Wretchard.com

But do you believe in memes?

Belmont Club

There’s something on the loose

As Christians in Sri Lanka gathered on Sunday morning to celebrate Easter Mass, powerful explosions ripped through three churches packed with worshipers, leaving hundreds of victims amid a havoc of splintered and blood-spattered pews.New York Times.

Convincing the world he doesn’t exist is only the 2nd greatest trick the ever Devil pulled. Persuading you that you and all you believe in don’t deserve to exist is the far more impressive achievement.

Alberta’s new premier plans to abolish the carbon tax. Jason Kenney, the newly elected premier, is set to clash with Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister

Economist

Canada’s opposition conservatives won a clear victory in provincial elections in oil-rich Alberta Tuesday, in a setback for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his environmental policies just six months ahead of national polls.
The United Conservative Party won a large majority in the legislature, with its Jason Kenney set to become Alberta premier, according to Canadian television projections.
Kenny, a minister in the government of Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper, will unseat the leftist New Democrats led by Alberta premier Rachel Notley.
In contrast to 2015 when Trudeau came to power and most of Canada’s provinces were led by fellow Liberals, he now faces the prospect of a phalanx of conservative premiers lining up against him.

France 24

From the new basing plans in Poland, to the rebuild of the US military, to a hardline vs Cuba it’s getting harder to see Trump as Putin’s stooge.

The Trump administration on Wednesday rescinded several Obama-era policies toward Cuba, while imposing tough sanctions against Venezuela and Nicaragua – as part of a new crackdown on what National Security Adviser John Bolton dubbed the “three stooges of socialism.”

Fox

A Florida man was convicted Friday of running an 18-year, $1.3 billion health-care fraud that prosecutors called the largest such scheme ever charged by the Justice Department.
Philip Esformes, a 50-year-old Miami Beach resident, used a network of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in South Florida to defraud U.S. government health-care programs while providing inadequate and unnecessary care to patients, prosecutors said. …

Prosecutors said Esformes bribed doctors to admit patients to the facilities he operated. The patients didn’t get appropriate care and sometimes received unnecessary services for which Esformes then billed the U.S. government. Esformes also bribed a Florida state regulator to learn about surprise inspections of company facilities ahead of time, prosecutors said.

Bloomberg

Caught up in Operation Car Wash, which has rocked leaders in Latin America.

Peru’s former president Alan Garcia, 69, died in hospital after taking his life as police were about to arrest him at his home in a sprawling corruption case.
The health ministry said Garcia died at 1.05am Thursday of “a massive cerebral haemorrhage from a gunshot wound and cardiorespiratory arrest”.

ABC Australia

The fundamental challenge that Tocqueville’s book poses to American dogma arises from his refusal to assume that equality and freedom are always mutually reinforcing. The American creed since the Declaration of Independence and especially since Lincoln has linked the two values, assuming that an increase in one naturally accompanies an increase in the other. Tocqueville suggested that we tend to ignore the threats that equality poses to freedom. Freedom was not, like equality, a naturally expanding feature of society. Nor was it a necessary consequence of equality of conditions.
It is too simple to say that Tocqueville presented equality and freedom as principles sometimes in tension with one another. His point was different. Equality was not merely a moral principle. Nor was it merely a material fact. More fundamentally, equality was a passion that gave rise to a certain dynamic in politics. Freedom, on the other hand, he portrayed as a set of skills and habits that required practice, an art that could be learned but also forgotten. The danger of democratic life, Tocqueville thought, was that the passion for equality would lead us to stop practicing the art of freedom.

Tablet Magazine

Equality can be the byproduct of freedom only when it arises out of free association. Mandatory equality is not equality at all, for those who govern the system will be more equal than others.

The definition of a meme

Dilbert walks into a meeting and asks, “Who called this meeting?” The male coworker replies, “We thought you did.” The coworker continues, “I think we should discuss issues and assign tasks so it’s not a complete waste of time.” Dilbert responds, “Maybe meetings have become a lifeform capable of calling themselves and thus reproducing via human hosts.”

Dilbert

Can memes go extinct? If they spread by natural selection why doesn’t socialism go extinct? Or perhaps socialists would prefer this question: why doesn’t religion go extinct?

Perhaps nothing goes extinct, the dinosaurs included. They simply change form — into birds — in this case. The Tower of Babel may be with us still in the form of the GND. The Tower didn’t fall, it’s simply hidden information.

Someone else wrote: “Ideas can be spontaneously generated which is why the cannot go extinct. A lineage could die out; if the last person who believed in it and all records of it were destroyed so it couldn’t infect new hosts. But then another human could independently come up with the same idea.”
That is like the Boltzmann Brain scenario. Given enough time everything will happen again and again. And thus, even if the Greenies succeed in killing off conscious life to let Gaia live, nature will try again and eventually the Greenies lose.

ISTANBUL — The party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey applied to the country’s election commission on Tuesday for a rerun of the Istanbul mayor’s race, after two weeks of appeals and recounting of ballots still showed the opposition candidate ahead.

NYT

Maybe the biggest existential danger to humanity are UN bureaucrats with trillion dollar terraforming schemes.

As a result of global warming, winters are only going to get more severe, but there’s at least one silver lining as researchers from UCLA have come up with a way to harness electricity from all that snow.

Gizmodo

Ever since the 1975 movie “Jaws,” great white sharks have been considered the most fearsome predators in the ocean. But new research published Tuesday shows that may not be the case.

Mercury News

Instead of using visible light to spot incoming objects, Mainzer’s team at JPL/Caltech has leveraged a characteristic signature of NEOs—their heat. Asteroids and comets are warmed by the sun and so glow brightly at thermal wavelengths (infrared), making them easier to spot with the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope.
“With the NEOWISE mission we can spot objects regardless of their surface color, and use it to measure their sizes and other surface properties,” Mainzer said.

Phys.org

The man who argues interstellar object Oumuamua could have been an alien spacecraft now says a meteor that hit Earth’s atmosphere in 2014 also came from elsewhere in the Milky Way, perhaps carrying life with it. …

“The reported meteor entered the solar system with a speed of 60 km/s (134,216 mph) relative to the local standard of rest (obtained by averaging the motion of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun),” Loeb wrote in an email. “Such a high ejection speed can only be produced in the innermost cores of planetary systems — interior to the orbit of the Earth around a star like the sun, but in the habitable zone of dwarf stars, hence allowing such objects to carry life from their parent planets.”

CNET

It’s not new. The Soviets funded the Communist Party of Italy, the 2nd biggest postwar, for a long time.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, four out of the 28 European countries do not have any restrictions on foreign donations to political parties. They are Belgium, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands. This means that, for example, an Italian political party could receive funding from a third country, without it being illegal.
Eleven other countries have partial restrictions to foreign donations. And only 13 have full bans in place….

European officials are paying particular attention toward Russia, given the conclusion from U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin did interfere in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.

CNBC

French President Emmanuel Macron has already staked out his position on talks: Europe should not negotiate a trade deal with a country that is not part of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.

CNN

Macron says that unless Trump signs up, the USA will have a competitive advantage over Europe. Trump must ‘wake up’ before talks can start.

“Macron argues that it wouldn’t be fair for only one party of a trade deal to follow the strict environmental standards agreed in Paris. France voted against opening trade talks on Monday, but was overruled by a majority of EU member states.”

But it’s the French who want the border to come with Brexit, hence Pelosi is essentially saying the UK should stay in the EU.

She added: ‘First of all it is very hard to pass a trade bill in the Congress of the United States, so it’s no given anyway.
‘But if there were any weakening of the Good Friday accords there would be no chance whatsoever, a non-starter for a US-UK trade agreement.
‘The Good Friday accords ended 700 years of conflict.
‘This is not a treaty only, it’s an ideal, it’s a value, it’s something that’s a model to the world, something that we all take pride in.
‘It was a model and other people have used it as a model and we don’t want that model to be something that can be bargained away in another agreement.’

Daily Mail

A Federal Court judge has ruled James Cook University acted unlawfully when it sacked physics professor Peter Ridd after he publicly criticised the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the global warming impact on the Great Barrier Reef …

Judge Vasta found that a clause in the university’s enterprise agreement, which upholds academic freedom, justified Professor Ridd’s conduct. “This trial was purely and simply about the proper construction of a clause in an enterprise agreement,” he said.
Judge Vasta also said the university had misunderstood “the whole concept of intellectual freedom”.
“In the search for truth, it is an unfortunate consequence that some people may feel denigrated, offended, hurt or upset,” he said.
A penalty hearing will be set for a later date.

Australian

The university tried to keep the disciplinary process itself under wraps.

On 24 August 2017, he was told that he could not mention anything to
do with the disciplinary process to anyone who was not a support person.
When he queried whether he could talk to his wife about the matter, he
was told in an email on 27 August 2017, that he could not.

Ridd vs James court document

Meanwhile the climate change activists shut down Central London.

A total of 290 climate change activists have been arrested for blocking roads in central London, amid protests aimed at shutting down the capital.
A second day of disruption is under way after Extinction Rebellion campaigners camped overnight at Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Oxford Circus.
Police said 500,000 people had been affected by the diversion of 55 bus routes in London.
The Met said 290 people had been arrested by 21:30 BST on Tuesday.
Three men and two women, in their 40s and 50s, arrested on suspicion of criminal damage at Shell’s headquarters on Monday, have since been released under investigation.

BBC

The Jack Ryan novel, True Faith and Allegiance, is a fictionalized account of just how destructive the OPM hack could be. The power of data fusion is amazing, especially when deployed against clueless persons who don’t even know what they’ve lost, or those determined to minimize the extent of what they’ve lost to avoid embarrassment.

Until the last years of the Obama administration officials simply turned a blind eye to Chinese hacking.

Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”

NPR

Maybe the good old global world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Moving a university from curtailing free speech on campus to protecting it is a momentous task. It often requires years of effort from students, professors, administrators, and public policy organizations…

Taylor said the most difficult obstacle to overcome was administrative inertia rather than hostility or active resistance to change.

James Martin Center

Despite a dearth of evidence that he was complicit in Moscow’s hacking, President Trump was forced by the Justice Department and the FBI, urged on by congressional Democrats, to endure a two-year investigation and to govern under a cloud of suspicion that he was an agent of the Kremlin. Now we have Assange, as to whom there is indisputable evidence of complicity in the hacking conspiracy, but the Justice Department declines to charge him with it — instead, positing the dubious Manning conspiracy that may very well be time-barred.
What is going on here?

National Review

That was my first impression too. Which is why I remarked that the whole thing seemed to have more angles than a protractor. But if I were to make a wholly unsupported guess based on nothing but speculation, I would suspect this is legal cleanup code. They want all the objects they created for the Collusion routine to go out of scope. Assange is being put through the meme destructor. His usefulness is over.

Why Washington’s trust systems need an upgrade in the global world.