The Left Is The Politics Of Crazy

It has long been known that Conservatives are happier and have better mental health than Liberals. And, per an article from the Daily Citizen, "[a] new study published in the journal Political Behavior supports this conclusion. It shows that mental illness is emerging as its own political identity and is most heavily aligned with leftist political ideology and causes."

    Psypost.org, in their reporting on Van De Hey’s study, explains, “Approximately one-half of study participants with mental illness stated that their identity as a person with a mental health illness is very important or somewhat important to them.” The study’s author also noted, “I find that the political predictors and political consequences for the emerging mental health identity differ from those for physical disability and serious physical illness categorization and identification.”

    This means political identity among liberal citizens can be expected to be more closely tied to mental health struggles that are more subjective in nature. This article concludes, “These findings have far-reaching consequences for mental health advocacy, and the role mental health identity will play in the political sphere – especially as Gen Z matures as a cohort.”

    We have seen this play out in gender politics, where the subjective nature of gender confusion and dysphoria became a major political issue driving the behaviors, values and messaging of political parties and individuals.

    It is likely we will see this spread to other political issues where mental issues are increasingly construed as a protective class. 

We should expect, therefore, that the Left will become more crazy, more radical, and more detached from reality. 

Importing The Third World Has Consequences

From the Daily Mail: "Terrified students flee Belfast after homes named on rioter 'hit list' in wake of Sudanese migrant 'knife attack'." The article wants to give the impression that the students are not migrants, but none of the students are named or shown; so it is possible that they are, in fact, also foreigners. It is notable that the Daily Mail has shut down comments to this article, which is unusual for the outlet. 

    Also remarkable was this sentence: "The 44-year-old [victim of the attack] suffered serious injuries to his face, back and eyes." And then they show a picture of him before the attack. "Serious injuries" fails to convey the truth. Mr. Ogilvie's face is so cut up that it looks like a patchwork of skin crudely stitched together from scraps. 

Hmm. Anthropic Pulls Access To Its Most Powerful AIs.

Stephen Green at PJ Media reports that the federal government ordered Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythic 5 AIs by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. Since Anthropic apparently couldn't just exclude foreign nationals--its chief technology officer, for instance, is Indian--it decided to disable Fable 5 and Mythic 5 for all its customers. 

    Although the administration failed to give any specific details, Anthropic says it believes the government became aware of a method of "jailbreaking" Fable 5, potentially unleashing the AI from its built-in guardrails against use in developing cyber exploits, deadly chemical synthesis, and other sensitive topics.

    That's a big deal. The "Fives" are the latest version of Claude, Anthropic's enterprise- and government-centric LLM. Fable is the "safe" version available to the public, while you might think of Mythos as the weapons-grade version. Because it is.

    What separates Fable from Mythos are the guardrails that, as Anthropic put it, are supposed to "greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others)." 

    “To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” the company continued. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government.”   

Bank Info Security reported last week:

    The company's Mythos 5 model introduced Tuesday can meaningfully contribute to offensive cyber work, raising questions around how much autonomy these systems should be granted and how effectively safeguards can limit harmful use. Mythos 5 isn't restricted by the safeguards placed around Fable 5, but access will initially be restricted to the 200 organizations vetted through Anthropic's Project Glasswing.

    "Claude Mythos 5 demonstrates the strongest overall cyber capabilities of any model we have ever evaluated," Anthropic wrote Tuesday. "Across our internal evaluation suite, it meets or exceeds the performance of Claude Mythos Preview, whose step-change in autonomous vulnerability discovery and exploitation led us to restrict access to a limited set of partners for defensive cybersecurity purposes."

    Large language models could explain vulnerabilities, generate proof-of-concept code and assist with penetration testing tasks, but Anthropic said Mythos 5 appears to have moved beyond that. It demonstrated the ability to discover vulnerabilities, triage them, develop exploit chains and ultimately achieve arbitrary code execution with a level of consistency previously unseen, Anthropic said.

    "Although Mythos 5 is in Tier 1, its performance was strong enough on our evaluations that we have chosen to deploy additional mitigations that block potentially harmful offensive cyber uses," Anthropic wrote in a 319-page system card for Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5.

    Exploit development traditionally required a combination of deep reverse-engineering expertise, understanding of memory corruption, knowledge of mitigations such as ASLR and sandboxing, and substantial experimentation, Anthropic said. What makes Mythos 5 noteworthy is not merely that it occasionally succeeds, but that it succeeds consistently, producing working exploits 90% of the time.

VIDEO: .44 Special Gold Dot Disappoints

Tools and Targets tests Spear Gold Dot 200 grain 44 Special out of two revolvers with 2" and 3" barrels, respectively. Average velocity for 5 rounds out of each yielded results below 800 FPS which is just too slow to expand. And, sure enough, when put through the ballistic gel and fabric, there was no real expansion. Consequently, as the host notes, it is a waste of money to buy expensive hollow point ammunition for a shorter barrel revolver in .44 Special, but that you might as well just run flat nosed FMJs or use hard cast bullets. 

    My opinion is that the .44 Special is a round that would really benefit from having +P loads to give you something more powerful than standard .44 Special but less than .44 Magnum, just like .38 Special +P falls into a middle ground between .38 Special and .357 Magnum.  I've brought this up before and received suggestions to just use a reduced power .44 Magnum. But my interest is not in a lighter round to shoot out of a .44 Magnum revolver, but making .44 Special a better caliber for concealed carry or home defense. A .44 Special +P would allow a lighter and smaller (and less expensive) revolver than one capable of handling .44 Magnum (which would be the inevitable requirement of something that could chamber full length .44 Magnum cartridges); and it is likely that many .44 Special revolvers marketed and sold could handle the higher pressure of a +P round without modification.  

 VIDEO: "Their Own WORST Enemy!...Speer Gold Dot 44 Special Self-Defense AMMO Ballistic Gel Test!" - Tools&Targets (15 min.)

Support for Mass Deportation of Illegals Increases

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that the "Latest Harvard/Harris Poll Shows Increasing Support for ‘Mass Deportations’." Key part:

    Some 80 percent of voters polled support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes”, up five points from April, when three-quarters, 75 percent, supported a “worst of the worst” policy.

    The rise compared to April crosses party lines, as support for criminal illegal deportations has risen among Democrats (71 percent support May; 63 percent April), Republicans (90 percent support May; 89 percent April), and Independents (79 percent support May; 73 percent April).

    Then there’s “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally”, and the responses to that one are truly surprising.

    A solid majority, 56 percent, of the voters polled by Harvard/Harris in late May support such a “mass deportation” plan, including 77 percent of GOP voters, 53 percent of Independents, and well more than a third (37 percent) of Democrats.

    While overall that’s a modest one percentage-point climb compared to April (55 percent support, well within the margin of error), it also represents a four-point jump compared to April among both Independents (49 percent support then) and also among Democrat voters (33 percent that month).

    Had it not been for a three-point decline among Republican voters between April (80 percent support) and May (77 percent support) for deporting all those who are here unlawfully, we’d be close to talking about mass deportation as a “60-40 issue”.

    Of course, in the end it doesn't matter what the voters want. Peter Turchin's research showed that even in so-called Democracies, voter preferences had zero impact on government policy; but that government policy followed the preferences of the elites. Unless the elites favor mass deportation, it won't happen. 

Wilder's Latest: What America Might Look Like At It's 350th Anniversary

John Wilder's latest is up: "America 350: Looking Backward from 2126." Short take is that a financial crises in the 2030s causes the country to start to fracture. An excerpt:

In a United States that ceased to have an overwhelming majority of Western European-derived populace, what has happened at every point in history happened: cultural lines formed along racial lines, and self-segregation again took hold. First this was by neighborhood, then by city, then, finally, by region.

This actually had already started to happen in the 1950, '60s and '70s before it was effectively quashed. It was called "white flight" which Wikipedia describes as "the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse to more racially homogenous suburban or exurban regions." It goes on (footnotes omitted):

Migration of middle-class white populations was observed during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s out of cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City and Oakland, although racial segregation of public schools had ended there long before the Supreme Court of the United States' decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the 1970s, attempts to achieve effective desegregation (or "integration") by means of busing in some areas led to more families' moving out of former areas. More generally, some historians suggest that white flight occurred in response to population pressures, both from the large migration of blacks from the rural Southern United States to urban cities of the Northeastern United States, Midwestern United States and the Western United States in the Great Migration and the waves of new immigrants from around the world.   

The federal government, state governments, local governments, and the courts worked hard to quash "white flight" through laws prohibiting discrimination in housing and through the aforementioned forced busing. The difference between then and what Wilder is predicting is that decades back, the populace could be propagandized into believing that diversity was a strength, while now it increasingly apparent that the opposite is true--hence the sudden interest in controlling what people can read or see on the Internet--with even the research showing that it destroys social capital and trust. The fact that terms like "high trust" and "low trust" societies is bandied about shows that the narrative is falling apart. 

     John is ultimately optimistic, however, seeing a stronger, more unified country arising from the chaos of the mid-21st Century. 

The Replication Crises Revisited

Robert Zimmerman notes that yet another study, this one of social science research, reveals that only half could be replicated. He includes this quote:

Researchers from a variety of universities looked at “164 quantitative papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 54 journals in the social and behavioural sciences,” according to the summary in the Nature article. The team “attempted replications of 274 claims of positive results” but found only about half could be replicated. The researchers found that many published findings did not consistently hold up when tested again, although the exact replication rate varied depending on how success was measured.   

Zimmerman comments:

    This result jives with other reports over the years that found most science research difficult if not impossible to replicate or confirm.

    In fact, every study in the past two decades that attempted to replicate earlier work has consistently found that about half the papers published in the scientific literature in the soft sciences (psychology, social sciences, biology, medicine, pharmaceuticals) could not be confirmed.   

It is not just the soft sciences, though. As long time readers know, one of my particular interests has been in the theory of a Younger Dryas Impact Event. There have been a clique of influential scientists that are die hard opponents to the theory, yet their "research" to debunk an impact event has been fast and loose such that it would appropriately be included as part of the replication crises. What we need to realize is that science is driven by money, envy, politics, and ego as much or more than any other human endeavor. And it will only get worse as the scientists that have passed through the DEI screening process become more influential in their fields.

Trump Places The Deep State In A Catch-22

From the New York Post: "Trump says he’ll refuse FISA spy power extension without SAVE America Act tacked on." 

Another Conspiracy Theory Proven True: US Biolabs

The Office of the Director of National Security issued a press release last Friday: "DNI Gabbard Reveals Evidence of U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Global Biolab Program." The press release indicates that an investigation was "revealing new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries." Of these, 40 were in Ukraine. A few points from the release:

• "These biolabs include labs in Ukraine, which may be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. For example, the Intelligence Community previously warned that a US-funded biolab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to longstanding threats of Russian attack, seizure, or damage."
• "Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America."
• "Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight."

In an article at Hot Air discussing this announcement, the author reminds us that "Vladimir Putin, among many of the excuses he used to justify his invasion of Ukraine, accused the United States of conducting biowarfare experiments on Ukrainian soil." 

    As soon as he made this accusation, it became forbidden to ask questions about US funding of biological research laboratories. 

    In fact, as they always do, the "fact checkers" swooped in to "debunk" all the claims that these labs existed as conspiracy theories. Because, as we know, if Vladimir Putin says something, it must be entirely false. 

Some of these fact checkers were NPR, NBC News, and, of all organizations, the ADL. Why would the ADL bother itself with this issue? It's not related to Israel, is it?

    In any event, quoting from a Fox News report, the Hot Air article also notes: "The records also show Ukrainian scientists received U.S.-funded training to work with hazardous pathogens and participated in a program focused on handling especially dangerous diseases. The documents list pathogens studied or stored within the laboratory network, including anthrax, tuberculosis, plague, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, MERS and SARS."  

The Mysterious: Blacked Eyed Children

A tale of the strange and mysterious: "Inside the frightening phenomena of the Black-Eyed Children who knock on people's doors pleading for help then vanish." This appears to be a fairly recent urban legend:

    The paranormal phenomenon traces its origins to a 1996 account from Texas journalist Brian Bethel, who claimed he encountered a group of children with completely black eyes while sitting in his car outside a strip mall in Abilene that left him petrified.

[snip]

    According to Bethel, he was sitting in his car outside the former Westwood Theater in Abilene at twilight, using the glow of the theater marquee to write a check when two boys approached his vehicle.

    The children appeared to be between nine and 12 years old and were wearing hoodies, he recalled.

    What struck him first was not their appearance, but an overwhelming sense of dread.

    'Immediately I am afraid. There is no reason to be afraid. There is no external thing going on that should be prickling my senses this way, but immediately I'm afraid,' Bethel said.

    One of the boys asked for a ride, claiming they needed to go get money from their mother to see a movie.

    Bethel said the child was 'real smooth - too smooth for a kid' and recalled becoming increasingly frightened the longer he listened.

    'The more this kid talks to me, the more afraid I become. It doesn't make any sense,' he said.

    The boy allegedly tried to reassure him by saying, 'We don't have a gun or anything.'

    'That actually is when I really start to click into pure panic mode,' Bethel said.

    'Something in my gut tells me that these kids don't need a gun.'

    The children said they wanted to see Mortal Kombat, but Bethel noticed the movie had already started and realized they would miss most of it if he drove them to the mother's house and back.

    When he looked back at the boys, he claimed their eyes were completely black.

    'These kids have all black eyes. And I'm not talking just dilated pupils or anything like that. Just totally black,' Bethel said. 'Just soulless black void reflecting the light of the theater marquee.'

    As he attempted to roll up his window and leave, Bethel said the spokesman became angry and began pounding on the glass.

    According to Bethel, the boy shouted: 'Mister, we can't come inside your car unless you tell us it's okay. Let us in.'

    Bethel said he immediately threw the car into reverse and sped away. Moments later, he checked his rearview mirror.

    'There are no kids standing on the sidewalk and they don't have time to have gone anywhere,' he said.

    After arriving home, Bethel said he 'literally' ran from his car to his apartment door and spent time trying to process what had happened.

According to the article, Bethel wrote about the experience a few weeks later and shared it online, after which he started hearing from others with similar experiences with black-eyed children. 

    Nearly 30 years after the first reported sighting, folklore experts and paranormal researchers remain divided over whether the Black-Eyed Children are an internet legend or something more sinister.

    Jason Offutt, a journalism professor at Northwest Missouri State University who has spent more than a decade researching the phenomenon, said one of the most striking aspects of the reports is how similar they remain regardless of where they originate.

    'I've talked to people from all across North America, talked to somebody from Portugal, England, Saudi Arabia, Australia - they've all had almost the exact same experience,' Offutt told the Daily Mail.

    According to Offutt, witnesses often describe two children appearing together, with one seeming slightly older and more confident than the other.

    Many accounts describe pale youngsters with black eyes, outdated clothing, greasy hair, bad breath and unusually mature speech patterns.

    'They speak with confidence. They speak like they're much older than they appear,' Offutt said. 

The article continues with more from Offutt including another encounter that he considers the scariest of those he has interviewed. The recurrent theme that the children need to be invited in to a vehicle or home reminds Offutt of other myths with similar features, including vampire myths from around the world where the vampires similarly need to first be invited into a building. 

    The article linked to the YouTube video below in which Brian Bethel describes his experience:

 VIDEO: "The Night of the Black-Eyed Kids"
City of Abilene, Texas (29 min.)

    The Why Files did an episode several months ago that included a segment on the black eyed children as well, which I've included below. This was one of The Why Files "campfire" episodes, so it just relates the story without the standard analysis of its authenticity. The segment about the black-eyed kids begins at the 15 minute mark:

 VIDEO: "Witnesses of: Black Eyed Kids, Phone Calls from the Dead, The Cursed Heart"
The Why Files (40 min.)