cultural Revolution. Fast forward to today and we see a lot of cargo cult and outright fraudulent “science” being done in the PRC, in part by the CCP’s insane metric of judging scientists by the number of papers they get published. This has consequences as they can’t for example match Russian military jet engine technology, they are improbably far away from being able to do EUV lithography for cutting edge computer chips now that the only company in the world that’s managed this insane feat is in the Netherlands and is embargoed from shipping machines to them (which is not to say they can’t do what they really need with 193 nm lithography), etc. And need I mention the distinct possibility they accidentally gifted the world SAR-CoV-2?

Why would he want to ban those things? Those things would make people more intelligent, more beautiful and healthier, all with no extra work.

I’m sure he has some really long and convoluted rationalisation, but it better be extraordinary.

If it is “nature says this” or some other dishonest ventriloquist act then I will die from cringing.

Christians in Hungary & Poland like seeing expensive heating bills pile up for anti-Christian, “Welcome Rape-ugee” Germans. The purpose of NS2 is to expand and increase “Open Muslim Borders”.

You do realise that SJW Elites dominate Germany, and they hate traditional Christian values? 50/50 odds their next PM will be from the Green Party….

PEACE 😇

Should El Salvador have adopted Ethereum instead?

How long until their official wallet is hacked?

JF is in favor of banning gene editing technologies like CRISPR, embryo selection, etc.

I have no idea who that dude is but why should anyone care what he’s in favor of banning? The moral pontificating over “bioethics” is infuriating and anyone who is a professional bioethicist or even likes to assume the airs of a bioethicist in their spare time is the scum of the earth. The very existence of Bioethicists as a profession is a crime against humanity.

Should there be bio-safety experts to ensure research is being done in a responsible manner to minimize risks and prevent harm? Absolutely.

Should some areas of research be off limits due to terrible risk vs reward ratios? Maybe so.

Should “ethical” concerns prevent the pursuit of research that could dramatically improve the quality and even duration of life? Not if I had my way, but if the majority of the population felt otherwise I’d have to concede the point as per the will of the people.

But should a handful of smarmy professional virtue signalers aka bioethicists get to stymie the roll of human progress based on what is essentially personal WHIM? If society as a collective decides that a perfectly safe, high reward/risk area of biomedical research should be taken off the table then so be it, but what right does a group of a few dozen old bloviators have to dictate to the rest of the human race that this research should not be pursued because in their great wisdom they decided they just don’t like it and think it’s icky? Anything spouted by a bioethicist should be met with a dismissive “cool story bro, now tell it again.”

TLDR Version: Unlike other disciplines such as engineering and medicine where the value of the professional is objectively weightier than the value of a layman, bioethics is an entirely subjective realm of value systems. The idea that there should be professional boethicists whose personal value systems outweigh and dictate to the collective value system of all of humanity is preposterous in its face.

I do not know if this is funny, tragic, or scary: (1)

If you watch the actual Oval Office event, the motive to quickly get the media out of the room is actually quite different. As the British Prime Minister was talking, Joe Biden started to fall asleep. The WH handlers noticed it quickly and shouted for everyone to get out. That shout actually startled Joe Biden awake.

It was obvious before Election Day that Biden was physically and mentally unfit to serve. His decline since then is staggering. As much as the Fake Stream Media wants to cover up for JoeBama, the fiction is collapsing.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/22/jen-psaki-says-uk-prime-minister-boris-johnson-did-not-ask-for-white-house-permission-before-talking-to-media-that-is-why-he-was-cut-off/

when you're seated apart the virus is incredibly dangerous, even when you're both vaccinated, so you MUST WEAR A MASK

but when you're standing close together, you're completely safe!

that's just SCIENCE, folks pic.twitter.com/LAguBFnoR3

— steve hilton (@SteveHiltonx) September 22, 2021

Prichal to depart to the ISS soon.

I was planning a vacation in America for the last couple weeks, and when it noticed my searches, I had YouTube algorithm sending my television the first days with happy content about “best states of America”, “inside this \$100 million mansion in Newport Beach”, etc.

Then it learned that I click on the negative videos, and YouTube has been sending me these increasingly divergent content on America.

These kind of videos I received on the television Kensington Philadelphia – this channel uploads daily videos of the zombie apocalypse situation.

There is on the opposite side of the world, bourgeois New York areas where there are fewer fat people, European cafe culture, and it could be claimed African Americans have been “ethnically cleansed”

There the comparison of Detroit with 1980s South Bronx

Michael Caine could be smarter than Connery.

Fast forward to today and we see a lot of cargo cult and outright fraudulent “science” being done in the PRC, in part by the CCP’s insane metric of judging scientists by the number of papers they get published.

Are you aware of how things work in academia in the USA? And have you heard of something called the “replication crisis” — where, in some fields, 90% of papers are irreproducible?

The problems you describe are not unique to China. If anything, they’ve aped the way things worked in the USA. Sure, it’s insane over there, but it’s no better over here — and it may indeed be worse.

Are you aware of how things work in academia in the USA?

You might say that. It’s clear you have no idea whatsoever, including the hierarchy of sorts with math at the top, and the fields with extreme replication crisis problems at the bottom.

Ones that started getting heavily corrupted in the US a century ago when a certain ethnicity started to gain gatekeeping power so it could falsify a variety of facts that were inconvenient to it and it’s universal agenda. And biology is pretty bad, say “biomedicine” is probably about half wrong, but is still a lot better than the perhaps 90% wrong of the worst field (although we need to reevaluate that 2005 paper by John Ioannidis now that we’ve taken his measure in the pandemic). Also makes a difference that a lot of biology research is hard. There “high impact” papers get get real traction from others in the field, get put to the test in a way unlike the social sciences. And note how prepending “social” to anything nowadays means 99% of the time it negates what follows.

But we can see for example many concrete accomplishments in the pandemic from combinations of chemistry, biology and medicine. Mother Nature is harder to fool than associations and journal publishers, people get sick or they don’t, go to the hospital or they don’t, and die or they don’t. The more solid the metrics for a field, the more likely more of its research is to be solid. Thus see Moderna design its COVID vaccine literally over a weekend, which turned out to be safe, effective, relatively easy to manufacture, and and a lot more physically durable the BioNTech’s. Of course, that’s the results of decades of research and development in both mRNA vaccine platforms and designing safe vaccines, but they were ready when we really needed them.

The last tweet is by an idiot, Boris Johnson has natural immunity at minimum, claims I assume to have vaccine immunity on top of that. And it’s important for leaders to set examples, something Trump was totally allergic to when it came to masking.

None of those are gonna happen since the rationale of progress (“transhumanism”) is rejected wholescale. The tools themselves won’t be used much if at all, since everyone is moving the other way, back into organic social evolution. We are not going to be superhumans but people better adapted to demodernized, post-industrial realities.

Moderna design its COVID vaccine literally over a weekend, which turned out to be safe, effective, relatively easy to manufacture, and and a lot more physically durable the BioNTech’s

Do you realize it is based on the half of phony biomedical “science” you are trying to discredit?

Have you ever visited Kosovo btw? I guess I should admit I may be “biased” since I went out with an Albanian girl for a while, so of course, I would hear about the similar outrages about Serbs acting like pigs when Kosovo was often practically under Serbian military occuption during the Yugoslav era, or people spitting or not talking to her simply because she was Albanian, blahblahbalh.

Karlin says:

As usual, “real result” of United Russia would have been around 35% instead of 50% (and a simple majority instead of a Constitutional majority).

The data of the oppositionist you mention contradicts polling data from one to two weeks prior to the election:

Date / Polling firm / United Russia %
13 September / FoRGO / 42–46%
13 September / FPP / 41–44%
9 September / INSOMAR / 45.1%

All of them pointing to an outcome substantially above 35%.

A brief googling shows that Sergey Shpilkin is a darling of Meduza, RFE/RL, the Wilson Center, among others ill-wishers.

Can Karlin explain why he, who’s fond of polls, is against them this time, choosing instead to amplify an oppositionist who’s more than happy to socialize with, and give his time to, these hostile organizations?

Performing medical experiments on strangers is generally considered to be a bad thing. It doesn’t make it any better if those strangers are children. In fact, it makes it worse.

I was planning a vacation in America for the last couple weeks,

Where would you be interested in going?

The talk on manga-comic comparison inspired me to say this all over again: you can’t be an escapist into pop culture forever.

In WWI & WWII existing pop culture is retooled to churn out war propaganda on conscripts and civilians that were mildly enthusiastic at times and indifferent otherwise. In the coming WWIII, much of it will simply collapse for their massive civilian commercialization, after a long period of detachment from its markets under woke & general non-based pressure. The rest of it will be done when it is co-opted by the war propaganda machine like last time and the last viewers turn against them on their anti-authority instincts.

And maybe organic folk culture rooted in tradition can finally be born.

Our civilization risk-reward calculation in technological progress and application has just been crossed into negative territory. We just need to wait for the anti-Great Reset-antivaxx coalition to effect the catastrophic unraveling of the Machine.

I haven’t personally read The Revolutionary Phenotype, but I may read it at some point in the future. JF frequently talks about his book on his show, and it seems like the sort of thing that is relevant to your interests. Based on what JF has said about it, it’s more about science than politics. It talks about the origin of life, and how DNA-based life may have emerged from a simpler life form. He also theorizes that life goes through events that he calls “Phenotypic Revolutions”. He also talks about how additional phenotypic revolutions may happen in the future, namely through gene editing technologies, and how this will result in unintended consequences and the creation of life forms that will end up outcompeting humanity. He also talks about the differences between genetic and memetic evolution, and how memetic evolution lacks the mechanism of random recombination that genetic evolution has.

Here’s the Amazon description of it:
The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

Because JF has an overly human-centric worldview, and wants to preserve the human species at all costs. He believes that gene editing will result in the creation of life forms that will out-compete humanity, and this will lead to human extinction. JF is big on having as many children as humanly possible and making as many copies of his genes as he can, and he wants to prevent his lineage from going extinct, even if it means holding back progress.

“And as far as as winners and losers go, there are always winners and losers in genetic lottery. ”

In evolution it is the environment that decides winners and losers. It is possible that your beautiful and smart designer children will be first to be exterminated by Martians for reason only Martians know and you have no way of anticipating.

Our beautiful and productive cows and pigs that we helped to evolve survive only because they are useful to us. The moment human race is finished all those cows and pigs will end up being losers when confronted with raw nature.

JF is big on having as many children as humanly possible and making as many copies of his genes as he can, and he wants to prevent his lineage from going extinct, even if it means holding back progress.

Idiot. What does ‘your’ lineage really mean after five or more generations? If he really wants to extend life of ‘his lineage’ he should fuck his mother and his sisters (and his father as well so he does not feel left out) and his daughters and then his granddaughters and then keep jerkin off as many times a day as it is possible and storing his sperm in liquid N2 for his great grand daughters to use…

Here is an example of great Amish lineage (not brothers):

The new film adaptation of “Dune” – my impressions are mixed.
The atmosphere is well conveyed, the music is excellent, the views of the planets are excellent, the cast as a whole is very accurately selected. The film follows the book with minimal deviations. In fact, the film is a classic symphony (music plays a major role in the film), where the music is illustrated by a video sequence. In this respect, the film is brilliant and full of tragic beauty

The technique is well done, the scenes with graders, ornithopters, lighters are shot very effectively

Very good Timothy Chalamet as Paul Atreides
But! If you watch the movie without reading the book, the world invented by Herbert will be undiscovered. According to Herbert, once humanity developed using computers, but then smart computers got too smart, machines rebelled against mankind, and were destroyed during the all-galactic war. Now computers (and a number of other technologies) under the strictest ban, but instead of them, special people (mentats, navigators, Gesserits) are used who, with the help of drug spice, can process huge volumes of information and, due to this, look into the future. And spice cannot be synthesized – it can only be extracted in the deserts of the planet Dune. Without spice, flights between the stars will become impossible (the routes are laid by navigators who are under the constant influence of spice) – accordingly, without spice, the entire civilization will collapse.

This moment in the film is blurred. A person who has not read the book at all will have the impression that spice is just some kind of drug playing an auxiliary role, and the whole struggle is for money from the drug trade. Mentats are extremely disappointing – ordinary intelligence officers are shown, their diabolical abilities are not revealed in any way. The Bene Gesserit, on the other hand, are shown quite well.
Harkonens good – the baron turned out to be a smart and scary creatureThe key point of Herbert’s fantasy is that force fields made soldiers invulnerable to firearms and lasers, and this is why there was a return to cold weapons and hand-to-hand combat. The exception is the desert Dunes – there, because of the worms (which feel the protective fields, and attack them), you can not use these very fields, so the local natives are armed with firearms (while civilized people have long switched to swords).

Here the military actions are the weakest moment of the film. In the film, the logic is lost – first they show how the fleeing soldiers are killed with missiles from the air, and then how they are cut down with the attackers with swords. Well, it’s absurd after all – why do you need to engage in hand-to-hand combat, if you can kill the enemy with missiles? Then, in the hands of the Fremen, a completely modern-looking firearm appears. In Herbert’s book, this was logically justified. In the film, it looks completely absurd.According to the mind, it was necessary to show the Atreides warriors walking unharmed through the explosions, since when the missiles hit directly into groups of fighters, the flashing blue cocoons of force fields protect the soldiers from the shock wave and shrapnel. Then it would be clear why such a strange situation is when the warriors of the interstellar empire are armed with swords

Well, the sword fights themselves are not impressive – there is no drive necessary for film performances. This applies both to mass scenes and to the combat exploits of individual heroes.

The Sardukars are completely disappointing – in the film they are ordinary rather sluggish soldiers.Based on the film, it is completely unclear what their infernal reputation is based on.
In the book (at the end of the first part) Paul Atreides sees the future under the influence of spice, but in the film this prophetic vision occurs in small pieces throughout the film, and this violates the logic of the work.

The riddle: why was it necessary to take the beautiful Rebecca Ferguson,
to play the role of a beautiful witch seductress Jessica, and then make a colorless church mouse with her hair tied up in a bun out of the heroine.
I wasn’t impressed with Duncan Idaho. Momoa without a beard and mustache (and with muscles hidden by armor) does not give the impression of a great warrior at allThis could have been redeemed by powerful combat scenes, but here, alas, the creators of the film failed-Idaho’s fight with the Sardukars does not catch at all.

Gurney Helleck is quite good, although he does not quite match the image from the book

Chani is a shame: the heroine of the book, who has the “face of an elf”, will be replaced by an plain girl with a wide face and a duck nose. Well, how can the Messiah be charmed by such ordinary girl?Well, if she took charisma, because she plays the same way she looks.

In general, if you have read the book, then it is definitely worth watching the film adaptation. But if you haven’t read Frank Herbert’s novel, it’s better to start with it

Performing medical experiments on strangers is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Who else would you perform medical experiments on? The only reason we even have such thing as medical science is because we perform medical experiments on strangers. You can’t really test things any other way – cell and animal studies will only take you so far. Human trials will always be the gold standard in medicine.

It doesn’t make it any better if those strangers are children. In fact, it makes it worse.

Children never get a choice, on the account of never being there when relevant choices are made. It’s just reality of the situation. But it is reasonable to assume that they would prefer to be prettier, taller, smarter, and healthier rather than the other way around.

Films are not for people who read books. That Rebecca Ferguson I have never heard of is much more sexy with much more sex appeal in the 2nd pict were according to you she is like a church mouse. You would be surprised how passionate and sexually uninhibited the church mice in the real world can be. Always go for mousy librarian or lab assistant. There is something in the air in libraries. Must be the old paper or glue in book.

As usual, “real result” of United Russia would have been around 35%

Shpilkin is a patent crook, and his “method” is a patent scam, at the level of astrology or clairvoyance (although outwardly covered by mathematics). It is sad that you refer to such prostitutes

Here is an analysis of the Shpilkin “method”, nothing has changed since then
https://wiz-aut.livejournal.com/5934.html

In evolution it is the environment that decides winners and losers. It is possible that your beautiful and smart designer children will be first to be exterminated by Martians for reason only Martians know and you have no way of anticipating.

Forced evolution can simulate environments conventional evolution couldn’t even dream of. Humans with tardigrade genetics will be able to nap outside of space stations or in hydrothermal vents. And how exactly being weak, ugly, stupid, and sick will help you fight off genocidal Martians? Not sure how that logic works. I’d think being beautiful and smart would be an advantage to fighting the Martians, not a hindrance.

Our beautiful and productive cows and pigs that we helped to evolve survive only because they are useful to us. The moment human race is finished all those cows and pigs will end up being losers when confronted with raw nature.

Feral pig infestation is pretty wild in US. So it’s not all clear cut. But overall, yes, we optimized pigs for meat production, not wilderness. But we can optimize for other traits, including survival, which will help us deal with raw nature, no problem.

Idiot. What does ‘your’ lineage really mean after five or more generations?

You recombined DNA will carry on, absorbing more and more information about its environment and developing more and more solutions on how to deal with it. Your lineage is an environmental computer that has been operational for billions of years. Something to be proud and be in awe of. Not quite immortality, but as close as you can get to it in the real world.

And what do you really mean? You are not even the same person you were when you were like 2 years old – the cells that made up the bulk of your body back then are long dead. You are a new pile of cells stacked together only to fall apart again in short order. The only thing that carries on is information contained in you. And that would be your lineage.

You would be surprised how passionate and sexually uninhibited the church mice in the real world can be

Well I am glad that you have such a great practical knowledge in this field

In Australia, the Tesla Megapack battery did not work for 4 months of the year
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australia-sues-neoen-lack-power-its-tesla-battery-reserve-2021-09-23/

As usual, “real result” of United Russia would have been around 35% instead of 50% (and a simple majority instead of a Constitutional majority)

According to the results of exit polls, United Russia is gaining 42-47% of the votes. Were the exit polls (conducted by different organizations) also falsified?
https://meduza.io/news/2021/09/19/exit-poll-edinaya-rossiya-nabiraet-45-2-golosov-na-vyborah-v-gosdumu-u-kommunistov-21

Shpilkin has a very advanced method – he draws a graph of voter turnout depending on the time, then (meditating on this graph) falls into a trance, and in a trance state announces the numbers-exactly the numbers that the customer who finances Shpilkin needs

https://katehon.com/en/article/mali-fate-great-africa

The Europeans in the Age of Enlightenment created the vile myth that not all races are equal and that those who have achieved great success in technology and material apparatus have the right to rule over those who are supposedly behind in their development. The idea of ​​progress itself had an initially racist and slave-owning motive: the more developed have every right to rule over the less developed.

But West African civilization and, in particular, the great culture of the peoples from the Manden Highlands, the creators of the Mali Empire, has nothing to do with the caricature that the European colonialists turned typical Africans into. It was a full-fledged beautiful and refined society with its own traditions and ideas, with its own art and special technologies. But colonialism canceled all this with one gesture.

A quick glance shows that VCIOM was giving UR 26-29% in the month before the elections: https://wciom.ru/ratings/reiting-politicheskikh-partii/

Adjusting for non-participants/don’t knows, that’s around mid-30%s.

Percentage amongst those who would “definitely come”? 35.2% https://wciom.ru/analytical-reviews/analiticheskii-obzor/rezultaty-vyborov-v-gosdumu-2021-prognoz-vciom

Straight from the link you gave

“На основании данных опроса аналитики ВЦИОМ подготовили прогноз результатов выборов. Согласно прогнозу, в Думу пройдут пять партий:

«Единая Россия» (42%), возможный диапазон между 41-44%;
КПРФ (19%), возможный диапазон между 18-22%;
ЛДПР (11%), возможный диапазон между 10-13%;
«Справедливая Россия — Патриоты — За правду» (8%), возможный диапазон 7-9%;
«Новые люди» (5%), возможный диапазон 4-6%.”

That is, the forecast is: “United Russia” (42%), the possible range is between 41-44%;
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (19%), possible range between 18-22%;
LDPR (11%), possible range between 10-13%;
“Fair Russia-Patriots-For the truth” (8%), possible range 7-9%;
“New people” (5%), possible range 4-6%

“the hierarchy of sorts with math at the top, and the fields with extreme replication crisis problems at the bottom.”

Are you seriously implying that this hierarchy — to whatever extent it actually exists — is an American thing, and that in China (and Japan, France, etc.) it is not just as well established? If anything, it seems to me that engineers and physicists are higher-status in China and Europe than they are in the USA. (I mean working engineers and physicists, 99.9% of both professions. Sure, the USA has its handful of celebrity professors, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.)

Besides, money can sometimes be a decent proxy for status, and look at how professors in the US are paid:
https://www.salary.com/articles/how-are-college-professors-paid/

Law — the greatest waste of human capital by a tremendous margin, quite literally a human capital shredder — apparently pays best. Economics — among the softest of the soft sciences — pays better than physics or math.

Thus see Moderna design its COVID vaccine literally over a weekend, which turned out to be safe, effective, relatively easy to manufacture, and and a lot more physically durable the BioNTech’s. Of course, that’s the results of decades of research and development in both mRNA vaccine platforms and designing safe vaccines, but they were ready when we really needed them.

Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech are both mRNA vaccines, developed along the same lines, at the same time, with the same tech. Moderna just happens to be much higher dosed. So your comparison here is a very odd one.

Now, SinoVac and Sputnik are derived from a totally different technology, and a much more traditional one. They may not have been prepared over a weekend, but they were not introduced any later than Moderna, and I don’t believe that they’re much less effective. Data from just yesterday has SinoVac, Moderna, and AstraZeneca performing more or less comparably in Malaysia: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sinovacs-covid-shot-highly-effective-against-serious-illness-malaysia-study-2021-09-24/

As an aside, that no US or western European countries developed a traditional SinoVac/Sputnik-style vaccine was a huge, world-historical mistake. A mistake that understandably fueled all sorts of vaccine hesitancy.

Anyway, if you’re implying that Moderna is a triumph of American exceptionalism and that the Chinese are idiots, you’re way off base.

Tellingly, VCIOM either did not do exit polls

Vtsiom stated that it would not conduct an exit poll since there is no customer
https://ria.ru/20210823/vybory-1746911605.html?in=t
“Exit poll будут, если будет заказчик, это очень дорогое удовольствие. За свой счет его проводить не можем”, – пояснил Федоров.
Впрочем, он подчеркнул, что ВЦИОМ готов провести всю необходимую работу, если заказчик все-таки появится. Время на подготовку, по его словам, еще есть.

But there is a VTsIOM forecast – United Russia has 41-44%. Use it if you consider the VTsIOM data to be reliable

SPLC: Jan. 6 Video Suggests ‘Russia Insider’ Entered Capitol

So why are SPLC writing about this?

They may not have been prepared over a weekend

The Sputnik V vaccine was created (using ready-made technology) in two weeks (according to its creator)

And even so, they’re way off anyway, with UR getting 49.8%.

It’s not about that – if you refer to VTsIOM, it’s better to give the VTsIOM forecast (41-44%), and not other figures. If we consider the VTsIOM forecast to be false , it is better not to refer to VTsIOM completely.

These data (from VTsIOM) are completely different from those that the fortune teller Shpilkin came up with. I was not interested in the question much, but I can say one thing for sure – Shpilkin’s “electoral mathematics” is such a shameful pseudoscience that a reference to this man discredits any statement

* Steve Sailer: Foundation vs. Dune. I wasn’t a big fan of the book, I allow that the movie will be better. Have yet to see it.

It’s a shame Jodorowsky had all his ideas stolen and denied the funding to make Dune. It would have been awesome.

Also brah…. Your beta is showing. Harry Potter good? Asimov/Herbert meh? Does your shirt come in men’s?

It’s a shame Jodorowsky had all his ideas stolen

From what I know about the Jodorowsky dune , it’s lucky that this film was not made. This project was terrible

Two days ago, Ann Barnhardt, the virgin churchmouse exponent of Catholic flyover America, unironically quoted Bronze Age Pervert without elaboration or explanation (or citation).

https://www.barnhardt.biz/2021/09/22/the-mass-annihilations-that-will-be-carried-out-by-homosexual-transsexual-and-especially-lesbian-commissars-will-exceed-in-scale-and-cruelty-anything-that-has-yet-happened-in-known-history/

She has the book.

No, Asimov is absolutely great. I found Dune overrated IMO, worldbuilding is cool and unique but everything else seems meh, it’s the only book of Herbert’s I read.

A strange assessment. Half of the subsequent science fiction and fantasy is based on” Dune “- including” Star Wars “and”Warhammer”, which were licked from the Dune. In this regard (through their children like the mentioned Star Wars) Dune surpasses in its influence not only the sterile creation of Asimov, it far surpasses Harry Potter. The plot in Dune turns into irrational chaos after the first book (actually, only the first book should be read). But the first book is written brilliantly

Both the KMT and the CCP made intensive efforts at modernization that were derailed by the Japanese invasion and by the GLF/Cultural Revolution, respectively. So, unlike a lot of developing countries, Deng at least had a template to work with.

One thing that’s interesting is that Mexico attempted to do a lot of the same things (look up “maqiladoras”) that China did in the 1980s. But, among other factors, they didn’t develop educational infrastructure needed to get to the next levels.

Until the day when democracy can be put out of its misery, I’m happy to let the Russian government manage election outcomes. That said, plausibly establishing election fraud is much harder than amateurs claim it is. As for Shpilkin, apparently he couldn’t hack it in physics.

No, Asimov is absolutely great.

By what? Asimov’s “Foundation” is a pseudo-history transferred to the space of the distant future. The personages there are flat and formulaic and designed to illustrate the author’s sociological schemes. The adventures of heroes – in the style of books for middle school students (the level of Harry Potter, but on a template pseudoscientific-fantastical background). The only fresh idea is about the Jewish Freemasons who secretly rule the world with the help of telepathy and hypnosis. But the Bene Jasserit Order was invented by Herbert earlier

they didn’t develop educational infrastructure needed to get to the next levels.

And then being ravaged by successive debt crises that China has largely avoided before firmly setting their feet in high-tech production & R&D?

Shpilkin could guess about the election results with the help of Tarot cards – the degree of” scientific ” of his work would not change from this. But the Russian authorities who have made the elections as opaque and dubious as possible are strategically doing great harm to themselves and the country

Never heard of the Barnhardt person. On her home page she had this which I thought was a laugh riot:

Do they still have that subreddit I am going to hell for this?

I agree. Faking of elections should be done more professionally, as in some other countries. Perhaps a foreign consultant should be hired.

Revisiting the BS Regarding Artemi Panarin

His family was said to be in danger on account of his pro-Navalny Tweet. His father in law just got the nod to coach the Russian national men’s ice hockey team, from Vladislav Tretiak, who has ties to the dominant political party in Russia.

https://tass.com/sport/1342013

This article proved correct over the gossip that Panarin’s family was in danger:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/27/putting-artemi-panarin-situation-in-proper-perspective/

Irish EU Rep Rocks:

We surround #Russia with #NATO bases and call them the aggressor. We support opposition groups and accuse them of foreign interference. Undermining the #EU? That will be the rank hypocrisy of today's deeply unserious resolution on 🇪🇺-🇷🇺 relations. https://t.co/AOizMxNdaO pic.twitter.com/gGDo6i7xoE

— Clare Daly (@ClareDalyMEP) September 15, 2021

Are you actually making your case from an anomaly? These guys could just be four big galutes, or they could have genetic abnormalities. The Amish, at least the ones I’ve seen on trips to Pennsylvania, appear to be sturdy, healthy farmers who’ve built a decent community for themselves, whether one believes in their Faith, or not. You might be very young, but growing up in a very Catholic community when I was a kid, where birth control was frowned upon and abortion equivalent to child sacrifice, there were many children who suffered from Down’s Syndrome, who had six or eight other healthy siblings.

David Goldman has something intelligent to say about EverGrande, as usual:

https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/evergrande-bubble-popped-in-time-no-lehman-moment/

Those 6 or 8 healthy siblings matter.

He is possessed by Agent Smith from The Matrix 🤣

Life should be about being a virus, and whomever propagates the largest clone army is the winner?

Hopefully he will grow out of this before his children are old enough to realise that this is the type of object relation that they need to fulfill in order to maintain attachment with him.

(My username has been given the same restrictions as an “anon” now. I cannot react and can comment 3 times in 24 hours so apologies to anyone if I don’t reply or react.)

Are you seriously implying that this hierarchy — to whatever extent it actually exists — is an American thing, and that in China (and Japan, France, etc.) it is not just as well established?

Of course not. Just that cheating in the PRC goes much higher up in the hierarchy. In part for cultural reasons, but above all because that’s what the CCP incentivizes.

Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech are both mRNA vaccines, developed along the same lines, at the same time, with the same tech. Moderna just happens to be much higher dosed. So your comparison here is a very odd one.

Only odd if you’ve failed to notice the massive differences in the cold chains each requires, normal medical freezing for Moderna, dry ice or ultra-low temperature freezers for BioNTech’s, as well as the latter being a lot more physically fragile. The next quote is out of order to illustrate a point:

As an aside, that no US or western European countries developed a traditional SinoVac/Sputnik-style vaccine

Umm, No. This is even before going into how “active” vaccines like mRNA ones are more traditional, like Jenner’s all means to the end of getting some mRNA to make some viral proteins inside of cells.

Because SinoVac’s is a a “passive” inactivated whole virus vaccines, the very most primitive you can develop, and the type the anti-vaxxers love to tell us failed in their initial versions against SARS and then I assume MERS. And it turns out Valneva in France is trying to develop such a vaccine with U.K. money, but their “big” Phase III trial has only 4019 subjects. This is only useful to maybe get funding for a big, useful for authorization trial, and the U.K. recently canceled their contract(s) with the company for failure to perform, which I can believe based on just this one trial and no future non-tiny ones registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

On the other hand Sputnik V uses the second newest and previous to COVID least tested of technologies, and it’s active to boot. The most we’ve seen from virus vector vaccines like it is the first Ebola vaccine, very successful in dealing with the last major outbreak, but uses a different and replication competent virus.

While Janssen, Oxford, and Gamaleya of Sputnik V fame all use adenovirus vectors, and none prior to COVID got further than Janssen’s European Phase III trial for their own Ebola vaccine, the first dose of which uses their Ad26 based vector. Sputnik V uses the same virus for their first dose, but Gamaleya made a terrible mistake with their second dose Ad5 vector platform, no one in Russia or Argentina so far can make it in quantity, the latter in a 6:1 ratio for their first non-test batch.

So Sputnik V is more theory than practice in terms of fighting COVID being largely unobtanium, as utu said essentially correctly Russia’s vaccine diplomacy began and ended with tiny San Marino (about 35,000 people). Although they’re repurposing the first dose as Sputnik Light, it’s very much like Janssen’s one jab vaccine except grown in different human cells.

Now, SinoVac and Sputnik are derived from a totally different technology, and a much more traditional one.

See above, not in the least true for Sputnik, and all three Western adenovirus vector vaccines have had trouble getting produced in quantity. Whereas the much more simple mRNA vaccines have turned out for the same reason to be easier to manufacture in bulk, E. Coli beats human cell culture hands down, although there are a lot of in vitro steps in mRNA vaccine production after that workhorse bacteria makes DNA plasmids including the code for stabilized spike proteins.

That’s one more difference between Oxford and Gamaleya’s vaccines and the rest of the Western ones, they use wild type spike proteins. Although I’ve lately been wondering if they get adorned with sugars like the true wild type from infections.

Given this particular forum, I’ll mention Russia has two other vaccines in the works, a very interesting one from the Vector Institute that presents three bits of proteins, currently from the spike protein, to the immune system along with an adjuvant, and another from the Chumakov Centre not so far along which is an inactivated whole virus vaccine. Which India’s Bharat Biotech’s version shows can also induce immunity to the “N” nucleocapsid protein, which is probably a very good thing.

They may not have been prepared over a weekend

The Sputnik V vaccine was created (using ready-made technology) in two weeks (according to its creator)

The timeline for when Janssen started testing their same technology vaccine candidates aligns with this (there’s quite a delay while you make your first batch for testing, wait two weeks to prove sterility etc.).

Once you have your adenovirus vector platform, two for Gamaleya but this work can be done in parallel, you’ve already knocked out their E3 set of genes that inhibit immune system responses, and all you have to do is replace or splice in place of the E1 genes for replication the DNA for the target.

Which the whole world got access to on January 10th (not with CCP approval of course). Oxford had a head start because their second attempt at a MERS vaccine had its Phase I real start date in mid-December 2019. Thus allowing them to go straight to their Phase II test substituting the COVID for MERS spike protein, for example only used one dose for that (Phase I is all about dosing).

Sputnik V uses the same virus for their first dose, but Gamaleya made a terrible mistake with their second dose Ad5 vector platform, no one in Russia or Argentina so far can make it in quantity, the latter in a 6:1 ratio for their first non-test batch.
So Sputnik V is more theory than practice in terms of fighting COVID being largely unobtanium

I do not know how things are in Argentina, but in Russia you can get four doses of Sputnik without any problems, that is, two first and two second (Ad5)

So, kinda like a more efficient, even more suppressive Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok etc. China is out front about threatening, imprisoning, economically harming and controlling people to induce correct speech and thought. The Chinese people typically have no illusions about supposed freedom in our sense of the word. Americans and Latvians, by contrast, are under the delusion that they are ‘free.’

Oh those terrible chinese. It’s much better to have corporate and government employers ruin your career and starve you out if you won’t put their preferred drugs in your body or if you express the wrong opinions or even ask the wrong questions. At least we’re ‘free’, LOL.

The chinese and us governments are two peas in a pod. Disgusting.

No matter his many faults, and I think the Foundation series original trilogy is at the low end of his fiction, Asimov wrote compelling stories. Like our host, I only read one by Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment, and it was so awful and disgusting I wrote off reading anything more from from him.

I only read one by Herbert

Herbert’s books are very different in level. In the Dune series, the first book is brilliantly written, the rest are monstrous trash. So in the case of Herbert, each book should be evaluated separately, they are sooooo different

Libertarian ideology is going to be globalized. It used to be only suited to the highly neurotic, individualist and collective-hating American culture. But with all those invasive state policies implemented across the board it will become the global zeitgeist.

Have you ever visited Kosovo btw?

No, but a branch (they have a memory of living in Kosovo and Metohija since around 1700’s) of my family was forced out by Albanians in the early 60’s.

A grandma worked in the Pristina hospital where Albanian nurses stabbed needles through the heads of Serb babies (because babies have soft heads so they could get away with it, of course).

Another ancestor was a judge and WW2 veteran who fought for Partisans against Germans and Albanian SS divisions. He sentenced many Shiptar criminals and scum successfully for violent crime and terrorism against Serbs. After Rankovic was removed by Tito and Kardelj, his position became untenable and Albanians shot bullets at his door and window in the night (he was a man that survived Germans shooting a bullet into his lung that stayed there even after WW2). After several nights of that, him and his family had no choice but to pack and leave although they could’ve maybe fought the Albanians, but there were only a few dozen of them compared to hundreds that the Albanian clans and tribes could’ve summoned (they were also in Metohija, technically Kosovo but sort of its own region/sub-category, not far from the border with Albania).

I would hear about the similar outrages about Serbs acting like pigs when Kosovo was often practically under Serbian military occupation during the Yugoslav era

During the SFRY only in the time of first Aleksander Rankovic and then Milosevic was Kosovo in any sense “ruled by Serbs” (so effectively ruled by Albanians from 1945-Rankovioc ascension and ~1960-Milosevic ascension ~1989). “Serbian military occupation” (JNA was also multi-ethnic and Serbs were around ~40% until it was reformed into VJ in April 1992) only existed during Milosevic’s time as a reaction against Albanian separatism, terrorism and subhmanry.

It might be pointless to explain further, but Albanian mass immigration occurred in waves during SFRY with no more than a few hundred thousand in total, but in waves of ~50,000 mostly and ~100,000 once (although Albanians had already been relative majority but combined with high birthrates it was yet another fatal blow).

IMO, early Asimov is top form Asimov, with all his flaws (horrendous dialogue and characters)

After being dubbed a great and getting more senescent, and physically declining from heart problems and HIV, his novels become very self-indulgent. His absolute low point was when he tried to tie everything together in one universe, with Hari Seldon becoming an obvious stand-in for himself.

IMO, early Asimov is top form Asimov, with all his flaws (horrendous dialogue and characters)

Yes. And this is typical for many authors (the same Herbert, Zelazny)

Quite possible – they come from a similar class. And I don’t mean to make a direct comparison so much as to highlight the wider trend, which I think Caine was emblematic of.

Perhaps, it had something to do with the Beatles, but it seems very pronounced today. And I think it is not some random change, but reflects changes in values. That lower people once aspired to be part of the upper class, and that was a message promoted to them, that they could aspire to it. But now I think diversity signaling has destroyed it. They say even the Queen’s accent has changed.

In America, there seems to be a weird parallel trend of anyone with a British accent automatically being elevated, particularly BIPOC.

It’s just an optimistic vision at the moment about next summer, with this paperwork and the pandemic not finishing.

I’m optimistically going to visit Bay Area/Palo Alto, but then afterwards to use the visas and difficult entry procedure – maybe we will try to add a vacation in New York, or anywhere else in the USA (Hawaii is tempting but probably a bad idea considering its distances).

–

By the way how was your experience travelling in Europe from America during this pandemic?

Another thing from YouTube – what is this hype about a mass exodus from California to Texas?

Texas’s economy seems to be better planning of US states recently. Texas property prices must be a boom.

derailed by the Japanese invasion

Under Japanese administration Manchukuo became the top industrial powerhouse in Asia that rivaled the Home Islands. They don’t get much credit for it since their rule of Manchuria also involved opium peddling and other criminal activities.

After Red Army’s Invasion of Manchuria (Operation August Storm 1945), the Soviets handed off Manchuria to CCP, but took apart the industrial foundation wholesale and shipped it back home. Nevertheless Manchuria remained a large part of PRC’s GDP in the early years.

The Soviets would give PRC’s First Five Year Plan industrialization a huge boost from the early 50’s. This is remembered as 156项重点工程 156 Major Industrialization Projects.

After Sino-Soviet Split (1966) Mao opens door to America and joins Dollar-Reserve system. In the 80’s a huge amount of investments would come from — Japan.

In succession PRC followed 3 models of modernization 1. USSR 2. Japan (and Asian Tigers) 3. USA

The fourth model being discussed is the stakeholder (rather than shareholder) capitalism of Germanic Europe.

1. no state income tax in TX
2. for the price of a slum dwelling in CA you can buy a mansion (although not in a convenient location) in TX
3. the weather in TX is dreadful and many of those people are going to have buyer’s regret–although if you can just afford to vacate for all of July, August, and September it’s not that bad

Every place has good points and bad points. CA and TX (I have lived in both) are a stark contrast. One of the best features of TX is the state government compared to that in CA which is totalitarian. One of the best features of CA is the weather.

There really isn’t that much to do in TX except make money and the business of Texas is business. There is a slack minority but they are the bottom of the society as opposed to CA where that is the mainstream. The same building that takes two years to build in CA gets put up in six weeks in Texas. When I lived in Houston the two Mexican guys in the apartment next door to mine used to sprint to their car to get to work at 7:00 A.M. Monday through Friday. This behavior would not be recognized among their California cousins.

The pushback against vaccine passports provide a near-term boost that pushes many (even Democrats) to leave who won’t have the intention otherwise. Even more so with the NY-FL rush since Cuomo and DeSantis represent 2 opposite poles in their treatment towards COVID policies.

It starts looking like population exchanges that have preceded clean partitions/secessions.

This is straight out of the playbook of Kaiser’s Germany. Investment in STEM education is one of the main reasons how they surpassed Britain by 1900’s*. Also initially they only had to copy industrial technology from Britain and Netherlands, innovation didn’t come till later.

Deng studied five years in France and one in Moscow (unlike Mao who never lived abroad, and only traveled twice outside China, both times to Moscow). Amongst CCP founders he was the most educated on economics.

Despite knowing Russian, he was not particularly pro-Soviet. This was a reason why he, unlike Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai, survived the Cultural Revolution. So in the 80’s under him, Glasnost and perestoika did not take place.

*They also didn’t have to maintain an extensive colonial empire and allocated capital more efficiently under Konzern system

Which is why American Imperial system is setting up once again a more lopsided WWI scenario with Japan as France, in order to impose Versailles-style constraints on China and reverse the emergent trend.

It’s an interesting article. Thanks.

Far from a Lehman moment, the Evergrande crisis was a preemptive popping of a bubble – the sort of action that US authorities might have been wise to take in 2004 before the collapse of the US housing market nearly took down the global banking system.

But 2004 was an election year. Bush’s policy was to inflate the real estate bubble in order to keep the economy running hot.

Perhaps he could have popped it in 2005.

The video does a good job explaining what’s going on. California’s long road down trying to build a liberal, quasi-socialist, system is backfiring in a big way. It’s wealthier citizens are regurgitating the “eat the rich” philosophy of its ensconced Democratic politicians, and leaving. Those making less money, up to 100k can no longer afford the high cost of living, including homes that start at over \$1M.

Houses in Arizona are being bought/sold by buyers unseen. A guy in San Francisco sells his \$6M home, buys one in Arizona for \$1-2M, pockets the rest and lives happily ever after. Arizonans are most anxious about these Californians bringing with them their liberal political views and screwing things up here too. This is touched on in the video clip. The video also indicates that up to 48% of the country’s homeless take up residence in California. Who wants to live in a state with so many homeless drug addicts that end up living in your neighborhood’s streets, and paying exorbitant prices for the privilege? The country’s highest combined state/federaltax rates, are you kidding?…

Yes I also saw on the CNBC YouTube a lot of hype about Arizona’s investments for electric vehicles and semi-conductor manufacturing.

In CNBC they focus on these are untested EV startups – it’s not clear if they be successful. But there is also a investment of semi-conductor manufacturing (with Intel and TSMC) to Arizona.

Arizonans are most anxious about these Californians bringing with them their liberal political views

Economically America benefits from high labour mobility in certain industries, but from a negative it can also seem like workers are expected to behave like migratory birds how easily moving across places. I guess a negative aspect of this labour mobility might be a contribution to reduce cultural distinctiveness of the different regions?

Texas governor also claimed that Elon Musk said he exited California because of in part social policies, although Musk denies this and said he avoids politics.

In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness. That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 2, 2021

CA and TX (I have lived in both) are a stark contrast

But I guess less of contrasts than emigrating from California to somewhere like Massachusetts?

That is, Texas still has Mexican maids, palm trees, warm weather, garden swimming pools, and similar houses and city planning styles.

Its also come to my attention that the business climate is booming in Colorado too. I don’t know what exactly is propelling this growth? Many Russian/Ukrainian immigrants are relocating to this state, landing good job opportunities. I do know that lot of wealthy Iranians, Indians and even Russians are moving to the Denver/Aurora areas and building beautiful large homes.

Apparently, at least some of the Haitians invading the US now are the ones that corrupt people imported into Chile to pick fruit to be sold to the US in the off season.

I’ve been thinking about how globalism works in these complicated ways.

For example, Mennonites moved to Honduras ostensibly to help Hondurans by educating them on farm techniques. Some of them were from the old Soviet sphere, though I suspect the anchor population was American Mennonites. I wonder whether they helped Hondurans immigrate to the US. Seems pretty probable.

Instead of bringing Somalis to work in chicken-packaging facilities, the US government should have cut a deal with Mennonites to work in these factories.

But the Russian authorities who have made the elections as opaque and dubious as possible are strategically doing great harm to themselves and the country

Is there even actual need for this, except some stubborn sclerotic political inertia at the very top? I mean why should it hurt any real power balances or levers if UR was ordered from Kremlin to make a Duma ruling coalition with LDPR and New People party, which could be easily achieved without any excessive vote faking?

Cringe.

Gang uber-antihumanism.

Well, depends on what you consider human.

I say, the Final Solution to the Human Question is transcendence into an indestructible, immortal, perfect body with no needs, obsoleting all problems instantly. Anything short of that is, well, not good enough

Arizona has long been a place where semiconductors were designed and manufactured, Motorola in particular had a big presence there and subsidiaries it sold off like Freescale still have a presence there. Not sure when Intel started investing there, but it’s an obvious place for TSMC especially in terms of reliable power which is something Taiwan’s leaders are said to be catastrophically screwing up.

For a very long time California’s unassailable advantage in high tech was its long standing public policy of making non-competes unenforceable, giving the Bay Area for example the most liquid pool of semiconductors, hard disks, computers, telecom etc. talent in the world. And I’ve been wondering when they’d effectively kill that gold goose by negating the advantages of that, which for example helped bring down the Boston area high tech ecosystem after the Cold War ended.

Good analogy. Despite fame for the adage “Politics is the Art of Possible”, Bismarck violated it himself by annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and precluding the possibility of Franco-German rapprochement.

Nevertheless the number of parallels between Kaiserreich and PRC cannot be overstated. Wilhelm I-Bismarck Era 1871-1890 can be compared with Deng-Jiang-Hu Era 1979-2013. The question is whether Xi can avoid the fate of Wilhelm II.

View post on imgur.com

Li Hongzhang und Reichskanzler Fürst Bismarck, Friedrichsruh 1896

Supposedly, in Japan, at one time, it was common for companies to require some sort of pedigree for all job applicants. You would send in a copy with your resume.

Wonder what the exact purpose was. To catch Koreans? Or Bakuman? Or bastards? Or search for samurai for leadership positions?

Anyway, I think it is quite an interesting idea, and I’d like Euros to adapt it.

Basically, you want to perform horrible trial-and-error medical experiments on children for the sake of some sort of nerd utopia. No thank you.

I might go along if we are talking about eliminating some terrible genetic disease by editing a single gene. In that case, the risk/reward ratio is reasonable.

But “making humanity more intelligent”? No way.

To begin with, it’s a cockamamie objective. Even if achieved without any negative effects it will likely do more harm than good.

But it will have negative effects. Plenty of them. We know that it requires editing hundreds or thousands of genes. No one knows what else these genes are responsible for, either singly or in combination. You are monkeying around with genetic code when you have only a foggiest idea of how it works. The results will be easy to predict. The poor victims of your experiment will be in for a lifetime of hurt. And for what reason? Gaining a few IQ points? The risk/reward calculation here is equal to infinity.

You are free to experiment on yourself if you really want to. Leave other people’s defenseless children out of it.

You can’t compare a handful of self-contained short stories with an enormous novel. Azimov is a mediocre writer but he is a great sci-fi writer. Far better than Frank Herbert, who only wrote one good book.

And where did get that Herbert invented Bene Gesserit before Azimov? Foundation predates Dune by 20+ years.

I would be very interested in reading more about this. Some of the superintelligence-transhumanist-singularity authors with one course on the subject of genetics (if that) write like it’s inevitable and soon. Not just geniuses but invincible warriors. The practical experience of breeding animals and plants for agriculture over hundreds of years seems to be more along the line of one-step-back-two-steps-forward.

Genetic diseases can be horrible. Like worse than death horrible.

I guess part of the improvement in the conditions for growth of these states, can be so simply that production in many “tech industries” are less sensitive to location than traditional industries?

Oracle can relocate its production from California to Texas just by building some new office buildings (and asking employees to change their house), but a more traditional industry like ExxonMobil cannot relocate its oil production from Texas to California.

In theory Oracle’s production could be moved around America geographically in a few months (just the time required to relocate employees and their office equipment, who are responsible for production).

So when states like Texas or Arizona adapt more regulatory hospitality, these location insensitive industries can more easily relocate their production than was possible in previous historical times.

Although Arizona’s new investment is partly in semi-conductor manufacturing, and Texas is receiving things like a new Tesla giga factory.

(3/9)

Next up on the list, this #NDAA actually targets the Second Amendment rights of America’s military personnel with unconstitutional, gun-grabbing “red flag” laws.

Yes, that means violating the Constitutional rights of those defending the Constitution. pic.twitter.com/jJpkFp58kZ

— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) September 24, 2021

It also creates an “Office of Countering Extremism” which could expel troops who engage in so-called “extremist activities” or belong to an “extremist organization

pic.twitter.com/3TtaEsu8Bs

— PJ Farts (@PJMorell) September 24, 2021

The Chinese public is more adapted to being ground under the boot of authoritarianism than Americans; recall the concept of one’s outer face vs inner face for instance, or that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.

The US and its population is in an interesting situation here, ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense. Or should we call it zugzwang? Several available paths, all of them looking like things get much worse.

Which is called Buddhahood or Mystical Union with the Divine/Tao/Brahman.

The mistake of your view on the current situation quite common to most observers, is to assume the temdency being limited to one’s own country, while in fact the whole world is afflicted more or less by the same malaise. You don’t realize the anti-vaccinr passport movement is more active in France and Italy, and for once in Moscow (against restaurants). Several assassination of Black national leaders are suspected to be for their anti-WHO, anti-COVID narrative stance. It is at the core the bad karma of Americanization and the world-system.

Just that cheating in the PRC goes much higher up in the hierarchy. In part for cultural reasons, but above all because that’s what the CCP incentivizes.

I don’t see how the CCP incentivizes it more than the US academic culture of “publish or perish.” That phrase didn’t originate in China.

Besides, as you yourself have alluded to, cheating is hard to hide when it matters. It’s difficult to effectively disguise cheating in the hardest sciences such as math and physics, and difficult — as a practical matter — to effectively cheat in the chemical and material sciences. Cheating in softer sciences, and in subjects like economics, is generally of no consequence. Besides, those subjects are so poorly understood that even well-intentioned researchers typically produce garbage.

And in the subject of law, which is nearest and dearest to the modern American heart and has the most well-compensated practitioners and professors, the entire concept of “cheating” is utterly meaningless. (It’s just a foolish game, but one which devours lives and minds. China has one strong — and little commented upon — edge over America: A much more constrained civil legal system.)

As for vaccines, I do see your point, but hang out on /pol/ for five minutes, and you’ll find it impossible to escape the conclusion that otherwise reasonably intelligent people are averse to this “untested” mRNA technology in particular, and that a “most primitive” Sinovac-style vaccine — even if only as a fourth option — would likely have been better received. And, hey, it works pretty well, despite the fact that it’s the most primitive option.

Poland is in the early stages of a massive demographic implosion. Subsidizing children to the tune of 4% GDP didn’t help, and the effect of 1990s has yet to fully kick-in.

GUS:
W lipcu urodziło się 28 tys. dzieci (33 tys. rok temu)
Zmarło 33 tys. osób (33,6 tys. tok temu).

W ostatnich 12 miesiącach urodziło się 338,6 tys. dzieci. Zmarło 539 tys. osób.
O 200 tys. więcej osób zmarło niż się urodziło ⚠️

Zaczyna brakować skali pic.twitter.com/ncYXpHl0Xu

— Rafał Mundry (@RafalMundry) September 23, 2021

Never heard of the Barnhardt person.

If you’re not a Catholic flyover American, there is no reason you should have. She’s sort of a modern Jeanne d’Arc for this demographic. (Which is why I thought it was surprising and significant that she promoted BAP.)

I am going to hell for this?

Only to shitlib Hell, which is something between purgatory and paradise for normal people.

Poland’s 90s demographic hole was not nearly as bad as was Russia’s.

So, for example, under my proposed system BoJo’s brood would lose caste, instead of probably being rewarded in transactions that are untraceable to the public.

The current system in the West is designed to reward bastardy, which strongly promotes cucking. Obviously, what is needed is a multi-layered system designed to prevent this at every level. And also designed to prevent one’s elites from being born internationalists, like Obama or Harris, or many others.

I heard a few people recommended Peter F. Hamilton, including someone based.

Tried reading him and the first line of the first book I picked up, “The Nanoflower”, read like the most extreme scat.

Anyway, I get the feeling that everything that is bestselling now is pozzed and/or extremely decadent, no exceptions.

Poland’s TFR gradually slid from 2.08 in 1989 to 1.22 in 2003. Annual number of births declined by 38% during this time.

So we can expect that Poland will be producing around 200,000 babies during 2030s (down from last year’s 355,000). That would be the target for this decline.

I propose the creation of a new country called “Bastardia”, to which the civilized world could deport all its bastards.

The ideal location would probably be Africa, though I wouldn’t necessarily be against the US having it’s own location for domestics, provided it was walled off and minefields deployed around it, since there is so much utility in the idea.

21th century Draka but it’s impotent.

Peter Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy includes the concept of Ethnic Streaming for off-world colonies: (1)

Ethnic Streaming is the prevailing philosophy behind Adamist colonisation.

The first colonies, such as Felicity and Nyvan (2125), were populated by a diverse mix of nationalities and ethnicities. This led to unrest and, in some cases, outright warfare between different ethnic factions.

Following the foundation of New California (a colony only open to native Californians, therefore avoiding the ethnic strife present in earlier colonies) in 2163 all colony planets were developed along the same lines with immigration restricted to a particular national or ethnic grouping.

This has a strong, logical tie back to financing. If PRC spends the money to develop an off a world colony, who will they send? Hard to envision any scenario that is not 99%+ Han Chinese.
___

I have not read NanoFlower. A number of associates indicated that it was very skippable.

The first book in the Nights’ Dawn series has an official copyright date of 1996. Broad concepts would have been locked down in the late 80’s or early 90’s. If the books were being written today, odds are New Palo Alto would replace New California.

I do not believe the word “pozzed” existed when these originally came out. While the DNC was an inept party back then… they were not the intolerant Fascist Leftoids of today.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://nightsdawn.fandom.com/wiki/Ethnic_streaming

I propose the creation of a new country called “Bastardia”, to which the civilized world could deport all its bastards.

If you society treats them as they should, you need to leave some around to visibly suffer this and provide stark object lessons.

And what about adoption?

For women in Russia in the 1990s, the completed fertility has been 1,6 children per women. It’s below replacement, but any significantly not more than Poland.

–

Poland’s demographically worse difference from Russia, is that it has open borders emigration availability to some wealthy countries in Western Europe (which possibility is far limited and difficult for Russians). As a result, Poland have a greater problem of emigration of young workers. On the other hand, Poland receives free trade and massive investment from the EU which is an acceptable compensation for the demographic losses.

As part of any natalist propaganda push, I think it would be essential to amplify the crazy cat lady meme. For example, on an ensemble show, always have some old maid character that is made to look lonely and uncool.

Though, she need not necessarily own cats. In fact, doing a good job would require coming up with interesting variants, like the “Log Lady” from Twin Peaks, who carries around a small log and talks to it cryptically.

In general, modern adoption primarily seems to reduce itself to some form of cucking. I don’t know any same-race adoptees who aren’t middle-aged or older. I have heard that even the Mennonites have adopted some black children.

But in general, I would say part of the solution is having women marry younger. In my experience, it is often women who already have biological children who are looking to adopt, because they are getting older and still haven’t had a single girl or a single boy, or because the last one came out messed up.

Wouldn’t say I am an absolute hardliner against adoption. Some forms aren’t necessarily cucking, like adopting the children of relatives.

There is no compensation that could ever make up for the dying out of one’s people, one’s extended family.

Pardon the interruption here, but I remember in the Open Thread #165, that you were still considering adding in one other area to your upcoming visit to the States. Hawaii seemed too far away, and you were writing some very interesting comments about Russian modernism. You might want to consider visiting the Twin Cities, it should also satisfy your sweet tooth for older neighborhoods with great Victorian architecture (some nice homes by Frank Lloyd Wright too, if that’s your thing too). Look what’s on exhibit at the Minneapolis Russian Art Museum:

Alexey Brodovitch: Designer of the Avant-Garde will be on view in the Main Gallery June 23 – October 24, 2021

Need some more:

And everybody loves traditional Russian lacquers, right:
The permanent collection is a great romp mostly into Soviet Realism……you could do a lot worse!.

Needless to say people are not dying from emigration. But by living and working in the rich European countries, they are being lost from the point of view of Poland’s economy – decline in Poland’s workers and tax base. But in Poland there is also enormous economic benefit of being in EU.

The names of the last two exhibits didn’t come through for some reason:

“E.O. HOPPÉ AND THE BALLETS RUSSES
Saturday, September 18, 2021 – Sunday, November 14, 2021”

“THE ANCIENT ARTEL: LACQUER MINIATURES FROM PALEKH
Saturday, August 14, 2021 – Sunday, October 24, 2021”

BTW, September/October are two of my favorite months in Minnesota!

Thanks do you live near there? I guess these are cities to visit if you drive across the North from one side to another?

For women in Russia in the 1990s, the completed fertility has been 1,6 children per women. It’s below replacement, but any significantly not more than Poland.

It’s about birth rate per population in the 1990s. There were more Polish kids being born per capita in the 1990s than there were Russian kids. So according to Worldbank, in 1993 the crude birth rate in Poland was 12.9, versus 9.4 in Russia:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?locations=RU-PL

The birth rates equalized in the year 2000 and then Russia had the advantage until 2019, when Poland’s was very marginally higher.

So all things being equal, even though the 1990s-born kids will have fewer children of their own in Poland now that they are adults, there would still be more of them in Poland than in Russia. Of course this advantage will be erased if many of them have simply left the country. As a result, in 2019 crude birth rates in each country are about the same (9.9 Poland, 9.8 Russia). Russian women have more kids but there are more Polish women of childbearing age – the 90s hole in Russia is equalized by the emigration and lower fertility in Poland.

But Poland will get worse when the people born in the 2000s reach peak childbearing age, which will start soon. So Felix wasn’t really wrong, he just misidentified the problem generation.

Poland’s demographically worse difference from Russia, is that it has open borders emigration availability to some wealthy countries in Western Europe (which possibility is far limited and difficult for Russians). As a result, Poland have a greater problem of emigration of young workers.

Correct. Russia has better long-term prospects. My point was that Poland did not have as much of a demographic hole as Russia did, in the 1990s. This will make the effect worse for Russia than for Poland – although as you note, Poland has additional disadvantages.

I don’t live there now, but live in AZ. It’s really in the center of the northern part of the US, as you point out. Being in Mpls/St. Paul this time of year is great for outdoors sightseeing too – the colors are really vibrant – I hope that you make it there, and whether you do or not, let us know about your big trip!

Poland’s TFR gradually slid from 2.08 in 1989 to 1.22 in 2003. Annual number of births declined by 38% during this time.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=RU-PL

Well, the 1990s, Poland’s slid from 2.06 in 1990 to 1.37 in 1999.

Russia’s slid from 1.89 in 1990 to 1.157 in 1999.

The largest gap was in the early 1990s. In 1993 it was 1.87 for Poland and 1.385 for Russia.

2002 was the first year when Russia exceeded Poland.

Minnesota is sort of like Finland or northern Sweden or parts of Russia – flat, with forests and a lot of lakes. Nice, but I’m not sure it would be particularly interesting for him. Similarly, the Twin Cities offer a great quality of life (unless BLM has ruined this) but they aren’t really spectacular. Chicago has more interesting architecture. MN is also far from everywhere. If you are going to travel all the way from Russia, MN is probably not a worthy destination.

Also, if he were to drive cross country, the southern route would be better. Places like Arizona or Utah are absolutely unique.

about birth rate per population in the 1990

This difference is irrelevant for the topic of natural population replacement between the countries.

It’s important if you are working in government to plan schools and pension allocations, but the relevant input for population replacement is the completed fertility – and in Russia and Poland not much difference in the completed fertility in these years.

In terms of the rhymical fluctuation in birth rate – this is a problem for the country in terms of planning of allocation of the resources like school capacity, and the 1990s has enhanced this wave pattern in the population pyramid.

There is a strong “waves” in the population pyramid in Russia, and this is contributing in various problems for the government planning.

Poland did not have as much of a demographic hole as Russia did, in the 1990s. This will make the effect worse for Russia than for Poland

But the completed fertility rate was more or less the same for women who were fertile in Russia in the 1990s, as for those women who had been fertile in Poland during the 1990s.

So Poland not different from Russia, from this perspective (of natural population replacement).

So other determining facts for population replacement to look at, can be the spacing between generations (where larger space, or older parents, will reduce the speed of the decline; younger parents increase speed of decline).

Not well known for its mountain range, it does have one (The Sawtooth Mountains) in Northern Mn. I know, they’re tiny in comparison to other ranges in the States, but beautiful in their own right and quite traversable (I know because I conquered “Eagle Mountain” in my youth, wonderful views from the top!).

Having lived in both areas, I can say that the Twin Cities are much nicer overall, and offer much more culturally than the Phoenix area. It’s the long cold winters is what tore me away from Minneapolis. The dozen or so lakes, rivers and ponds in Minneapolis, with some of the most beautiful old Victorian neighborhoods, are something to behold and something that I’m quite sure that Dmitry would enjoy seeing. How many “Russian Art Museums” can be located in comparable sized cities, in the world? The largest art museum, the Minneapolis Museum of Arts is home to many masterpieces and is constantly adding quality works to its collection. There’s even a great museum dedicated to modern art, that houses some nice sculpture by Archipenko, The Walker Art Institute. For those with a large plastic card, there’s the Mall of America, still one of the largest of such malls in the world. All four major sports are well represented, as are nearby lakes/rivers that provide for superlative fishing opportunities. Music venues? A major symphony orchestra and all of the pop music shows that would please most any hipster of any persuasion or passion.

To be sure, it’s a long trip by car from either coast. But as Dmitry mentioned Hawaii as a possibility, I envisioned him flying for the long lengths of his trip. If he is indeed flying, the Twin Cities is still highly recommended. Autumn in Minnesota, I’m quite sure rivals even the sights in New England. If you don’t believe me, take a car trip a little past Duluth on the rugged North Shore and see some breathtaking autumn views.

You don’t need to go to New England to see views like this:
A little bit closer:
Split Rock Lighthouse, North Shore, MN

I guess the way to attain a perspective about America, would be a crosscountry drive in both routes (North and South – Route 66).

You would have to travel slowly, so you don’t spend all day driving or inside a car, and can relax some days in every city.

So maybe 4 weeks in one direction, 4 weeks in another – with a couple weeks in the coasts?

Personally I can’t have such extended vacations (perhaps when I am a pensioner) – but maybe there are more time-lucky people here who have done this? Sadly fated Gabby Petito supposedly was trying a 4 month roadtrip, somekind of really hippie timescale.

It’s important if you are working in government to plan schools and pension allocations, but the relevant input for population replacement is the completed fertility

This is captured by the crude birth rate.

Fertility rate is number of children per woman. If there are few children per women but many women, the population may grow at the same rate as in a country with few but very fertile women.

An extreme example: country X has 100 million women of childbearing age this generation, each of whom has only one child. The next generation will have 50 million people.

In country Y each woman has 2 children, but there are only 25 million women. So the next generation will have as many people as in country X – 50 million.

Relative to Russia, Poland has more women of childbearing age per capita because the previous generation had been more fertile. But this advantage is squandered by a lower fertility rate by these women, compared to Russia. So births per capita in Poland and Russia are about the same. However this will change in 3-5 years.

“Poland did not have as much of a demographic hole as Russia did, in the 1990s. This will make the effect worse for Russia than for Poland”

But the completed fertility rate was more or less the same for women who were fertile in Russia in the 1990s, as for those women who had been fertile in Poland during the 1990s.

No, it was significantly lower in Russia. The 1970 cohort (women who were 25 years old in 1995) in Poland had a cohort fertility rate of about 1.9. In Russia women of this birth year had a cohort fertility rate of about 1.6. So every three Polish women of birth year 1970 had about one additional child than every three Russian women of the same birth year.

https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_events_6123/news_press_releases_4630/press/lifetime_fertility_on_the_rise_3144

Yes, though you can probably do 3 weeks in each direction. I once drove from Michigan to the Pacific Ocean in about 10 days, with stops along the way. Many places have no real city to relax in, so you should just spend the day driving and enjoying the view from the car. The impressive treeless plains of Nebraska, eastern Colorado and Wyoming, are like this, you can observe far-away weather systems (sun up above, heavy storm somewhere far off to the northeast, etc.) as if you are in the middle of the ocean. But there isn’t really any place worth stropping out there for an extended period of time. Just drive for hours and hours.

To be sure, it’s a long trip by car from either coast. But as Dmitry mentioned Hawaii as a possibility, I envisioned him flying for the long lengths of his trip. If he is indeed flying, the Twin Cities is still highly recommended. Autumn in Minnesota, I’m quite sure rivals even the sights in New England. If you don’t believe me, take a car trip a little past Duluth on the rugged North Shore and see some breathtaking autumn views.

You don’t need to go to New England to see views like this:

That is very beautiful and comes close. A difference is that New England has higher mountains and a greater diversity of trees and therefore leaf colors. The White Mountains of New Hampshire are 6 hours by car from New York:

Maine, where the mountains meet the ocean, is only 7.5 hours drive from New York City:

There are exotic and tasty dishes there such as fresh lobsters and clam chowder.

Beautiful Minnesota is 20.5 hours drive away. Or you can fly there but it still takes longer and is much more expensive (2 hours in airport, 3 hours in sky) then drive from Minneapolis to North Shore 3 hours for about the same length of time. I’d rather recommend flying to Utah or Arizona.

Nick Johnson’s video about Dayton Ohio was pretty interesting to me. He’s producing a series of vlogs about problems with Ohio.

He thinks the main problem is loss of manufacturing jobs. But that there is lot of people who are voluntarily unemployed. He says when he visited a restaurant they said to him that they cannot find workers, because people don’t want to work.

He talks about how Turkish immigrants are trying to develop Dayton. (Not actually from Turkey, but a Turkish minority from postsoviet countries https://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2019/05/07/turkish-center-leader-talks-about-cycle-of.html )

For next year, I will only have a week extra to visit. I’ll visit a week in Palo Alto, and maybe another week we should add for somewhere else. I was thinking probably New York or maybe somewhere else. But if I can receive the multi-entry visa, I’ll be visiting America probably quite regularly in the future.

Minneapolis

Lol I’m so blank about this area even on a cultural level, I was trying to think if I saw any films set in the area.

Then I remembered Werner Herzog’s classic “Stroszek”, in which a mentally disabled German immigrant tries to settle in Wisconsin and shoots himself.

If United Russia in reality got about 35%, who would get more? Who was cheated?

Minneapolis

Lol I’m so blank about this area even on a cultural level, I was trying to think if I saw any films set in the area.

Coen brothers are from there. Their films Fargo and A Serious Man are set in Minnesota and next-door North Dakota.

The largest gap was in the early 1990s. In 1993 it was 1.87 for Poland and 1.385 for Russia.

Which means that Russia probably won’t get much worse, than it is today, whereas Poland’s demographic meltdown has only just begun.

There is another interesting chart you can find at worldbank. It shows the share of children in the population.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS?locations=RU-PL

You can see how Russia greatly benefited from the “Putin-boom”, and is now significantly more youthful society, than Poland. Poland, despite having an edge throughout communist period, completely stopped reproducing itself.

There are a lot more than 2-3 films that have been shot in Minnesota. Here’s a list of about 120 such films, I’m sure that you can find a few here that you recognize. The “Grumpy Old Men” series was quite popular at the box office starring all star perennials Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. I enjoyed seeing some modern day noirs shot in Minnesota, in addition to “Fargo” that AP has mentioned, I got a kick out of “Feeling Minnesota” and especially “A Simple Plan”. Prince was another ambassador for Minnesota, and his film “Purple Rain” was quite popular with the hipsters of that era.
His main residence is located in Chaska, not in California, and he always enjoyed life in his native Minnesota. It’s now a museum of sorts, dedicated to his life and music (Paisley Park has daily tours)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_shot_in_Minnesota

And for AP. who appreciates more “diversity” in his Autumn trees and colors:
More North Shore colors
And you don’t need to go “way up north”to see great fall colors. This photo was taken at Minnehaha Falls right in the center of South Minneapolis. I used to watch the foliage change color daily as a college student, walking by bridge from the left bank to the right bank of the U of M over the Mississippi. When you thought that the colors were at their peak, you’d walk slowly and stop a few times while crossing. 🙂

Like this?

Relative to Russia, Poland has more women of childbearing age per capita because the previous generation had been more fertile. But this advantage is squandered by a lower fertility rate by these women, compared to Russia

There are a number of factors impacting childbearing. Two things spring immediately to mind.

-A- How many young adults depart Poland for other EU countries via Schengen? My understanding is that young adult outflows are even worse for the Baltic EU nations.

Poland may wind up repatriating potential parents from the UK as a consequence of Brexit.

-B- Real earning power for working class individuals has been diminished by Globalist policies such mass migration and outsourcing. For example: (1)

Germany’s pro-business FDP claims country needs 500,000 immigrants annually
…
Amid an increasingly contentious debate over the country’s pension system that has taken place ahead of Germany’s federal election this weekend, Free Democratic Party MP Christian Dürr is arguing that the government must “fundamentally rethink its migration policy” while an increasing amount of Germans edge closer to retirement age, NTV reports.
…
mass migration over the years has resulted in either immigrants or first or second-generation descendants of immigrants composing over 25 percent of Germany’s population. If Germany continues to have a net immigration of 200,000 to 400,000 per year through the next decade, which is expected, nearly half (40 percent) of the people living in the country will have migrant backgrounds by the year 2030.

In 2017, Frankfurt became the first city where native Germans were a minority compared to those who have migrant backgrounds

Lower earning power versus sharply higher Cost of Living (especially rent/mortgage) forces working class families to have two wage earners.
— Traditional “one wage earner” families have more children.
— Financially pressured “dual income” families have less children.

The EU could substantially improve worker class incomes by reducing immigration from outside the block to near zero for an extended period of of time.

It is unclear what can be done to fix unacceptably high, internal, Schengen migration. Unanimous approval by all 27 member states would be required.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://rmx.news/germany/germanys-pro-business-fdp-claims-country-needs-500000-immigrants-annually-but-is-that-really-true/

Exactly the opposite, actually.

Happiness and pleasure are merely consequences of a balance, not the end goal.

Hence, in scenario one, every few years all the VR cattle are to be injected with time dilating drugs and then tortured for what will appear to be quadrillions of years to them, in meatspace, before being offered to return. Make the torture extra strong because escapism is cringe and I hate anyone who would take it on a molecular eternal quantum level.

In the second, a frowny face that will seek to destroy the happy face’s work.

There, balance, but so extreme nobody will find it actually good.

The true solution – neither. To be as neutral and balanced as possible, so such extreme measures don’t have to be taken.

Why can’t you be more Buddhist?

I’m not Asian and frankly I don’t care about it. It’s not in my assigned cultural package.

Taiwan with its developed testing capabilities, but with generally previously unexposed and unvaxed population, may show quite accurately that true CFR of current Covid is about 5% after the end of 2021 summer outbreak. Further studies are needed to assess probable IFR, which may be somewhat different, but doubtful it will be that drastically lower, as the conventional wisdom about the ratio of 10 not catched cases to 1 known is hardly applicable to Taiwan at this stage of pandemic.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/

“Money is the root of all evil”

“A Simple Plan”

A small hidden gem that you probably never watched. It sucks you in and takes you for a wild ride!

And for AP. who appreciates more “diversity” in his Autumn trees and colors:

I was speaking objectively: the Northeast United States (New England and upstate New York) – as well as the Smoky Mountains – do actually have the widest array of deciduous tree species and the brightest red and orange colors in fall in North America.

Overall tree diversity (the southern ones do not necessarily produce bright colors):

This is a busy highway in the New England state of Connecticut, an hour from New York City. Imagine driving 80 mph under such a leaf canopy:

The same state:

Same scene with more saturation:

European Christians like expensive heating bills?

European Christians in Poland Sign Nuclear Energy Pact with U.S. (1)

Polish state-owned mining company KGHM signed an agreement with the U.S. NuScale Power LLC company to build at least four nuclear power plants.

According to the agreement, the U.S. partner is meant to build several nuclear reactors using the small modular reactor (SMR) technology. KGHM requires at least four nuclear power plants, and the company assumes that the first of the plants will be operational in eight years’ time — in 2029.
…
According to CEO of KGHM Marcin Chludziński, SMR technology is accelerating and it is possible that the time required to construct one of the reactors will be less than the aforementioned eight years.

“Access to cheap energy is a Polish raison d’etat. The growing prices of energy are forcing us and other energy companies to search for stable energy sources, hence our cooperation with NuScale Power,” he said.

KGHM is currently the seventh-largest copper producer in the world and the second-largest energy consumer in Poland. Therefore, the price of energy is a key factor which influences the company’s efficiency and profit margins.

Poland is headed towards lower energy prices and less expensive heating bills.

No doubt SJW German/Brussels authoritarians will be very upset by this. Their plans for use of “EU Energy Policy” to undermine democracy in the Visegrád 4 is falling apart. It is not difficult to envision a future where Poland is a net electricity exporter to Germany.

It is a double win. WEF Elite families have money invested in wind & solar boondoggles. They were counting on government suppression of economically effective electricity generation.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://rmx.news/article/polish-state-mining-giant-kghm-signs-deal-with-us-partner-to-build-nuclear-reactors/

I can’t fight the laws of physics , nor tree diversity maps! My favorite tree, that reflects all of the awe inspiring colors of the autumn season are sugar maples. Green, lime green, yellow, orange, and of course bright fiery red are on full display, even brown and purple are to be seen within the maple tree. This map shows that Minnesota is on the outer edge of the “maple zone” and doesn’t have nearly as much as in the New England states. Wisconsin, right next door, however, seems to be abundantly full of this beautiful tree, at least in he northern part of the state. I do notice that the abundance of these trees doesn’t seem to extend all the way to the coast, areas that you’ve included mostly here, I think?…

Actually, I was wrong in my assessment of both New England and Minnesota. In Minnesota the light green color (31 – 50) is quite abundant through the eastern part of the state, and in New England, the green zone does indeed cover the areas closest to the sea. I was hasty and was looking at the red zones when I made my original assessment. Seems like there are a lot of maple trees throughout the whole zone. So, a lot of color for a lot of states!

I also like the idea of exiling all the women with tattoos to a country that would be called “Tattooine.” Some of the men too – depends where they have it.

One day, I hope the forces of justice prevail in the US, and the pernicious Shaw Memorial is removed from Boston Common and transported to the place of exile of “good whites” in Africa, where they can still admire it in-between their bouts of malaria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gould_Shaw_Memorial

Of course, there is a greater historical context within the US, but in a way it can be reduced to the same process by which Europe is afflicted with black statues, in order to clear the way for invasion by blacks. Blacks were basically a rare sight in the city, until about the 1950s or 1960s.

Taking balance to its logical conclusion would mean destroying all of reality. If nothing exists but absolute nothingness, imbalance can’t exist, since the amount of everything that exists would be zero.

WTF is the point of exit polls (dimwit)…… for a 3 day vote? Only a loser would want to do that. Nobody knows what turnout or what hours are going to be busy for this new type of vote to anticipate how best to conduct the exitpoll anyway.

It’s even more dumb when you know afew million are going to vote electronically, where obviously no exitpoll is done.

In 2016,exitpoll was also 45% and ER got 54% in final result, this year the exitpoll was 45% also… and ER received 50% final. This is perfectly normal – and electronic voting going to be even more Pro-ER.

Just for selecting candidates to represent ER, 11 million votes were received earlier this year. With 11 million votes guaranteed for this election, how dumb do you have to be find it anything else except completely plausible that ER got 17 million more votes from the remaining 45 million russians who also voted?

I feel like the new countries created this way (by radical segregation) would help increase world tourism. That is, supposing that some of them were still functional states.

Not to mention, that many of them would be interesting psychological experiments. For example, would a tattoo-freak identify with other tattoo-freaks? If they were his countrymen, would he be a nationalist? Or would he intrinsically identify with outsiders, even if all the tattoo-freaks were his countrymen and there were none outside of it?

Perhaps, some could be created based on physiognomy: Soyland, Whaleland, or Non-detached Earlobes Land.

Perhaps, it would have made more sense for the USSR to have had a smaller army, after it got the bomb, and to have put the difference into the production of blockbuster movies.

“Cosmetic” segregation won’t be the future, and what we will have instead is ethnic and ideological segregation, or what’s called population exchanges before partitions.

What did the post-socialist emigration waves select for? Supposedly more pozzed people who left to find greener pastures (to them)? How much of it has led to the apparent “ideological freezer” post-socialist countries have come out from?

My favorite tree, that reflects all of the awe inspiring colors of the autumn season are sugar maples

I spent some years out West, regularly doing a lot of hiking and some camping in some spectacular national and state parks. But eventually I really missed the smell of maple trees in fall. Do you?

Glad to see the Vikes get a win. Became a fan of theirs when the Giants traded my favorite player Fran Tarkenton to the Vikings after announcing they were leaving NY to NJ, which at the time wasn’t taken so well by many NYG fans. At the time, the Giants weren’t good unlike the Vikings.

I thought this latest influx of Haitians was interesting. Because at least some of them were in Chile for a few years. Not very long, many only like 2-3 years. Some a little longer.

You might say that that is not comparable to people who have managed to “launder” their legitimacy by being born in another place or even being the grandchildren of immigrants. And for all I know, there might still be many Haitians in Chile, yet I feel like the whole incident demonstrates how transitory these movements could be, and how superficial the motivations for moving are (pure economic gain).

What is difficult to understand though is how the intuitive “moral” values of liberals could be circumvented. I feel like that is the key to the whole thing. Progressives have no loyalty to their countrymen. And for all the talk of environmentalism, I feel like they are, in the main, just not able to grasp longterm trends – the consequences of having open borders. Not that I believe that open borders would be popular, if on a ballot, but it is hard to see how the regime could change its values, without being totally replaced.

I’d like to see Rightists organize a based alternative to the UN, just for trolling and for subverting the concept of internationalism. Could be done purely over the internet, with no salaries or rent, I guess. Though, I imagine that the members would quickly become targets.

To your original comment – picking subcultures you don’t like and populate places exclusively by them is meaningless and stupid, except if they do it by themselves.

As for Haitians, it’s because France transplanted entire slave populations from Africa to Saint Domingue, then after a slave revolt imposed extreme reparation + debt burden on a rapidly localizing economy that went from the “richest” plantation economy in the Americas to subsistence level. Someone’s karma shifted onto others.

To your original comment – picking subcultures you don’t like and populate places exclusively by them is meaningless and stupid, except if they do it by themselves.

It has its uses as a thought experiment.

For example, if you can walk people through some of the more ridiculous examples, and get them to imagine the differing consequences, then that might help them to consider more realistic and fruitful proposals that are less politically correct. It also helps one to think about group dynamics and the possibilities of exiling people who belong to your group, but who don’t play nice with the group – and it need not be an unpleasant exile.

imposed extreme reparation + debt burden on a rapidly localizing economy that went from the “richest” plantation economy in the Americas to subsistence level. Someone’s karma shifted onto others.

Have you ever seen a Haitian IRL? I ask because I have noticed repeatedly that they have visibly smaller heads. And Dominicans who are not my idea of a model population, and who share a lot of customs with them, really, really hate them – like something that you have to see to believe.

Without the massacre, Haiti might have eventually become similar to Jamaica. But that is supposing a higher level of white immigration and miscegenation, as well as a longer period of rule. And Jamaica isn’t exactly a great place.

Have you ever seen a Haitian IRL?

Do you see my username? I’m at the opposite end of the world from Haiti. If you mean some Latino from Dominican Republic, it’s partly because of Trujillo’s propaganda.

Jamaica was on a decent track of development until ~1970.

I’m at the opposite end of the world from Haiti.

I am nearly at the antipodes of Haiti myself – or at least in the way that people used to conceive of distances. I merely asked, in case you have traveled to the US, in which case, it would be difficult to avoid seeing them, at least in some places.

If you mean some Latino from Dominican Republic

I dislike this phrase, though some employ it. They are clearly a different people than mestizo Mexicans, and they actually do have a sort pseudo-uniformity. Not a race, yet – thought they may be among the closest of Latin Americans in getting there.

it’s partly because of Trujillo’s propaganda.

Trujillo wasn’t exactly an ethnic nationalist. (see his visa policy during WW2) Haven’t cracked open any Dominican school books, but the point is, they’ve had a lot of experience with Haitians since then. Haitians are perennial migrants into DR, for low wage labor. The border is also swarming with ones that return every day to act as merchants. The traffic of labor has always been one way. And there are regular campaigns to deport them.

Jamaica was on a decent track of development until ~1970.

It was a British colony until 1962, and like many colonies, remained heavily under British influence, for some years, while nominally independent. I have seen my fair share of Jamaicans too, and never wonder where they went wrong. The answer undoubtedly lies in the soft soil of their progenitors, and with the terrible diseases of the tropics, which made life very uncertain and pushed evolution in one direction instead of another.

similar to Jamaica

Before its rebellion, Haiti was anyway colonized by prerevolutionary France.

A higher quality of political and legal system is generally inherited in the United Kingdom’s colonies and ex-colonies.

Jamaica’s socioeconomic situation is somewhere near a lower point of the deviation from the mean for the Kingdom’s colonies and semi-colonies. Aside from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Canada – there are ex-English colonies like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and British Virgin Islands which are developed countries by income. Maybe Barbados is middle income, and Montserrat low income.

Dominicans who are not my idea of a model population, and who share a lot of customs with them, really, really hate

Without knowing anything about the region, we could predict nationalities who share a single island are already probably going to hate each in most scenarios. And I also noticed Dominican Republic has a GDP per capita 5 times higher than Haiti, and receives proportionally a large flood of immigration and guestworkers from the latter (maybe something around 8% of the population, or a number like that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitians_in_the_Dominican_Republic.

I can’t honestly say that I’ve missed the smell of maple trees, but yes, I have missed the overall smell of autumn in the air, including the fallen leaves of many types of trees. There are different species of the maple tree in the more northerly climates of the Western states. Close to home, I’ve encountered them in Flagstaff, and further away in Oregon. In fact, I was surprised to run into the beautiful catalpa tree in Flagstaff too, now that was a surprise.


Northern Arizona, a you can see, can rival even Minnesota and New England when it come to colorful autumn foliage.

Well how about that, Fran Tarkington was (and is) my favorite football player of all time. He was a magician that kept everybody glued to the TV, trying to anticipate his next incredible play. I think that he was with the Vikings longer than he was with the NYG’s?

A higher quality of political and legal system is generally inherited in the United Kingdom’s colonies and ex-colonies.

I don’t think that there are enough colonies that one can draw any conclusions, nor would it be trivial to adjust for human capital differences between colonies. And the fact that the English were extremely competent and largely benevolent administrators, which can hardly be said for any other nation, must also be taken into account.

Today, in any case, the Common Law tradition is in shambles. It has done the inevitable: It has collapsed under its own weight. Most developed countries with Civil Law codes have more efficient, far less mercurial, and ultimately more effective civil legal systems.

Jamaica’s socioeconomic situation is somewhere near a lower point of the deviation from the mean for the Kingdom’s colonies and semi-colonies. Aside from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Canada – there are ex-English colonies like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and British Virgin Islands which are developed countries by income. Maybe Barbados is middle income, and Montserrat low income.

It’s not entirely appropriate to compare those nations with Haiti. If you add up the populations of Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, the British Virgin Islands, Barbados, and Montserrat (pop: ~4500) — you’re at less than 5% of the population of Haiti. Add Jamaica, and you’re somewhere around 30%.

Haiti is in a uniquely bad position, with tremendous population pressure, worthless institutions, and a populace which is good for nothing. This sorry situation is, in part, due to their legitimately disadvantaged and bloody colonial history. But not entirely.

The North American West does not quite have the diversity of deciduous trees of the East (or Europe), although we make up for it with our bigger variety of beautiful conifers. But we do have more than enough to enjoy a symphony of colors under our serene blue skies when we look out of the window in autumn.

Yes, as he started out with the Vikes before going to NY, followed by his return to Minnesota.

Couldn’t stand that second stadium the Vikes played in. They had a greater advantage playing outdoors before their fans, when the weather got cold.

I’m not sure that the legacy of systems of law is really that important, in the sense of French vs. English. After all, France inherited its own system of law. And there is Réunion, which although a part of France, is very isolated (per capita €22,970.) Though, obviously, it has better demographics than Haiti.

there are ex-English colonies like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and British Virgin Islands which are developed countries by income. Maybe Barbados is middle income, and Montserrat low income.

Small islands are different. It is multi factor. More beaches=more tourism. They are more attractive targets for offshore banking, which has a large per capita effect. Lastly, there are HBD factors, revolving around which place got first pick of slaves and in which place murderers could be easily caught vs. hiding inland in difficult terrain and having many sons.

Without knowing anything about the region, we could predict nationalities who share a single island are already probably going to hate each in most scenarios.

Humorously true, to a large extent.

Also integral to this definition was how the ethnicity in question did not need to be the predominate one in the state (e.g. Apartheid South Africa was not majority White, but was still an ethnostate. Singapore and Israel are far from 100% Chinese/Jewish, but still ethnostates).

— Hül (@AqBoga) September 24, 2021

Not to mention the fact that the same government is making every effort to increase that thirteen precent by every means; foreign aid to bloat Bantu populations abroad, purposeful destabilization (not that they need it, but see assassination in Haiti), then resettlement en masse.

— Hül (@AqBoga) September 24, 2021

The United States is a Black ethnostate.

— Hül (@AqBoga) September 24, 2021

What does this mean, please?

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/go-for-gold-%20where-to-hike-drive-to-see-the-best-displays-of-yellow-aspens-fall-foliage-in-colorado

Are there tree-ologists who dissent from that internet-fact that an aspen grove is one organism of perfect clone trees?