Thu: “we should kill ‘em all” when asked about Gaza kids

They Are Inventing Psychohistory

I’ve been working as a historian and complexity scientist for the better part of a decade, and I often think about this phrase as I follow different strands of the historical record and notice the same patterns over and over.

My background is in ancient history. As a young researcher, I tried to understand why the Roman Empire became so big and what ultimately led to its downfall. Then, during my doctoral studies, I met the evolutionary biologist turned historian Peter Turchin, and that meeting had a profound impact on my work.

I joined Turchin and a few others who were establishing a new field – a new way to investigate history. It was called cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history, and dynamics, the study of how complex systems change over time. Cliodynamics marshals scientific and statistical tools to better understand the past.

The aim is to treat history as a “natural” science, using statistical methods, computational simulations and other tools adapted from evolutionary theory, physics and complexity science to understand why things happened the way that they did.

Mosiac of a Roman muse.

By turning historical knowledge into scientific “data”, we can run analyses and test hypotheses about historical processes, just like any other science.

How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse

Hari Seldon is a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In his capacity as mathematics professor at Streeling University on the planet Trantor, Seldon develops psychohistory, an algorithmic science that allows him to predict the future in probabilistic terms.

There;s a Gullible Editor Born Every Minute

For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

And yet basically everybody and I mean everybody ended up falling for this. Indeed, the very brief efforts to remain wary of the laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election have evolved into an object case of the dangers of censorship and even liberal media election meddling. It’s a decision — albeit one lasting only a few days — that everyone now agrees “we got wrong.” It was the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nonsense. But Elon Musk going in for it isn’t the point. He’s a clown. All the serious people ended up doing exactly the same. This has always been bullshit. Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious.

The real issue, as I note above, is the reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit…

This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.

Bad news for Biden as new poll finds him leading Trump

I don’t write much about polls here for the simple reason that you generally shouldn’t think much about polls. And I’m not really writing about a poll right now, though in order to make my actual point I need to start off by telling you some key findings from a new Quinnipiac poll1 that was just released.

Joe Biden leads Donald Trump, 49-45

Biden’s net favorable rating is a couple points better than Trump’s2

49 percent of Americans say Biden is ethical while 47 percent say he is not. Only 29 percent say Trump is ethical, while 68 percent say he is not.

A majority of Americans, 51 percent, say Biden “cares about average Americans,” while only 42 percent say the same of Trump; 57 percent say Trump does not care about average Americans.3

49 percent say Biden “has the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president,” compared to only 37 percent for Trump; 61 percent say Trump does not.

When asked if Trump’s statement that “if re-elected he would not protect NATO allies who do not meet their NATO spending targets and he would encourage Russia to do whatever they want against those NATO allies,” 71 percent said this was a bad idea; only 18 percent said it was a good idea.4

So Biden is beating Trump; Biden is viewed more favorably than Trump; 68 percent of Americans say Trump is not ethical; 61 percent say Trump does not have the personality and temperament to serve effectively as president; nearly 60 percent say Trump doesn’t care about average Americans, and Trump’s batshit crazy statement that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO is quite properly seen as batshit crazy by nearly everyone. That’s a pretty terrible poll for Trump!

I bet some of you already know where this is going.

Here’s how POLITICO reported that poll:



And AXIOS:

So Now Normally Dangerous and Abnormally Dangerous Guns are OK.

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked California's attorney general from enforcing a new law that allows residents, the state and local governments to sue members of the firearms industry that manufacture or sell "abnormally dangerous" guns.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Schopler in San Diego sided with a firearms industry trade association in finding that part of a gun control measure signed into law by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 was likely unconstitutional.

It is the first ruling in a case challenging the constitutionality of California's Firearm Industry Responsibility Act.

The law was enacted shortly after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in June 2022 concerning the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment that significantly expanded gun rights.

Newsom, in signing the new state firearms restrictions into law in July 2022, called them necessary to ensure makers of deadly firearms could be held accountable in court and could "no longer hide from the mass destruction that they have caused."

You Need to Leave Alabama to Have a Baby and to Not Have One.

Asecond Alabama provider announced that it will pause its in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments on Thursday, just days after the state supreme court ruled in a first-of-its-kind decision that embryos are “extrauterine children”.

“We have made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists,” Alabama Fertility said in a post to its Instagram account. “We are contacting patients that will be affected today to find solutions for them and we are working as hard as we can to alert our legislators as to the far reaching negative impact of this ruling on the women of Alabama.”

The clinic said it does not plan to close entirely, and urged people to check back in for “advocacy opportunities”.

Alabama Fertility is at least the second IVF provider to announce that it would suspend its IVF procedures after the University of Alabama at Birmingham Wednesday said it would pause treatments in the wake of the court ruling. A spokesperson for the university, the largest healthcare provider in the state, said the institution is “saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments”.