Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of fiction author Jane Austen, who examined ordinary, day-to-day, small-town family life within an Overton window-frame which once included Biblical civilization and ethics.
The world of Jane Austen's generation was rapidly pivoting the Overton window to a secular worldview, and so were the cultures of contemporary nations.
Lord David Cecil, a biographer of Miss Austen, noted this comparison between authors:
"If I were in doubt as to the wisdom of one of my actions, I should not consult Flaubert or Dostoyevsky. The opinion of Balzac or Dickens would carry little weight with me: were Stendhal to rebuke me, it would only convince me I had done right: even in the judgment of Tolstoy I should not put complete confidence. But I should be seriously upset, I should worry for weeks and weeks, if I incurred the disapproval of Jane Austen."
Somebody typed a prompt, and a virus came out.
Sixteen of them. Genomes written by artificial intelligence, ordered as synthetic DNA, assembled on a bench, and grown into stocks that replicated and threw off offspring. Thirteen carried mutations that match no known natural sequence. The scientific paper ran in the publication Science, and its senior author disclosed funding from the Gates Foundation.
Six years ago, on April 6, 2020, Bill Gates sat with Trevor Noah and said a vaccine was the only thing that would let us return to normal — and announced that his foundation would start building the factories before anyone had seen efficacy data. Scale during testing, he said, rather than waiting for results. A great many people heard optimism. Some of us heard a schedule.
-- Dr. Peter McCullough
"There are times when a people tolerate an evil for so long that they cease to recognize its enormity. The evil acquires procedures, professional language, political constituencies, legal protections and respectable explanations. Eventually bloodshed receives a clinical name, partiality becomes public policy, and injustice—once sufficiently regulated—begins to look almost ordinary."
-- Bill Evans
The @EU_Commission met today with Meta & TikTok on the situation in Ceuta.
"Platforms must act decisively in keeping the integrity of the digital space, in particular during crisis situations. Monitoring must increase, cooperation with fact-checkers to be strengthened."
What has social media been commanded to do? Cover up the fact that 72,000 military aged males invaded Spain over a two day period? Spin the story? Hire fact checkers who say, "Don't believe the misinformation. It was only 72 migrants." What were the orders given to social media regarding the Hungarian election of 2026? What orders are being given to the new puppet government of Hungary by the EU?