You see them everywhere. Men and women walking down the street, all of them with masks on their faces and cell phones in their hands. People jogging, with masks covering their faces and cell phones in their hands. Mothers wheeling their babies with one hand, holding a cell phone in the other hand, with a mask covering their face.

The world has gone insane.

Back in May, the President of Tanzania announced that a goat, a quail, and a papaya had tested positive for COVID-19. People did not stop eating papayas. But when farmed minks began testing positive, the response has been to kill them all.

After a few minks in the Netherlands tested positive in April, 570,000 minks were slaughtered. Minks started testing positive and being killed in Denmark in June, and on November 4, Denmark announced it would destroy the rest of its 17 million minks. Sanity finally broke out in that country, and the eradication campaign stopped after only 2.5 million minks were slaughtered. But minks have also been killed in Spain, Sweden, Greece, France, and the United States.

Lions, tigers and leopards in zoos have tested positive.

After the pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Twitter blue-checks, politicians, and elite corporate journalists wailed and rent their garments in outrage. But they weren't really outraged.

Yes, the breach of the capitol was appalling and disturbing. Most people didn't see it coming and were understandably shocked when images of MAGA bros fighting capitol police began popping up on social media (although the authorities should have been better prepared, most of all D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had earlier rejected offers of additional law enforcement.) There's no question the protesters who decided to riot should be prosecuted, as all rioters everywhere should be.

But elite outrage is not really about what happened at the capitol — about the "sacred citadel of our democracy being defiled" and so on. The outrage, like almost all expressions of righteous indignation from our elites in the Trump era, is performative. It is in service of a larger purpose that has nothing to do with the peaceful transfer of power and everything to do with the wielding of power.

Antifa still wreaked havoc Wednesday night in downtown Portland after Congress certified the election for Joe Biden. No arrests were made at the third Black Lives Matter-Antifa riot since New Year's Eve.

WhatsApp users must share their personal data with parent company Facebook going forward, the app's new privacy policy has declared - flying in the face of everything that attracted privacy-oriented users to the platform.

Facebook's bait and switch will see WhatsApp sharing private information that goes significantly beyond names and profile pictures with Facebook and other subsidiaries. Phone numbers, address books, status updates, and even detailed data on the type of phone they're using will be fed to the Facebook hive-mind.

And woe betide anyone who does business on WhatsApp - information about shipping addresses, purchases, and the amount of money spent also belongs to Facebook under the new policy, which is supposed to take effect on February 8. The changes were quietly posted on the app's website on Monday.

The devices found near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday were actual explosive devices, according to a senior federal law enforcement official briefed on the investigations.

Fox News first reported that multiple IEDs, resembling pipe bombs, were found near the Capitol grounds on Wednesday.

Specifically, two law enforcement sources said devices resembling pipe bombs were found near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, both buildings located near the Capitol grounds.

One senior federal law enforcement official confirmed to Fox News those devices were not phonies, "those things were the real deal."

The investigation into who is responsible for planting the devices is ongoing and Department of Justice officials are vowing that the person, or persons, responsible will be held accountable.

Germany's cabinet approved on Wednesday legislation to force larger listed companies to have at least one woman on their management boards, following years of debate over the issue.

The law builds on a 30% quota for supervisory boards introduced in 2015 and will apply to listed companies with more than three management board members.

The measure has long been a demand of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), but Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats long resisted the move. However the chancellor has expressed frustration that companies were moving too slowly to appoint woman leaders.

"This law is a milestone for more women in leadership positions," SPD Family Minister Franziska Giffey said in a statement.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was punched by Antifa militants while out dining Wednesday night in Northeast Portland.


Videos posted on social media showed an assembly of outraged extremists shouting expletives at the mayor as he sat in an outdoor dining tent.

"You are going to be made to feel like the scum you are," one instigator yelled in Wheeler's direction while he remained calm. "F — you. F — you. Shame on you."


In another clip, someone approached Wheeler and called him out by his middle name: "We're never going to forget you, Tevis, ever. I hope you enjoy your little wine."

Decreases in the birthrate and natural population growth rate in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 2018 resulted from the eradication of religious extremism, a report released on Thursday said.

The report on population change in Xinjiang published by the Xinjiang Development Research Center said extremism had incited people to resist family planning and its eradication had given Uygur women more autonomy when deciding whether to have children.

The changes were not caused by "forced sterilization" of the Uygur population, as repeatedly claimed by some Western scholars and politicians, it said.

In a research report released last year, Adrian Zenz, a German scholar, said there had been a significant drop in the natural population growth rate in southern Xinjiang in 2018 and claimed that proved China was trying to control the size of the Uygur population.

Cases are soaring, with a record 60,916 new cases reported yesterday. Hospital admissions for Covid are going up and up. Deaths are in the hundreds per day and increasing. Only an idiot would doubt we're in the midst of a serious pandemic, right?

Except all these figures that show there's a deadly pandemic raging are based on mass testing using PCR and more recently lateral flow tests. Cases are just positive tests. Hospital admissions are just people in hospital who test positive (and all patients are tested). Deaths are just people who die of any cause within 28 days of a positive test.

To get a true picture of what's going on you have to look at data that are independent of PCR tests. So overall hospital and ICU occupancy, excess deaths, emergency calls for flu-like symptoms and so on. Strikingly, these data all speak in unison and tell a very different story.

Look at the graph below of A&E attendances in England for acute respiratory infections (which include COVID-19). It's trending well below baseline and, save for a September spike leading into elevated winter levels, been almost flat since the spring.

In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses, James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a "pseudo-reality" in service to a vision of the world that serves their needs. That pseudo-reality holds as its North Star a Utopian vision that aligns with artificial resolutions to their inability to cope with reality as it is, and it thereby attracts others who have similar issues. By constructing a false logic (a paralogic) and a false morality (a paramorality) to define and enforce the pseudo-reality, they can gather supporters in a cult-like fashion. In the end, those ensnared lose the ability to distinguish reality and pseudo-reality almost entirely and become functionally psychopathic, and if they gain enough social, cultural, economic, and political power, they can hold hostage entire societies that are, in effect, on the march to totalitarianism and, eventually, total catastrophic collapse.

The essay is an important read, but it is also a difficult one. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James seeks to explain the essay in easier language and to flesh out its ideas one by one. He sees this process of unpacking the essay as his next major work, and in this podcast, he begins the process of linking the concept of "ideological pseudo-reality" to more familiar examples, not least Wokeness. Critical Race Theory, for example, is a pseudo-reality that positions racism as the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an immoral aberration from them. Queer Theory is a pseudo-reality in which being normal with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality is a problem while being in some way deviant (which is not the same as being gay or even trans) is elevated as normal. Communism is a pseudo-reality that deems socially engineered command economies as effective and efficient ways to maximize human flourishing. Covid-19 is a pseudo-reality built to enact control around a genuine and serious virus called SARS-CoV-2. These topics and more are presented in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to help people understand and, hopefully, able to see reality for itself again.