Year: 2023

Phonics are the Only Way

Mississippi is no longer the uneducated laughing stock of the US public school system:

It’s a cliché that Kymyona Burk heard a little too often: “Thank God for Mississippi.”

As the state’s literacy director, she knew politicians in other states would say it when their reading test scores were down — because at least they weren’t ranked as low as Mississippi. Or Louisiana. Or Alabama.

Lately, the way people talk about those states has started to change. Instead of looking down on the Gulf South, they’re seeing it as a model.

Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.

The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids.

We utilized phonics to teach our children and all of them were reading simple sentences before they were four years old. Originally, with a Powerpoint slideshow, and later with a homemade Android app, then followed by the Bob Books. Any child can learn to read before the age of five if provided with a daily phonics run, first through the alphabet, then through the randomized phonemes.

Phonics vs whole language is the precisely akin to the difference between learning to read Japanese through kana and through kanji. The former is easy and can be accomplished in a matter of months. The latter is incredibly difficult and requires years of study for even basic literacy.

Don’t ever take any teacher, professional educator, or scientist seriously if they oppose phonics for any reason. At best, they are ignorant and maleducated. At worst, they are malevolent and seeking to intellectually lobotomize children.

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The Bindery is Installed

If posting and streaming are light and I’m generally unresponsive this week, don’t be surprised. Today marked the completion of the Castalia Bindery installation, which means that all of the machines we require, and more, are now physically present inside the bindery space.

This is a more significant development than it might seem, since today was a major operation that, in the case of one machine, required two forklifts, two ramps, eight men, and the partial disassembly of the machine concerned. It took three hours, and we faced challenges that ranged from missed trains to a rented forklift that was DOA, but there were no accidents or incidents, and by the time we knocked off around 7 PM, the big machine was fully reassembled inside the building.

Tomorrow, all the machines will be tested, connected to the compressed air system, and the training will begin in earnest. We’re not live yet, but we are on the verge of getting there.

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Biden as Valens

Martin Armstrong draws a historical parallel:

My phone has been in meltdown ever since Trump was arrested… EVERY phone call I have had from Asia to Europe, they are all expressing complete shock that the United States is collapsing and they are now all seeing that our forecast that the 2024 Presidential Election would be the most corrupt in history and market the END of democracy in the United States.

These people just do not get it, they crossed the line and now the view of the United States from the outside looking in, they no longer believe that America is the beacon of liberty to the world. It is becoming so obvious that our computer will be right again. I warned it even was showing that the 2024 election might not even take place. That was a small 18% probability, but that NEVER came up EVER in this history of running our political models – NEVER!

This year, 2023, was a MAJOR Directional Change that was showing up in both the LEFT & the RIGHT databases. The year 2025 is when a president would take office in January. This has been the #1 target on our political models for decades. The NEOCONS are in full control of the government. There is no way to stop the collapse of the United States at this point. Nobody will listen and there is nothing I can do. People often ask what if people protested? We will never realize the opportunity to reestablish a new form of government post-2032 without the pain and destruction first.

During the Reign of Valentinian I and his brother, Valens, who came to power in 364AD where Valentinian I died in 375 and Valens ruled into 378, there are serious correlations from both and economic and monetary perspective. They too saw their power weakening so they allowed the Goths to cross the Danube and settle within Roman territory provided they would also then serve in the Roman military. This is what is really behind Biden allowing all these people to flood in through the border. What they do not realize, is that history repeats as Biden grants citizenship in return for military service. The Neocons want to build an army to defeat China and Russia simultaneously.

We all know what happens when you don’t sink the ships. Eventually, the barbarians take over the government. In 2004, when I first predicted the collapse of the USA as a political entity in 2033, the prediction was seen as an utter absurdity. Now, it’s not looking crazy at all.

We’ll know it was dead on when people start denying that I could possibly have seen it coming three decades in advance. But history always rhymes, and the patterns are there for those with the education and the wherewithal to read them.

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The Course of Future History

Like Paul Krugman, Peter Turchin was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation. Unlike Krugman, Turchin appears to understand that psychohistory is not merely fiction, it is impossible due to the instability introduced by mathematical chaos theory.

I am often asked by people who first encounter Cliodynamics whether I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and what is the relationship between Asimov’s Psychohistory and Cliodynamics. I read Foundation some 35 years ago, and it left quite an impression. I actually begin my popular book War and Peace and War by referring to Hari Seldon and his prediction of the collapse of the Galactic Empire. So there is no question that Asimov’s ideas have been an influence.

However, there are many differences between the Asimov’s imaginary science of history and the reality of Cliodynamics. Asimov wrote Foundation in the 1940s – way before the discovery of what we now call ‘mathematical chaos.’ In Asimov’s book, Hari Seldon and psychohistorians develop mathematical methods to make very precise predictions years and decades in advance. Due to discoveries made in the 1970s and 80s we know that this is impossible.

In Asimov books Psychohistory, quite appropriately, deals not with individuals, but with huge conglomerates of them. It basically adopts a ‘thermodynamic’ approach, in which no attempt is made to follow the erratic trajectories of individual molecules (human beings), but instead models averages of billions of molecules. This is in many ways similar to the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, and indeed to cliodynamics, which also deals with large collectives of individuals.

What Asimov did not know is that even when you can ignore such things as individual free will, you still run against very strict limits to predictability. When components of a dynamical system interact nonlinearly, the resulting dynamics can become effectively unpredictable, even if they are entirely deterministic. For complex systems like human societies this possibility becomes a virtual certainty: they are complex and nonlinear enough and, therefore, must behave chaotically and unpredictably. This is, by the way, why weather cannot be predicted more than a few days in advance (and in Connecticut, where I live, not even a day in advance).

The hallmark of mathematical chaos is ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’ In climate it means that a butterfly deciding to flutter its wings (or not) can cause a major hurricane to veer from its predicted path.

This is actually a very optimistic result. It means that human individuals are not as powerless as Asimov imagined them. Exercising one’s free will can have major consequences at the macrolevel, just like a butterfly fluttering its wings can affect the course of a hurricane. However, such optimism should be tempered by realism. Although each of us probably affects the course of human history, most of us have a very slight effect, and any large effects are probably a result of a completely unforeseen concatenation of events.

In short, making precise predictions about events in human societies decades or centuries in the future is just science fiction. It seems that Asimov himself became uneasy with the mechanistic unfolding of future history according to the Seldon Plan. He solved the problem by throwing in the Mule – a mutant with frightening mental powers who derails the actual history from the course predicted by Seldon. In actuality, we are all ‘Mules.’ By exercising a multitude of choices throughout our lives we constantly derail the course of future history in unpredictable directions.

There is, of course, a considerable amount of general predictability concerning the course of the future due to the fact that people are still people and behave according to the same behavioral patterns that have been exhibited reliably across the millennia. Alphas are going to alpha in the future, just as gammas gammad in the past. History does not repeat, but it rhymes sufficiently to provide us with a reasonable clue which way things are going; it was not difficult to anticipate the pendulum eventually swinging back with a vengeance on globalization and its manifold ills.

However, no purely material model will ever suffice, because no material model can account for either human evil or spiritual evil. And that is the fundamental weakness of cliohistory, since it takes no account of anything beyond the material world.

DISCUSS ON SG

Reddit vs Reddit Moderators

The moderators of Reddit belatedly come to understand that the Reddit administration is dishonest and its intentions are wicked.

Hello, r/antiwork! As you’re probably aware, r/antiwork has been set to private until recently in solidarity with the sitewide protest against Reddit’s attempt to kill third-party apps. At the start of the protest, we received assurance from Reddit administration that mods have a right to protest and to set their subs private. Today, we received a message from Reddit that our mod team will be replaced if we do not open up the subreddit immediately.

The important takeaway here is Reddit does not care about this community and Reddit does not care about you. They see you as nothing more than a statistic to monetize. They do not care about the quality of this community. They do not care about the desires of the community or the mod team. We set the subreddit private to protect the community from the changes Reddit intends to force through, and Reddit is forcing the subreddit open because a worse user experience for you is more profitable for them.

Going forward, the mod team is going to lose some very important tools that we’ve relied on to keep you safe from spammers and scammers. This means we’re going to have to reassess our rules and procedures in order to serve you more effectively. The mod team will keep you updated on any developments. We thank you for your understanding.

Reddit has always been a venomous swamp. But remarkably, the venomous creatures that inhabit it have turned out to be less malevolent and disgusting than the swamp itself.

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I Do Not Support Free Speech

Andrew Torba has come a long way since he appeared on Brainstorm to introduce Gab to the community. I really respect his perseverance and appreciate what he’s accomplished. But he’s still clinging to his misapprehensions about free speech.

Doing this for almost seven years now I can tell you that sadly most people do not support free speech. Even those on “the right” who claim to beg Gab to censor certain words and ideas because it offends them or whatever. The good news is those of us who do support it are waking a lot of the people in the middle up, who then in turn end up supporting it after being censored themselves or learning something on Gab thanks to free speech.

At the risk of substituting dialectic for rhetoric, I took the liberty of correcting his meme for historical accuracy.

You needn’t take my word for it. Read JB Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought. It’s written by a major historian of the early 20th century who is a strong free speech advocate, and he’s not shy about explaining how the right to free speech came to be and what it was intended to accomplish.

If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin.

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Vaccines Almost Certainly Cause Autism

As Steve Kirsch notes, the list of evidence suggesting that vaccines cause autism is growing steadily. And in light of the known corruption and proven unreliability of professional science, it it really reasonable to assume that the lack of a definitive scientific consensus concerning the link between vaccines and autism is even relevant one way or the other?

Here’s my favorite short list of evidence that can’t be explained if vaccines don’t cause autism. Does anyone think I’m wrong and can explain the list?

  • Madsen study: Even in this heavily flawed study, the raw data showed a strongly elevated risk of autism. So they never showed the raw data odds ratio (did you know that the rate of autism was 45% higher in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group?) and the paper only showed the adjusted numbers! That’s unethical. You can read the flaws in this study that was widely cited to prove that there was no association here. Over 1,000 scientists didn’t see anything wrong with the study! It’s really stunning how easily bad science propagates into the mainstream. Note that this is the single best study that is cited to prove that vaccines don’t cause autism and it is deeply flawed. The authors wouldn’t provide the underlying data and refused to answer any questions. Is that the way science works?
  • 214 papers in the peer-reviewed literature linking vaccines and autism: Autism mom Ginger Taylor compiled a list of 214 studies showing the link between vaccines and autism. Here’s the list as a single download.
  • Wakefield 1998 paper: Wakefield’s retracted paper reported that “We investigated a consecutive series of children… Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children, with measles infection in one child, and otitis media in another.” So 66% of the cases were associated with the MMR vaccine.
  • The 2022 Morocco study: 70% of the 90 parents surveyed affirmed that the first autistic features appeared after vaccination with the MMR vaccine. The rates are nearly identical to the 66% rate in the Wakefield study.
  • DeStefano paper evidence destruction: CDC scientist William Thompson was ordered by his bosses at the CDC to destroy ONLY the evidence linking vaccines and autism. Furthermore, the race subgroup analysis showing the link was omitted from the paper which is also unethical. When Congressman Bill Posey tried to get Thompson to testify in Congress, they shut him down so there was no testimony. This coverup was what convinced Wakefield that he was right: vaccines cause autism. More about the DeStefano paper in this article.
  • Simpsonwood meeting: CDC scientist Thomas Verstraeten did a study in 1999 linking thimerosal with autism. They tried to make the autism signal go away. They couldn’t. The original signal was a RR=7.6 which is a huge signal. See my article for details and a link to the original Verstraeten study.
  • Paul Offit lied to RFK Jr. about thimerosal: RFK Jr told me the story personally, but now, it’s on the Joe Rogan podcast Episode #1999. Start listening at 23:00. The punchline is at 28:33. Basically, the ethylmercury in the thimerosal makes a beeline out of your blood and deposits into your brain (unlike the methylmercury in fish which has a harder time entering your brain so it stays in your blood longer). Offit tried to convince RFK that the mercury gets excreted by referring to a paper. When RFK brought up the Burbacher study, there was dead silence on the line because Offit knew he had been caught in a deception. In short, thimerosal can seriously damage people’s brains. Vaccines are not supposed to cross the BBB. This creates biological plausibility needed for causality.
  • The CDC study showing how the measles vaccine caused permanent brain damage
  • Studies of the vaxxed vs. unvaxxed
  • There are large cohorts with a no vaccination policy which have NO autism
  • The before:after odds measures
  • The admission of a top autism expert

Read the whole thing. The most damning piece of evidence is the last one.

“We all know vaccines cause autism. We just aren’t allowed to talk about it.”

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They TRIED to do That

An absurd ex post facto explanation for the Bud Light marketing fiasco that naturally appeals to Smart Boys has been making the rounds:

Bud Light’s controversial partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney could have been a “strategic” attempt to permanently alter the brand’s audience, according to an anonymous former employee.

The popular beer brand came under fire in April after a post from Mulvaney’s Instagram account featured a personalized Bud Light can. The backlash to the brand in response to partnering with the transgender figure led to a massive slump in sales.

Though the company’s CEO insisted in a statement that it “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” the ex-Anheuser-Busch worker suggested that the move was intentional.

“[Employees] expressed the fact that they were shocked. ‘Why would they do this? What were they thinking?’ Especially now. This is the worst; it’s like the worst time yet, the best timing yet if a company were trying to change the way it operates from a corporate level. And that’s just my opinion,” he said to OutKick’s Tomi Lahren, “Many of us are talking about that like they planned it in a way…like a strategic destruction of Bud Light.”

This has been spreading around social media courtesy of the dumber sort of conservatives and conspiracy theorists. It’s one thing to reject the mainstream narrative on the very sound grounds that a) the observable facts don’t support the narrative and b) the media always lies. Always be suspicious of any explanation that depends upon a motivation.

Since Smart Boys habitually claim retroactive intent for their stumblings and bumblings, and since they love to see things that everyone else doesn’t, especially things that aren’t there, it’s no surprise that the explanation appeals to them. They would LOVE to explain the REAL reason Bud Light’s marketing team immolated its own product, which of course couldn’t possibly be related to the reason the entire game, book, and movie industries have been doing the same.

After all, wouldn’t exactly the same motivation account for THE RINGS OF POWER? The strategic destruction of Amazon Studios!

To accept a substitute motivation for what has been the observable motivation of the corpocracy for the last decade on the basis of a suggested possibility that is the opinion of an uninformed former employee borders on the retarded. Especially when that “they MEANT to do that” motivation very usefully absolves the SJWs of their responsibility for the failure, thereby encouraging other SJWs in other corporations to continue metastasizing their cancers.

Come to think of it, perhaps we should be encouraging the Smart Boys here after all…

UPDATE: Heckuva plan, Brendan!

Sales are down, A-B’s stock price is getting crushed and CEO Brendan Whitworth is planning a tour across America to save the brand. Now, Anheuser-Busch is also writing checks to Bud Light distributors losing business, according to Beer Business Daily. Some distributors will be paid $.20 to $.50 per case depending on how bad sales have fallen, according to the report. Anheuser-Busch will also pick up the tab for any fuel and freight surcharges.

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