“A new study comparing the biodiversity of wild mammals in Europe 8,000 years ago with the present has found that more species have been gained than lost on the continent.” https://phys.org/news/2022-11-biodiversity-europe-mammals-rich-years.html
phys.org
Biodiversity of Europe's mammals as rich as it was 8,000 years ago, according to new research
A new study comparing the biodiversity of wild mammals in Europe 8,000 years ago with the present has found that more species have been gained than lost on the continent.
Risk of Biometric Identity
One of the biggest problems with biometric identification (apart from untrustworthiness of those who would manage the identification system) is the belief that it cannot be counterfeited. If the identity test based on the iris, face or finger data points could be passed by artificial means, it would be virtually impossible to prove that whatever was done under your identity was not you. When this technical risk is combined with the criminal potential of the authorities who would store and manage your digital identity, being best positioned to make illicit use of it, the downside of this technology becomes insurmountable. In short, the technology would allow the authorities or the affiliated corporations to frame you for any crime without the possibility of meaningful defence. The most insecure aspect of this technology is the ‘authority’ itself. The traditional, analogue system based on multiple points of reference under no centralised authority is largely immune to this vulnerability, giving more power to the inherently weak individual and less power to the inherently powerful corporations - a fairer and ultimately more secure system.
One of the biggest problems with biometric identification (apart from untrustworthiness of those who would manage the identification system) is the belief that it cannot be counterfeited. If the identity test based on the iris, face or finger data points could be passed by artificial means, it would be virtually impossible to prove that whatever was done under your identity was not you. When this technical risk is combined with the criminal potential of the authorities who would store and manage your digital identity, being best positioned to make illicit use of it, the downside of this technology becomes insurmountable. In short, the technology would allow the authorities or the affiliated corporations to frame you for any crime without the possibility of meaningful defence. The most insecure aspect of this technology is the ‘authority’ itself. The traditional, analogue system based on multiple points of reference under no centralised authority is largely immune to this vulnerability, giving more power to the inherently weak individual and less power to the inherently powerful corporations - a fairer and ultimately more secure system.
The idea of common good makes sense only if it is good for everyone. Anyone who advocates harming some people for the prospective benefit of the majority is no longer serving the common good. The fundamental common good is the freedom to realise individual intentions, which is the essence of conscious agency, delimited by non-negotiable universal rights.
On Being Offended
The idea of ‘feeling offended’ is very strange to me. I understand that when people say they ‘are offended’ they feel somehow diminished by the words or actions of another. It is not just that someone makes a derogatory or unwelcome statement about them, but that the person’s self-esteem is negatively affected by that statement. Even a true statement can be experienced as offensive. I have never experienced being offended and I struggle to understand how anyone could feel that way. When someone makes a derogatory, unwelcome, unfair or even defamatory statement about me, it is only a subjective opinion about me but an objective statement about the state or character of the speaker. If anyone is diminished by an unfair statement it is the speaker himself. Irrationality or unfairness of the speaker has no bearing whatsoever on my self-esteem. Am I misunderstanding what “feeling ofended” means? What does it feel like?
The idea of ‘feeling offended’ is very strange to me. I understand that when people say they ‘are offended’ they feel somehow diminished by the words or actions of another. It is not just that someone makes a derogatory or unwelcome statement about them, but that the person’s self-esteem is negatively affected by that statement. Even a true statement can be experienced as offensive. I have never experienced being offended and I struggle to understand how anyone could feel that way. When someone makes a derogatory, unwelcome, unfair or even defamatory statement about me, it is only a subjective opinion about me but an objective statement about the state or character of the speaker. If anyone is diminished by an unfair statement it is the speaker himself. Irrationality or unfairness of the speaker has no bearing whatsoever on my self-esteem. Am I misunderstanding what “feeling ofended” means? What does it feel like?
The definition of ‘offended’: “resentful or annoyed, typically as a result of a perceived insult.” Why would anyone feel like that about a deficiency or failure of another? It doesn’t make sense. Feeling offended therefore strikes me as a personality defect of the person who gets offended.
Perhaps offence sensitivity comes on a spectrum with increasingly divergent limits, and when extreme sensitivity is persistently emphasised as “offence” then the lower limit feels like it never was an offence at all, but something entirely different, logically incompatible with the new extreme.
Response from Auditor-General NSW to my submission re SafeWork Audit (https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/2104): “The Audit Office does not have the mandate to intervene in decisions made by audited entities, nor to direct them to take a particular course of action. We are also unable to question the merits of Government policy objectives under section 27B of the Government Sector Audit Act 1983. The scope of our work is limited to what we can observe and report on within the financial reporting and auditing framework we work within. The information you shared regarding SafeWork NSW has been provided to the audit team and will be considered as the team develops the detailed scope of the audit. The focus areas for this audit are yet to be determined. At this stage, we plan to commence this audit in early 2023.”
Telegram
Normal
Email to Auditor-General of NSW, Margaret Crawford (21.10.2022)
I want to share with you a probable violation of workplace safety and my experience of trying to communicate it to WorkSafe and other regulatory agencies.
I have contacted several regulatory…
I want to share with you a probable violation of workplace safety and my experience of trying to communicate it to WorkSafe and other regulatory agencies.
I have contacted several regulatory…
Forwarded from Jesse Zurawell
Do you see through the illusion yet?
—
"Besides being in charge of all of Russia’s nuclear weapons production and development, Rosatom supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. . . .
What’s Paris’s brief? Russia buys two-thirds of France’s electrical steam generators. Also, French nuclear fuel fabricator Framatome just struck a major nuclear fuel development cooperation agreement with Rosatom. . . .
Russia provides roughly 15 percent of America’s raw uranium and 28 percent of its enriched uranium. Combined with Russian nuclear sales to the EU, these uranium imports from Russia fatten Rosatom’s coffers by as much as $1 billion a year — easily more than Rosatom spends to maintain Russia’s nuclear weapons complex."
—
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3732521-stop-funding-russias-nuclear-weapons/
• • • • •
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3732521-stop-funding-russias-nuclear-weapons/
—
"Besides being in charge of all of Russia’s nuclear weapons production and development, Rosatom supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. . . .
What’s Paris’s brief? Russia buys two-thirds of France’s electrical steam generators. Also, French nuclear fuel fabricator Framatome just struck a major nuclear fuel development cooperation agreement with Rosatom. . . .
Russia provides roughly 15 percent of America’s raw uranium and 28 percent of its enriched uranium. Combined with Russian nuclear sales to the EU, these uranium imports from Russia fatten Rosatom’s coffers by as much as $1 billion a year — easily more than Rosatom spends to maintain Russia’s nuclear weapons complex."
—
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3732521-stop-funding-russias-nuclear-weapons/
• • • • •
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3732521-stop-funding-russias-nuclear-weapons/
The Hill
Stop funding Russia’s nuclear weapons
The United States has several practical, Russian-free options to secure affordable ore and enriched uranium.
Humans have evolved out of nonsense, and the history of humanity is the record of trying to deal with and eradicate the primeval nonsense that still permeates us. These is no other way of discerning nonsense than by the three fundamental laws of logic, so by rejecting or ignoring the laws we abandon the distinction between sense and nonsense, reject humanity and symbolically wallow in primeval slime. Sense unites, nonsense divides.
Laws of Logic are Purely Relational
The laws of thought (the three fundamental laws of logic) are the necessary and sufficient conditions for two or more meanings relating to one another in a way that makes a new, composite meaning. The laws were not invented but discovered; we were unwittingly adhering to them when combining meanings to make sense of any situation. For example, “I am walking” has a composite, situational meaning, whereas “I am not I” does not - the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the same identity cannot be combined to make sense and therefore does not result in a situational meaning; the independently meaningful parts [<I am>; <not I>] negate one another and thus remain conceptually disjointed.
Below is a list of articles in which I attempt to correct the most common errors in the interpretations of the laws.
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-law-of-identity
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-law-of-excluded-middle
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/derivation-of-the-principle-of-sufficient-reason-from-the-law-of-non-contradiction
The laws of thought (the three fundamental laws of logic) are the necessary and sufficient conditions for two or more meanings relating to one another in a way that makes a new, composite meaning. The laws were not invented but discovered; we were unwittingly adhering to them when combining meanings to make sense of any situation. For example, “I am walking” has a composite, situational meaning, whereas “I am not I” does not - the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the same identity cannot be combined to make sense and therefore does not result in a situational meaning; the independently meaningful parts [<I am>; <not I>] negate one another and thus remain conceptually disjointed.
Below is a list of articles in which I attempt to correct the most common errors in the interpretations of the laws.
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-law-of-identity
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-law-of-excluded-middle
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/derivation-of-the-principle-of-sufficient-reason-from-the-law-of-non-contradiction
Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
Tribalism is Self-defeating
An identity that is ideologically bound to the land, that includes the land as an integral part of ‘our people’, implies nativist supremacism, which is in principle anti-human and precludes universal ethics, and is therefore a priori wrong. It is trivially true that every human is a product of their ancestors and their cumulative experiences, but tribal cultures devalue the fact that we all share the same ancient ancestors, that we are all related, and instead carve out an arbitrary value-distinction in a particular time period and area; a negation of the common roots of humanity for the sake of tribal advantage over others. The injustice of tribalism is not so much the emphasis on bloodline in their becoming, but ignoring the fact that we are all of the same bloodline, and that the significance of bloodline is logically subordinate to the human capacity to generate meaning. The best thing that indigenous tribes can do to advance their agency is to abandon tribal ideology and embrace their human identity, as conscious rational beings capable of creating unbounded meaning with all other humans, by means of what we all have in common. You are all welcome.
An identity that is ideologically bound to the land, that includes the land as an integral part of ‘our people’, implies nativist supremacism, which is in principle anti-human and precludes universal ethics, and is therefore a priori wrong. It is trivially true that every human is a product of their ancestors and their cumulative experiences, but tribal cultures devalue the fact that we all share the same ancient ancestors, that we are all related, and instead carve out an arbitrary value-distinction in a particular time period and area; a negation of the common roots of humanity for the sake of tribal advantage over others. The injustice of tribalism is not so much the emphasis on bloodline in their becoming, but ignoring the fact that we are all of the same bloodline, and that the significance of bloodline is logically subordinate to the human capacity to generate meaning. The best thing that indigenous tribes can do to advance their agency is to abandon tribal ideology and embrace their human identity, as conscious rational beings capable of creating unbounded meaning with all other humans, by means of what we all have in common. You are all welcome.
They still don’t understand the moral wrong they have committed and their apology is worthless. Discrimination against the unvaccinated would be unethical even if the vaccine fully prevented transmission. Exclusion of the unvaccinated coerces a percentage of healthy people to let themselves be killed by the vaccine, therefore violates their right to life; exclusion of the unvaccinated discriminates on the basis of innate biological characteristics of the human race; exclusion of the unvaccinated implies that being born human is not a guarantee of full human rights; exclusion of the unvaccinated denies the right to free medical consent; exclusion of the unvaccinated coerces people to accept a violation of bodily integrity. APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED.
This is awaiting everyone. Even if you are now at your biological peak, in a decade or two your charms will wane, you will shrivel up and grow old. No mater how much money you will make, how much fame you will gain, how many followers on instagram you will attract, no matter how much pleasure or happiness you can buy, none of it will serve you in the end. The only reward that is immune to time comes from achievements that aim beyond you, and ideally extend to humanity, to consciousness, perhaps to time itself.
A new book “Covid-19 Lawlessness” is promoted by some human rights lawyers, claiming to be “anti-fascist”. https://covid19lawlessness.com/ After reading the previews it appears that this is another example of a Professor of the establishment using the large print to giveth and the small print to taketh away. His primary argument seems to be (again!) that the vaccine was experimental, not that free medical consent and the right to bodily integrity should apply absolutely: “Standing up for what is right starts by speaking out against injustice and the violation of fundamental rights such as the right to be free from medical experimentation without free and informed consent.” No, this is not a defence of ABSOLUTE rights, but an implicit defence of proportionality when violating human rights. Vaccine mandates even for a perfectly safe and fully approved “vaccine” (which would have to be a placebo to be perfectly safe) are still implying that being born human is not a guarantee of human rights, which are thereby abrogated and replaced with privileges conditional on giving up your control of bodily integrity.