Post by PeelerOn Mon, 16 Mar 2020 05:13:34 -0700, clinically insane, pedophilic, serbian
bitch Razovic, the resident psychopath of sci and scj and Usenet's famous
Post by KKKernal CornApe.
White people probably don't understand what she's saying.
"I just arksed you a question."
Your psychopathy in full swing again, serb pig?
It always is.
What a mangina he is!
Jeff Jacoby writes about several subjects.
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The Boston Globe
Arguable - with Jeff Jacoby
Monday, March 16, 2020
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A self-quarantine like no other
On Christmas Eve in 1664, a London resident named Goodwoman Phillips was
found dead in the run-down district of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Telltale
“buboes” on her corpse left no doubt about the cause of death. Her house was
sealed and the words “Lord Have Mercy On Us” were painted on the door in
red: Phillips had died of bubonic plague.
Only a few other deaths from plague were reported over the next few months.
But by April, the numbers had begun to climb markedly. When summer arrived,
death was everywhere. Records from mid-July showed 2,010 deaths, spread
among every parish in London. The death toll a week later had jumped to
7,496. Over a period of 18 months, the Great Plague of London, as the
epidemic came to be called, would claim more than 100,000 lives — roughly a
quarter of the city’s population.
Then as now, social distancing was an important response to the deadly
outbreak. Urban residents who could afford to do so fled to the countryside.
Among the institutions that closed for the duration was Cambridge
University, and among the students who headed home for what today we would
call self-quarantining was a 23-year-old mathematics student by the name of
Isaac Newton.
For the next year and a half, Newton remained at his family’s farm in
Lincolnshire, reading, studying, and thinking alone. While the bubonic
plague raged elsewhere, Newton embarked on what he would later describe as
the most intellectually productive period of his life. That long interval,
from the summer of 1665 to the spring of 1667, might be described as the
most intellectually productive period of any individual’s life — ever.
One subject that had always interested Newton was light and color. Two years
earlier, visiting the annual Sturbridge Fair near the university, he had
purchased a small glass prism. He had been fascinated by the way the prism
seemed to change white light into a spectrum of rainbow-like colors. No one
understood where those colors came from; one theory was that the glass
somehow added color to otherwise colorless light.
Newton decided to use his enforced absence from Cambridge to try and crack
the mystery. Setting his prism in different positions as the sun streamed
through his south-facing window, he carefully noted where the colors
appeared on the wall across the room. He made detailed observations and
measurements , and gradually came to understand that the prism was
refracting — that is, bending — the sunlight, and in the process revealing
its component colors. Newton had discovered that white light is a blend of
every color in the rainbow, but that those colors become visible only when
light rays are refracted at different angles.
All of modern optics builds upon Newton's discovery. It would be another
seven years before he communicated his findings to anyone else, and nearly
40 years would elapse before he published his findings in book form. But the
groundbreaking insights dated to those months of self-quarantine on a farm
in Lincolnshire.
That wasn’t all that occupied Newton’s mind. He turned his attention to
movement and inertia, and what was then the unsolved problem of how to
measure the changing speed and direction of an object in flight. Shoot an
arrow or fire a cannonball: They hurtle upward, then gradually slow, then
change direction and plunge back down. But what determines their velocity
and direction? This was a mystery no one had solved — until Newton focused
his attention on the question of motion and how it was governed. Gradually
he worked out the three essential laws that make motion comprehensible:
A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in
motion, unless acted upon by an external force.
The force acting on an object is equal to the mass of that object times
its acceleration — or in mathematical notation, F = ma.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton’s laws laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and upon it
generations of physicists would build towering edifices. The mathematics
required to derive these laws — which involve multiple variables with
continuously changing quantities — did not exist in Newton's day. So he
invented an entirely new mathematical discipline. He called it his “method
of fluxions,” though eventually it would be known as differential calculus.
(Independently, the German scholar Gottfried Leibniz would later develop it
as well.) Without calculus, modern mathematics, engineering, and statistics
would be impossible.
A page of Isaac Newton's notes on light and color, written during his annus
mirabilis in 1665-66.
Any of these achievements would have assured Newton's fame. But the heights
he scaled during his months of isolation were greater still.
In his garden one day, an apple really did fall (or so he recalled as an old
man decades later). The young university student pondered the force that
pulled that apple to the earth. It was a force that seemed to operate even
at great distances: An apple dropping from the highest tree imaginable would
still hit the ground. How far out did this force reach? Perhaps all the way
to the moon. Yet the moon didn't fall to the earth, but traveled around it
instead. Why?
The problem of celestial movement vexed the intellectuals of Newton's day.
They could envision a globe being swung on a chain, circling round and
round, centripetal force holding it in a steady orbit. Cut the chain,
however, and the circling stops — the globe flies off in a straight line.
Yet heavenly bodies don't fly off in straight lines. Though untethered by
chains, they move in fixed orbits. How could that be?
Alone in Lincolnshire, Newton solved the puzzle: Incredibly, he discovered
the law of gravity. The same force that pulls an apple to the ground holds
distant planets in their paths. That was the chain linking the moon to the
earth and the planets to the sun. Gravity couldn't be seen or touched, but
it could be proved with mathematics. He filled page after crowded page with
his calculations, and eventually derived the formula that, he said, “allows
me to explain the system of the world.”
For nearly 20 years, Newton told no one of his discovery. When he finally
published his great treatise on motion and gravitation — its title was
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Latin for Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy ) — the effect was seismic. Newton’s
discoveries, in the words of Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at
the University of Pennsylvania, amounted to “one of the most extraordinary
scientific syntheses in the history of the human mind.”
The Principia is generally reckoned the most important book in the history
of science. It jolted Western civilization to its core, for it demonstrated,
as no prior work ever had, that the universe was lawful, logical, and
knowable. To a deeply pious Europe, it meant that mere mortals could
perceive the very blueprint of Creation. To study the world empirically, to
understand its workings, was to come closer to the mind of God than had ever
been thought possible. Newton's insights during the months of plague that
kept him at home imposed a mathematical order to the universe that
permanently closed the door on the age of magic, and opened the door to
something even more wondrous: the triumph of modern science. That
astonishingly fruitful period of “social distancing” came to be known as
Newton’s annus mirabilis — year of wonders.
Unlike so many who perished during the Great Plague of London, Newton lived
a very long life. He was 84 when he died in 1727, and was interred with many
honors in Westminster Abbey.
But his most famous epitaph was the couplet composed by Alexander Pope, the
famed English poet:
“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light.”
Does history smile on Biden's chances?
Barring the unforeseen, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for
president. But if history is a reliable guide, he is highly unlikely to be
elected president.
So, at any rate, argues veteran political journalist Byron York in a recent
Washington Examiner column . He focuses not on Biden’s specific strengths or
weaknesses vis-à-vis Donald Trump, but on the track record of presidential
candidates with his political résumé — specifically, his 36 years in the
Senate and two terms as vice president. Judging from the experience of other
senators and vice presidents who have run for president, writes York, Biden’s
odds don’t look good:
[T]he first reason Biden will not become president is that no one who served
36 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 30 years
in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 25 years in the
Senate has ever become president. No one who served 20 years in the Senate
has ever become president. No one who served 15 years in the Senate has ever
become president.
It's not for lack of trying. Bob Dole, who was sworn into the Senate on Jan.
3, 1969, ran for president 27 years later, in 1996. He quit the Senate
during the campaign to show his determination to become president. But his
long years in the Senate, plus his age — he was 73 at the time and the
subject of endless suggestions that he was too old to be president — were a
deal-killer for voters.
Others tried, too. In 2008, John McCain ran for president after 21 years in
the Senate. It didn't work. In 2004, John Kerry ran for president after 19
years in the Senate. That didn't work, either.
A long career in the Senate is simply not a foundation for a successful run
for the White House.
In the past 100 years, only three sitting senators have been elected
president: Warren Harding in 1920, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Barack Obama
in 2008. Harding had spent just five years in the Senate, Kennedy eight, and
Obama four. Biden’s exceptionally long tenure, six full terms, strongly
suggests that he is cut out to be a senator, writes York — not a president.
In the past 100 years, only three sitting senators have been elected
president. The two most recent were Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy.
Biden’s eight-year run as Barack Obama’s vice president might seem to give
him an advantage in landing the top job; after all, nearly one-third of US
presidents formerly served as veep. But there, too, historical precedent
cuts against Biden’s chances. Eliminate the vice presidents who ascended to
the White House on the death or resignation of the chief executive, and
eliminate those who were elected president while they were still serving as
vice president, and what remains isn’t encouraging:
Only one president has gone from the vice presidency to private life and
then to the presidency. Richard Nixon served as vice president in the 1950s,
narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election, and then came back to win the
presidency in 1968. That is Biden's hope — that a vice president can leave
office and then, after a period outside government, return to win the White
House.
Perhaps. But Nixon, who spent less than three years in the Senate, became
vice president a few days after turning 40 and was sworn in as president at
56 — more than two decades younger than Biden, who will be 78 on
Inauguration Day, 2021.
Finally, there is what York, crediting the respected scholar and journalist
Jonathan Rauch, identifies as the “14-Year Rule.” It amounts to a sell-by
date for politicians: Anyone who takes longer than 14 years to get from his
first statewide victory (governor or senator) to a party’s national ticket
will not become president.
Biden didn't even get close. It took him 36 years to get from his first
Senate victory to the vice presidency. If he wins the presidency now, it
would be 47 years from that first Senate swearing-in until Inauguration Day.
It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway): Such historical “laws”
exist to be broken. Until 2016, no one had ever been elected president
without previously holding high political office or military rank. Until
2008, no African American had ever been elected president. Before 1980, a
divorced president was considered unthinkable. In theory, anything can
happen in a presidential campaign. In theory.
As investors are constantly reminded, past performance is no guarantee of
future returns. The same is true of campaigns for the White House. All the
same: If you’re planning to gamble on Biden’s presidential prospect, history
would recommend you hedge your bet.
China's worst medical scandal
The coronavirus pandemic would have been dire and scary under any
circumstances, but the fact that the first infections appeared in the
Chinese city of Wuhan made it worse. Some voices in the West have suggested,
perversely, that China’s authoritarian harshness was actually a blessing
that helped contain the disease — the latest iteration of the
“but-he-makes-the-trains-run-on-time” argument that dates back to American
admirers of Mussolini in the 1920s.
In fact, China’s tyranny has made everything about coronavirus worse. For
weeks, Beijing’s highest priority was to keep word of the public health
threat metastasizing on Chinese soil from spreading, particularly among
China’s people. The communist government, cracking down with customary
ruthlessness, punished doctors who notified online followers about the
disease, detained or threatened journalists who tried to report on the
outbreak, and initially ordered genetically sequenced samples of the
dangerous new virus to be destroyed — and the destruction covered up.
China’s dictatorial impulses (soon exacerbated by similar impulses in Iran)
gave the sickness a lethal headstart against efforts to rein it in.
“Coronavirus Spreads, and the World Pays for China’s Dictatorship ,” read
the apt headline on a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times in
January. Tyrannical regimes aren’t only a menace to freedom and civil
liberties. They are also a deadly threat to the openness, cooperation, and
constructive criticism on which public health, especially at times of
crisis, depends.
Yet China’s outrages during the coronavirus epidemic are far — very far —
from its worst medical abuses.
In several columns in recent years, I have written about China’s involvement
in one of the most depraved of all systematic human-rights atrocities in the
modern world: Its industrial-scale harvesting of vital organs from prisoners
of conscience, to be transplanted into patients paying exorbitant fees for a
heart, kidney, or liver made available on demand.
Here, from a 2016 essay, is a bit of background:
In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ
transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant
tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain
lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. China had no
voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing
thousands and thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready
cash or high-placed connections. How was that possible?
The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative
journalists , added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous
numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating
tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then
delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become
a major source of revenue. Chinese officials [formerly claimed] that organs
came from violent criminals on death row. But [researchers’ findings have
made] it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted
for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all,
practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful
meditation and ethical commitment.
Since then, the proof of China’s involvement in this literal butchery has
continued to accumulate. Yet it all too rarely draws the attention of
mainstream news organizations.
A number of independent researchers have exposed China's organ-harvesting
atrocities. One important work is Ethan Gutman's chilling 2014 book, The
Slaughter.
Last week, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — a human rights
educational institute created in 1993 by act of Congress — released a
detailed new review of the evidence . It draws from internal and public
Chinese archives and sources, many unearthed and translated for the first
time. Though China has begun insisting in the last few years that it has
reformed its organ procurement practices and transplants only organs that
come from consenting donors, the new report makes clear how dubious that
claim is. As the foundation’s executive director, Marion Smith, writes:
the growth of the voluntary figures is highly questionable — rising from 34
in 2010 to 6,316 in 2016 — and follows a quadratic equation to the 99.9%
level. Nor does it make sense that China can provide organs on demand, often
within hours or days, from such a small population. Only forced organ
harvesting of blood-typed prisoners can meet that timeline.
The report also shows that China transplants far more organs than
authorities admit. Some 173 Chinese hospitals are currently authorized to do
transplants, yet just 10 hospitals account for nearly 14,000 annual
procedures. The total number of transplants is likely at least several times
larger. Beijing is falsifying both the number and the source of the organs
it sells for profit.
Coincidentally, the foundation’s report was released very soon after a
similar document emerged from a separate quarter: On March 1, the
London-based Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from
Prisoners of Conscience in China published its final judgment . The tribunal
was headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC, the British barrister who headed the
war crimes prosecution of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in The
Hague. It spent six months taking testimony from witnesses and studying
data; it too concluded that China’s organ donation records have been
fraudulently manipulated. The tribunal’s 562-page final report leaves no
doubt that the allegations against China’s government — allegations of “acts
of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of medieval
torturers and executioners”— are well-founded:
[T]housands of innocent people have been killed to order, having their
bodies – the physical integrity of their beings – cut open while still alive
for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea, and skin to be removed and
turned into commodities for sale. Those innocents were killed by doctors
simply because they believed, for example, in truthfulness, compassion, and
forbearance and lived lives of healthy exercise and meditation and because
the way they lived was seen as dangerous to the interests and objectives of
the totalitarian state of the People’s Republic of China.
Given China’s sickening record, it is hard to understand why doctors,
scientists, and public-health professionals in the free world should be
relying in any way on medical information provided by the Chinese government
or the institutions it controls.
This month, it was widely reported that surgeons at the Wuxi People’s
Hospital in Jiangsu province had performed the world’s first double-lung
transplant for a victim of coronavirus disease. Ordinarily, a patient in
need of a lung transplant can wait for years before one becomes available.
Yet Wuxi hospital managed to secure two lungs in the space of mere weeks.
If, as seems likely, they were forcibly extracted from a Chinese dissident
or prisoner of conscience, the transplant was not a medical advance to be
hailed but a crime against humanity that ought to be prosecuted.
Cooperating with China’s medical establishment is akin to cooperating with
Nazi Germany’s concentration-camp doctors. Whatever genuine medical
knowledge may be shared is fatally tainted by the monstrous means by which
that knowledge was gained.
The London tribunal concluded its report with these blunt words:
Any person or organization that interacts in any substantial way with the
People’s Republic of China, including:
doctors and medical institutions;
industry and businesses, most specifically airlines, travel companies,
financial services businesses, law firms, and pharmaceutical and insurance
companies, together with individual tourists;
educational establishments; arts establishments
should recognize that, to the extent revealed in this document, they are
interacting with a criminal state.
A criminal state.
The virus that has emerged from China is sinister, as the whole world has
learned to its sorrow. But it is not nearly as sinister as the government
that rules in Beijing. We are properly doing everything we can to isolate
and suppress the coronavirus. Why do we do so little to isolate and suppress
China’s lethal communist regime?
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ICYMI
In my Sunday column, I explained why I take coronavirus fears quite
seriously, even though I’m skeptical of the alarmist hyperventilations over
climate change. Why the difference? In part because there is a long,
well-understood history of viral epidemics. There is nothing theoretical
about the murderous efficiency with which new diseases can cut down
populations encountering them for the first time. By contrast, while climate
doomsayers have insisted for decades that the end of life as we know it is
just around the corner, the apocalypse never quite materializes . Plus, the
coronavirus coverage has been steadfastly focused on the practical. Unlike
with climate change, no one is trying to make coronavirus a culture-war
battlefield, or to exploit the disease to bring about a radical overhaul of
modern life.
Last Wednesday , I noted that the Democratic Party has moved so far leftward
that even if “moderate” Joe Biden becomes the nominee, he will be his party’s
most liberal standard-bearer — ever. Though one of his chief selling points
is the time he spent as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden has veered
sharply from Obama’s path on one issue after another. Many of the positions
he takes that are described as centrist today, would have been wide-eyed
liberal dreams during the Bill Clinton years and were still out of reach in
the Obama era. “Moderate” Joe Biden? Only if “moderate” means nothing more
than “a little less socialist than Bernie Sanders.”
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The last line
“I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a
coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my
ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!”
— Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
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